Dave Barry's Money Secrets (17 page)

The Americans will study this for a while, trying to figure out whether it is a number, and if so
what
number, and, above all, whether it includes a tip. They may even attempt to ask the waiter about this; if so, he will respond with a shrug that could mean “Yes,” or “No,” or “Just pay the stupid bill, because in twenty minutes I get off work for the rest of the year.”

Sometimes the Americans will consult a guidebook, which will helpfully inform them that
usually
a service charge is included, but not
always,
and
sometimes
it is appropriate to add more, although the guidebook does not say
when,
or how
much
more. The Americans will spend twenty minutes or so trying to mentally divide or multiply—they are not sure which—by 1.85732. Finally, they will put down an amount of euros roughly equivalent to the annual budget of Liechtenstein. Then they will nervously slink away from the café to resume looking at buttresses, leaving the other café patrons to shake their heads, sip their coffees, and wonder how the hell a nation as clueless as America ever became a major world power.

Tipping Taxi Drivers in Foreign Countries

You should tip taxi drivers 10 percent, and increase this to 20 percent if they perform some special service, such as getting you to your destination alive.

Tipping Bathroom Attendants in Foreign Countries

You should not go to the bathroom in foreign countries.

20

SAVING MONEY ON TRAVEL

Good Luck

T
RAVEL IS AN EXCELLENT WAY to escape from your boring, everyday lifestyle and visit places where you cannot easily locate the restrooms. Also, if you go abroad, travel gives you an opportunity to be exposed to other cultures and learn interesting things about them, such as: Do they speak English? Do they have any American food? Do they at least have ketchup?

Of course, travel is not free. In addition to the basic expenses of transportation, food, and lodging, you also need to budget incidentals such as T-shirts, souvenirs, bribes, antibiotics, surgery, and ransom. So, rule number one of travel is:
Take money.

One way to take money is in the form of traveler’s checks. The way these work is, you give a traveler’s check company a bunch of money, and the traveler’s check company gives you some checks. You cash some of these checks on your trip, and when you get home you put the rest of them in the back of your sock drawer for safekeeping, and then you forget all about them. Eventually you die, and the traveler’s check company gets to keep the money you paid for the uncashed checks forever.

So traveler’s checks are very popular with traveler’s check companies. But they are not always such a big hit with regular humans such as cashiers and waiters, who, when you ask them if they take traveler’s checks, will sometimes roll their eyes and demand photo ID and generally act as though you are trying to pay them with grocery coupons. Also, in many countries traveler’s checks are not accepted as ransom.

The one big advantage of traveler’s checks, of course, is that if you lose them, the traveler’s check company will replace them promptly and without hassle. We know this because, in the TV commercials for traveler’s checks, the person who loses the checks always gets replacement checks within seconds, and thus is able to resume enjoying his or her carefree vacation on the Planet Haboonda.

Here on the planet Earth, however, replacing lost or stolen traveler’s checks is not always quite so simple. I base this statement on an experience I had several years ago involving my son, who, in the interest of protecting his identity, I will refer to here as “Fobert.” When Fobert was nineteen, he went to Europe on a backpacking trip. I bought him some traveler’s checks from a company that, in the interest of protecting its identity, I will refer to here as “Fisa.” I figured this was a safe choice, since Fisa is a large company with many high-quality commercials, and their official Fisa Internet site stated that you could, quote, “easily get a refund if your cheques are lost or stolen.”

Anyway, to make a long—you have
no idea—
story short, Fobert’s traveler’s checks were lost or stolen. His passport was also gone. This somehow happened when he was
on the plane going to Europe,
which I believe is an international-traveler record for losing all your really important possessions.

So Fobert arrived in Europe with no money, and no proof of citizenship. Fortunately he landed in a nation that, in the interest of protecting its identity, I will refer to as Fermany—a casual, laid-back, no-rules kind of place whose Official National Motto is, “Whatever.”

But seriously, the Fermans were pretty good sports about it, holding Fobert for a mere eight hours and never once bringing out the cattle prod. When Fobert finally got out of custody, the U.S. consulate quickly gave him a new passport. And getting the traveler’s checks replaced turned out to be every bit as easy as the Fisa company had promised, provided that you define “easy” as “extremely hard.”

Over the next two weeks, I made numerous telephone calls to a Fisa office in Europe, which in case you were wondering is not a local call from my house. The Fisa people kept telling me they were investigating the matter, but for days they would not tell me what they were investigating, nor when they expected to be finished. Finally, one of them revealed to me that they were trying to determine whether Fobert had been “careless.” This caused me to momentarily lose my temper and shout, “OF
COURSE
HE WAS CARELESS! HE’S A TEENAGE BOY AND HE’S CARELESS AND HE LOSES THINGS! THAT’S WHY I BOUGHT HIM YOUR [
very bad word that, in the interest of protecting its identity, I will refer to as
“
wucking
”] TRAVELER’S CHECKS!”

Finally, after many testy phone calls from me, the Fisa people refunded the money. By then, Fobert was back in the United States, having completed his trip with money I sent to him via Festern Funion.

What is the moral here? The moral is that traveler’s checks, at least Fisa traveler’s checks, are a wonderful idea, provided that you are not careless. In other words, you should buy them only if you will never actually need them. The other moral is that if you permit your teenage child to travel alone to Europe, you are out of your wucking mind.

Another option is to use credit cards, which are lightweight and widely accepted, plus there is always the hope that your plane will crash on the way home and you won’t have to pay the credit card company back. The disadvantage of credit cards is that, if you use them in foreign countries that use foreign currencies such as the peso or the kilometer, you will have no idea what you are actually paying for anything, which means that when you get home and open up your credit card bill, you could discover that when you were in Cairo, you paid $16,000 for a Snickers.

This is why, when I travel, I always carry cash. The danger with cash, of course, is that it makes you a target for professional pickpockets, who, especially in foreign tourist destinations, are so skillful that you won’t notice them until your money is gone. In the photographs below, see if you can spot the professional pickpocket. He’s in all four of the photos, but he’s hard to find because he has mastered the art of using costumes and disguises to blend into any environment:

Which One Is the Pickpocket?

SOURCE:         Scotland Yard

Photography Credits

See? You can pore over these photos for hours without spotting the pickpocket! That’s how clever these people are. And that’s why, when you travel abroad with cash, you should do what seasoned world travelers have been doing for years:
Keep your money securely in your underpants.
This is usually the last place that a pickpocket thinks to look. Another advantage is, when you get a bill at a restaurant, and you start fishing around inside your drawers for the cash, sometimes the waiter will let you have the meal for free.

Speaking of being unwanted, another important security tip for foreign travel is:
Do not look like an American.
As a nation, we Americans have spent many decades, and trillions of dollars, trying our best to make the rest of the world want to be friends with us, and as a result the rest of the world hates us. This is especially true in places such as Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, Central America, Antarctica, the Moon, and pockets of North America, including Mexico, Canada, and Manhattan Island.

If you plan to travel to any of these areas, for your own safety you must create the impression that you’re not from the United States. Rule one is:
Do not wear sneakers.
I don’t know why, but the first thing most Americans do, when they’re getting ready for a trip, is go to the mall and purchase new, blindingly white sneakers. Your chunkier, more sedentary Americans also choose to travel in athletic-style warm-up suits, as though they expect to be competing in the 200-meter hurdles, when in fact they will not be doing anything more active on their trip than pointing at the dessert cart.

The result is that a foreign pickpocket can easily spot American tourists: They’re the ones who look like the Senior Weight Watchers track team. You do
not
want this look. You should dress to blend into the local environment, as we see in these examples:

How to Dress So Foreigners Won’t Know You’re American

Photography Credits

Another good way to blend in when you travel abroad is to speak a foreign language. Most Americans cannot do this, because they speak only English. When confronted with a foreign person who does not speak English, Americans will generally seek to bridge the language gap by speaking English louder (“IS THERE A BIGGER
MONA LISA
AROUND ANYWHERE?”). So if you want to appear non-American, it helps if you know at least a smattering of some foreign language. Here’s a list of useful phrases you can memorize:

U
SEFUL
F
RENCH
P
HRASES

•                  Où est l’Internet?
(Where is the Internet?)

•                  Comment venir ces portions sont si sacrées petites?
(How come these portions are so darned small?)

•                  Nous voulons un REPAS, zut, pas un d’oeuvre de hors piquere une crise.
(We want a MEAL, dammit, not a freaking hors d’oeuvre.)

•                  Ces Américains! Qu’un paquet d’idiots! Nous nous sont de la Scandinavie.
(Those Americans! What a bunch of idiots! We ourselves are from Scandinavia.)

U
SEFUL
I
TALIAN
P
HRASES

•                  Dov’è il Internet?
(Where is the Internet?)

•                  Ci sono qualunque gabinetti PULITI in questo paese?
(Are there any CLEAN toilets in this country?)

•                  Quanto costa vedere il Papa?
(How much does it cost to see the Pope?)

•                  Lei tenta di dirme che siamo venuti tutta la maniera da New Jersey—l’attesa no, io Scandinavia media—soltanto di scoprire che IL PAPA NON È DISPONIBILE?
(Are you trying to tell me that we came all the way from New Jersey—no, wait, I mean Scandinavia—only to find out that THE POPE IS NOT AVAILABLE?)

U
SEFUL
G
ERMAN
P
HRASES

•                  Wo ist das Internet?
(Where is the Internet?)

•                  Junge, Sie können Leute keinen Weltkrieg, NICHT wahr, gewinnen?
(Boy, you people CANNOT win a world war, can you?)

•                  Die Amerikaner haben wirklich Ihre Esel, nicht wahr getreten? Nicht, dass es irgendein grobes Geschäft zu uns Skandinavier ist.
(The Americans really kicked your asses, didn’t they? Not that it’s any big deal to us Scandinavians.)

•                  Ich werde Sie dies geben: Sie haben ausgezeichnete Toiletten.
(I’ll give you this: You have excellent toilets.)

U
SEFUL
S
PANISH
P
HRASES

•                  ¿Dónde está el Internet?
(Where is the Internet?)

•                  ¿Esta España es, o México? Yo nunca los puedo decir aparte.
(Is this Spain or Mexico? I can never tell them apart.)

•                  Sé uno de ellos le da diarrea.
(I know one of them gives you diarrhea.)