Sometimes I think I should rename my website “The Lazy Traveller.” While my friends have been off on amazing adventures to Japan, southeast Asia, Dubai, Qatar, Belize, Mexico or Arizona over the past few months, I seem quite content to stay at home and read books about travel.

I feel a bit like a “voyeur” - always looking at the photos my friends post on Facebook, Instagram or email me directly of their journeys. Perhaps re-branding myself as “The Voyeur Traveller” would increase my audience.

While I often think I’d love to see New Orleans, Quebec City, Tokyo, Lisbon, Barcelona, or go back to Berlin, London UK, Montreal or New York City, I don’t do anything about it so perhaps “The La-Z-Boy Traveller” is more fitting.

Another winter has gone by and all I have to show for it is a stack of read books about places I have or would like to visit.

Here is some of the fun literary travel adventures I have been on this winter.

FYI: Yes, they were all found at thrift stores.

Lazy Traveller Tip: Be sure to have your phone or iPad with you when you are reading travel books so that you can look up the various places the author mentions as you read.

Sweet Paris

“The Sweet Life In Paris” is by David Lebovitz, an American pastry chef who moved to the “City of Light” to start a new life in the lively Bastille neighbourhood. It was a fascinating read, especially for someone like me who has not only a “sweet tooth”, but as my mother used to say, “a hollow leg.” Lebovitz offers some great observations about everyday living in Paris.

In his acknowledgements he states, “Despite what many tourists think, Paris is not a museum; it’s a big city with flaws like any other major metropolis, and any frustrations and negative impressions I encounter are balanced by my love for the city and its people.”

Later he adds, “Paris is a major metropolis, yet it has all the peculiarities and charms of a small town. Each neighbourhood has a special personality, its butchers and bakers, the maraichers (market gardeners) at open-air stalls selling fruits and vegetables piled high, and the cafes, which Parisians use as makeshift living rooms to mingle with friends over a glass of wine, or to just sit by themselves with a chilled Kir, content to do nothing more than gaze off in the distance.”

Hmmm…kinda like what I do on my front porch.

Bonus: the recipes he shares including one for hot chocolate that I told myself I must make this winter - and of course didn’t. Guess I am the “La-Z-y Cook” also.

Almost every neighbourhood in Paris has a weekly farmers’ market along one of its main streets.

Sophisticated Traveller

I picked up a copy of The Sophisticated Traveller’s “Beloved Cities – Europe” partly I expect because of the charming steamship art deco graphic on the cover and perhaps the connection with the New York Times. Who knew “The Sophisticated Traveller” was a New York Times series of books also included:

Great Tours and Detours
Enchanting Places and How to Find Them
Winter: Love it or Leave it

Note: I will be keeping an eye out for these.

Even though it was published in 1986, I thought it would provide some fun insights about European cities. It is a series of essays with intriguing titles like “ London Walks, Twenty Sidewalk Favourites, Where to sit, to see and to be seen and Discovering the Hidden Paris.” Really, how could this not be a fun read! In total there are 45 essays on travel in Europe in the late 20th century by various authors including Jan Morris and Saul Bellow – good for a couple of weeks of travel adventures.

In the Introduction, the editors note that by the late 20th century, “We are all travellers. It used to be, and not long ago at all, that only a few kinds of people travelled…that is one of the glories of our time. Almost anybody who picks up this book can read it, not as the literature of the unknown, but as remembrance of what was seen yesterday or what will be experienced tomorrow.” I can relate - we took our first trip to Europe in 1987 to Portugal.

In “Where To Sit, To See, And To Be Seen” Patricia Wells, like Lebovitz observes how “It is impossible to imagine Paris without cafes…the café serves as an extension of the French living room, a place to start and end the day, to gossip and debate, a place for seeing and being seen….they made an art of doing as they pleased in public.”

Muriel Spark observed in “My Rome” what attracted her most was the “immediate touch of antiquity on everyday life.” Hard to get that in North American cities!

Paris is known for it vibrant street life, which includes its cafe culture where people sit for hours sipping a coffee, chatting, reading or people watching. However, the city’s number of cafes are in decline with only about 1,400 today, from a peak of 45,000 in 1880s.

Taxi Driver Insights

“Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers” by Calgarian Marcello Di Cintio is definitely an off-the-beaten-path book. One of the things I love about browsing the books at thrift stores, is you find things you never knew existed. In “Driven,” Di Cintio shares his experiences talking to taxi drivers across Canada, which in turn results in some interesting observations about Canadian cities today (it was published in 2021), from the perspective of immigrants.

He sees the “taxi experience as occupying the space between public and private, a cab brings together people who might otherwise never have met – yet most of us sit back and stare at our phones, rather than engage in a conversation.”

This hit home for me as on our most recent taxi trip to the airport we had an engaging conversation with the driver who was from Eritrean in Africa who helped us better understand the underlying violent protests happening in Calgary in Edmonton between rival Eritrean groups at the time. It turns out he was actively involved in trying to get both sides to stop protesting, but explained how difficult it was given some of the individuals involved were themselves tortured in their home country or had family members who were being hurt.

It is hard for the average Canadian to understand the injustices happening in other countries. While it is easy for us to say “leave the violence at home when you move to Canada” we simply don’t understand the history and severity of the injustices that we are asking them to let go of. And for them the freedom to protest is one of the things that makes Canada such a great place to live.

Note: Our taxi driver thanked us profusely for being so interested and listening to him.

In the epilogue, Di Cintio observed “Still, all the cabbies I met had laid claim to the cities where they now live and drove…regardless of when or from where they’ve arrived, the drivers’ intimacy with these cities gives them a sense of ownership that even some lifelong citizens will never have. The most compelling view of a society if from its margins. Taxi drivers inhabit this borderline. They have ready access to a place’s spirit, to its hidden psychology, that most of us do not. The cities are theirs.” FYI: You might want to re-read this insightful observation.

The book is full of persuasive stories like “The Women of Ikwe” which is about Anishinaabe artist and community activist Jackie Traverse who founded Ikwe Safe Rides in 2016 in Winnipeg. The initiative was in response to First Nation women who sometimes were refused rides by taxi drivers at night or didn’t feel safe taking a taxi ride with a strange man. It started as a dedicated Facebook page where women who needed a ride could sign up as Ikwe members and post requests while women with a vehicle and some spare time then offered to pick them up. Within a few days of the launch, a dozen women volunteered to be drivers and within four months 10,000 women had registered as members. It is a very touching story.

The architecture of Asmara complements the plan and forms a coherent whole, although reflecting eclecticism and Rationalist idioms, and is one of the most complete and intact collections of modernist/rationalist architecture in the world. Who knew?

The Devil’s Picnic

As I had read Taras Grescoe’s well researched and written book “Strap Hanger” about travelling the world to experience different transit systems, when I saw “The Devil’s Picnic” on a thrift store shelf I had to grab it. Turns out it is exactly what the back cover says it will be - “a provocative tour through forbidden foods of Europe, Asia and Americas, exploring the mystique that surrounds some of the world’s most highly sought after – and often illegal – delicacies.”

As everyone knows, culinary travel is popular these days. However, Grescoe’s “fascination with the forbidden” will “tantalize your travel tastebuds” like no food tour I have heard about.

In the first chapter, we head to Norway to find the forbidden moonshine “hjemmevbrent.” Along the way, we learn a lot about Norwegian life and cities that you won’t find any travelogue. Like how Norway has a national binge drinking habit i.e. “drinking alcohol is integrated into the Norwegian folk soul.” This leads to an interesting discussion of the alcohol drinking habits of different cultures around the world, “It took Mediterranean cultures centuries of social wine drinking to arrive at the norms and rituals that contribute to moderation; from a global perspective, they are an anomaly.” Drinking and travelling definitely go together.

Grescoe visits Singapore wondering if his “poppy seed crackers” will land him in jail. Here he talks about this city state’s “controlling” culture where he was told there are three things we don’t talk about in public: race, religion and politics. He laments about the loss of freedom of speech and how the while the city looks spectacular from the outside with its gardens and architecture, the everyday life is much more claustrophobic with all the government controls.

In New York City, Grescoe is on the search for the truly great raw-milk cheeses from France that are prohibited in the United States as they aren’t pasteurized. This leads to a humorous discussion of the different cheese cultures around the world, especially “Epoisses,” the cheese he found at Zabar’s, a famous speciality shop in NYC (which I will visit, if I find the energy to organize a trip to NYC).

I love the way Grescoe writes and thinks “When a nation holds a food close to its collective heart, it will usually find a way to spare it from an outright ban. Though hamburg meat has brought bloody and excruciating deaths to hundreds of children in the United States, nobody ever considered a total prohibition on two-all-beef patties.”

Or “I judge the civilization and livability of country by the price of a can of beer in a 7-Eleven. It’s freaking $3.30 here! Tooooo much!” (The book was written in 2005). This hit home with me as my observation about what makes Berlin so attractive to young people is the fact that beer is cheap; you can buy it at the corner store and drink it on the street or nearby park.

Another Grescoe travel tip is, “You know how to tell if a bar is good in Madrid or Seville? If the floor is dirty? If it’s clean, that means they have too much time to sweep up, and it’s not popular.”

Sometimes a good cheese looks disgusting, oozing, weeping or blooming with mold, these gobs of coagulated milk often smell like rot and stinky feet. Yet there's an allure to them—a richness and complexity of flavours that's enticed humans for millennia. Devoted connoisseurs clamor to get their hands on these funky cheeses.
Read More: How to get illegal cheese in the U.S.

Life is about taking risks

Daniel Libeskind is one of today’s “starchitects,” having designed some of the world’s most famous contemporary and controversial buildings. In Canada, he is best known for his expansion of the Royal Ontario Museum and its dramatic entrance that links the past to the present. However, from a global perspective, he is probably best known for designing the Jewish Museum and Memorial in Berlin and New York City’s “Freedom Tower” on the site of the World Trade Centre site after 9/11.

For me, this book was a fascinating read, having been to Berlin and spending significant time exploring the Libeskind’s museum and memorial. Ironically, many of the criticisms I had of the museum i.e. poor entrance, unfriendliness and foreboding sense of place were explained in the book as intentional i.e. to give visitors an experience that somewhat simulated that of the Holocaust.

It was also captivating to read about the politics behind the building and how many times it almost never got built.

The other major section of the book is about the redevelopment of the World Trade Centre site and power struggles between Libeskind and developer Larry Silverstein and his architect David Childs, partner in Skidmore, Ownings & Merrill (one of the world’s signature architectural firms) over the design of the Freedom Tower.

Note: This “David vs Goliath” story (or should I say David vs Daniel) would make for a great movie.

Throughout the book, Libeskind shares intimate thoughts about how he analyzes a site and the importance of each building’s link to the past, the present and future as part of his design process. Fascinating to get inside the mind of an architect.

He also offers up some interesting observations on modern architecture and city planning.

“People forget that skyscraper cities are only about 100 years old; they are young and constantly evolving. As all cities of the world merge into one bland cosmopolis, I must ask: Is this what people want?”
Today, “the building is just another consumer product, like any other.”
“I feel this (anonymous sense of place) as I walk by new, soulless buildings and realize there is nothing to look at besides my own reflection in the glass. Such buildings have lost their sense of civic generosity and their feel for the public gesture.” (In other words, they are not pedestrian friendly.)

At the end, Libeskind, who was born in Poland to parents who were Holocaust survivors shares his thoughts on the United States, “This country was founded as a nation of risk takers, and democracy itself is one of the greatest risks; it is an ongoing participatory experiment in which much depends on individuals.

One of the things I admire most about this country is its readiness to experiment and to change. Americans are alive to and enthusiastic about, the unexpected, and they place a premium on individuality. They see the world as a work in progress. That’s the beauty of American pragmatism and American ingenuity.” I wonder what he thinks today! The book was published in 2005.

This book made me want to go back to Berlin and New York City with a new perspective.

Lessons Learned

Whenever I read books about international travel, I am always reminded how different Canada and Canadians are from other countries. In many ways we are still a frontier country, still a teenager trying to find our identity. It is only in Canada, USA, Australia and New Zealand where people live in big houses and cars are the primary mode of transportation, both of which collectively have a huge impact on how we live, work and play everyday.

We are also a private society while Europe is more of a public one. We love the privacy of the car vs. public transit, the privacy of a single family home vs an apartment block and the privacy of a backyard vs the street café or plaza.

I was especially reminded of this in the first two books about Paris’ “joie de vivre” approach to life which is the opposite of the average Canadian, whose focus is to work hard to get ahead, i.e. earn enough money to buy a big house, with front and backyards, and double garage big enough for two cars, several bikes, toboggans, sleighs and skis.

I often bang heads with some urban planers with their obsession to make Canadian cities look and function like European ones. Why can’t they see Canada is not Europe and Calgary is not Paris, Barcelona or Copenhagen?

I remember one urbanist posting on social media a few years back, “I don’t understand why Canadians love the urbanity of European cities (walking, transit vs driving) when they are on holidays, but when they get home they fall back into their suburban car-oriented life.”

I responded, “There is a big difference between what we do on vacation, when we have lots of time to wander (dare I say flaneur) and are exploring a city for the first and maybe the only time vs “everyday living” when we need to get to several places a day at specific times (jobs, kids to school, groceries, after school activities for kids that are often at the other end of the city, fitness studios, cultural and sporting events.)

My niece once told me that when you are on vacation you always have your “Vacation Googles” on i.e. you see and experience everything differently. How true!

Canadians love the convenience, comfort, safety and freedom that everyday driving gives them to maximize the number of things one can do ourselves or with our children - that is why we work longer hours and have fewer vacation days. This is why our work/live balance is different and don’t have the same café culture.

Some urban planners and politicians would be wise stop trying to make Canadian cities function like European cities with their centuries old city centres and try to create sustainable, made-in-Canada cities with a diversity of neighbourhoods - some focused on being walkable, some that are transit-oriented, others that have great cycle tracks and yes, some that are car-oriented. Not every neighbourhood in a city needs to look or function in the same way.

For most Canadians the ideal “15-minute neighbourhood” would be one where most of your everyday and weekly needs are within 15 minutes by foot, bike, transit and/or CAR.

Last Word

I say, “vive la difference” between everyday living in European vs Canada.

Am I a LAZY Traveller?