Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need (14 page)

Buckingham Palace:
This is, of course, the home of the famous British royal family, which upholds many ancient cherished British traditions such as the tradition of Wearing Comical Hats and the tradition of Appearing on the Cover of
People
Magazine at Least Once Per Month (“Fergie: Does She Have Shingles?”). Each day thousands of tourists gather at the palace to watch the famous ceremony of the Changing of the Guard, which follows the ceremonies of the Bathing of the Guard and the Sprinkling of Some Talcum Powder on the Guard’s Butt.

Located partly inside the Arctic Circle, Finland has long been a popular destination with travelers who enjoy the feeling of knowing that if their car breaks down, they could be eaten by wolves. Finland is also the home of the sauna, which is a wooden box in which you subject your body to extreme heat, which causes you to become very relaxed, unless of course the door gets stuck, in which case it causes you to become lasagna. We ourselves prefer to stay outside and take our chances with the wolves.

The major city in Finland is Helsinki, home of the world-famous Gverjkinklankerwanker, or “Tower of Linoleum.”

First of all, let’s dispense with this absurd stereotypical notion that the French are rude. The French are
not
rude. They just happen to hate
you
. But that is no reason to bypass this beautiful country, whose master chefs have a well-deserved worldwide reputation for trying to trick people into eating snails. Nobody is sure how this got started. Probably a couple of French master chefs were standing around one day, and they found a snail, and one of them said: “I bet that if we called this something like ‘escargot,’ tourists would eat it.” Then they had a hearty laugh, because “escargot” is the French word for “fat crawling bag of phlegm.”

This spirit of daring culinary innovation persists in France, which has also pioneered such advances as:

• The entree that costs as much as a set of radial tires and consists of a very large plate that appears at first to be totally empty except for a tiny speck of dirt that turns out, upon closer inspection, to be the entree. (A top French chef can carry an entire year’s supply of entrees in his wallet.)
  

• The waiter who makes it extremely clear that he did not get into the waiter business to waste his valuable time actually
  waiting
  on people, especially not lowlife scum such as yourself who clearly would not know the difference between fine French Cuisine and Cheez Whiz.
  

• The tip that is automatically included For Your Convenience even if your food arrives festooned with armpit hairs (les haires du pitte).
  

So you will definitely want to go to some fine French restaurants. We don’t mean go
inside
them. We mean stand around outside with the other tourists staring incomprehendingly at the menu, which should look like this:

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Once you’ve looked at the menu for a while, it’s time to enjoy a hearty one-ounce bag of peanuts saved from your plane trip over, then set out to view:

One of the main attractions is of course the world-famous
Eiffel Tower
, which created a lot of controversy when it was erected in 1889 because the builder, Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, had presold it as a condominium. “Where the hell are the walls?” the buyers wanted to know. “Where are we supposed to go to the bathroom?” This is
still a problem at the tower so don’t stand too close.

Another well-known Paris landmark is the
Arc de Triomphe
, a moving monument to the many brave men and women who have died trying to visit it, which we do not recommend because it’s located in the middle of La Place de la Traffic Coming from All Directions at 114 Miles Per Hour. But you should definitely visit the
Louvre
, a world-famous art museum where you can view, at close range, the backs of thousands of other tourists trying to see the
Mona Lisa
, which actually was stolen in 1978, but the crowd is so dense that it doesn’t matter. People come away convinced that they’ve seen it, similar to the way people in underdeveloped nations are always seeing the face of Jesus on the skins of yams. Also in the Louvre are various
statues with pieces missing;
visitors are welcome to try to patch these up.

“I guess you guys really bit the big one in World War Two, huh?”

Germany is really a very nice nation that used to have an unfortunate tendency to fall in with the wrong crowd every few decades and try to take over the world. But that is all in the past, thank goodness. After years of painful division, East and West Germany are finally back together as a large, vibrant, strong, dynamic, extremely powerful and heavily armed nation that we are sure will be a Good Neighbor for … LOOK OUT! HERE THEY COME!!

Ha ha! We are just poking a little friendly fun at Germany, which is famous for enjoying a good joke, or as the Germans say, “Sprechnehaltenzoltenfussenmachschnitzerkalbenrollen.” Here is just one hilarious example of what we are talking about:

FIRST GERMAN
: How many Polish people does it take to screw in a light bulb?

SECOND GERMAN
: I don’t know! How many?

FIRST GERMAN
: Let’s invade Poland and find out!

MILLIONS OF OTHER GERMANS
: Okay!

No! We’re just kidding! Probably! The truth is that we like Germany a lot. In fact, we celebrated our fortieth birthday there with some friends, the idea being that if were going to get old, we should do it while surrounded by the maximum possible quantity of beer. They have wonderful beer in
Germany, and they serve it in containers so large that, in other nations, they would be used as shelters for the homeless. This gives new meaning to the concept of “having a beer.” In the United States, “having a beer” is a semi-harmless act that leaves you feeling slightly mellow, whereas in Germany it can leave you dancing naked on the roof of a moving bus.
³

Eating in Germany is easy, because there is basically only one kind of food, called the “wurst.” This is a delicious item made by compressing random pig parts until they have reached the density of bowling balls, then serving them in long brown units that don’t look at
all
like large bowel movements, so just put that thought right out of your mind. At first, all wursts seem the same, but in fact each region of the country has its own “special recipe,” thus producing a wide variety for your eating excitement. Some of our personal favorites are: