When Europe Doesn’t Deliver

By JP. We love Europe.  Love it.  The people, the food, the traditions, the languages, the landscape, the churches…  Ever since our first visit, we have been scheming ways to return.  And we’ve managed to get here almost once a year on average since taking a professorship eight years ago.

But many of you have asked: what don’t you like about living over there? Does Europe ever fail to deliver?  Well, yes, sometimes it does.  Here are the top examples according to our family experience.

Paying to pee.  Public areas rarely have free bathrooms.  That means that if you’re at a train station, the mall, or an outdoor park, you’ll have to part with some pocket change if you want to pee.  Sometimes this means putting coins in machines to open doors.  Other times it means paying an attendant who controls access to the porcelain gods.  It’s strange.  And once, in Luxembourg, I had an argument with the attendant who insisted that Aeneas pay the rate for a mademoiselle (that’s right, ladies, you gotta pay more to sit).  I tried to explain that he was a “petite monsieur,” but she took one look at his long hair and wasn’t having any of it.  Is this really worth the hassle?  I say, “Let my people pee!”

Apothecaries: Mixed Blessings.  Austria’s approach to medicine is interesting.  Universal healthcare means that everyone is covered.  That’s cool.  But their approach to over-the-counter meds is a mixed blessing.  There are apothecaries in every city. 

They are like pharmacies.  Inside you find well-educated and exceptionally helpful staff who talk to you about symptoms, offer basic diagnoses, and sell you a wide range of medicines and equipment with almost no questions asked.  The plus is that these places are awesome and they can sell you far more stuff than you can get over-the-counter in the States.  Tylenol with Codeine?  Not a problem!  The negative is that these are the ONLY places that can legally sell drugs of ANY kind.  Got a headache on your road trip?  Sorry, the gas station can’t sell you Advil.  Hurt your leg skiing? Sorry, the ski shop won’t sell you an aspirin.  Hopefully your minor aliment  happens only 6 days a week. Apothecaries—like most shops—are closed on Sundays.

Cash only.  Upon arriving in Innsbruck for the very first time, we walked to a local Indian restaurant.  The food was great, and the bill was delivered in a folded leather binder with a place inside marked ‘Visa’.  But when I returned it to the waiter with my card securely installed in the envelope, he grimaced and told me that they took cash only.  So I walked around for about 30 minutes looking for an ATM.  Now don’t get me wrong—lots of places take cards.  But lots don’t, too, and getting cash out of ATM’s is expensive.  So you learn where to go and where to avoid and you carry cash for the places that turn you down.

Tap Wasser.  Although many European cities have beautifully designed public drinking fountains, virtually no restaurant serves patrons water when they arrive, and many will not provide tap water even upon request.  So you either buy bottled mineral water or go without water for the meal.  It’s kind of funny because the house beer is typically cheaper than the bottled water.  That’s my kind of incentive!  But, seriously, for a continent that leads the entire planet on environmental stewardship, and especially since Austria is known for the water being so pure and delicious that you can drink it directly from the mountain streams, why are we still serving bottles of water in restaurants?

School first, family second.  When we pulled our kids from school to go to Italy for a week, we were thoroughly chastised by the officials at Aeneas’s school.  Turns out that all absences from school must be approved by the bureaucracy in advance: the teacher can excuse one day, the principal can excuse 2-5 days, and anything over a week must be approved by the local government.  And you can forget trying to homeschool your kids.  Now, in fairness, I get it—education is serious business, and we want to make sure that no one is short-changed.  But not all education takes place in school.  And it’s arguable that a more flexible system combined with periodic rigorous tests would be a better solution (see: Finland).

Up in smoke.  One of the first things the boys noticed when we arrived in Europe was how many people here smoke.  I don’t know the statistics, but it seems that it’s much more prevalent.  In the summer, it’s not really bothersome: you can’t smoke in public buildings and all of the smoking at cafes happens outdoors.  It’s pretty easy to avoid.  But the winter is another story.  The smoking moves indoors at restaurants, so we have to be picky about where we go.  At the ski area last weekend, the one indoor restaurant at the bottom of the hill was so thick with smoke that we opted to sit out in the cold to drink our beers.  So while the libertarian in me applauds Europe for letting people smoke and drink if they want to do so, the level of second-hand smoke in certain spots is hard to avoid.

#school #culture #curiosities #food #family