During my stay in Rome in 1985, a veteran Australian wanderer taught me a “wedding crasher” trick he claimed to have learned in Greece when not otherwise preoccupied with devouring skewers of souvlaki, cradling drams of ouzo, and ineffectually pursuing love near the Aegean (or was it beer?) beaches.
The Australian said that he had undertaken a careful study of tour groups.
Allow me to interject that Australians were fine teachers when it came to learning how to save money. They seldom departed Down Under for a European stay without remaining away for months, preferably years, often finding temporary employment with fellow Anglophones. Employed or not, every drachma, mark, pound and forint counted for them.
Not only that, but Australians were invariably friendly, easy-going and impossible to dislike, and they appeared to have been gifted with a cultural “get-out-of-jail-free” card. Hypothetically, an American or Englishman drunkenly urinating on a beloved civic monument would prompt protests, denunciations and immediate arrest, culminating with expulsion from the locale, and likely the entire country.
But if an Australian did the same, odds were that he’d be regarded as no more than an overly exuberant lad on holiday, soon to be merrily sharing drinks with the same policeman who’d misplaced the key to the jail cell housing the American or Englishman. At least this is the way it looked to the rest of us, who sensed that our own margin for “nationality error” was far slimmer.
I thought about the Australian when I saw the obligatory Vienna souvenir t-shirts: “There are no kangaroos in Austria.”
His strategy for frugality at museums and historical sites was based on the simple observation that while solo visitors (or pairs, or trios) typically bought tickets and were controlled individually, groups generally were ushered straight past the checkpoint as a unit; seeing as the group’s guide typically was busy with administrative tasks at entry, the counting of heads often became delayed until everyone was inside.
By waiting patiently in the shadows for an aggregation of fellow English speakers to arrive, solo travelers like us could artfully feign membership in the group, discretely sidling over to join the crowd just as it entered the site. Then, once safely inside, there’d be an artful detachment and the resumption of one’s individual identity,...Read more
