Tag Archives: Europe 83

Italian Lira, 1983

Posted on by

Rain, rain, rain. So many times in that last few days I can’t remember how often. The best of them was Sunday not long after midnight. Not a lot of thunder, just rain. I opened the windows in our north-facing bedroom and lay in bed, listening to the rhythm of the falling rain. It didn’t tell me what a fool I’ve been, and even if it had, I’d have told it to mind its own business.

An artifact from Italy, July 1983.

Why do I have this? Just my pack rat nature. It’s in an envelope marked Europe, 1983.

Also, it confirms what I already knew: pre-euro Italy was a good deal in those days, though it took a few minutes to gather some data points on that. Not exactly dirt cheap, but reasonably priced, especially considering the high value, such as the many good meals.

The receipt shows that I exchanged a $100 travelers check for lira at Banco di Roma one day in July. At that moment, the exchange the bank gave me was $1 = 1,502 lira, though the bank dinged me 5,000 lira as a fee, so I didn’t quite get that. But 1,500 lira to the dollar is close enough

I checked the diary I kept during the trip for notes about what cost what. I wasn’t very good at making such notes, but I did mention a few costs in passing, such as the fact that admission to the Forum in Rome cost 4,000 lira.

So, 4,000 lira would be about $2.66. That’s in fatter 1983 dollars, however. A current equivalent ($1 in 1983 = about $3.15 now) would be roughly $8.40. And how much does admission to the Forum cost these days?

It’s a little hard to get an exact equivalent, since the options are more complicated now. Of course they are. The Forum Pass SUPER Ticket has this description: “Roman Forum-Palatine and Imperial Fora in a single itinerary. One ticket gives you access to the new route, which allows you to visit the archaeological heart of Rome in about two hours: the Roman Forum, the Imperial Fora and the Palatine.”

That costs €24. So let’s say three times as much as I paid, more or less. Are the Italians three times better now at maintaining the Forum than they were 40 years ago? I’m skeptical.

Other costs from 1983 (expressed in period units):

A bed in Rome at the Pension Grossi: 7,000 lira ($4.60). Of course, there were about a dozen beds in that room.

A meal at Mario’s in the Trastevere in Rome: 5,800 lira ($3.80). I had a number of wonderful meals in Italy, as you should, but that was one of the best: spaghetti and salad and liver and onions.

A room at the Albergo Italia in Salerno: 15,000 lira ($10)

A meal in Salerno: 7,500 lira ($5). The stars of that meal were gnocchi, along with squid fresh from the Mediterranean, about which I raved. Wish I could actually remember it.

A toilet at the Salerno train station: 200 lira (13 cents). Cheap, but not for something that should be free.

A room in Florence: 10,000 lira each ($6.60)

Doughnuts in Florence: 500 lira (33 cents) each. I remember the gelato in Florence, which we ate more than once, but not the doughnuts. I bet Florentine doughnuts were almost as good. I didn’t record the price for the gelato, but it was probably comparable. A 33-cent doughnut would be about $1 now. Still not bad, and certainly cheaper than any hipster doughnut you can get these days.

The Lüneburg McDonald’s

Posted on by

It’s a minor travel habit of mine to visit a McDonald’s in each country I visit, if there is one. Not as a source of comfort food, particularly, though I knew other gaijin in Japan who treated it that way.

Instead I’m curious to scope out any differences, such as the bouncers at the Moscow location, the availability of alcohol in various European locations (including Portugal), the occasional item that far exceeds anything at a USA McDonald’s – the wonderful McTeriyaki in Japan – or even tiny distinguishing details in something otherwise like a domestic restaurant. The one I visited in Australia might as well have been in the Midwest, except for the sign that said that 100% Australian beef was used, with notes to that effect on the boxes and wrappers.

The first non-American McDonald’s I visited must have been in Lüneburg, West Germany in 1983. I don’t think we went to one in the UK, though we did eat at a Wimpy’s, nor in the Netherlands, before our arrival in Lüneburg. But I know I did once we got there. The first visit wasn’t planned.

June 12, 1983

I discovered today that Frau Horsch probably isn’t going to supply us borders with toilet paper. An unpleasant discovery, this. At 9:45 in the evening I went out seeking that paper by which we all live and found it – where? – the public WC was closed, locked! Argh. McDonald’s was open, and I accessed its facilities for the price of a soda to go.

I went back a time or two for a fuller meal, though it couldn’t really compare with the chicken shack where you could get roast halb hähnchen mit pommes frites nor a number of other spots in Lüneburg.

I checked my envelope of paper debris from that trip, and remarkably found this (which was a little larger that the scanner bed). Or maybe not so remarkable, considering my idea of an interesting souvenir.German McDonald's place mat 1983

Through the marvel of Google Maps, I’ve determined that that location – which I think was near the Rathaus and the Marktplatz – doesn’t seem to be there any more. These days, you need to visit the main bahnhof or a 24-hour location north of the town center near (I’m not making this up) Hamburger Straße. Of course, that isn’t so odd when you realize that the road is named for the city of Hamburg, which isn’t far away.

Noises Off ’99 & ’20

Posted on by

It’s been two years since I’ve been to the theater. In February 2020, just before I went to California late that month, I took Ann to see Noises Off at the Metropolis Performing Arts Centre in Arlington Heights, where we go periodically. Logistically, it’s more convenient than theaters in Chicago, though of course that didn’t stop us from going into the city in ’19 a number of times.

Noises Off is a British farce first staged in London in 1982. It was at the Savoy until 1987, but I wasn’t fortunate enough to see it during my ’83 visit. Rather, my friends and I went to see The Real Thing at the Strand, a Tom Stoppard play also from 1982, which I remember being amusing.

Noises Off is really amusing. I didn’t see it until ca. 1999 in Chicago, and it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen on stage. Actually, it still is. Laugh out loud funny, along with the rest of the audience.

The 2020 staging was also funny, but not quite as much as the first time around. Maybe because I was older; or the cast wasn’t quite as good (though they were good); or that I knew what to expect. Still, Ann seemed to enjoy it, and I certainly did, even if it didn’t quite have the same punch as my memory of it.

It occurs to me now that I need to start going to the theater again. Health concerns haven’t been stopping me for a while now. It’s just that I got out of the habit. So I’ll soon do my bit to support regional theater, as part of that pent-up demand.

Paestum 1983

Posted on by

One more card, depicting Paestum, which I visited on July 20, 1983. The postcard dates from the early 1990s, sent to me by an Australian I knew. I’d recommended he visit the place, and he did.Paestum

“Paestum, also known by its original Greek name as Poseidonia, was a Greek colony founded on the west coast of Italy, some 80 km south of modern-day Naples,” says World History Encyclopedia.

“Prospering as a trade centre it was conquered first by the Lucanians and then, with the new Latin name of Paestum, the city became an important Roman colony in the 3rd century BCE. Today it is one of the most visited archaeological sites in the world due to its three excellently preserved large Greek temples.

“Paestum is most famous today for its three magnificent temples which are amongst the best surviving examples of ancient Greek architecture anywhere,” the encyclopedia continues. I’ll vouch for that. They were impressive indeed, and I also delighted in walking along such a well preserved Roman road.

A bonus thing to think about in that text: Lucanians, an Italic people who spoke Oscan. The Roman juggernaut eventually absorbed them, lock, stock and barrel, and I’d say they and their language are even more obscure than the Etruscans.

On the whole, it seems to be a well-written article, but I’m not sure about Paestum being a “most visited archaeological site.” It might not be entirely authoritative, but Travel & Leisure published a list in 2012 regarding the most-visited ancient ruins. Paestum doesn’t make the cut; the closest places are Pompeii and Herculaneum.

My own experience was that Steve and I had the place to ourselves on that summer afternoon — the same summer when we encountered a well-populated Pompeii. Of course, those recollections are decades old, but I suspect even now people don’t show up at Paestum in any great numbers, but rather go to Pompeii as always.

Clichéd the term might be, the beaten path is a very real phenomenon in mass travel, with its own discontents. The odd thing is that you don’t have to go very far or think that hard to find marvels away from the path.

Jugendherbergen in Europa und im Mittelmeergebiet

Posted on by

Folded away in my collection of maps is a well-folded and slightly yellow youth hostel guide map of Europe, vintage 1983. Even if I hadn’t carried that map around Europe in the summer of ’83, I would know the date.youth hostel map 1983 youth hostel map 1983

It’s fairly large, 24 x 34 inches, and a little cumbersome to use except in your room, as you planned a future stay. We had guidebooks that might (or might not) mention a particular youth hostel, but there were no websites to tell you what you were getting into, though I never did stay in a bad one, just some mediocre ones. You also never knew whether it had a vacancy, unless you figured out how to call ahead, which could be an involved process. Even in the high season of summer, however, I remember that being an issue maybe only twice, and in those cases the hostel staff recommended somewhere else to stay.

One side includes most of northern Europe, including insets for Ireland and West Germany, where youth hostels were thick on the ground. But not in East Germany in those days. Guess the DDR didn’t take kindly to youth traveling around.youth hostel map 1983Interestingly, most of the other communist countries, at least those that weren’t the Soviet Union, had a system of youth hostels. Bulgaria seemed to have been especially fond of them. Maybe they still are.

The other side features southern Europe and northern Africa, including a fair number in Tunisia and a scattering in Morocco, Egypt and Libya, of all places.
youth hostel map 1983
The map is relatively simple, noting national borders, some of the larger cities and roads and rivers, and each IYHF-affiliated property as a blue triangle to stand out against the browns of the rest of the map.youth hostel map 1983

The German inset.youth hostel map 1983

I took a few notes on the map, such as these between Devon and Brittany.youth hostel map 1983

Looks like I was working out my travel schedule from August 3 to 9, as we headed north from Switzerland to the coast at Oostende. I wrote “Brugge” at the end, but for reasons I don’t remember, and can’t fathom now, we didn’t stop there.

We stayed at hostels in the UK, West Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Denmark. All the more expensive countries, in other words. In Italy, which had any number of cheap guesthouses, we didn’t bother, and sometimes the hostels we stayed at in northern Europe weren’t affiliated with the IYHF.

Keith Jarrett, Piazza del Campidoglio

Posted on by

July 16, 1983, was quite a day for me. In the morning my friend Steve and I visited the Castel Sant’Angelo (the Mausoleum of Hadrian), followed by an afternoon at the Vatican. As in, the Vatican Museums, the Sistine Chapel and finally St. Peter’s itself, including a climb to the dome.

That should have been enough for any day, but at some point, Steve spotted a poster advertising an outdoor concert by Keith Jarrett that very evening at the Piazza del Campidoglio. I would have blown it off, having only a faint notion of who he was, but Steve knew more and insisted we go. It was standing room only.

Remarkably, I found a recording of that concert on YouTube.

The recording is about 25 minutes long. Not because whoever recorded it didn’t capture it all, but because right in the middle of things, the known-to-be-prickly Jarrett — maybe bothered by the persistent ambient noise of the setting — stormed off, never to return.

The National Museum of Denmark

Posted on by

Another example of somewhere I visited but don’t really remember: The National Museum of Denmark (Nationalmuseet). You could say that’s because I was there 37 years ago this month, which is a long time ago, but at roughly the same time, I visited the Carlsburg Brewery and Tivoli — the same day in the case of Tivoli — and I remember those fairly well.

Memory’s a slippery character. Here’s what I wrote at the time.

June 18, 1983

Walked [after breakfast] to the National Museum and spent a lot of time in the early Danish collections, a fine assortment of artifacts from pre-farmers (4000 BC) to the Vikings. They had a lot — tools, weapons, pots, clothes, ornaments, more. I noticed that much of the collection — seemed like nearly all of it — survived because it was buried with people.

Then I spent a long time ogling the coin collection, mostly the Roman ones. The museum had at least one example of every emperor and plenty of usurpers and others. I didn’t take as much time in the rest of the museum, but walked through. It is vast. Rooms and rooms and rooms of exhibits.

I left to eat lunch at a Chinese place, spring rolls with sauce and a heap of rice. After lunch I bought chocolate: Toblerone and Ritter Sport.

Those sound like ordinary chocolate purchases, and maybe they are now, but in those days Toblerone wasn’t available in every shop from here to East Jesus and my traveling companions and I had never heard of Ritter Sport. It was an important discovery for us that summer, somewhere in Germany a few weeks earlier. If you’re walking around all day, chocolate’s a good thing to have. Even better, it’s good to snack on high-quality choco like Ritter Sport. Best of all, it’s chocolate that I’ve enjoyed ever since it became available in the U.S. sometime in the late ’80s.

Italian 50 Lira, 1951

Posted on by

If this banknote could talk, I’d imagine it would say, “We just lost a major war and can barely afford such luxuries as currency.”
Italy, 1951. Small in value — 50 lira, or the equivalent of about 8 U.S. cents, at least as of the mid-50s, which is when my parents picked it up in change. Must adjust for inflation, however, so theoretically in today’s money that many lira is the equivalent of a whopping 75 U.S. cents, or about 0.68 euros. Apparently this note and the 100-lira were replaced by coins not much later in the 1950s.

The Italian lira was a famously small currency. I checked the 1983 exchange rate not long ago, and found that the lira gradually lost ground to the dollar that year. In July, when I was in country, it was about 1,500 lira to the dollar.

I recorded a few prices in the diary I kept that summer, noting (for example) that the admission to the Forum was L 4,000, or about $2.60, which seemed reasonable (and would be about $6.70 now). I wondered how much the price has been jacked up since then. But I didn’t have to wonder long. I looked it up, and now it’s 12 euros, or about $13.20, though that includes admission to the Colosseum as well. I don’t remember whether I paid separately for that, or at all.

The note is also small in size. Interestingly, exactly four inches long and two-and-a-half inches tall. Odd, I would have thought that the sides measure evenly in centimeters rather than inches.

Vienna 1994

Posted on by

At Stephansplatz in Vienna in November 1994, I posed for a picture in front of Stephansdom. I decided to make a globe-like shape with my hands by putting the fingers of both hands together, fingertip-to-fingertip.

Stephansplatz in ViennaWhich looks like some kind of nightmarish gluing of my fingers together. Just an eccentric little gesture that didn’t quite go right. I’d realized sometime earlier that Vienna was as far east as I’d reached in July 1983, when coming from the west. In 1994, coming from the east, I’d reached Vienna again. So I had passed through every longitude. Hence, a globe.

Actually, I’d already passed through every longitude by the time I’d reached Prague about 10 days earlier, traveling from Krakow, because Prague is west of Vienna, but never mind. I figured Vienna was the meeting point. It occurs to me now that besides London, Vienna is the only place in Europe that I’ve visited more than once. Need to rectify that in future years if I’m able.

Had a good visit both times. Here’s Yuriko on the grounds of Schönbrunn Palace.

Schönbrunn Palace

It was a foggy day. Just barely visible in the background is the Gloriette. The day I visited in 1983 was sunny, not too hot, and pleasantly windy. I parked myself on a bench on the slope between the palace and the Gloriette and sat a while, admiring the view and writing a letter. A peak moment.

The Christkindlmarkt on the Rathausplatz had just started when we were there.
Christkindlmarkt on the Rathausplatz In the background is, naturally, Vienna’s Rathaus. Lots of pretty things were for sale at the market, I remember, but more expensive than the equally pretty baubles we’d seen at Krakow Cloth Hall market, which wasn’t a Christmas market, but had ornaments.

Belvedere Palace. You want palaces? Wien’s got ’em.

Belvedere PalaceVienna’s Ringstrasse.
RingstrasseOne of the things that struck me when wandering around that part of town during my first visit to Vienna was spotting OPEC headquarters. It was in this building from 1977 to 2009.

If I’d known OPEC HQ was in Vienna, I’d forgotten that fact. OPEC isn’t that well known these days, but in the ’70s the organization was in the news all the time, generally characterized as shifty foreigners gouging upstanding Americans for oil. Not the kind of organization that occupies a building in a major European city, with offices and windows and phones and secretaries and all that. A silly thing to think, but often enough it’s hard to shake the prevailing nonsense.

Getting Around Europe, Summer 1983

Posted on by

June 3, English Channel

Woke and had a good breakfast at our Harvich [England] B&B. After some confusion caught a bus to the Parkeston Quay, where we had no trouble boarding a huge ferry, the Prinz Oberon. It had five decks, with shops and restaurants for the elite, a cafeteria for the everyone else. We ate in the cafeteria — I had some industrial white fish — and then watched a sweet and sour Bert Reynolds movie, Best Friends, in the ship’s tiny movie house. As usual, Bert Reynolds can’t act.

Afterward Rich and I had a talk with a 10-year-old English boy named John, who knew all sorts of dirty jokes, and told us them. He had his Dutch mother with him, who habitually closed one eye when she talked, which was mostly about the perils of Amsterdam. Things aren’t what they used to be, everybody’s nasty now, etc.

June 16, Lüneburg, West Germany, to Copenhagen

At 12:30, Rich, Steve and I went to the youth travel agency and they told us, and we somehow understood, that the next train to Copenhagen was in 50 minutes or so. We bought tickets and dashed off to the bahnhof. And I mean dashed — Rich was worried about getting lost on the way and Steve had to meet us there, because he had to meet French Girl for a moment about something or other. I wonder that we ever got on the train, but we did.

For a while we were on the wrong car. Only some of the cars are put on the ferry, like a snake swallowing mice. One of the conductors told us that, and we went to the right car with a few minutes to spare. The crossing was brief, but we didn’t know that, so we ordered lunch. We had to eat fast.

Arrived in Copenhagen, spent some time figuring the subway out, then rode to part way toward a hostel we knew to be nearly out of town. Then we walked the rest of the way, only to find they had no space. But the kindly clerk at the hostel recommended another place that did have room — near the main train station we had just come from. We took a bus back into the city. Beds were available at the close-in hostel.

July 1, Lüneburg to Bremen

Rode a morning train from Lüneburg to Hamburg-Harburg. Some punkish fellows sat across from me: colorful pants & leather jackets with steel studs & short, almost crewcut hair with a mandatory earring each. One wore a digital watch.

At Hamburg-Harburg, I had 40 minutes to wait. I met a fellow, more conventionally dressed and only a little older than I am, who spoke British English so well I wasn’t sure whether he was British or German for a few minutes. Turned out he was from near Lübeck. His book for the ride was an English-language edition of The Lord of the Rings. The German translation, he told me, is “rubbish.” We talked about a number of other things as well. He told me he didn’t like the prospect of Pershing IIs stationed in West Germany, but he thought they were necessary.

July 14, Vienna to Rome

In the afternoon, we boarded our train. In my compartment was a family of four Hungarians and an Italian. Slept on a top bunk from 10 to 7 or so. Sometime in the night we crossed the border and so I woke in Italy. By that point no one had asked for a passport or a ticket. Arrived Rome at about 2. No one ever did ask for a passport, but the conductor eventually got around to checking my ticket.

July 22, Campania, Italy

Steve and I boarded the bus to Avellino in mid-morning yesterday and I remember having a fine ride – no hint of things to come. The Campanian scenery was pleasant, a lot of rolling countryside, though the air was more polluted than I would have expected. We got to Avellino, expecting to find a station, but instead a large parking lot full of buses functioning as the station. We asked a driver which bus connected with our destination, Mirabella, the small town where Steve has relatives, and he told us where to wait for it.

I felt nauseated in the hot sun waiting for the connecting bus. That bus wasn’t especially late — a notable thing in Italy — and my condition got worse during the bouncing, twist-and-turn ride deeper into the country (for Mirabella is a very small town). We arrived at a street corner in Mirabella, and immediately after unloading our packs from under the bus, I said to Steve, “I think I’m going to throw up.” Which I did right away. First on the sidewalk, then another wave in the gutter.

July 30, Florence to Innsbruck

The midnight train out of Italy was, of course, crowded, but at least we found seats. We had to disturb a mother and daughter already asleep to get those seats, and then more people boarded the car. After Bologna, the rest of the night passed more quickly than I expected in a fitful sleep sitting up, and by daylight I woke up tired in the Italian Alps. It was a good sight after the flatter, dustier parts of Italy we’d passed through earlier. Arrived Innsbruck about 9. Mucked around the station a while and then walked no short distance to a hostel run by a small church.

Aug 7, Down The Rhine

Today we took a slow boat down the Rhine. As good as it sounds. We started out this morning on the train to Mainz. Unfortunately, we forgot to change trains, and so ended up in Frankfort. But no problem. A friendly Ⓘ staffer helped us find a train to Rüdesheim, where we waited for the boat to Koblenz.

At this point, the Rhine cuts through steep hills, all very green and many overgrown with grapes. Castles stand on a few of the hills. We sat on the pea-green deck under a warm afternoon sun, watching the hills and castles pass by and listening to the other passengers, mostly children at play on the deck. Now that was an afternoon.