125 Tips and Tricks if You’re Missing European Travel

I keep seeing the same questions and laments popping up on my social media feeds: “When can we travel again?” “Is it safe to go to…” “I was supposed to be going to _____ tomorrow.”

Why do we travel? To experience places and cultures and peoples who are different from us. To enjoy the idiosyncrasies that make the world interesting. Sometimes those idiosyncrasies draw us in, and sometimes they make even the most seasoned traveler miss home, but they’re all part of the experience.

So while we can’t travel, what can we do to re-create the experience of travel at home?

(All in good fun, and some more earnest than others.)

You can behave like an American traveling in Europe.

1) Day drink

2) Carry a day bag everywhere you go

3) Tell yourself the dessert you’re having is a cultural experience and is therefore zero-calorie

4) Enjoy a slower pace of life

5) Take many opportunities to say to your “travel” partner, “Isn’t the pace of life so much better here”

6) Always wear your money belt

7) Wash your clothes in the bathroom sink using packets of shampoo you had to fight to get open

8) If someone says they don’t understand, repeat yourself louder as though that’s a reasonable way to fix that problem

9) Take a picture of something with your phone. Then put your phone away and take a picture of the same thing with your camera

10) Stop in a random building to enjoy the art and architecture

11) Stop every so often and say, “I’m glad I brought these shoes”

12) Carry your passport with you at all times while worrying it will be stolen. Alternatively, lock your passport in your home and worry it will be stolen

13) Go the State Department’s website and let them know you’re going to the grocery store and hardware and what time you’ll be home

14) Stop your mail for two weeks

15) Tie a jacket around your waist

16) Wear quick-dry clothing and things that look good wrinkled

17) Pay for everything with cash

18) Decide to be fascinated by the small things

19) Choose to feel self-conscious about your pronunciation

20) Put any euro you have from a previous trip in your wallet. If you don’t have any, use Monopoly money or cut dollars to be proportional to the denomination.

21) Take the stairs

22) Call your bank and credit card companies and let them know you’ll be gone for a few hours

23) Get drunk and mistake someone else’s bedroom for your own

24) The next time you’re out and about, sigh and say, “Another fast food joint. Don’t they know how to preserve their culture around here?”

25) Wear a hat. You don’t know why you’re wearing the hat, but you’re traveling so you feel compelled to be wearing a hat

26) Constantly feel around for your passport, phone, and wallet throughout the day and momentarily panic if you don’t feel them

27) Spend your money like it’s not real currency

28) Pack a suitcase and live out of it for a couple weeks

29) Get some mini toiletries and use them in your bathroom

30) Leave a review about the staff and furnishings at your house

31) Leave a review about the quality of food in your kitchen. Be sure to mention the chef by name

32) Slow down and remember you’re not in a competition

You can shape your environment as though you were in Europe.

33) Charge yourself $1.50 for every glass of tap water

34) Put an armoire around your toilet and pretend your bathroom has always been that size

35) To give it that Roman feeling, go around your neighborhood and stencil “SPQR” on all the manhole covers

36) Dress up your family like Europeans by buying them clothes one size too small. Then say, “I guess that’s just the style here”

37) Extol the virtues of parliamentary democracy

38) Re-create the experience of walking on ancient streets by taking a sledgehammer to your driveway and sidewalks

39) Point at something, anything, and say, “The Romans built that”

40) Put a coin lock on your bathroom

41) Turn off your air conditioning

42) Turn off your heat

43) Install a bidet

44) Get rid of all your ice and all ice making apparatus

45) Point at something and say, “That’s from before the war”

46) Refer to something 200 years old as “the new one”

47) Switch your clocks to 24-hour

48) Switch the units of measurement on your phone to Celsius and kilometers

49) Replace decimals with commas

50) Refer to the second floor of your home as the first floor

51) Have your locks re-keyed for keys that weigh six ounces and look like they belong in an old timey movie

52) Rename all the streets in your town for saints and national founders

53) Remove all the window screens from your house

54) Replace all the outdoor staircases in your town with ramps, insert an angled block every eighteen inches, then claim that’s the same as stairs

55) Construct an outdoor urinal

56) Find some peat and set it on fire

57) Take down your “Elvis slept here” sign and replace it with a “Galileo slept here” sign

58) Serve no more free refills in your home

59) Set up a desk near your front door and have a helpful but vaguely surly person waiting there for you when you get home.

60) Fresco something

61) Create a walking tour audio guide for your hometown

62) Create a walking tour audio guide for your house

63) Go to the hardware store and buy some wood. Rub some dirt on it, put it in a display case with a small brass plaque declaring it a piece of The True Cross. Put this on your mantle

64) Go to a public park and say, “You know this park used to be reserved for the nobility

65) Go to a church and stare at the ceiling

66) Put some fingernails and hair clippings in a display case, call them relics, and place them in a niche

67) Go to the local art museum you have avoided for years.

68) Get a guidebook to your own city and check out all the must-sees in your hometown

69) Hire someone to explain each piece of art and furniture in your home

70) For those missing the British Isles, drive on the wrong side of the road

71) Install a drain in the middle of the bathroom floor, then remove your shower curtain or door

72) Get rid of your bed, buy two twin beds, and push them together.

73) Set a recording to say, “Mind the gap” every 180 seconds.

74) Serve ice cream with a spoon so small you can’t help but get some on your hands and napkins treated with some kind of ice cream proof varnish

You can act European.

75) Learn something about history

76) Drink wine with every meal

77) Organize a strike just to remind the bosses you can strike

78) Learn a second (or third or fourth or fifth) language

79) Charge the people in your household a VAT when it’s your turn to cook, because, dammit, you added value, and that should be recognized

80) Grow something edible in your backyard or on your patio, balcony, or rooftop

81) Hang up your wash to dry

82) Buy a diesel-powered hatchback

83) Look out at a field and say, “We came this close to being conquered by” and finish the sentence with any of these: Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Suebi, Alemanni, Cimbri, Nervii, Carthaginians, Magyars, Rus, Vandals, Vikings, Huns.

84) Speak softly (actually, could we do this all the time?)

85) If you’re missing Italy, make many animated hand gestures while speaking

86) Hold a soccer riot

87) Hold an unemployed youth riot (this one may happen without your help)

88) Be patient the next time a non-native speaker is talking to you

89) Have dinner at 9pm

90) Walk instead of drive

91) Hold a grudge about something that happened to your country in the 9th century. Bonus points if it’s something that happened to your city

92) Wait for someone to ask for a refreshment and explain, no, it’s the wrong time of day for that particular drink

93) Look out at a field and say, “We came this close to conquering all this back when we were” and finish the sentence with any of these: Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Suebi, Alemanni, Cimbri, Nervii, Carthaginians, Magyars, Rus, Vandals, Vikings, Huns.

94) When someone asks for water, say, “Gas? Con gas?”

95) Decide everything is personal data and defend it as though it were a newborn babe

96) Depending on what part of Europe you miss, say whatever comes into your head. Alternatively, never say exactly what you mean.

97) If you wish you were visiting Germany, wait for someone to cross against the light and then rip them a new one

98) Explain to someone that “upper class” has nothing to do with wealth

99) Embrace public nudity

100) Figure out how to stay thin while frequently eating rich meals and never exercising on purpose

101) Claim no one outside a 5-kilometer radius of your hometown knows how to cook. Narrow the radius to two kilometers around your childhood home if referring specifically to a food commonly found all over the world

102) Trace your ancestry back to the days of Alaric I

103) When a beloved public figure dies, display the corpse for public viewing. For four centuries

104) Shop at a butcher for meat, a baker for bread, a green grocer for produce, and a patisserie for pastry

105) Choose harm reduction policies over punitive policing

106) Extol the virtues of having a prime minister, president, and royal family all at the same time. Zealously defend this arrangement

107) Let your 9-year-old have a beer

108) Eat seasonally

109) Keep a box of inexpensive umbrellas nearby at all times so you are prepared to turn a quick buck if it starts to rain. When it’s not raining, try to move your selfie stick inventory

110) Buy a loaf of bread and some cut flowers and just carry them around all day

111) Redesign your government to be a constitutional monarchy without a written constitution or governing monarch

112) Tell visitors this property has been in your family since Charlemagne

113) Eat breakfast for five minutes, lunch for ninety, and dinner for three hours

114) Treat yourself to a multi-course meal

115) Buy fresh food every day

116) Work to live. Don’t live to work

117) Support a robust social safety net and system of worker rights

118) Think about diplomacy before the use of coercion in foreign affairs

119) Legalize something. Anything

120) Live your life as though no matter what, your family will have access to affordable, high-quality healthcare and education

121) Tie something colorful to a stick, wear a microphone headset, and badger passersby with, “English! English tour! 20 Euro! Okay — 10 Euro.” Then glare at them as they pretend they don’t see you.

When you’re ready to “return” home after all that “travel.”

122) Make an Instagram out of all the things you saw in your house last week

123) Insist people look at your pictures. Don’t notice or care how bored they are

124) Text or call your American family and friends, saying “The pace of life is so much better here” until they stop responding or tell you to shut up already

125) Make your friends wonder what’s happening by conspicuously wearing an anachronistic item of clothing from a European culture such as a beret or kilt. When someone asks you why, nonverbally communicate that nothing out of the ordinary is happening, and then patiently explain that’s what they wear in Europe and that you feel much more European than American now. This is a double bonus as you will feel not only as though you’ve recently returned from Europe but also that it was a semester abroad and you’re still twenty years old.

Hang in there, everyone! We’ll be back on the road someday.

And I’m hoping some Ameriphiles will do one of these for the U.S.!