American Idiots and Idioms Abroad
The first time I went to Europe was the summer of 1990, in the wake of the Berlin wall's crumbling. I arrived in Germany with a friend I'd known since high school, and since Jenny had spent the previous summer hitting all the sunny European destinations, we were going to spend our eight weeks ticking off every country in the Eastern Bloc. Jenny just couldn't wait to get into Auschwitz.
It wasn't until we reached Budapest that I realized, disappointed, countries so recently freed of Communism were depressing. I hadn't been expecting dancing in the streets and confetti everywhere (okay, that is exactly what I expected). Somewhere along the gray Danube, all silty from the constant rain, I began dragging my feet and craning my neck southward. Jenny and I had a nasty spat in a a grocery store full of empty shelves in what was then known as Yugoslavia. She hopped on a train headed north, and I headed west into Italy, where the World Cup had just begun. A bed for a budget backpacker couldn't be found, but that was okay, since it was raining cats and dogs all over that blasted country too.
I hightailed it south on an express train to Bari, arriving at the seedy little port in the dark of night. I bought a ticket for the last ferry to Athens, and the ticket agent roped a sketchy-looking Italian into escorting me to the docks. He turned out not to be Italian at all, but a Mexican American college student from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Alex had just finished his semester abroad studying architecture in Florence. We sat up all night on the ferry's deck drinking harsh red wine bottled by his Sicilian roommate's family.
Eight days had passed since my arrival in Europe, but the way time mystically expands and contracts whenever you leave your home continent, I felt I'd been there two months already.
By the time we docked in Athens, I was deeply smitten, so when Alex suggested we share a room to save money, I jumped at the chance. In the morning, we caught a boat to Mykonos, where he had arranged to meet up with an American classmate. Karen was a cheerful, beautiful, buxom blonde. We became instant friends, and so it was determined, without any input from Alex, that the three of us would spend the coming weeks island-hopping, riding mopeds, eating feta, drinking Ouzo, and staying in adorable, blue-roofed guesthouses which cost the drachma equivalent of $9 a night.
We were not living the threesome fantasy straight out of the cheesy 1982 film "Summer Lovers." I was, in fact, the third wheel on the rickety tricycle of thwarted love. While Karen was giving blowjobs to guys named Hercules on Samos and Santorini, Alex was pining away for her. He was too kind to flat out tell me to get lost, and I was too consumed with a desire to merely kiss him to read the silent signals.
One day, it occurred to Karen that Turkey was only a 20-minute boat ride away and we had a guy. This was a time when Frommer's still cautioned against women going to the country unescorted. It was easy to convince Alex that he wanted to go to Turkey as much as we did. None of us had an actual travel itinerary; it was one reason we all got on so well despite never getting what we actually wanted from the arrangement. We just rolled with the Aegean tide.
Alex looked like a native of every country in the Med. If I had a lira for every time he had to say, "Dude, I'm American," I could've lived high on the hog in Europe forever. I don't know if the locals really thought Alex was a Muslim playboy with an American wife on each arm. I do know that Greeks spoke to him in Greek, Turks spoke to him in Turkish, and as long as we stuck by him, Karen and I weren't treated like the international stereotype of American whores we resembled.
We'd landed in the middle of Eid Al-Adha, the 11-day festival of sacrifice. Once in, it was nearly impossible to get out, what with all the banks and travel agencies being closed. So we changed money on the black market and explored all we could via the limited bus service available during the holiday.
Arriving in Akçakoca on the coast of the Black Sea, a Turk our age named Nissam offered a room in a guesthouse only a block from the bus station. He was the friendliest and most talkative local I'd met in my now four weeks abroad. Nissam exclaimed everything, and smiled constantly in a way that made my teeth hurt. On the path to the guesthouse (in fact, several blocks from the station), we bought a six-pack of beer - because that's the first thing you do in a Muslim city during a religious holiday. You buy alcohol.
Nissam set us up in the only one of the four rooms available at his guesthouse. He explained in fairly smooth English that Akçakoca was a favored vacation spot for Saudis, so we were lucky. There was a shared kitchen, where we tossed our bottles of beer into the freezer to get cold while we took a much-needed afternoon nap. Not long after dozing off, we woke to what sounded like gunshots, followed by screams. The explosions were our bottles of frozen beer. The screams were the Saudi Arabian women in the middle of cooking dinner for their husband and children.
In no time flat, Nissam was at our door, grinning maniacally. "Guys, guess what? I found you much better place to stay! Much nicer! Much private! Not far." We slung our backpacks onto our shoulders and avoided the scowls of the Abaya-clad women. At the end of a dusty road, Nissam stopped at what looked like a three-story pile of abandoned cinder block. "Just one room!" he said. "Electric! And running water!" He wasn't lying. A single finished space sat on the top floor with three single beds. "I take you my favorite restaurant tonight to celebrate our new friendship. Pick you up at 7!"
The restaurant on the beach had a cool breeze wafting off the sea and the sand felt like velvet under our toes. Nissam seated us with fanfare at a table alongside two Norwegian couples who were sunburned to within an inch of their lives. He darted around making introductions, and brought everyone a beer. Then he took the head of the table and popped open a cold one himself. He looked only a little sheepish when admitting, "Yes, I'm Muslim. I don't drink. I mean, mostly! Sometimes, though, with Western friends..." he gestured around the table, at a rare loss for words. "Dude," I said. "We get it. Alex and I used to be Catholic."
The beer and the excellent seafood feast went down easily; conversation flowed like a river into the sea. All our seasoned travel stories were recounted and, as I've found with Scandinavians the world over, their English was better than ours. At one point, Bjorn slapped Alex on the back. "Man, you're English is so good! Where did you learn it?"
The table fell silent. Alex had grown weary of this sort of thing, it was written all over his Mexican American Italian Greek Turkish face. "Dude," he began, then Karen and I jumped in. He's American!" We all burst out laughing, but no one louder than Nissam. Through his gasps and snorts, he managed to shout at Bjorn, "Dude! Please! Put your mouth on your shoes!"
Again, silence fell over the table, and Nissam looked puzzled. "What? This common American expression, yes? When you make mistake?" We Americans looked at each other a long moment, then my darling Alex figured it out. He carefully explained the difference between a foot in a mouth and a mouth on a shoe.
Nissam just shook his head. "You Americans!" he said, popping open another beer. "What you say never make sense!"
