European Travel Skills with Cameron Hewitt

Let me introduce myself. My name is Cameron Hewitt. I work here at the Rick Steves' Europe Through the Back Door offices. And, like a lot of us here at Rick Steves', I wear a lot of different hats. My main role is -- when I'm in the office, when I'm not traveling -- I work in the travel guidebook department. As you know, you probably know, we've got about 30 different guidebook titles. All of our guidebooks are updated in person either every year or every other year. By the way, if there's a date on the cover, you know it's updated every year. If there's not a date, it's updated sometime in the last two years. Those all have to be updated and produced and sent to our publishers. That takes a lot of work and I'm part of a 10-team department that works year-round getting those guidebooks up to date and on the shelves. But also like a lot of us here at Rick Steves', I get to travel a lot as well, which is a really fun part of my job. Every year for -- basically since 1999 - I've spent about three months traveling in Europe and when I am traveling I do one of two things. One thing is, I've led a lot of our guided tours through Europe. I'm a tour guide specializing in our Eastern Europe tours, but I also go and do guidebook research. Someone has to go, someone has to have the very difficult task of going and traveling to all these exotic, glamorous places and I have to tell you, I can speak from experience, these are the most carefully, thoughtfully, sort of strenuously updated guidebooks that you're going to be able to find in print. Unlike a lot of travel publishers, we really make a point to literally go to every single -- in person - every single hotel, restaurant, train station, boat dock, Internet cafe, launderette, anything that's mentioned in our guidebook, someone from our staff is going to actually personally talk to those people at least every two years to make sure that the details and the information are correct. So I can personally guarantee you that these are the best and most carefully up-to-date guidebooks you're going to find in print. My specialty is Eastern Europe. I'm the co-author of Rick's Eastern Europe, Croatia and Slovenia, and Budapest guidebooks. Co-author? What does that mean? Basically it means I go over and do all the work to research and write the book, and then Rick puts his name on it so we can sell a few more copies. No, seriously, Rick goes every couple of years and kind of checks my work and puts his stamp on it and it's a wonderful collaboration. It's really a fun thing for Rick to have someone like me who's enthusiastic about places like Bratislava so that he doesn't have to be and knows that it's being taken care of, and it's a great opportunity for me to get to know these places that I really love. Even though I'm the Eastern Europe specialist, I also do a lot of guidebook work in other destinations. I'm about to take off in one week, one week from tomorrow, and I'll be traveling for six weeks. Italy, Germany, Great Britain. Not going anywhere near Eastern Europe on this trip, which is just fine by me. I've written guidebook chapters in Spain, Belgium, England, Turkey, Greece. A lot of different places. So anyway, Rick kind of wanted me to do this talk in his absence because I'm one of, sort of the generalists on the staff. We have a lot of specialists and then we have more generalists. Speaking of Rick, you're probably wondering, "Hey, where's Rick? Who is this guy?" Rick's already in Europe and he really walks the walk. Rick actually goes over and does a lot of the work personally. He's very much involved in everything we do. He took off about a week ago. You might have heard he's in Egypt right now. He decided to try something different on this trip. He's going to make some TV shows on Egypt and the Holy Land, so he's right now in the streets of Cairo learning about this recent revolution and doing some sightseeing there. So we'll be getting some sort of messages and blog updates from him in the next coming coming days and weeks from his time in the Middle East. The nice thing about working at this company, though, is you know Rick is obviously our public face and there's nobody who works harder at this company than Rick. He's really personally involved in everything that we do. But for every Rick, there's 80 really hard-working people who love travel who are just as passionate and capable as Rick is, behind the scenes doing a lot of work and without Rick here actually it's kind of fun because the rest of us get to take center stage a little bit and I hope you get to meet some of these folks as you enjoy our Travel Festival today. For example, Joan, who's going to be teaching our packing class later today. She teaches our Packing Light class. She also has some input in designing our bags and our accessories. That's the nice thing about a small company that's staffed with really capable travelers: the guy who sells you your Ireland guidebook at our travel store might just be the person who wrote that guidebook. We all wear a lot of hats here and it's a really fun kind of a company to work for, and even though Rick's not here I think it's safe to say that we have Rick's seal of approval and all the stuff that's going on here today, he's certainly with us in spirit. And with that, I'm going to go ahead and take off. And before we get into the nitty-gritty I'd like to talk, just to give you a little bit of a snapshot of what is a waiting for you in Europe. Raise your hand if you're going to Europe for the first time, by the way. I'm just curious. Great, alright, I'd say maybe a little less than half and that's excellent. This talk is really geared not necessarily just for first-timers but it's just sort of a broad European travel skills. If you've never been to Europe, hopefully this will both inspire you and equip you with some good information. If you've already traveled a lot to Europe, that's okay too. I hope you'll pick up a few additional tips in this talk. There's so much to see in Europe. It's an incredibly diverse continent, as I'm sure a lot of you have discovered and I'm sure that's why you're interested in going there. So maybe you're going to be heading to the beaches of Spain. While you're there, you can head up to a hill town enjoy some of the Moorish architecture in south Spain and some of the fine and really unusual exciting architecture of Barcelona. Or maybe you'll head up to the northern reaches of Europe -- Helsinki; St. Petersburg, Russia; the old town of Stockholm; the fjords of Norway; we're just getting started. You can go to Italy. When a lot of people think of Europe, they think of Italy. The three great cities of Italy, of course: Venice, where I'll be in a week; Florence, the birthplace of the Renaissance; Rome the Eternal City. Head a little bit further south and east. When you get to Greece you can hike up to the top of the Acropolis in Athens. Maybe I'll head out to a Greek island like Santorini. Or maybe you want a spot of tea. Head up to England, enjoy some of the thatched roof cottages of the English countryside. Maybe go up to some remote distant Scottish island or just enjoy the changing of the guard right there in front of Buckingham Palace in London. For a little bit of mountain culture you can head up to Switzerland, neighboring Germany. Head to Munich, enjoy some of the great palaces and other museums there. Head up to the Low Countries: the Netherlands, Belgium. The grand main square of Brussels, of Belgium. Or maybe you want to do something a little more exotic. Head to Eastern Europe: Poland, Hungary. Again, along with Italy, the main destination in Paris -- if you had to pick one place in Europe that people would like to go, it would be Paris, the City of Light. But while you're in France, make sure to also go for a canoe ride down to a scenic gorge overlooked by dramatic castles, or hike around one of those castles, Carcassonne, see some great ancient sites, the Pont Du Gard aqueduct. As I mentioned, I'm sort of the Eastern Europe specialist, and I really enjoy going to places like Croatia and Slovenia. A little bit less known, less discovered, but with some really spectacular natural beauty. This is Slovenia's Lake Bled. Croatia, the great city of Dubrovnik. And even dipping into Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, just to get a little bit of taste of the east, a little bit of a taste of Turkey. So whether you're going to be enjoying flamenco dancers in Spain or a whirling dervish in Istanbul, there's so much, and so much to see and do and experience here in Europe. Hope that wets your appetite for what we're about to embark on here. I'm going to start the talk describing a few kind of big-picture philosophical principles about traveling in Europe. These apply kind of wherever you're going. I'll use specific examples but this is kind of the mindset and the philosophy of travel that we embrace here at Rick Steves' Europe Through the Back Door. And then later on we'll be getting into more specific step-by-step nitty-gritty travel skills -- this is how you do this, this is how you do that. But let's start off with some of the more fun stuff. As you know, our company's full name is Rick Steves' Europe Through the Back Door. And this is something that we really believe in -- the idea here being, most tourists, I think a lot of tourists, end up going to Europe through the front door. They stay in big, fancy hotels. They go to all the big sights, but they don't really delve into what the real Europe is. Get to the offbeat places that other people miss. And one thing that I think we really encourage is to find some of those less discovered and less appreciated destinations. Now when you're traveling in Europe the first place you want to go is a tourist office. When I arrive in any town, my first stop is to stop by the "TI," as we call them. You can pick up a town map, you can ask basic questions. But keep in mind that tourist offices these days, while they used to be government-subsidized, more and more, they're privatized. They're run by private companies. Very often they're literally owned by hotel booking companies or owned by the local tourism organization. So a lot of the information they give you has an agenda. That doesn't mean they don't have any good information, you can still get some of the information you need, but they're in business to promote the places that are paying them to be promoted, and your challenge as a traveler is to get away from the promoted places and find some of the less promoted places. This is what a back door would be, a place that doesn't have a big promotional budget, and for that reason it's less discovered, less crowded, less touristy, more authentic. A lot of times these undiscovered places are close to very well discovered places. And I'm not saying don't go to the discovered places. I'm saying round out your trip with some of the the back door gems. For example, Siena is a very popular city in Tuscany, in Italy. Of course everyone wants to go to Siena when they go to Italy, and for good reason. It's a really gorgeous place. But not too far from Siena is this distant remote hill town sitting out on a knob of tuff in the middle of, basically, wastelands. It's a town called Civita Di Bagnoregio. You can call it Civita for short. We like it so much we named one of our bags after it, the Civita Day Pack. This is a little town that's been missed by the modern world. You have to walk across a donkey path to reach it. For centuries, this has been Civita's umbilical cord connecting it to the rest of the world. There's no tourist office in Civita. I just updated this for our guidebook last year. I can tell you there are 18 hotel rooms in all of Civita. Not enough for a big bus tour, certainly enough for a couple of people traveling together. The main square is the tidy, cute little quaint old world Europe that you might have thought had gone extinct. Again, even if you're visiting a big city, remember that you can always just go a little bit into the countryside and find a less touristy alternative. Salzburg, the great city of Austria, the city of the Sound of Music, justifiably popular - just an hour-and-a-half west -- oh, sorry east -- of Salzburg in the Austrian Lake District is Hallstatt. This is a town that's so remote, you have to take a boat across the lake from the train station when you come to Hallstatt. There's no train station in the town itself, but boy, is this a really romantic place to settle in and spend the night and get a taste of an Austrian mountain town that's not overrun with tourists. Prague is probably the best destination and most popular destination in Eastern Europe. Just a few hours south of Prague is a beautiful town called Český Krumlov. Probably 90% of people going to the Czech Republic only go to Prague, and that's a shame, because a town like Český Krumlov deserves a lot of visitors as well. It's got a beautiful colorful castle overlooking a tight bend in a river. You can go on a fun little canoe trip, go all the way around the town on the canoe and step off just a few feet from where you started. Athens, obviously very popular destination in Greece, Athens has a wonderful sights but it's a big, kind of hefty, smog-soaked city. If you want to get out of Athens, you can go to the port of Piraeus and in an hour-and-a-half on a fast catamaran, you can go here: the island of Hydra. It's less famous than some of the more famous Greek islands like Mykonos or Santorini but it's a lot closer to Athens. Very easy to get to. One thing I love about Hydra is, it's traffic-free. There are no cars on Hydra. All deliveries, all the people coming and going have to rely on beasts of burden. So there's horses and donkeys everywhere you go in Hydra. Instead of waking up to traffic jams and honking horns you wake up to the sounds of a honking donkey or a cock-a-doodle-doo of a rooster. Just an hour-and-a-half by fast boat from Athens. Copenhagen is a great city and really well worth visiting -- the capital of Denmark. Or, you could take the train a couple hours and take a boat across to an island called Ærø. In the town of Ærøskøbing, an adorable little village in a bottle that's tucked away on a Danish island, each of these towns kind of has their own claims to fame, their own, their own charms. In the case of Ærø, they have these delightfully painted doorways that you can enjoy. Now even if you're going to a big city like Venice, your challenge is -- again, I'm not saying, "Don't go to Venice." I'm not saying, "Skip the big places." But your challenge is to go to the big famous places and do them in a more intimate and more authentic kind of a way. Venice is a big island but the vast majority of tourists on the island of Venice are concentrated in a very small area -- St. Mark's Square, the Rialto Bridge. And if you've been to Venice, especially in the summer, you'll know it's an extremely crowded place. The nice thing about Venice though, is all you have to do is walk 10 or 15 minutes away from this mess and you have tranquil little canals all to yourself. And these places are just as beautiful, these neighborhoods are just as charming as what you'll see in the big tourist areas. It's just a few minutes away and you'll never see a tourist. One thing I love to do when I'm in Venice is just get lost. Just start poking down these little lanes, walking through these colorful neighborhoods. If you get nervous, just remind yourself: I'm on an island and I can't get off. If you get to the water, just turn around and go back the way you came. Get lost in a place like Venice. Don't spend your whole time right there at St. Mark's Square. Another good strategy is, if it's a popular day trip destination, spend the night. Toledo is this wonderful medieval town with great churches and great architecture and wonderful art just about an hour from Madrid. Because it's just an hour from Madrid, it's absolutely deluged by day trippers during the day, so you should spend the night. And as the lights twinkle on, all of the tourists pack back onto their buses, head back to their comfortable hotels in Madrid, and you can just feel the locals in Toledo relaxing. They can kind of let their guard down, pack up their souvenir stands and get on with their lives. And if you're spending the night in Toledo you can enjoy being with them when all the tourists have gone home and being a temporary Toledan. In another very popular destination in Germany, Rothenburg -- Rothenburg ob der Tauber -- this is sort of the classic cute quaint small town in the middle of Germany, right on the Romantic Road. It's a great example of a day-trip destination which during the day is absolutely jam-packed. During the day the bus parking lot that's just outside of town might have 100 tour buses. That's why our tours spend the night in Rothenburg, because after about 5:00 or 6:00, all those buses pull out and the only one left is the one with the Rick Steves' tour group, and we have this beautiful town all to ourselves. So again, even if you go to a popular place, there's ways to do it in un-touristy back doorways. And then there are the really authentic back doors. These are the places that have been kind of forgotten by the modern world. These are the places that, often intentionally, just seem like they've skipped a few centuries. One of Rick's favorite destinations in Italy is the Cinque Terre. This is a string of five towns. Cinque Terre means "five lands." It's tucked away on the most rugged stretch of the Italian Riviera, literally placed there intentionally to hide out from pirates. These days you can hike from town to town, between these five towns. You know, the thing about the Cinque Terre, it's connected by the train system, but some of these towns you literally can't even drive to. The town of Vernazza, I'll be going here in a few weeks to update it, and they just emailed me from my hotel and said, "Just remember you can't drive to Vernazza." You have to park your car two towns away and take the train in. And that's great because it keeps the big tour groups away, unless it's a Rick Steves' tour group, where we take the people on the train with us because we really want to make sure they can spend the night in Vernazza. The point being: it's a popular place. It's gotten a lot of promotion from Rick Steves and is becoming more and more crowded. But it's far less crowded than the more famous riviera towns just because it's less accessible. It's kind of like this little historic enclave of the old world Europe. Another great example is in Switzerland, in the Lauterbrunnen Valley. Some of the most famous and most popular ski resorts in Switzerland are right here, overlooking the Lauterbrunnen Valley. But then tucked between the peaks, right across the valley from some of the really famous resorts is a little village called Gimmelwald. If you've been following Rick Steves, you've heard of Gimmelwald and because it's been classified as an avalanche zone, they are not allowed to develop. So the next town over is a half-hour walk away, it's called Mürren, and it has a lot of big, ugly concrete hotels. It's a very beautiful setting and a nice town, but it's been very developed, it's very resort-y. Gimmelwald doesn't have any of that. It's all these kind of beautiful wooden buildings. All the hotels and accommodations are tucked inside 300-year-old wooden houses. So no matter what you do, however you do it, using Rick Steves' guidebook or do some exploring on your own, find these back doors. Enjoy the big places -- and I'll talk a lot today about how you can enjoy the big places -- but also make sure to explore other parts of Europe. When you're traveling in Europe, you can be a tourist or you can be a temporary European, and that's something that we really pride ourselves on here at Rick Steves' -- being temporary Europeans. Which means, sightseeing is great, but you don't want to just do sightseeing. You want to experience Europe. Look for opportunities to really experience Europe. A lot of people like to go to church every Sunday when they're home, and even when you're traveling, that doesn't mean you have to stop going to church. In fact, it can be a great way to see how local people go to church. St. Peter's Basilica, the most important church in the Catholic faith, the home church of the Pope, is a great place to do sightseeing, but you can also go to Sunday Mass here. Sit in a pew and watch the sunbeams, the play of light in Michelangelo's grand dome. You can do that as someone in the congregation, not as someone who's a tourist. I'm not a Catholic but when I go to St. Peter's, I become the best Catholic that I possibly can be. I was in Granada, Spain, a couple of years ago on Easter. Easter Sunday I woke up, I thought, "I need to go to church. It's Easter." So I went to the cathedral of Granada. It was built after Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic kings who also sent Christopher Columbus sailing the ocean blue. After they re-conquered Spain from the Moors, they began work on this glorious cathedral and boy that's a great place to have Easter Mass. Wherever you go, whether or not you're a religious person, this is the sort of thing you can do to really experience Europe -- not as a sightseer but as a temporary local. In Barcelona on Sundays, probably more interesting than going on inside the church is what's going on in front of the church. They have this wonderful custom called the sardana dance. Now if you go to Barcelona, people there will tell you very quickly, "We are not in Spain, we are in Catalunya." Catalunya is a very proud independent region that's part of Spain officially, but they're actually making more and more moves to even potentially separate as their own country. I'm not sure it'll happen but that just gives you a sense of the independent spirit in Catalunya. And one of the symbols of Catalan pride is, every Sunday morning in front of the Barcelona Cathedral, people walk up and - it's not performers, it's not people wearing costumes, it's everyday people - walk up, they join hands in a circle, they put their stuff in the middle to kind of keep an eye on it, and they dance the sardana dance around and around in a circle. They set up an orchestra on the steps of the cathedral. It's a beautiful, beautiful, wonderful experience. I was in Barcelona just a year ago working on our new Barcelona guidebook which just came out, and I walked by the church Sunday morning and this was going on and I stood and watched for a few minutes thinking, "Well, this is a great tourist attraction." And then someone walked up to me and said, "Do you want to join in? Come, I'll show you how to do the sardana dance." You can experience Europe, you don't just have to be a passive sightseer here. If you're in Budapest and you want to relax after a busy day of sightseeing, go to the thermal baths. Now I know what you're thinking -- don't worry, you can keep your swimsuit on the whole time. Budapest has two dozen of these beautiful thermal baths. And it sounds intimidating -- you think, "Do I really want to go and sit in a hot sauna with a bunch of Hungarians?" Right? But it's a lot more...it's a lot more interesting, it's a lot more accessible, it's a lot more enjoyable and a lot more relaxing than you might expect. It's basically like going to your hometown water park, except the water is 100 degrees, you're surrounded by gorgeous Baroque domes, and everyone around you is a pot-bellied, speedo-clad Hungarian. So it's a cultural experience and it's relaxing and you can call it sightseeing. Experience Europe. For extra credit you can join the guys playing a game of chess. These experiences are all over Europe. Everywhere you go, there's a place or a thing you can do that will help you feel like a temporary European. Go on a luge ride if you're in the Alps. In the Mediterranean world, join the evening promenade. In all Mediterranean cultures -- in Spain they call it "paseo;" in Italy they call it "passeggiata;" in Croatia they call it "corso." This is this phenomenon in Mediterranean cultures where it's hot and steamy. In the evening, just after the sun sets, people go out to a particular place in that town and they promenade. They just simply walk back and forth saying hello to their neighbors, licking an ice cream cone. This is this wonderful Mediterranean custom. You can join it. When you get to a town, ask your hotel, "Where is the passeggiata?" and then it's 7:00, go to that place and you'll be immersed in Europe. If you're in Ireland, enjoy some traditional music in a pub. My favorite Ireland sightseeing experiences have always been these musical evenings where you go and hear wonderful world class music played by a few people in a simple pub. If you're in Istanbul hop on a commuter ferry across the Bosphorus and go to Asia for the day. This was one of Rick's favorite experiences in Istanbul. You can ride one of these commuter ferries and step off. You're the only American on the boat and then you have a few hours in Asia to poke around and see how people live there and then hop on the ferry and 15 minutes later you're back in Istanbul, on the European side. You never know what you're going to find when you go exploring in some of these places. So, again, experience Europe. Part of experiencing Europe is connecting with local people. This may be obvious, but look for ways where you can really get to know Europeans. And something that I really love about Europeans, I think they do really well is they find their calling in life and they do it with gusto and they have this incredible enthusiasm and passion for whatever it is that they do. So for example, in the little Italian hill town of Montepulciano there's a guy named Adamo. Adamo works at the local winery there and he is extremely passionate about wine and he will talk with you for 15 or 20 minutes describing the merits of all the different wines, even though he doesn't speak a word of English. And the amazing thing about Adamo is you can understand almost everything he says because he's such an expressive communicator and his passion comes through for his work. Right across the street from Adamo is a buddy of his - still in Montepulciano -- a guy named Cesare. Cesare is a copper worker, a coppersmith, and he's spent his whole life creating wonderful copper items by hand the traditional way and he's got this little museum in the back of a shop where you can see all of the things he's very proud of. Cesare loves connecting with people who come and visit. I was there updating this guidebook a couple of years ago and I walked in with a family of American tourists and he spent 15 minutes chatting with them, telling them all about what he was doing, showing them his museum. He loves it when people send him postcards and pictures later. He's got a whole book that he'll show you with all the pictures and postcards that people have sent him that he's met in his shop. Let's go to Istanbul. We're walking through the Grand Bazaar, the world's original shopping mall. Now if you've been to Istanbul or you've heard about it, the Grand Bazaar is this gigantic labyrinthine warren of shops. There's a very touristy part of the Grand Bazaar but then there's some back streets of the Grand Bazaar where no tourists ever go. You can wander into these back streets. You're perfectly welcome and safe, it just doesn't look like a place a tourist would want to be, but if you walk around a little bit you walk by the shop of this guy -- Ayhan. They call him "Ayhan the Master." He'll come -- without speaking English, he'll wave you into a shop and he'll say, "Let me show you what I'm doing." He's a goldsmith and all day long little kids deliver little packets of gold dust and gold shavings left behind by jewelers and Ayhan collects them and when he has enough he melts them down into a little gold brick so it's actually useful and sellable and it's fun. You can actually watch Ayhan make one of his gold bricks. This is not a tourist attraction. We do tell you in our Istanbul guidebook how you can do this but it's not really a tourist attraction. You don't have groups coming to see this. This is a real person who's working his job in Europe. Pascal -- he loves making cheese. He lives in a very small village in Switzerland with a very famous name Gruyères. This is the town where they make the rich buttery Swiss cheese called gruyère, and Pascal spends his life making gruyère cheese. You can go and see him actually at work pressing his curds into a little mold and see the whole process as it goes through. Dubrovnik, Croatia, is a wonderful town with lots of little B&B's tucked in the upper streets. These are two guys who are in my guidebook and they are neighbors. They live across the street from each other. Coincidentally they're both named Pero so I just called them the Peros. For the record, this is Pero 1 and this is Pero 2. That's what I call them because I met this one first. But Pero and Pero, not only will they give you good value accommodations for less than $100, you can stay with your own private bathroom and air conditioning and satellite TV just a couple steps above the main drag of the old town of Dubrovnik. But they love to hang out with people. They'll come out and have breakfast with you, sitting out on this glorious main drag of Dubrovnik. Juan at the Boqueria Market in Barcelona loves to cook up tapas at his restaurant and loves to flash a thumbs up for any passing tourists and photographer. Again are these tourist attractions? Well they're in the tourist industry but they're real authentic people who are really proud of what they do. Try to find these people and connect with them. Wherever you go, you're going to find somebody who's just really enthusiastic about introducing you to their slice of Europe. How do you find these experiences? Well some of them are in the guidebook, but better yet, just stop the car at an interesting place, get out, walk around, and talk to the people that you meet. Try to make friends. Force yourself to be an extrovert. I'm actually a very introverted person but when I'm in Europe I really force myself to be an extrovert and I have much better travels because of it. If you see a bunch of Englishmen enjoying a game of croquet in an idyllic English countryside: pull over and ask them if you can play with them. If someone's playing boules in France, it's the same thing. They'll be really kind of, at first, a little shocked but then very charmed that this American from halfway around the world is taking an interest in them. If you're in Switzerland, talk to this woman about her cows that she processes in ceremonial every September down from the fields and back into town. Again, all over Europe there are wonderful people, each who has their own specialties, their own stories, their own experiences and they're very eager to get to know you. They're very happy that you're taking an interest in the place where they live. Rick has a philosophy -- he says, you know what? Again, force yourself to be an extrovert. If you see a bunch of old guys sitting on a bench, ask them to scoot over. And for years Rick's been taking his own advice, and time after time it pays off. He makes great connections, he makes new friends. People are charmed by his, his sort of American bravura of, "I'm going to come and get to know you" and ultimately they end up being good friends with him. If you start looking at Europe this way, you'll see cute old guys sitting at tables everywhere who are just dying to have you come ask to sit with them. There are benches waiting for you all over Europe if you're interested in connecting with the people, connecting with the locals. Now, America -- something that we've got Europe beat on for sure is, we have great natural wonders, right? America, if we have anything, we have spectacular natural wonders. When Europeans come to America, you know, they want to see New York City and and Disney World and Las Vegas. Once they've seen that they want to go to our national parks. We have breathtaking natural sights, but you know Europe has their own special natural sights, and the thing that's unique about Europe's sights is they're very accessible. They're easy to reach. They're not that far out of your way. This woman looks very rugged doesn't she? You can imagine she trudged up a hill, hiked up to sit out on this perch. What you don't realize is she's 10 steps away from a revolving restaurant looking out over the Swiss Alps loaded with little ladies who hiked up on the cable car wearing their high heeled shoes for breakfast. And from this viewpoint you can get a good orientation to the surrounding mountains and then you can go on a fantastic hike literally tight roping on trails between spectacular cut-glass peaks. For 20 bucks you can get on a cable car and zip up here in about 15 minutes. Again, beautiful natural wonders in Europe, very accessible. And you know, these really distant, remote, kind of off-the-beaten path places are also where the traditional cultures of Europe really thrive. So if you want to see this kind of cow culture in Switzerland, you have to go to these little villages, like Gimmelwald, that are a little off-the-beaten path but still well-connected ultimately with trains and lifts. Now you can hike or frolic all the way across the Alps from France all the way to Slovenia and all along the way you've got these spectacular mountain vistas. Everywhere you go, these gorgeous cut-glass peaks that fill your days with beautiful views. Spend your nights in places like this. This is a little guesthouse not for tourists. This is for hikers. This is for your Swiss people and Europeans who decide that they want to go out and do a hut-hopping vacation. But of course it's welcome to Americans as well. This is called Berggasthaus Aescher. It's in a place called Ebenalp, right near the very traditional Swiss region of Appenzell. Enough about mountains. There are some other grand, grand, grand, grand natural wonders that you probably don't know about that are tucked away in the unexpected places of Europe. This is in Croatia. It's about two hours from the capital. It's really about two hours from everything. It's in the middle of nowhere. It's called Plitvice Lakes National Park. Basically it's a Grand Canyon filled with 16 terraced lakes all connected by gorgeous waterfalls and ingeniously linked by a series of trails and boardwalks that literally get you close enough that you can feel the spray. I've never seen a place that's so beautiful and so easy to experience. Once you get there -- you can drive there, take the bus in three hours - you can see views like this, three hours all the way, and then you've seen what there is to see, and you can move on that same day to hit the beaches. Some of the trails literally go up the middle of a waterfall. These natural wonders are hiding out everywhere in Europe, you just have to do a little research, figure out what your interests are. You could go from the fjords of Norway down to the fjords of Montenegro. You could go from Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland to Dartmoor with its famous wild ponies in the English countryside. From the cliffs, the jagged cliffs, of Ireland to the jagged cliffs of Greece. This is Santorini, a village that's literally set upon the collapsed crater of a volcano that erupted thousands of years ago. You can actually see the shape of the volcano crater from the air. And of course, again, ever-popular Italy. Beautiful rolling hillsides of Tuscany. If you're a wine person, the vineyards of France in Burgundy. Plenty of natural wonders out there to discover if you take the time to figure out what it is you're interested in. Now I've talked a lot about some of the traditional, kind of old-world aspects of Europe, and this is a great place if you're interested in traditional cultures, a lot of that still persists into the modern era -- in some cases, subsidized by the government. Some of these cow farmers actually get subsidies so that they can keep carrying on their traditional methods. But that's not all you're going to see in Europe, and actually I really encourage you to be open to the fact that Europe is changing. Europe is a very modern place. If anything, in terms of things like technology and infrastructure, they're ahead of the curve from where we are. You've got all these super modern cities, skylines, and so forth. One thing Europe does really well is integrating the old with the new. This is the city center of Vienna, right? Two blocks from the cathedral you've got these traditional old buildings and they put a big modern building right in the middle, and yet somehow it all works. Europe is kind of constantly evolving and they kind of accept that and understand that. Athens, the capital of Greece, is huddled around the hillside called the Acropolis where you've got the Parthenon up top. Very recently they built a modern state-of- the-art museum just across the street, basically from the stairway up to the Acropolis, where they can house all of the greatest archaeological items from this archaeological site. Again, old and new -- they take an old place and they make it better by adding some modern spins. Something I enjoy doing in Europe also is just walking through everyday workaday neighborhoods. See how people really live. Europe has its share of hipster neighborhoods that are right up there with Capitol Hill or Ballard Avenue. This is a neighborhood called Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin, and I went with my wife to Berlin. It was her first time there last fall, and I said, "You know, we could go to all the big sights, but let's wander through this neighborhood. Really see how people live." Sometimes there's a seedier side to how people live in Europe, so you just have to be, again, open to the fact that it's not all cow farmers. It's a very thriving, vital, modern place. The big news in Europe the last 10 or 20 years is: Europe is uniting. The European Union is a single political -- basically, a single political entity made up of 27 European member states. The 28th country, Croatia, will be joining this July. I mean, the European Union stretches from Portugal all the way to Romania and Greece. It stretches from Ireland all the way up to Finland. Most of Europe, most of the places you're likely to go, are now part of this big super country, sort of, called the European Union. And that really informs a lot of what's going on these days in Europe, and this is a pretty new thing, and they're still struggling to some degree with how this is going to work out. I'm sure you've seen in the news a lot of the crises in Greece, for example. Now that they've joined the same common currency as places like Germany, you've got Germans, who expect to be very frugal with their money and plan themselves, plan their economy very wisely struggling and kind of chafing against the Greeks who have a very different philosophy about how to spend money. And because Europe is changing, you are going to encounter protests, you are going to encounter strikes, and this is just going to get more and more as this economic crisis continues. We had our economic crisis that hopefully now is sort of on its way out. Europe is stilll kind of in the throes of theirs. But don't let that scare you. This isn't going to be a problem for you. These folks have no interest in getting in the way of tourism. They don't want to - actually, it'd be bad for them to have the bad press of having a problem with the tourists. But what's unfortunate that's happening is, in a place like Greece, people see this in the news and then they're afraid to go to Greece. They think, "Wow, this is not the time to go to Greece." Well I'm here to tell you: maybe this is the time to go to Greece, in fact, because a lot of people are saying that occupancy is down. You can get some great deals on hotels, and the people are very appreciative for those who are still coming. You're going to be safe. There might be some strikes, there might be a boat that's cancelled that you have to wait six hours and take the next boat. "Oh darn, I have to spend another six hours on this Greek island." If you're flexible traveler you can kind of flex with that. But ultimately, don't be intimidated by all this news you're hearing about "crisis in Europe." It's a very safe and welcoming place still to travel, and no matter what goes on throughout the time that I've been traveling in Europe and long before that, no matter what is going on, the essential charm of Europe persists, regardless of the current political situation. I would talk a little bit about history. I'm kind of an armchair historian and that's partly because I've seen again and again that understanding history brings so much meaning to your travels. It makes a huge difference in understanding what it is that you're seeing. Here's a great example: in Germany - really all over Europe, especially in Germany -- you see all of these castles and you might just say, "Oh there's another beautiful castle." But what you don't realize maybe is, when you're looking at castles, you're looking at feudalism. You're looking at the Middle Ages of Germany. In the Middle Ages, Germany -- a country about the size of Montana -- had 300 separate little city-states and two-bit dukedoms and fiefdoms and each of them had their own weights and measures and their own taxes and so forth. So when you see a castle like this, or two castles like this, you can say, "I see. So this was where there was a border of some sort." There's a castle on the hill top and a castle down in the river. That's a very effective way to levy taxes, to levy tolls. If someone wants to come on the Rhine River past this castle, they're going to have to pay, and unfortunately for that merchant, for that traitor, they're going to have to go through a dozen different little city-states and pay a dozen different tolls as they go. Understanding that history, these things become more than just pretty castles. And every castle you go to in Europe has a different story. Each castle has its own stories about the kind of the local dukes and eccentric damsels that used to live here. So as you travel to Europe, make sure that you try to understand the story behind some of these things, in addition to just enjoying how beautiful they are. This can also really help you understand when something is different. This is Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria. One of the finest, probably the biggest, tourist attraction in Germany. Gorgeous kind of fairytale castle and for years I went to this castle and I thought, "Well that's a beautiful medieval castle." It sure looks medieval, doesn't it? Actually, this is not a medieval castle. This was built around the same time as the Eiffel Tower, in the late 19th century. This was a romantic era, and this is not feudalism, this is romanticism. This was a time when Europeans had a little bit more money and technology, and they were looking fondly back on those old-fashioned castles. People were building new things that were trying to look old. So if you go to Neuschwanstein Castle, it's really fascinating to learn, well, this wasn't built by some two-bit duke 500 years ago. It was built by an eccentric local ruler years ago: a guy named the Mad King Ludwig. They called him Mad King Ludwig because he was so eccentric. He grew up in this little yellow castle here called Hohenschwangau, and he used to hike up in these hills, in the beautiful Bavarian Alps and daydream about, "Someday, I'll have the perfect fairytale castle." And because he was a very influential and wealthy leader, when he got old enough, he could actually build that castle. Neuschwanstein was designed first by theatre decorators and second by architects. You might not know that if you haven't taken a little bit of time using a guidebook or studying ahead from home to understand what it is that you're seeing. Another example from Berlin: this is the Berlin Reichstag. This is the Parliament building. This is sort of like their Congress building, and it was built in the mid- to late 19th century. The first time all those 300 different disparate communities of Germany came together as one country: that didn't happen until the 19th century. And at that point, they built a unified Parliament building here in Berlin. And this has had a very traumatic history, most notably during World War II. Some of the final battles of World War II were Nazis fighting communists, fighting the Red Army on the rooftop of this very building. The city sat like a bombed-out husk right next to the Berlin Wall for 40 years. It was a deserted no man's land. It was almost a monument to the craziness of the Cold War. And then after Germany unified, the capital moved from Bonn back to Berlin. Not only did they rebuild the Reichstag building, but they topped it with this beautiful glass dome. Again Europe, old and new. And it comes with some extremely powerful archaeological or architectural symbolism. You can spiral up this spiral ramp and look down and the roof is actually glass. You can look down through the roof of the Reichstag and literally see onto the desks of the parliamentarians who are sitting below. Again understand history. The Germans have been jerked around by rulers throughout much of their history. They've done some terrible things because of charismatic leaders. They've decided, "We're taking charge. We want to be able to keep an eye on the people who are making these decisions." So wherever you go, whatever sight you're seeing, take some time to learn the history and understand it, and part of that it sort of goes hand in hand with art appreciation. There's a fine line between history and art appreciation, but again, you can go to museums and say, "Well, there's Michelangelo's 'David.' Wow that's famous, I've seen that before, great, now I've actually seen it in person and I can go." But take a minute to pause and think about what this is. The first few times I saw 'David' in the flesh, I thought, "Wow, that's a pretty impressive sculpture." Well, it's more than an impressive sculpture. This is a symbol of the burgeoning Renaissance. It was carved just after the year 1500. This was a whole new way of thinking. First of all, David -- I never really knew -- David is the David of David and Goliath. If you don't study up, you might just think it's some guy named David. No, this is the humble shepherd boy who was the only one willing to go out and fight the giant Goliath. And when you look at the statue, you realize this is more than just a nice physique. He's got a sling that he's about to use to hurl rocks at the giant slung over his shoulder, and look at this hand. He's holding rocks in this hand. He's about to put them in that sling and hurl them toward the giant. And notice that this hand is really highly developed. You can see every vein. It's charged with the power of God in those stones. Only with the power of God is David going to be able to slay this giant Goliath. When you're looking into the eyes of 'David,' you're looking into the eyes of Renaissance man. You can see the confidence of humanism and the Renaissance and the people of Florence who, after a thousand years of dark ages, are finally coming out of that cocoon. They're going back to the ideals of the Roman times, when there was great civilization and great art. Particularly fitting symbol for the people of the Renaissance, the people of Florence, because they saw themselves facing down all of this brutish Dark Ages thinking, like Goliath, and they're the David. They're the people who are believing in the power of man to -- with the help of God - supersede all of those things. If you didn't understand all that, you just say, "Wow, that guy is really good-looking" and then go on to your next sight. Take some time to learn these things. Use a guidebook so that you can really appreciate what it is that you're seeing. One of the greatest museums in the world is the Louvre in Paris, and I gotta tell you: there's a lot to see in the Louvre. You could spend days seeing it. You could just join the paparazzi snapping pictures of the 'Venus de Milo,' but if you're not careful, you can get exhausted. You can just become another victim of the Louvre. Keep your sightseeing focused in a place like that. Know what it is that you want to see. Be surgical in going and seeing it and getting the information and making sure you understand it. And then move on to the next thing. You don't have to see everything in the Louvre. See just the things that are really important and understand their significance to the greater history. Now, we've got a lot of great guidebooks. This is one of my favorites. This was written by Rick and Gene Openshaw, who's this great guy who does a lot of our writing on art and history, an old friend of Rick's. "Europe 101." This is your crash course in European art and history to help you appreciate all these things in their historical context. This is written for people who fell asleep in their art history classes before they realized they were going to Europe, and now they're going to Europe and they want to be sure they know the difference between Gothic and Romanesque and Renaissance, and this is the place where they find all of that. Speaking of which, it's just generally a good idea to equip yourself with good information. Find a travel information source with a philosophy that agrees with yours and take advantage of the information that they have. Europe is crowded. It can be a real drag to show up at some of the great sights of Europe and find it completely jammed with people. Here's a great example: I was in Granada in southern Spain a couple years ago updating our guidebook there, and I went into the tourist office in Granada to ask some questions, and there was a lot of people in front of me in line, so I had to wait for 10 minutes. Now, the most famous sight Granada is the Alhambra. The Alhambra is this incredibly grand Moorish palace that was built by the leaders of the Moors who took over Spain, south Spain from North Africa for hundreds of years, were finally forced out by Isabel and Ferdinand. One of the finest Moorish palaces, probably the finest Moorish palace you'll find anywhere in the world. Everyone who comes to Granada wants to see the Alhambra. I'm standing in the tourist office and I have to listen to 10 people in front of me go to the desk and say, "How do I get tickets for the Alhambra?" and the person at the desk rolls their eyes and says, "The Alhambra is sold out today, I'm sorry," and the person says, "Sold out? I came all the way to see the Alhambra," and the person at the desk says, "Yeah I'm sorry, it's sold out." So that person leaves disappointed, and the next person comes up. "Hey, how do I get tickets for the Alhambra?" If these people had been reading their guidebook, they would know that there's lots of ways to get tickets for the Alhambra, but you have to do it ahead of time. Because if you show up on the day of, it could be sold out. When you make your hotel reservation, you can say, "Please book me tickets for the Alhambra for this day and time." You can go on a website or call a phone number and book with your credit card. You can go to an ATM in Barcelona and book tickets for the Alhambra for a week later. There's so many ways to get these tickets ahead of time, but if you don't have a good guidebook and don't know that you're going to be one of those tourists who kind of stumble up to the desk and say, "How do I get tickets?" and then walks away disappointed and wish you hadn't come all the way to Granada. This applies to places all over Europe. Florence, the Uffizi, the greatest museum of Renaissance artwork anywhere. Now, when you go to the UffizI courtyard, it won't look like this. It'll look more like this. There are literally five different entrances to the Uffizi depending on what kind of tickets you have -- whether you're in a group, whether you have a reservation, it's a mess. It's a mob scene. If you have a good guide book you'll know, "Okay, again, I can book my hotel and at the same time say, 'Can you please get me UffizI tickets?'" You can go online. You can call a phone number. You can drop by a ticket-booking office the day before. There's so many ways to get advance tickets and believe me, you don't want to be at the end of a line of 100 that takes an hour to get into the UffizI when you could have so easily in two minutes booked it online before you left on your trip. Now sometimes it's not about pre-booking, it's just about being smart. At Rome's famous Colosseum, this is the line for buying tickets. It's not the line for going inside. These are people who just showed up and said, "Let's go to the Colosseum." If they had their guidebook, they would realize the Colosseum is actually on a combination ticket that also includes Palatine Hill, which is a two-minute walk away. There's never a line at the ticket office for Palatine Hill. All you have to do is walk two minutes over to Palatine Hill, say, "I'd like the combo-ticket." You get the combo ticket, walk right back across the street, and you can go to the head of this line and go through the security checkpoint and you're in the middle of the Colosseum. It's amazing how many people don't take the time to learn how to avoid lines like this. The Eiffel Tower -- obviously if you're going to Paris, you think, "Well, I'd love to go up at the top of the Eiffel Tower." Well if you show up without reservations you're going to be at the end of this line. I tell you there's two IQs for travelers traveling in Europe: those who wait in lines and those who don't wait in lines. Speaking of IQ -- I queue as little as possible by making advanced reservations. That was a little Rick Steves chestnut for you. Now if you don't want to get in this long line, if you've read your guidebook and know ahead of time to book ahead of time, you see all these empty stanchions? This is the line for people who pre-reserved. You can literally zip through these stanchions in two minutes and beat the line, provided that you've read your guidebook and know how to get those tickets ahead of time. Again, make a point to learn how it is that you beat these lines in Europe. It will make your trip so much better. Obviously I'm a big fan of our guidebooks, but I really will say, we've written these guidebooks to be very practical and very useful for travelers like you, and we spend so much time looking for these kinds of strategies. In addition to all the other stuff we do, our main goal when we're updating a guidebook is: how can we make people have a better experience? How can we give them savvy tips that help them beat the lines and have a more meaningful experience? All of our guidebooks are 20% off today and I'll just quickly explain to you the differences, because people get confused sometimes about how the different guidebooks work. We have country and regional guidebooks, like Italy, for example. Italy, Germany, Spain, France, and so forth. We also have city guidebooks, like Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice. The Paris information in the Paris guidebook is greatly expanded from the Paris information in the France guidebook. Now if you're going to France and only spending two days in Paris, you can just get the France guidebook and get 100 on Paris. If you're going to go to Paris for longer than that or you really want more detail, you can get 500 pages on Paris by picking up our Paris guidebook. The things that we add are mostly museum tours and neighborhood walks. So we have two pages on the Louvre, for example, in our France guidebook. We have 20 pages on the Louvre in our Paris guidebook: a painting-by-painting self-guided tour. So if you're debating which of these books to get I would say: if you want those tours or if you're staying for more than a couple of days, pick up the city guidebook. If you just want kind of the basics you can pick up the country guidebook. We also have a new book, which I don't have here -- there's a new style of book called Snapshot. You'll see them over in our travel store. Snapshot -- for example -- Cinque Terre. And you'll know it's different because it has a little different color and it has the word Snapshot on it. The Snapshot books are just excerpted from the country guidebook. There's no extra information, okay? So if you want to go to Scotland, instead of buying the whole Great Britain guidebook, which is this thick, you can buy the Snapshot, which is this thick. So it's just designed for your convenience if you don't want all of that information. So you've got country guidebooks, city guidebooks with all of the expanded museum tours, and Snapshots. So when you get over to the desk there and you're curious about which guidebook to get, hopefully that'll help you make a decision. Again, everything I'm talking about here today is in much greater detail in "Europe Through the Back Door," and I really think if someone's going to Europe, particularly for the first time, there is no better investment than this book. We spend years -- and every year, a couple of months -- making sure we have the best and most accurate and most up-to-date advice for general travel skills. This isn't destination-specific. "Europe Through the Back Door" is about how to travel, and then "Paris," "France," "Italy," is for what to do when you get there. A lot of our information is available free on our website, so go check that out. It's actually amazing to me how much free information we give out through our website. I mean pages and pages and pages of free content from the guidebooks. So my co-workers in our guidebook department, it actually kind of sticks in their craw. They say, "Why do we give away so much free information? Make them buy the book." And this is Rick's philosophy -- he really wants people to have great trips, even if it means giving out free information more than might be prudent. We just really believe in helping people with their trips. Now there's lots of other guidebook resources available. This is all the Rick Steves' stuff, but of course, there's a whole world of other resources. Find a resource, again, that really agrees with your travel philosophy. Really popular right now, I don't have to tell you - TripAdvisor and other kind of review booking sites. I actually have kind of mixed feelings about TripAdvisor. I use TripAdvisor all the time. I think it's a great addition to using a good guidebook. If you don't know, TripAdvisor really specializes in crowd-sourced reviews. In other words, anyone who wants can post a review for a given hotel or restaurant and it's a great way to kind of get 100 people's average take on this hotel, and I think it's a great supplement to a guidebook. But there's a lot of limitations. For example, you hear a fair amount in Europe about a hotel's competitor will set up a fake email account and start posting negative reviews to take down their competition. And also you've got people writing these reviews who might have different tastes than you do. One of my favorite examples - I use TripAdvisor for hotels. I kind of stay away from it for restaurants. In Budapest, one of my favorite cities -- boy, I love Hungarian food. When Hungarian food is really well-executed I think it's one of the best cuisines in Europe. But I checked the Hungarian restaurants, the restaurants in Budapest, here on TripAdvisor and five of the top ten are Italian restaurants. I didn't go to Budapest for Italian food. I went for Hungarian food. And I've been to some of those Italian restaurants and I know that there's much better Hungarian restaurants. So I'm not saying that TripAdvisor is useless, I'm just saying keep in mind that people maybe have different tastes than you do. It skews to more touristy options. You also probably know Rick has a great television series. It's on every night. I think they moved it to channel 12 now, every evening at 7:30 I think. You can also watch Olive Rick's TV shows -- all 100 episodes are available on DVD and Blu-Ray, they're on sale today of course. But you can also watch them free streaming on Hulu.com anytime you want. So just click on over to Hulu.com, type in "Granada" if you want to know more about the Alhambra, and you can watch - for free -- Rick's full-length show about Alhambra and Granada. Rick has a lot of fun filming these shows and you can really see his enthusiasm in the final product. Another way to equip yourself with good information is to hire a local guide or join a local tour, and this is something that Rick's a big believer in and I'm a huge believer in as well. There's nothing like having somebody who lives in that place tell you about the place that you've come so far to see. You can join a regularly scheduled tour. Every town has tours that leave at 9:00 and you pay 10 or 15 euros which is about, oh, $13-20, and you get a very experienced local guide who can really tell you what there is to see in that town. Often they're really wonderful people, great entertainers, and they can really give you the whole story, save you the time of reading it in your guidebook. And sometimes they can even tailor the tour to your interests. Hiring a local guide is a great option as well. It sounds like it might be expensive but you know, you can hire a local guide for three hours depending on where you are in Europe for maybe $100-200. Now that sounds like a lot, but if you're traveling with a group of four, if you split $150 four ways, that's cheaper than a big bus tour around London. So it can actually be a great value. And the nice thing about hiring a local guide is they can tailor the tour to your interests and you get their personal stories. Here's a great example -- the city of Prague has this great grand main boulevard called Wenceslas Square. I'm walking around Wenceslas Square, kind of at the bottom of the square with my friend Honza. Honza's a registered local guide in Prague. he actually writes our Prague guidebook, but you can also hire him or one of his friends privately to be your guide when you come to Prague. I walked by this plaque on the wall at the bottom of Wenceslas Square, I don't even pause. Honza says, "Now hold on a second, let me tell you about this. Let's look at this here." 17-11-1989. November17th, 1989. What was going on in 1989 in Czechoslovakia? The end of communism, right? This was a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but at this point Czechoslovakia was still a communist country. It just so happens this was the day of a celebration of a very popular Czech writer. It's kind of the Youth Writers Day, so all the kids in the town, all the students showed up for a big festival celebrating this writer. At the end of the festival, all of these teenagers said, "You know what? We're just fed up with this. We're inspired by the Berlin Wall coming down. We're tired of this communism. Let's go and have a protest on Wenceslas Square." They started walking through town and walked along the river was about a mile and a half. Walked along the river, went up on a modern street, next thing you know what? They're coming down this arcade, this building that's closed off on all sides, and all of a sudden they're surrounded by the riot police. The communist government had found out this was happening and they sent out their troopers. The students were terrified because here you have these riot police with these big batons threatening them. They held open their hands like this, they flashed the peace sign. "We're unarmed, we're defenseless, please don't hurt us." The only way -- because they were closed in, the only way they could get out was to run down this gauntlet of riot police who were hitting them from both sides on batons. The teenagers were running as they were getting slammed by these riot police. They all went home and licked their wounds. The next day word of this got out and the rest of the people of Prague got angry. And first it was the teachers of those students and their parents, and local theaters heard about this and said, "This isn't right. We're going to go on Wenceslas Square and protest what we heard happened to our kids last night." So there was a big protest the next day, and the next day it was bigger. And the next day it was bigger. And soon hundreds of thousands of people from all over Czechoslovakia were filling Wenceslas Square and after 10 days of this, the communist government literally voted itself out of existence. Václav Havel, who is a Czech philosopher and playwright who'd been imprisoned by the communists, became the first post-communist president of Czechoslovakia. They called it the Velvet Revolution because not a shot was fired. Wow that's powerful. It's even more powerful when you're hearing it told by Honza who, as 12-year-old kid, was with his sister that night being hit by those riot police. If you have a good local guide you can actually talk to someone about history from the perspective of that person who experienced that history This is a really amazing way to connect with Europe. If you don't hire your own local guide there's lots of other options. Most museums let you hire a guide for a couple of bucks, maybe 5 bucks. You can take an audio guide, which gives you a painting-by-painting tour of that museum. Another great option is an audio tour. Rick has produced this really wonderful series -- now this isn't a sales pitch because this is free -- Rick has produced this really wonderful series of free audio tours -- there's nothing that you have to pay for -- covering all the great sights in the great cities of Europe: Paris, London, Rome, Amsterdam, Venice, Athens, a few others. You can go on ricksteves.com where you can download Rick's app, "Rick Steves' Audio Europe" and you can download all of these free. Whatever you want for free. It's basically our museum tours from our guidebooks except you have Rick reading them in your ear, so you don't have to be fumbling with a guidebook. It's a really wonderful way to take with you before you go, download them on your iPhone and then you don't even have to think about it. You walk into St. Mark's Basilica and you can just click on the audio tour and you can get a great tour. Rick does those, you can get other audio tours from other companies as well if you'd like. Also included in this free audio content on our Rick Steves' Audio Europe app and on our website: free interviews from Rick's radio show. You may not know Rick has a radio show that is on every Saturday afternoon here in Seattle. We have podcasts and other excerpts from these radio shows that you can listen to any time you want for free. Now all of this stuff I've been talking about sounds great but you have to be realistic about your budget. I'm not going to tell you that Europe is cheap. Europe is a pretty expensive place to travel. It's not as expensive as it was a few years ago, the exchange rate's come down a little bit, but it's expensive, so be realistic about how you want to set your priorities. It's not a bad value. You get what you pay for. It's really worth paying for -- to go to Europe. But it just requires some strategizing, requires thinking about, how can I do this affordably? I'm not going to go through this point by point but this is a rough budget breakdown that I have on your handout. You can look at that later at your leisure. It's also in the guidebook. Just different categories and what you can expect to pay. What I want to highlight is, for room and board -- in other words, hotels and restaurants -- figure about, for two people traveling together, about $120 a day per person. That means about $75 per person in $150 hotel double that you're sharing, includes breakfast. $15 apiece for lunch. 20 for dinner -- sorry, 25 for dinner. 5 for gelato. Gotta have your priorities, right? Now there are ways to save money. You can picnic instead of going to restaurants for every meal. Eat for the price of groceries anywhere in Europe by stopping by a grocery store. I'll talk more about this a little bit later. You can stay in youth hostels instead of staying in a hotel. You can stay in a shared room in a youth hostel for $25 or $30 instead of $100, $150 for the room. Budget travelers do this all the time. For less than half of what I just said -- 120 per person per day - you can do it for 50 or 60 if you're really on a tight budget. So it's all about priorities and kind of travel styles and thinking about cheaper alternatives. Instead of taking a taxi, hop on the bus. You can save some money that way If you're worried about saving money, again, in our guidebooks we really try to give you strategies for how to do it as affordably as possible. Think about where you're going and how expensive those places are. There's almost nowhere in Europe more expensive than Norway. Now I'm not saying don't go to Norway. If your travel dreams are taking you to Norway, go ahead and go there. Just realize it's going to be a little bit expensive. But if you're going to several places, one strategy is to go really cheap in the places that are expensive, and then splurge when you get to places that are cheap. Here's an example from one of my trips a few years ago. I was updating our guidebook in Norway. I was sitting in Oslo and, actually for dinner my last night in Oslo, I went to a cafeteria. It's so expensive. I didn't want a sit-down restaurant. I went to a self-service cafeteria. My full meal was maybe $30. After dinner I went back and I got a cookie. The cookie was $5. Didn't think twice about it, I'm in Oslo, come on, a Coke at a grocery store costs $7 in Oslo. I get on a plane the next day and I go to Gdańsk, this beautiful Baltic town up in the northern coast of Poland. From the airport I go to my hotel, drop off my bag, I go straight to my favorite little hole-in-the-wall restaurant right on the main drag of Gdańsk, looking up at all this great scenery. I got a big tray full of Polish food, all sorts of traditional Polish cuisine, sat down, started eating, and I realized I had just paid less for my lunch in Gdańsk then I had for a cookie last night in Oslo. Again, I'm not saying go to Poland instead of Norway, I'm just saying be realistic about how much things cost in different places, and if you've got a limited amount of time, maybe spend a little bit more time in a place like Poland and a little less time in a place like Norway if budget is your priority. There's different ways of traveling, and it really is a question of: how independent do you want to be? Now the most independent way to travel is to travel solo. I travel solo most of the time just by the nature of my work. There's things I like about it, things I don't like about it. It's great to be independent. You don't have to confer with anybody to make a decision about where to go. You can just do whatever you feel like when you feel like it. But of course you have to combat homesickness and loneliness and there's times it can get pretty, pretty lonely traveling alone for a long time in Europe. Most people travel with a couple or with a small group and that's another good way to go, and probably that's what most of you are doing. Keep in mind though, if you're traveling together, I have kind of a rule of thumb -- everyone's going to have different interests, everyone's going to have different appetites for different sorts of sightseeing. One person wants to go to the museum, the other one wants to go shopping, and that's totally fine. I think it's great to have a rule with the person you're traveling with -- or the people -- it's perfectly okay to split up for a couple of hours -- "I'll do my thing, you do your thing and then we'll get back together later on." Just make that deal before you go so there's no hurt feelings later on, and it can really help everybody have a much better trip. Traveling with a family is another option. You know, people sometimes ask, "You know, I'm going to Europe, where should I take my kids?" And half-way I want to tell them, "To Grandma and Grandpa's house on the way to the airport." Now, traveling with a family can be wonderful and it can be incredibly broadening for the kids, just be realistic. You're going to pay twice as much to see half as much if you're traveling with a family. You have to rent a big car instead of taking a cheap train, for example. One strategy if you're taking families, taking a kid: give your kid an allowance every day. It helps them kind of understand the local economy and economize a little bit and figure out how to budget. And then also, as a condition for that allowance, make them keep a journal. This is something they're going to prize for the rest of their lives. They don't know it now, but 20 years from now they're going to find that journal and remember their first trip to Europe. That's a great way to make sure your kid has a really wonderful experience when they go to Europe. Another option of course is to go with a group, to go with a tour. As I'm sure you all know, we have lots of great tours here at Rick Steves'. We have, I think, 40 different itineraries. We're going to take 15,000 people to Europe this year on our tours. Now there's a lot of pros and cons -- like other types of travel - with going on a tour. You could get stuck in one of these traps where you're following around a guide with a color-coded paddle walking through the streets of Europe. You've seen these groups, maybe in Europe -- 50 people cramming around a guide, not being able to hear. Rick actually used to lead these kinds of tours 30 years ago, and from doing that he learned that there's better ways to do it, and he's been inspired to create a different type of tour. Let me tell you what's sort of unique about Rick Steves Tours. For one thing, we have small groups. Our groups are capped in the mid 20s. Usually most tours will have 24, 26, maybe 28 people. That lets us be smaller, more mobile. It lets us stay in smaller hotels that the big tours can't. It lets us eat at smaller restaurants that the big groups can't. It lets you stretch out on the bus -- 25 people on a 50-seat bus means everybody can stretch out. We have excellent guides on our tours. We have really a wonderful array of more than 100 different tour guides who are just so passionate and so expert about their destination. Whether it's Colleen here leading you through Greece or it's Elka leading you through Hungary or Ben who takes you to Croatia, there's just a whole world of Rick Steves guides. We all have the same kind of philosophy about travel but everyone has their different personality and specialty and interests. No matter who you get on your tour, you're going to have a great experience with your tour guide. One thing I really appreciate about our tours, as a tour guide is: we have a very strict "no grumps" policy. We also don't allow curmudgeons and cranks, if you're wondering, and I really appreciate that because we get wonderful people on our tours. I love spending time with the people who show up on my tours. There are people who are, you know, independent. They're smart, they're inquisitive, they're capable, they just want a little extra help seeing Europe and we're there to give it to them. These are fun-loving tours. We do a lot of important sightseeing. We take you to all the big sights. We also give you free time to do your own thing, and we also make sure you have some fun along the way as well. I think our tours are really well-structured between structured time and free time. These are active tours. We like to do a lot. We pack a lot into the day. You'll have an option in Switzerland to hike up through the Alps and so forth. Whether you're going with a tour or on your own, you want to get in shape before you go to Europe. I make a point -- I'm leaving in a week, and a month ago, I started going for long walks every night after work, because you really want to be able to -- the better shape you are when you go, the more you're going to be able to see when you get there. And then something else that I really love about our tours, and it comes from Rick Steves directly: again, we want you to be a temporary European. We're not there to show you some sanitized, packaged Europe. We're there to help you get in touch with the real Europe. The Eastern Europe tour, one of the tours that I lead -- we have this wonderful day in Hungary where we wake up in a small town in remote Hungary and we drive to a little village and we go into the school and we have lunch in the cafeteria with the school kids, and then after lunch we get to have a question and answer with the school kids in Hungary. They ask us questions we ask them questions. It's a wonderful cultural exchange, and it's deeply rooted in Rick's philosophy about connecting with the places that you go to see. Again, 40 different itineraries covering all of the continent. If you want all the details about these, you can check out our tour brochure, which is available in the lobby. Hey we also have a tour desk out in the lobby if you have any questions about any of the tours. Keith is right over there -- wave your hand, Keith. He'll be out at the tour desk after the class or right now if you want to go buy a tour, and he'll be able to tell you anything you need to know. Again, it's not for everybody. I'm not saying everybody should go on a tour. But just weigh your options and know that each one has its own pros and cons. Another option is going on a cruise. This is something that we've moved into pretty recently. For years Rick thought that people who like Rick Steves' stuff aren't doing cruises. He actually had kind of a bad attitude about it. Rick used to say, "Cruising isn't travel, it's hedonism. Cruising is all about, 'can I eat five meals a day and still go snorkeling when I get into port?'" But then Rick had kind of a "come-to-Jesus" moment a few years ago because he kept running into people using his guidebooks who are huge fans saying, "Hey Rick, we're having a great time. We're using your guidebook and we're on a cruise," and Rick realized - wait a minute, really smart, independent, capable travelers can take cruises. But there are pros and cons, like with anything. The pros of a cruise: very affordable. Certain parts of Europe -- you simply cannot do them more inexpensively than on a cruise in the level of comfort that you can on a cruise. It's great convenience -- you don't have to pack your bag and haul it to the train station every day. You go back to your cabin, you have a nice dinner, you go to bed, you wake up and you're in a different city. The disadvantages of cruising? Well the obvious one is: you're very limited on the amount of time you have in port, and that's something that I personally don't like about cruising. Just about 5:00, 6:00, I'm getting ready to kind of get going. I'm in the groove, I want to go check out some more neighborhoods. Nope I gotta get back to the ship. All aboard time's at 5:30, I better get back. So just be aware that there's pros and cons as there are with all types of travel. It's amazing to me people who go on a cruise and have no idea what they're going to do when they get there. I was researching a cruising guidebook a few years ago. Our cruise came into Florence. I was on the bus from the port of Florence that's actually called Livorno going into the downtown and I overheard the people behind me say, "Well, where are we today? Florence. I think there's a train that goes into Florence. Do you want to go to Florence? I don't know, where's the train?" And I thought, jeez, how much did these folks spend? And all the trouble they went to to fly all the way here and get on the ship and they land in Florence and have no idea what to do. If you're going to go on a cruise, equip yourself with good information so that you can make smart decisions. If you're on a cruise they're going to try to sell you excursions. So when you walk off a cruise ship you've got a row of buses, guides with numbered paddles. You can pay them triple what you would to do it on your own to go with them and if you want the convenience you can do that. But here in Tallinn, Estonia, for example, you walk off the ship, you can walk right by all those buses and head right for the spires of the Old Town. 15 minutes later you step into the old town of Tallinn, Estonia. You can have a great time there with a good guidebook, see everything that you would have with a tour, and you would do it for next to nothing compared to the $60 or $80 they would charge on the excursion. So just make informed decisions. Again, we're getting into this cruise thing pretty big. A few years ago, Rick sent me over to research and write our Mediterranean Cruise Ports guidebook. I actually went on three different cruises, stepped off the ship in a couple of dozens of different European ports, and I had to figure out, how do I get into town without paying for an excursion? What's the bus connection? What's the subway connection? And so forth. The book's been such a success that we just wrote a new guidebook. I went over and did a few more cruises last fall. Our Northern European Cruise Ports book is coming out in July. So if you're going on a cruise, make sure to get a good guidebook, equip yourself with good information. These guidebooks will tell you exactly how you will get from the dock in Livorno to Michelangelo's David in Florence. By the way, we recommend in our cruise book that people pull out the sections for that day. There's no point taking 100 pages about Barcelona for your day in port in Istanbul, and I think that's a good philosophy for any guidebook, whether it's Rick Steves' guidebook or whatever. I don't take a whole guidebook with me to Europe ever. Before I go on my trip, I always go -- with an Xacto knife -- and I cut out only the sections that I need. It's really important to pack light and that's a great way to do that. I'm going to talk a little bit about -- great, I've got plenty of time -- I'm going to talk a little bit about planning our itinerary. This is pretty basic stuff and some of it might be kind of intuitive so I don't want to, I don't want to go on and on about it . All the details are in our guidebook, but here's a few considerations to think about when you're planning an itinerary. First think about when you want to go. There's basically three options: you can go during peak season -- that means July and August. Again, each option has pros and cons. In peak season -- July and August -- it's going to be hot, it's going to be crowded, but everything is going to be open, there's long hours of daylight, and so forth. You know, I really discourage going in peak season in places like Italy that are very popular, very crowded. Italy in particular can be extremely hot. If you have to go in July and August, that's fine but it can be a little bit harder to get around, things are a little more expensive because occupancy is really high. For a lot of places in Europe I really prefer to go in shoulder season. Shoulder season would be before and after peak but not quite off-season. That means May, June, September, October. My favorite months of the year to travel really anywhere in Europe are in September, because you get the best combination of: the weather is pretty good -- you might have a few raindrops here and there but the weather is still pretty nice -- but it's less crowded, less expensive, easier to get around. There's some caveats depending on where you're going. If you're going to a cold weather climate, if you're going to Great Britain or Scandinavia, you probably do want to aim for peak season. July and August are really good for those because it never gets that hot, it never gets that crowded in those places and winter can come really quickly in September, let's say, in Norway. You can also consider going off-season, in the wintertime. Air fares are going to be cheaper, it's going to be totally uncrowded but of course it'll be cold and Europe is at very northern latitudes. If you, if you look at a map of Europe, you'd be surprised how far north Europe is. It gets dark -- in some parts of even Central Europe -- it can get dark at 4:00 in the afternoon, which draws the shades on your sightseeing before, perhaps, you want to be. So just be aware that there's pros and cons of each. My favorite is shoulder season for most of Europe. Let's talk a little bit about not just when to go, but where to go. Let's say you've got three weeks for a vacation in Europe. First just do some daydreaming, do some brainstorming. Make a list of where you want to go, write them down in a rough geographical order and then you'll have this sort of sticker shock when you realize, "I have three weeks but I've got 39 days that I want to be traveling." You're never going to get to everything so just accept that you're going to have to make some cuts, save something for another trip. Your next step is to start making those cuts. So, for example, I would love to go to Greece but it's going to take a whole week. It takes a long time to get there, it's not exactly close to Italy. Let me save Greece for another trip. Bologna is a great city but, you know, I'm already going to Florence, maybe there's some redundancy there. Let's take out Bologna. Berlin -- another great city, but I'm doing a lot already in Germany and Berlin is sort of not that close to this other stuff. It's going to take me a good 5 or 6 hours on the train each way. Let's take out Berlin. I'd love to have five days in Paris, but really, I can only spare three. You see what I'm doing here? You kind of cut and whittle down. Night trains -- this is code for night train -- can save you a whole day for sightseeing. Florence to Rome, night train. Venice to Munich and Bavaria, night train. Pretty soon you're down to 21 days. It fits with your schedule. Again, this is a really basic and quick example. All the details for this exact example are in the Europe Through the Back Door book, but just gives you a sense of how you might whittle things down. My next step after I make that list is to lay it all out in the calendar so I can really visualize what it's going to look like. Use a guidebook to be smart about planning your time. If you're going to be in Florence on a Monday, the Uffizi is going to be closed. I might put a little reminder in my schedule. Just be careful not to plan your trip around going to the Uffizi on a Monday, and so forth. Now I want to talk about packing light. Don't make this mistake. If you know anything about Rick Steves, one of the gems of Rick Steves' travel wisdom: pack light. Pack as light as you possibly can. You will never meet a traveler who brags, "After each trip, I pack heavier." You're always better packing less, and it's a philosophical thing. We're accustomed to thinking, "Well, I better pack for the worst-case scenario." Don't pack for the worst-case scenario. Pack for the best-case scenario, and then buy yourself out of any jams. If you're going to Italy in the spring, you might not need an umbrella. Don't pack an umbrella. You can buy one for five bucks when you get there, don't worry about having enough for every eventuality. Just take a tube of toothpaste. If you run out in Bulgaria, you can have the fun cultural experience of going in a grocery store, picking up something that you think might be toothpaste. And you see it all the time in Europe and out on the street. It's so clear when you see someone like this that they're struggling through Europe with their bags. It's about being mobile, it's about being able to pick up and go at a short notice. It's about not getting tired. You don't want to get so tired hauling your bags to the hotel that you don't have any energy left for sightseeing. She better be giving us a dirty look, 'cause we're giving her a dirty look. What do you need all that stuff for? This is what you want to travel like. This is how you want to look when you're traveling. Limit yourself to one bag, carry-on sized bag. 9 inches by 21 inches by 14 inches. I know that's shocking. There are people thinking, "9 x 21 x 14? That's my cosmetics kit!" But it's all a question of how high maintenance do you have to be in Europe? Lower your maintenance and pack less. This is the bag that I carry whether I'm going for a week or six weeks. I'm going, actually this exact bag is the one I'm taking when I leave a week from now for six weeks in Europe. I also take a day bag like this one here that I can sling over my shoulder so I can carry both at once. That's all I'm going to have with me for six weeks. If you want a wheeled bag -- show you some alternatives -- if you want a wheeled bag, which a lot of folks do, we have a similar sized wheeled bag. This is a picture of our group coming through the streets of Florence, just to give you a sense of what this looks like in practice. Some people like to have the backpack, sling it over their shoulder. You notice everyone's also got a day bag that they've got slung somewhere. It's reasonable. It's not a tiny amount of baggage. Notice that most people do have wheeled bags. I think most people prefer them. People on our staff here certainly prefer them, most of our tour members end up having wheeled bags. If you aren't comfortable carrying a backpack, you don't have to. Just do whatever is comfortable. Keep in mind though that a wheeled bag is great going through the airport, but it's a lot harder and noisier over cobblestones, for example. The nice thing about a backpack, if it's sort of a toss-up for you, is you're a lot more mobile. You also get a little bit more tired out, so just keep that in mind. Now, this strategy that makes this possible -- think about this: what's the biggest part of your luggage? Clothes. So the solution to packing light is: pack fewer clothes and do laundry more often. That's the secret. There's other secrets: don't take stuff that you might need, take stuff that you know you need. But the key thing is: pack clothes that make sense, wash them often. A couple of things to think about when choosing clothes -- you want versatile clothes, first of all. You want clothes that are wrinkle-free, or that don't wrinkle, or that look good wrinkled, that way you don't feel bad about washing them in the sink every so often. You won't always be able to get things pressed at a European laundromat. The other thing is: think about clothes that coordinate well, clothes that can go with anything. Everything in your luggage should match everything else in your luggage more or less. Think about things that have two uses a nice sweater or a nice shawl can warm you up if you're cold, but it can also dress up an outfit if you want to go to a nice dinner and evening of theatre. So think about each item you're taking and make sure that item makes sense to bring with you. I'm just doing a really basic packing run-down right here. Later today in this room Joan Robinson is doing a wonderful "Packing Light" class, so feel free to come back for that a little later this afternoon. It's on your schedule. She'll get into all the details, all the gadgets and gizmos. For now, the thing to really keep in mind: pack light, do laundry more often. By the way, when I talk about doing laundry, it doesn't mean going to a laundromat all the time. Do laundry in your sink. I take a little squeeze bottle of laundry detergent. About every three or four days I do a small load of laundry in my sink, hang it up on a clothesline. Maybe every week or two weeks you can go to a laundromat and get everything really clean, but it's amazing to me...I see people in Europe, I've had people on my tours even...one time I did a Best of Europe Tour. We had a day in Rothenburg, Germany, this beautiful medieval German town. We had about three hours free in the afternoon. Now most people were going to go hike around the walls for these great views, and there was one family determined to go to the laundromat, and they spent their whole afternoon going to the laundromat, sitting there, watching their undies tumble dry instead of experiencing Germany's greatest medieval town. Do laundry in your sink. You could have it done and it'll be dry by the time you would get to the laundromat and back. Just be comfortable, again, with being a little lower maintenance in Europe. You can still be clean, you just don't have to spend a lot of time doing it. I'm going to talk about transportation, and you know, again, this is one of these situations where Europe is really ahead of the curve. They have a really remarkable public transportation network. It's so easy to get around here. For one thing, it's small. In addition to being far north, if you look at a map of Europe, you realize these are really small places. It's not that far between cities like Paris and Amsterdam. That's just four hours on the train. This is not a huge area like the United States. Think about when you're planning a trip, how you want to get around. Your basic options would be train, rental car and flights. First I'll talk about trains, and this is something that Europe really specializes at. And you know, the great European train stations, they're practically temples of travel. This is Berlin's Hauptbahnhof, the main train station. They just opened it a couple of years ago. The biggest train station in Europe. They literally have trains coming and going on three different tracks at three levels coming in at three different angles. It's this hive of travel activity. It's just exciting to stand on the platform and think about all the places that you could go from here. Europe is so well-connected and it's getting faster than ever. They've got these high-speed trains, think about the best example the English Channel Tunnel. There's a train called the Eurostar that goes under the English Channel. Big Ben to the Eiffel Tower in 2.5 hours. You're traveling at almost 200 miles/hour through the French countryside. You go under the English Channel in 17 minutes. The lights go out, 17 minutes later, the lights come on, you're in another country. Germany has their ICE trains -- InterCity Express. France has their TGV trains. It's incredibly speedy to get around Europe these days. It's also well-coordinated. They do a pretty good job of anticipating the connections people need. For example, there are these remote Norwegian fjord communities where two times a day, the train pulls in, you walk five minutes to the boat dock and a boat leaves five minutes later, perfectly in time for that connection. Except in Italy, where the train comes in just in time for you to see the boat pulling out. Now if you want to research schedules before you go, you need to go to one website. It's on your handout: bahn.com. "Bahn" is the German word for railway. Basically this is the German rail website. Even though it's German rail, they cover destinations for all of Europe. Go to bahn.com, plug in the place you're going to and from and the date, and it gives you all of your options, tells you how many changes you have to make and where, what time it gets in, what time it leaves. It's very easy to research schedules. You have two options for paying for your travel on the rails in Europe. You can pay point-to-point tickets or you can buy a rail pass. If you're not familiar with the idea of a rail pass, you're basically pre-paying for travel, and they come in two forms. You can either do a consecutive-day rail pass where in this country you can travel all you want on the trains without ever having to buy a ticket for two weeks, and then there's also what's called a flexi-pass, where they give you five days of travel within a two-month period and you can choose which five days you want to travel. There's just a dizzying array of rail pass options. I'm not going to get into them all here, but we have this wonderful resource that we produce. I think this is the best resource anywhere in the world about rail passes: "Rick Steves' Guide to Eurail Passes." You can get a free copy at our Travel Center. We also have a rail desk where you can ask your questions, get personal advice about if I'm going to these towns, do I need a rail pass? And which one? Rail passes can save money, but not always. It's worth doing the math. The way you would do that is: make a list of the train trips that you're going on. Use a map like this, we've got maps like this in our rail guide. Between each city we've got an amount, how much that train costs. Add up the amount to buy point-to-point tickets, if you bought tickets, and then compare it to the cost of a comparable rail pass, and it's pretty obvious which of those prices is going to be higher. Keep in mind, if you have a rail pass, a lot of these fast trains require a reservation and/or a supplement -- either you have to reserve ahead of time or you have to pay a little extra to take a fast train. Even if you add all those up it can often still be a good deal. If you are buying point-to-point tickets as you go on your own, you can stand in line for 10 or 15 minutes at the ticket windows or you can look for automated ticketing machines. And you know, this really goes for all types of experiences in Europe. Everything is automated these days in Europe. Train tickets, subway tickets, you can even buy telephone SIM cards at a vending machine sometimes. Be comfortable with the automation of Europe. In Italy, you've got these self-service kiosks, English instructions. You can check schedule information, you can buy tickets. You insert a credit card and two minutes later, you've got a ticket. Again, these can be intimidating but once you spent ten minutes in a long line to buy tickets, watching in, that time, fifty people come and go with these little self-service and getting their own tickets, it becomes clear that that's a good way to go. With the time you spend on the train, it's a good chance to rest up a little bit, plan ahead. Use the time on the train to plan ahead for your next destination so you can really hit the ground running, literally. And also, it's a great chance to connect with Europeans. If you're on a train, you've got five hours, you've got nowhere to go, nowhere to be. It's a great chance to talk to the people next to you. This is a great "connecting with locals" opportunity. This is what I do all the time. One time I was sitting on a train - six hours through Poland. I had this bag of snacks. All I had to do -- I was in this sort of silent car with six Polish people and we were, none of us were looking at each other and all I had to do was hold my bag of snacks out to the person next to me and five minutes later we were all talking animatedly and had a wonderful experience. It's a great chance to connect with Europeans. Keep in mind too that a night train can save you time. People worry, "Well, I don't want to take a night train because I don't want to miss the scenery." Well if you're in cities that are 10 hours apart by train, the first couple hours you're going to enjoy that scenery. The next eight hours you're just going to be bored. Don't worry about missing the scenery. Doing a night train can save you that much time for sightseeing the next day. As far as rental car options -- this is another good option, but now keep in mind that rental cars are usually more expensive than trains. You have to kind of do the comparison -- a rail pass would cost this much, a rental car would cost this much. People who really appreciate a rental car: families or groups traveling together who want to be able to throw their bags in and not have to worry about hauling your bags to the station. Rental cars can be great in off-the-beaten-path areas that are harder to see by public transportation, if you go into the Scottish Highlands, if you're going up to the mountains, that could be a good place to have a rental car. A car is an expensive, expensive worthless headache in a big city. You have to deal with parking it safely and so forth. Instead of taking a car for your whole trip, consider just renting a car strategically for a day or two in the places where it really makes sense. Just cause you're going to Europe for 2 weeks doesn't mean you need a rental car for 2 weeks. You can take trains and flights to connect the long hops and then get a car for a few days if you want to drive around the castles of North Wales, for example. Let's talk about travel insurance. This is really in detail in "Europe Through the Back Door," so I'll just quickly explain this. Most American car insurances don't cover you when you go to Europe, so you're gonna have to come up with another solution. There's two options. First, call your credit card company. A lot of credit card companies offer some collision coverage if you buy the rental car with that credit card. So ask your credit card company how this works and quiz them about the worst-case scenario so you understand your options. The other option is your rental car company will sell you collision damage waiver -- CDW -- and this basically waives most of the deductible if you end up getting into some sort of an accident. Now keep in mind, if you do CDW it covers most of the deductible but you still might have a few hundred dollars deductible. So when you show up to get your car, they might offer you "super" CDW, which buys your deductible down to zero. This is sort of complicated but the point is, if you do CDW, it can end up being quite expensive, but it buys you peace of mind, so it's kind of your choice how much, how much of a peace of mind you want. Like its trains and everything else, Europe has really wonderful roadways, super expressways that connect things. Lots of beautiful kind of backcountry drives as well. It's a pretty easy place to drive in most countries. Be sure you're really familiar with the local traffic signs. And you know, Europe is really big on these automated tickets. So if you're driving in Europe, be very aware. If you're in England and you see this little camera, it means that someone is watching your speed. They'll take a picture of your license plate and they'll mail you a ticket. And if you're in Italy you have to be very careful of this: "zona traffico limitato." It means a limited traffic zone. The old historic centers of a lot of the most popular destinations in Italy -- Florence, Siena, San Gimignano -- there's about a dozen cities that do this. If you try to drive into the city center, there's no barriers, there's no warning except for this sign, and if you drive in that area, again, a camera will take a picture of your license plate and they'll mail you a ticket for $200. So know the local road signs, know these kinds of pitfalls. Of course all that's covered in the guidebook as well. As far as finding your way, I like using an old-fashioned paper map, but more and more I like using these apps on my smartphone. You can use the Google mapping app, you can use Apple's built-in map mapping app, whatever you like. Now, you might be worried about - I'll talk a little later about smartphone data roaming and this sort of thing. If you're downloading maps as you're driving on your data connection it can be very expensive. Here's a little tip: you can download the map and the route at your B&B in the morning before you leave and it'll stay on your phone then all day as long as you don't enter a different address, and then you can navigate with that all day without having to incur more Internet or access a Wi-Fi hotspot again. So just be aware of that possibility. And then there's another option that you might not have thought of, but actually, Europe has some wonderful low-cost budget airlines. There's probably dozens of these cheap, sort of semi-start-up companies that will connect European cities for $100 or less. It's really amazing. I'm going in a week to Europe. I bought two tickets on these cheap airlines, just to give you an example -- I'm flying from Florence to Munich on Air Dolomiti for $150. That's less than a train ticket and a lot faster. Later in the trip I'm flying from Hamburg, Germany, to Manchester, England, for $60 including taxes and luggage fees and so forth. Sometimes you think this is too good to be true but they really are cheap. You have very cheap options. And again, there's tons of them. Ryanair is one of the big ones. Some of the names don't exactly inspire confidence -- Wizz Air. Now these do sometimes have drawbacks. Be aware that they're usually not changeable, non-refundable. They tend to stack flights really closely. They squeeze in as many flights as possible, so if there's a delay there can be quite a big trickle effect. Often you have to pay big fees for extra luggage or for any luggage at all, although that's becoming common with the big carriers anyway these days. Before I take any long train trip in Europe, I always check to see if there's a cheaper flight and most of the time there is a cheaper flight that can save me 8 hours, 10 hours, 15 hours on a train. Each of these airlines of course has its own website where you can go and search around. A lot of them have these great interactive maps where you can click, "I'm going to be in Frankfurt" and a little fan of lines will spread out and show you everywhere they fly to from Frankfurt. But the best place to go is a site that collects all of this information. You could use kayak.com that a lot of people are already familiar with. I love this skyscanner.com. They really specialize in cheap European airlines. You can plug in, "I want to go from Rome to Amsterdam on August 5th." It searches all of the cheap airlines, and look at this: easyJet has a direct flight. $143. I can click over to the easyJet website and book that. I promise you, that's half as much and hours and hours faster than if you booked a train on this connection. So really consider these cheap budget airlines. Once you reach your destination, you have to get around as well. And of course, Europe has excellent public transportation within the city as well as between cities. Great subways, great bus systems. It can be crowded but it's a good, fast way to connect the dots, particularly if you're trying to zip beneath rush hour traffic. So get comfortable with the local public transportation. It's usually well-explained and well-marked. Taxis are an interesting challenge in Europe. Taxis can be great. I take taxis all the time. It can be actually a relatively affordable way to very quickly connect two points, especially if you're sharing with several people and split the cost, a taxi can be a great deal. But there are a lot of corrupt cab drivers. The problem's worse in some countries rather than others. My rule of thumb is, before I get in a taxi, I always ask the cabbie, "Estimate roughly, how much is this going to cost?" and then hopefully I have a sense of how much it should cost. In our guidebook we try to list, you know, from the airport into town should be about 30 euros. If he's asking way too much, I know that he's probably crooked and I can go check with the next guy. There's ways around it but if you're comfortable with that, if you're you're smart and have your wits about you it can be a really great way to get around. Let me talk a little bit about money here, and you probably all know that the most of the European Union countries are now on the same currency. It's called the euro. The currency is, right now the exchange rate is about $1.30 to €1, so if you see a price in euros, you add about 30%. So €10 would be about $10 for example. Fortunately it's pretty close so it's not that hard of an exchange rate. Not every country in Europe has the euro, by the way. Holdouts include Switzerland, some Scandinavian countries, Great Britain, some countries in Eastern Europe. But most of the core of Europe is on the same euro currency, making it really convenient. People ask me sometimes, "How do I get cash in Europe? Should I take traveler's checks?" or people also ask, "Should I ask my bank ahead of time if I can get some euros?" and if you're wondering this I can tell you with great confidence, I would never get cash before I go through my bank. They're going to give you a terrible rate. It's going to take a week for the euros to arrive, and then you're going to walk off the airplane when you land in Europe and realize there's an ATM right there that takes your card and at a much better rate can give you cash instantly with English instructions on the screen. Just to be sure you know what your options are, here's what I would do: call your bank first, make sure that your card works in Europe. Almost certainly it does but it can't hurt to check. Tell them that you're going to Europe and maybe even which countries are going to, because if they start to detect unusual spending patterns that they weren't expecting they could block your card. So make sure they know that you're going. It also is a good idea if you have a credit card, ask them for your PIN number. Now in America, when we use a PIN number, it's usually with a debit card. There are some new machines in Europe that take a PIN even for a credit card. I'll talk about that in a moment but that's something to ask while you're at it with your bank. Assuming you have all of that set up, again, it's incredibly easy to get cash in Europe, no effort. And the nice thing about using an ATM is that you get the idyllic bank to bank rate, as opposed to the lousy tourist teller rate. If you take cash and go to a money changing booth in Europe, they're going to give you an awful rate. If you use an ATM you're using the rate that banks use with each other, so it's much more favorable. This is the technology I was just mentioning. It's called chip-and-PIN. This is becoming very widespread in northern Europe. Scandinavia, it's very common in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Less common in places like Italy, Spain in the south. Chip-and-PIN is a new European system that hasn't quite caught on here in the US, partly because when it does it'll cost the banks a lot of money. But basically Europeans have cards that have an embedded microchip which they insert in the slot and then they have to punch in a PIN code to do a transaction. Now you're going to start seeing more and more of these pay points that are chip-and-PIN for transactions in Europe. They're most common in automated pay points: toll booths on the freeway, gas stations, ticket machines and so forth, and it's a total crapshoot. Sometimes your card works great, sometimes you put in your credit card and it asks you for the PIN. So that's why you want to know the PIN for your credit card. If your credit card doesn't work, there's a whole kind of flow chart of how you do this. If your credit card doesn't work, try your debit card with the PIN. Sometimes that'll work. Worst-case scenario: the machine just won't take your American card. This does happen occasionally. In that case maybe there's a machine that takes cash or you can go to a live cashier, a real person, and either they can make your card work or you can pay them cash. Now I don't want you to be intimidated or terrified or think "I'm not gonna be able to pay for anything in Europe." There's always ways around it. You should just be aware of, it's a good idea to carry some extra cash. Be careful if you're driving on the freeways in France. If you're on the tollway, be sure you don't end up in the cards-only lane on the French tollway because you can only use a French chip-and-PIN card in those and pretty soon you've got a stack of irate French drivers stacking up behind you. So just be aware that this is something going on in Europe and that you just really want to be aware that it's happening. It's possible to get an American credit card with a chip. A couple of banks have just started doing this in the last year. For a casual tourist, it's probably not worth the hassle. Alright, this is another kind of complicated topic. I get asked about this all the time so I'm really going to try to explain this. Sorry if your eyes glaze over but people worry about this: "How do I phone in Europe?" You know, a few years ago you used a European payphone. You'd just get a phone card, you'd insert it in the phone. That was the way to go. But you know, these days almost everybody in Europe and in the U.S. is using cell phones. So you might be wondering, "How does my cell phone -- or does my cell phone -- work in Europe?" Here are your basic options: you can take your American cell phone if it works in Europe and roam with it, which is expensive but very easy; or you can try to get a cell phone that works with European SIM cards, which I'll explain, that give you access to much cheaper European rates. It's much less expensive but a little bit more complicated to figure out. First option: your cell phone, taking with you to roam in Europe. Call your cell phone company. First say, "Does my phone work in Europe?" If you're on AT&T it probably works in Europe. If you're on Verizon it's 50/50 because Verizon uses a different cell phone technology but call and ask, first of all, does it work in Europe? Second, how much does it cost? It's probably going to be about $1.30/minute if you roam with your American cell phone. Pretty expensive. The third thing is to say, "Yes I want to enable international calling on that cell phone," so that when you get off the plane in Amsterdam and you turn on your phone you've instantly got access to the European phone networks. $1.30/minute -- that's expensive. That's the downside of doing it this way. Again, I would do this only if you don't think you'll be making many calls, if you want to be reachable at your home number, and if you don't mind paying for the peace of mind and not having to hassle with this other option. If you want to save a little money and you're a little bit more comfortable with the technology, let me tell you about SIM cards. This is a technology that all European phones and a lot of American phones work on, even if we don't know it. A SIM card is a little microchip that you stick in a slot in the back of your phone that gives it the phone number and gives you access to the phone network. You probably don't realize it but very likely the phone you have in your pocket right now has a SIM card inside it, but in America we don't really mess with that. We get a contract with one provider and we use it for the life of the phone, but in Europe you can buy these SIM cards as easily as buying a stick of gum. Stick it in your phone and you've got a new phone number with much cheaper rates. You may already have a phone that will work in Europe. The key is getting a phone that's unlocked. Now if you buy a phone under contract in the U.S., it's probably locked to work with that company. If you got a phone through AT&T, it can only be used with an AT&T SIM card. But after you're out of contract, after two years usually, you can call your cell phone provider and say, "Can you unlock my phone?" They'll send you a code that you punch into your phone and suddenly you can use any card in that phone. So find that that old phone that you threw in a drawer somewhere when you got your iPhone a couple years ago, call your cell phone company and say, "Does this work in Europe, and can you unlock it?" If you don't have a phone that can be unlocked, you can buy one. I went on Amazon this week and I checked "unlocked quadband phone" - "quadband" means it will work in Europe, and here are three options that are less than $40. Unlocked, I can walk off the plane in Europe. In the airport I can walk over to a newsstand. I can buy a SIM card, stick it in the phone and I've got a European phone number and I'm paying $0.10/minute instead of $1.39/minute. Now I made it sound really easy, it can be a little more complicated, but ultimately it actually is one of these things that sounds too good to be true, but it really is that easy. I've literally bought dozens of SIM cards in Europe. If I'm in a country for two days or three days, I might buy a SIM card for that country. I was in London for two or three days last September. I walked out of my B&B after I checked in, I crossed the street, bought a SIM card for five pounds. Usually a SIM card costs $5-10 and it includes that much credit, so you can buy a SIM card for five pounds, it'll have four or five pounds of calling credit and I could call anywhere in Britain or anywhere back home to the U.S. for $0.10/minute. That's a big improvement over $1.30/minute that you pay through AT&T or Verizon. So if you're comfortable with the technology, consider this. Some countries you have to fill out a little form and give them your passport -- Italy, Germany -- so there's a little bit more red tape, but in a lot of countries -- I literally in Greece went and bought a SIM card for less than $5 at a newsstand. 10 seconds later, it was in my phone and I had a Greek phone number. Before you go, again, be sure you have an unlocked phone and know where the cell phone SIM card goes. If it's an older phone, you take out the battery and it goes in a little slot here. iPhones have a little slot on the side if your iPhone is unlocked. iPhones take a slightly smaller SIM card -- this is getting pretty technical -- so just be aware of what kind of SIM card it takes so you can look for the right one when you get to Europe. But most cell phones, especially older ones, take this standard SIM card throughout Europe. Does that make sense? So again, your options are: expensive but easy to roam with your phone; cheap but a little bit more complicated to buy SIM cards. You know, and these days you don't have to phone as much because of Skype and FaceTime. Most travelers these days do most of their calling when they're at their hotel. They use their laptop or their smartphone or tablet to get on Wi-Fi and then they can use Facetime or Skype to make calls -- either free to another Skype-enabled device or maybe $0.05/minute to a phone line. There are still Internet cafes around Europe where they have a computer you can use if you do want to go low-tech and not carry anything, but these are very rare these days. These are mostly used by local teenagers playing video games who can't afford a computer at home. More often people, again, are using their own tablets, laptops, and smartphones. Wi-Fi is very widespread. There are hot spots at most hotels. There are hot spots at many cafes and restaurants. There are even hot spots in beautiful floodlit piazzas and a lot of towns, a lot of European cities are getting wired -- where you can sit out just about anywhere in the city and get online and have reasonably fast access. You can't expect it to be lightning fast all the time but you can usually get online when you need to. Okay, I promise this is the last kind of complicated technical bit here, but people wonder, too, about data roaming with their cell phone. You hear these horror stories -- "I took my iPhone to Europe, I was using the Internet all the time and then I got a bill for $500 when I got back." I'm here to tell you that that's not a problem as long as you think about it and set something up ahead of time. If you have a smartphone or a tablet, the easiest thing to do is just to be on Wi-Fi. Go from Wi-Fi hotspot to Wi-Fi hotspot. But there are times that you want to be able to get online without having to find Wi-Fi. If I'm driving around to Italian agriturismi and I want to get from one to the other and I want to get directions on my phone, if there's no Wi-Fi hotspot, I'm sunk. What I do is, I call my cell phone service provider ahead of time. You can set up international data roaming. For $25 or $30, you get about a hundred megabytes of data roaming that works anywhere in Europe. 100 megabytes is not a lot, it's about enough for sending a thousand emails or looking at 100 websites, so you can't use it all the time but once I have that, I have that to fall back on if I can't get to a hot spot. Think about whether it's worth it to you to arrange that ahead or whether you're just going to get by with Wi-Fi. If you do decide to use the data roaming, be aware -- and even if you don't -- be aware that most phones have an option for turning off roaming. Not just data roaming, but voice roaming. So familiarize yourself with your cell phone if you don't want to be having people call you on your American cell phone and running up really expensive bills because they don't realize you're in Europe. Go into your phone menu. Under "voice roaming" -- turn it off. That way you won't get calls if you're in Europe and you save that money. If you want to be available, you have to keep it on. If you have data roaming -- when I'm on data roaming, I try to keep it turned off unless I need it, so if I'm on Wi-Fi I don't want to have the data roaming turned on because I don't want to accidentally start eating up that limited budget. But if I need data roaming, I can go into this menu, turn on data roaming, use it. When I'm done using it, I turn it off. And again, look through your phone menus and you'll figure out how to do this. In a lot of ways, cell phones are your only options these days. Pay phones are an endangered species in Europe just like they are in a lot of places in the U.S., so get comfortable with the technology one way or another. Alright, now I promise that's the last of the really dense stuff. I'm going to talk about some more fun stuff from here on out, and the timing is perfect. So I'm going to talk about some more fun stuff and you can kind of relax. In fact, let's take a two-minute stretch. Everyone stand up and shake it out, wake up a little bit. All that ATM, chip-and-pin, SIM card, data roaming stuff is a little dense, so... Alright, and as you take your seats I'll just, I'll just remind you that all of these topics are covered in great detail in Europe Through the Back Door, again, if you couldn't quite follow all that stuff about getting a cell phone unlocked and so forth, just pick up the Europe the Back Door. A lot of that content is also on our website, ricksteves.com. You can read the same information there as well. So alright, let's talk about a few more things and then head on out and enjoy an Edmonds kind of day. Next thing I want to talk about is accommodations, and you know sleeping, hotels are probably going to be the biggest part of your budget, so you want to be really thoughtful about how you choose your hotels. I'm always amazed how many Americans go to Europe and think that they need to spend $300 or $400 or $500 for hotels everywhere. It's just, it's kind of like they're speaking a foreign language when someone says, I'm going to Paris and my room costs $500." I've stayed in a really delightful family-run little pensione on a beautiful street in Paris for a $120/night for the double with my own private bathroom and air conditioning and pretty tight, pretty small, but really fun people running it, and on it it's on a beautiful market street called the Rue Cler in this great neighborhood of Paris. And Rue Cler is wonderful because it's where local people actually go and do their market shopping. It's so French, you walk outside and you feel like you must've been a poodle in a previous life. I mean it's just a wonderful place, and then you talk to someone who says, "Well, I paid $500 at the Marriott." Well, that's one option. What we really don't do as well here in the U.S. - we have a lot of big chains, right? If you go traveling around, you stay in a Comfort Inn or a Holiday Inn Express or something like that. One thing that Europe really specializes in that I encourage you to look at are small family-run hotels. I'm talking about 10-20 room pensiones, small hotels really run by one family with maybe a couple other employees. It's been in the family maybe for generations. The nice thing about these is they're a lot less expensive. Again, I showed you that budget earlier -- figure $150 for a double room, for a really nice, very comfortable, not fancy but very comfortable hotel. You can find, actually, rooms for a lot less than that in some places, especially when you get out of the cities into the countryside and into some of the cheaper countries. In any event, these great, small family-run hotels are really a great option, and that's really what we emphasize in our guidebooks. They're less expensive but they're also often very well-located. For example, here in this little Swiss town of Appenzell, you've got several of them lined up here on the main street. In Dublin, you've got one overlooking the Ha'penny Bridge. This is what we really emphasize in our guide books and what you should really look for if you want to stretch your accommodations budget when you're in Europe. Another nice thing is these are run by really nice, friendly, welcoming people. They're eager to give you a warm welcome. They'll be happy to have you come and check you in and another nice thing is they can give you advice for sightseeing. When I'm updating my guidebooks I always make a point to chat with a friendly hotelier if they've got some of the latest information about, "Well you know this restaurant used to be great but it changed chefs and now it's no good." Don't be afraid to ask questions. These folks are here to help you. They're in the business of accommodating Rick Steves' travelers so they really know what the kind of things that you want to know about. If you want to save even more money there's lots of great options and they go by different names in different countries. You could call 'em a bed-and-breakfast, that's kind of the most common thing. We call them that here, B&Bs. In Italy they're called pensiones. This for example is Mama Rabatti. She has this wonderful little pensione in her house in downtown Florence. Five-minute walk from the Florence duomo. You can get a double room here for less than $100, and some of the rooms have shared bathrooms, and for those you might pay $70. And not only are you getting a comfortable room, but you get to know this delightful wonderful Mama Rabatti, who's got so much energy, and like a lot of people in Italy, she'll chatter at you for ten minutes in pure Italian and somehow it makes sense because she's such a warm person and she's such a great expressor and she is a great communicator. And one of the nice things about these pensione B&B options, they're less expensive, but they also have more personality. You really get to know the people who run them. And they're all over Europe. In Croatia for example this is very common. They go by different names in different places, so learn the name of the type of accommodation in the country you're going to. For example, "sobe" is Croatian for "zimmer," which is German for "camera," which is Italian for "bed and breakfast," which is English, and so forth. You've got a lot of great options if you go beyond just hotels. In fact, on a lot of booking websites, there's a separate category: hotels and B&Bs. A couple other budget options to consider. One thing that's becoming very popular are apartment rentals. There's a lot of great websites that point you to these. vrbo.com is one of many good apartment rental websites. The nice thing about an apartment is it's often less expensive, especially kind of inch-for-inch for the size of accommodations you get, and that's because you're not paying the overhead of having a 24-hour reception. You're very independent, it's kind of low-service. You meet the person, they give you your keys, they check you in and then you're on your own. So if you want somebody who's there to answer your questions 24 hours a day, don't do this, but because it doesn't have those services it's a lot less expensive. It also is nice because it comes with a kitchen so it can help stretch your budget in the sense that you don't have to go to restaurants all the time. You could do more cooking for yourself. My parents are retired and they more and more enjoy renting an apartment for a week in a town where they can really settle in and go shop the local market and so forth, rather than paying for hotels. You might even have your own little scenic patio where you can look out over the Spanish countryside. Another even cheaper budget option of course is hostels. Now these are called "youth hostels," that's probably what you think of them as, but you know youth hostel isn't just for youth anymore. There was a time when there actually were age limits -- over 26 you weren't allowed. More and more, especially as Europe gets more expensive, both European and American travelers are finding that this can be a great alternative to an expensive hotel. The key thing about youth hostels is, it's usually a shared room. So, for example, you'll be in a dorm room with 10 beds. For that reason, you can get a bunk for $20, rather than $60, $70, $80, $100 for having your own private room, and if you're traveling alone this can be a great option too, because it comes with a built-in camaraderie. You meet the people who are staying there with you. It's a great way to keep up with other travelers, team up for a day of sightseeing or whatever. They range all the way from these rustic mountain hostels like this one in Gimmelwald all the way to big modern very efficient city center hostels. This is one in Copenhagen that was just built a couple years ago. Eight stories of hostel beds, state-of-the-art lobby with free Wi-Fi, three bars, laundry services, so forth. There's all sorts of options, and it's not just these little rustic hole in the wall places. This hostel for example has private beds that maybe are half as much as a comparably located hotel. You'll probably still have to share the bathroom and a lot of the folks that you're going to be staying within the building maybe a little bit younger than you are but it'll certainly save you some money, so consider youth hosteling even if you're not necessarily a youth. There's different ways to book hotels. I may be a little old-fashioned, I still prefer to book direct with the person who owns the rooms. I send an email -- everyone speaks English when it comes to booking hotel rooms, I don't ever worry about emailing Mama Rabattii, for example even though she doesn't speak English. She's got a friend who can translate, or she reads enough English to know when someone wants a reservation. I send emails direct. You can also book online. Most hotels have their own website and a lot of those have a booking form now that you can fill out. And then there's sites of course like TripAdvisor and booking.com. Like TripAdvisor, I think there's pros and cons to Booking.Com. The big advantage is you can type in where you want to go and which nights and it'll show you exactly what's available and what all the prices are, but keep in mind that if you book a hotel through booking.com that hotel is paying a cut of their profits to booking.com, and for that reason in some places you can actually save money by emailing the hotel direct. They might be able to give you a deal. Sometimes you can even suggest that. "I saw your place had a discount on Booking for this amount, would you be willing to give me that price to book direct?" Now this won't always work because actually a lot of these sites have a deal where they won't let the hotel undercut those prices, but it's sort of a case by case scenario. As you know I'm the author of the Croatia guidebook. There are some wonderful little five-room family-run B&Bs in Croatia and it just, it just tears me up because I was there last year and they said, "Could you please tell people that they shouldn't read about our B&B in your guidebook and then go and book it on book.com, because if they send us an email instead we would keep all the money, but when they go and book it on booking.com we end up paying 15%?" So just keep that in mind as you're using these sites. I usually, certainly for comparing the options, sometimes I'll just go ahead and book direct once I've found what I want. Here's a fun topic: eating. And boy Europe is a paradise for foodies, I can tell you. Here's a few strategies for eating. First of all, again with this sort of budget focus, Europe is expensive. It's really really easy to blow a lot of money on a bad meal in a big touristy city. The obvious key -- this is so obvious that maybe it doesn't need to be said: Don't go to the big fancy places on the main drag with a big neon sign that says, "We speak English and accept credit cards." And you'd be amazed how many people do that, and every city has one of these streets where it's all of these kind of tacky restaurants and there's someone out front shoving a menu in your face and so forth. Just walk a half-block, two blocks, three blocks down a side street and you're going to find a place that has better food for half the cost, much friendlier. These are people who are cultivating a return clientele. These aren't people who are just trying to pick off the tourists who are walking through town for one day. We love to find - for our guidebooks, on our tours - family-run hotels where mama does the cooking and the father goes out and manages the front of the house. Ideally you want to find a family-run restaurant that doesn't have any employees. Think about it: that lets them have a lot less overhead. If you've got a little mom-and-pop place where it's mom and dad and the two kids running the show you're going to get a much better value because you're not paying for them to employ servers and so forth. Another great sign to look for when you're looking for a restaurant is a short, handwritten menu. The menu is short because it's based on what the person found at the market that day. They don't want to have 20, 30, 40 different things on the menu. They want to highlight the things that are the best showcase for the ingredients that they were able to pick up. It's handwritten and it's in only one language -- in Italian -- again because they're targeting local eaters. People say, "Well this place doesn't have an English menu. I don't want to go here." It's a good sign if it doesn't have an English menu because they're not trying to attract the tourist who's in town one day of their life. They're trying to attract the people who live there. That's a great indicator of a good restaurant, and again, there's so many great options, it's a really kind of a haven for foodies. In terms of budgeting, again, Europe is a little bit expensive. You're going to have to expect that it's not going to be bargain basement but you can do pretty well if you pick these kind of local family-run places. This is Simon. He's the producer for our TV show with Rick, and when Rick and Simon are filming, every day at lunch they manage to find a place that has a nice filling lunch salad for maybe, 10 euros let's say, and then they throw in a beer for another 5 euros or so. 15 euros. That's about $20 for for a really nice filling sit-down lunch. If you want to go cheaper, you can just grab a sandwich on the go or do a little impromptu picnic on the go. But it is possible, you know, to eat for pretty, pretty affordably. $20 - is that high? Well it's a little bit more than I might want to pay if I'm just having lunch in my hometown, but that's that's what it costs these days in Europe. And some of these experiences are so unique. This is a great restaurant in Montepulciano, a cute little hill town -- that's where we met Adamo & Cesare, who I showed you earlier on. Just down the street from those two guys you've got Giulio and he runs a steakhouse. In the front of the steakhouse you've got people sitting at tables eating pasta and salad and so forth, and then in the back up a few set of stairs, you've got this big chopping block where Giulio has this huge hunk of fantastic beef. This is beef from Chianina cows. These are these white cows that Tuscans say are the best possible kind of beef. After you finish your first course -- after you finish your pasta and your salad -- Giulio comes around and says, "What do you want?" and you say, "I'd like a steak." He goes back to the butcher block, uses this cleaver to chop off a steak. In his bare hand he comes out and shows it to you and says, "Is that ok?" and you say, "Absolutely." A little bit of salt, a little bit of pepper, 7 minutes on one side, 7 minutes on the other and it's done. There's no asking, "How do you want it done?" That's how it's done in Giulio's steakhouse. One of the best meals I ever had in my life -- in Giulio's steakhouse. His pasta and salad were great as well. Speaking of pasta, you want to look for local specialties wherever you go and really be adventurous. Don't be afraid of local things like truffles, for example. This is something maybe you don't have a lot here, we don't really produce a lot of truffles in America, but there's some wonderful regions in Europe where you can get delicious truffles. It's a great place to try local specialties. Be willing to be a little more adventurous, to try things you might not normally try. You might say, "Octopus? Why would I ever eat octopus?" But then you go to Croatia or Greece and in front of you, they put a really delicious octopus salad. It's amazing what chefs can do when they come from a culture that maybe you haven't been exposed to yet. When you're in Germany you go to the beer garden. This is in Munich's beautiful Tiergarten Park. You've got Chinese pavilion and these giant tables out front where you can go get a big mug of beer and a sausage and a pretzel for a nice lunch. In Spain you might want to go to a tapas bar. This is where you stand up at the bar, you take what you want. They're keeping track because everything that you take has a toothpick in it. At the end of the meal, the bartender just counts the toothpicks and charges you and you pay him and you're on your way. Each country has its own way of doing things, and really -- using a good guidebook -- learn what that is, and take advantage of it. In France you want to try a cheese course. In Italy of course you want to try some pasta. Look for local specialties in towns and cities. Naples, Italy, is where pizza was invented. If you're in Naples you have to get a pizza. The best pizza I've ever had in my life was in Naples, which is very fitting because that's where it came from. There's a couple of restaurants that claim that they've been doing it longer than anybody else. Absolutely delicious. Know what the local specialties are and take advantage of them. If you're in Eastern Europe, if you're in Hungary here, you might want some spätzle and some pork stew. In Greece you want to get a delicious -- we call it a "Greek salad," they would just call it a salad there. And don't forget, a big part of the cuisine is the wine. So if you're a wine lover -- I don't have time to get into the whole thing now, you could do a whole class just about the great wines of Europe, but really be out there to seek out the wine, get the right wine to go with your meal, go to some wineries to do some tasting, this sort of thing. There's just a whole world of culinary experience out there. I'll talk a little bit about service in Europe. One thing that, if you haven't been to Europe, this is really good to know: European service is very relaxed, very slow to an American. And the reason is they have a different philosophy about eating. This is really important to understand so you don't get impatient when you're waiting for your bill. In America we tend to eat a meal when we're on our way somewhere. "Let's go to dinner and then we'll go to a movie." So we want to get in and out and we expect the service to be prompt and we want them to come right away and the second you finish the last bite of your food you want the bill on the table. Europeans have a totally different philosophy about this. When they go out to dinner, that's an evening in itself. They want to relax, they want to savor the meal. They don't want the bill until they ask for it. After I've been in Europe for a few weeks and I come home and someone drops the bill at my table while I'm still eating, I get a little bit offended because I'm in a European mindset and the European mindset is, "If you're giving me my bill, you're saying 'Get lost, we want to free up that table.'" That's the way Europeans think of it. Now this means, from an American perspective, you have to be a little more assertive. You have to ask for the bill. They won't bring the bill until you ask for it. If you're in a hurry, you can try being assertive and saying, "I'm in a hurry, can we make this fast?" but don't count on it. Another interesting thing about what's different in Europe -- they pay their servers very well. We have this tradition in the US where we pay our servers pretty miserably and expect them to get by on tips, so we really have to tip 15, 20%, maybe more. In Europe they're paid very well. Europeans never tip more than about 10%. Most Europeans tip about 5%, and there's a lot of Europeans who don't tip at all. And then -- this is really hard for Americans to get through their heads - they go to Europe and they just feel so guilty if they haven't tipped 15 or 20%, but in most European restaurants if you tip 15%, it's excessive. They think it's a mistake. So just be really comfortable with the fact that 5% is enough. 10% is for outstanding service. It varies a tiny bit by country so check the details in your guidebook, but in general, don't worry about it. Tipping is just not as big a deal in Europe as it is here. Always looking for ways to stretch our budget -- you can look for lunch specials. Stockholm is a very expensive city but most restaurants have a lunch deal: 69 kronor, which is maybe $12 or $13 for a good lunch. Keep an eye out for that. Ethnic food is often a really good, affordable budget option, and in most parts of Europe you'll find these doner kebab stands or falafel stands where you can grab a nice filling sandwich for 4 euros and 50 cents. For example, again, if you don't want to spend $20 on lunch, you can spend $5 on lunch if you are willing to go with something a little bit more casual. But a really affordable and a really fun way to eat in Europe is to picnic. Picnicking -- when you think of a picnic you might think of a wicker picnic basket with a red and white checkered sort of placemat, tablecloth that you take out. Picnicking just means you're buying groceries and eating them on the go. It can be anything from just grabbing a sandwich in the grocery store and sitting out on a park bench to going and picking out your favorite cheeses and meats and so forth. One way or another, enjoy picnicking. It can be a great way to expose yourself to European foods. Most European cities have a great market hall. This is actually in Budapest, it's actually called the Great Market Hall. Inside is a great place to go and browse and pick up the produce that you want for your meal. This is a market hall in Stockholm, similar selection. This is a great way to shop with what's in season as well to pick up only the freshest stuff, the most local stuff. Here in Tangier, Morocco, just across the water from Spain, you can go to the olive vendor, pick up a load of olives for your picnic. Or in some towns it's great to just hop from shop to shop. In France for example they have a fromagerie that specializes in cheese and a charcuterie that specializes in meats and so forth, so you can stop by the cheese shop and get some cheeses, and then go to the bakery to get some bread. Assemble the perfect picnic. Outdoor markets are another great way to go. If you're desperate you can always go to the supermarket, the big grocery store. Once you have your picnic -- again, it can be an adventure in high cuisine -- this is for more than one person, by the way, but this is what sort of the ideal European -- this is an old slide but just because it illustrates it so well -- you've got some local meats and cheeses, fruit, apples, bananas, some wine, local breads, maybe a jar of olives. For dessert you've got a jar of Nutella, this delicious chocolate hazelnut spread that you can enjoy putting on just about anything. Once you have your picnic, go find the perfect place to have your picnic. You don't have to just eat it where you buy it. Be adventurous. Follow picnic signs. Make some new friends. This is a tour that I was on a few years ago, where we set up a beautiful picnic here in the Lauterbrunnen Valley in Switzerland. Again, it's a great way that's cheap and affordable to fill the tank, and also have some great scenery. The last thing I want to talk about are a few of the hassles that you might encounter when you're traveling in Europe. One hassle is pickpockets. Now I want to be really clear about this: there's very little risk of violent crime in Europe. It's much more dangerous to be in a big American city than a big European one, from a violent crime perspective. But what Europeans seem to specialize in are pickpockets and petty crooks and people who shortchange you on your bill, trying to pocket the extra. I don't want to make you paranoid or scared, but you really do have to keep your wits about you, particularly in certain cities. The big cities of Italy: Rome, Florence, Venice; Paris, Prague -- really popular touristy cities are just loaded with pickpockets, and a lot of times you wouldn't guess that they're pickpockets. This is somebody who's posing as a beggar and I guess she sort of is a beggar. She's got her baby with her, but what you don't realize is: this is a fake hand that she's got slung over her shoulder, leaving her real hand free to sneak in while she's distracting you with the baby to reach into your pocket and take your stuff. These folks work on distractions and diversions, okay? If you're trying to get off the subway in Prague and the doors won't open, stand back -- pockets are being picked. If you see an old lady fall down an escalator in Munich, you can move in to help, but first, step back, check your pockets. Ok, now can I help you? If someone squirts mustard on your jacket, what you don't realize is that their cohort is on his other side digging into your pocket. Again, I don't want to make you paranoid, but it is something to be aware of and keep your wits about you. It's something that we're not really used to here. There is a solution that can buy you tremendous peace of mind, and that's a money belt. If anyone knows anything about Rick Steves, you've probably heard of the money belt. Basically this is a pouch that you wear around your waist, tucked in under your clothes like a shirttail. You keep all of your really valuable stuff in here, the stuff that you couldn't go on with your trip if you lost it: your passport, credit cards, large bills of cash, rail pass, that sort of thing. I still carry a wallet but I carry a small wallet. I wear it in my front pocket and all I have in that is my day's spending cash, and if you're wearing your moneybelt and you put it on, you don't have to worry about it all day long. You know that everything's going to be right where you put it so you don't even know it's there, much less are they able to get into it. And when you have that peace of mind, then having somebody's hand slowly slip into your pocket just becomes another interesting cultural experience. And if they get my wallet, so what? They got 20 bucks that I had in my wallet. They didn't get the $500 and euros that I have in my money belt. They didn't get my passport. Again, it's really easy if you wear a money belt to not have to worry about this stuff. And the last thing I want to talk about is language barrier. Something that people might worry: "Jeez, I don't speak any (fill in the blank of this language), how am I going to get around in Europe?" Relax. There is a language barrier, but it's extremely small. You can overcome it just by stepping over it usually. First of all, Europeans are very comfortable with English. English is the official common language of the European Union. For the last 20 years, almost everybody who grew up in Europe has learned English as their first second language. So first of all, you're not going to run you a lot of people who are monolingual. Certainly not young people or people in the tourist industry. And everything is -- because of that -- everything is very clearly marked in both English and the local language. Now I'm not saying that it's okay to just totally ignore the other language. I happen to speak German and Spanish, and when I'm in places that speak those languages, I probably have a little bit deeper experience or I catch things that other people don't because of it. On the other hand, I've traveled to 20 countries where I don't speak the language. I mean, I write a guidebook in Poland and Hungary and Croatia where I just speak a few words and I get by just fine. It really can be done. It's not something to be proud of, not to speak the language, but it's really okay. What I do in a country where I don't speak the language: well the first thing I say, just to be polite, is I ask somebody, "Do you speak English?" and sometimes they say no, in which case I kind of struggle along for a few words in their language, and usually after a couple minutes, they say, "Actually I do speak a little bit of English." Europeans are a little bit shy about their less-than- perfect English but in general it's not that big of a deal. They usually find ways to make it clear. Rick has a museum that he can't stand in Germany because there's not a word of English in the museum. There's no English descriptions, except at every exhibit there's a "No Touch" in English sign. They'll get their point across when it really matters to them, because there are so many different languages and Europe is such a diverse continent, they find creative ways to convey meaning even if you don't speak the language. You don't need to speak any language to understand this. It's a hundred and fifty meters to the right to find a bathroom. WC, by the way -- we use that a little bit in the US. That's the European international code for a bathroom. So if you're ever looking for a bathroom, you look for a WC. And they can get pretty extensive. Switzerland, which has four official national languages, does this very well. There's barely a word of English on this sign but it's all pretty clear what it is that you want to do. One way or another they'll make their meaning clear. Now even if they don't speak -- if the sign isn't international -- you're smart people. Trust yourself to make an educated guess. Even if this didn't have a picture of a dog with an X through it, sound it out. If it sounds the same it's probably pretty close. This says in German "hunde"... "hund"..."hound" "verbot"..."forbidden." "Hounds are forbidden"...Oh, no dogs in this park. Let me show you a more complicated example. This is a sign that you really want to know that you understand if you're driving a car and trying to park it on the street in Italy. Ok so I'm clearly not supposed to do something here. This is either a Zamboni or a street cleaner. I'm standing on the street so it's probably a street cleaner, and this looks like a car being towed. Okay so there's something that would happen here that would make me get towed. Okay 00-06... oh, that's a time, right? 00 would be like midnight, 06 would be 6 am. Between midnight and 6 am I shouldn't park here. But what about this part? And this is where it can be helpful to have a phrase book. "Giovedì" is the Italian word for "Thursday." Once you learn that one word the entire sign becomes perfectly clear. Parking is "dispari" -- not allowed on Thursdays -- "giovedì" -- from midnight until 6 am, and if you don't obey you're going to get towed. Just, again, take the time use your logical thinking cap to figure out what these signs mean. Folks, I really want to thank you for all of your attention today. I know this was a lot of material but again, all of it's covered in detail in Europe Through the Back Door, and I hope what you come away with from this talk is that you can really have a wonderful trip in Europe. There's so much to see and do on this great wide continent, and something that really inspires us in our work is that the people that we meet when we travel in Europe are traveling with the savvy and the confidence of a return travel, even if it's their first trip, and that's because they expect themselves to travel smart, they equip themselves with good information, and therefore, they do travel smart. And we love running into people who are using our guidebooks. These are folks whose grandkids said, "You shouldn't be doing this when they said they were going to Europe," but because they equipped themselves with the right information they can enjoy all that Europe has to offer and have a really wonderful time. Thank you so much and happy travels!

Channel: Rick Steves' Europe

Views: 161,788

Keywords: Cameron Hewitt, Rick Steves, destination, tips, Europe vacation, European travel skills, Europe travel skills, Europe travel tips, Europe travel advice, European vacation, European travel, Rick Steves Europe travel skills, Rick Steves European travel, Rick Steves European Travel Skills lecture, Rick Steves lecture travel skills

Id: o4V6VVuwBfM

Length: 127min 47sec (7667 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2013