THE ANATOMY OF… A WEEKEND BREAK

You were only ever told that weekend breaks were a good idea; you never actually believed it for yourself.

To make sure you’ll never make the mistake of embarking on one again, here’s a list of compelling reasons why visiting another country for the ludicrously limited window of 48 hours is the stuff of nightmares.

The Tip

If there’s one person/colleague/couple/family member you need to surgically remove from your life both brutally and entirely, it’s the one who suggests you visit _enter obscure eastern european city_ on a weekend break.

‘Omigod, you NEED to visit Vulvagrad! It’s so quaint and compact and walkable. And the food: am-ay-zing!’ You’re about two bottles of wine into another dull Friday night and the furthest you’ve been from your ass-printed couch since Christmas was to the ‘fancy’ supermarket where you bought a six pack of San Pellegrino Limone cans. ‘A trip wouldn’t be a bad idea’, you think to yourself. And those former communist countries are barely back on their knees, so things will be pretty chea… wait, that’s a bit cynical. Bollocks, now you’re overthinking it. Fuck this noise, you deserve this. You need to LIVE!

Honey, find my dangerously outdated Lonely Planet Guide to Europe: we’re taking a trip.

The Flight

There are lots of hackneyed things you can say about cheap air travel; the sort of derivative shite that Michael McIntyre would base a world tour on. Incessant queuing, garish colour palettes, utterly arbitrary hidden charges (‘Sir, we noticed you have two nipples. You do understand there will be an extra charge for the second?’). Y’know, the usual. And that’s not even touching on the irreversibly negative impact the age of affordable air travel has had on our planet’s climate. But you know what the worst thing is, really? Getting up early.

And this isn’t ‘Heh, whoops! Early start in the morning for me, haha!’ sort of early. This is ‘Jesus Christ, I’m blind… my legs, they’re… numb. Am I dead? Is this heaven?’ sort of early. It’s a nigh-on indefinable period of the day that you could technically call morning but it’s not really, is it? It’s the homunculus child of night and dawn you’re only used to experiencing during enjoyably semi-catatonic, full-bladdered stumbles to the bathroom for a piss, OR if you’re fucking stupid enough to be heading off on a weekend break.

Bleary eyed, you stumble through packing your bags like a first-time thief off his tits on heroin, masterfully overlooking essentials such as toothbrushes, underwear and socks, instead amassing utterly redundant items including three coats, a book you’ll ignore to tap on your phone like a fuckhead, a hairdryer and a ‘sandwich for the journey’ which is lobbed into the first airport bin. But listen, relax. In a matter of, oh, pffft, six hours, you’ll be sitting pretty in… erm…eh… God, fuck: where are you going again?

The Hotel

Well, that took a little longer than expected. The flight was scheduled to take off at 8am, but you noticed that it actually didn’t take off until at least 9:30. Funny, neither the pilot nor the staff mentioned that we were late. Oh well! Guess they’re just a bunch of motherless whores! Haha, what can you do, eh? Classic.

Regardless, here we are, arrived at our hotel and it’s time to inspect our room that will no doubt reflect the crisp, clean imagery presented by the hotel website. Sure, there may be a little less space than you had imagined, and every time you turn around you crack your head on that wooden beam that makes your skull shake like a Tex Avery cartoon. And yep, the double bed is technically two single beds shoved together that, when you’re both sleeping, will incrementally separate from each other, leaving a gap twixt them into which you’ll fall during the night while deeply immersed in an intensely sweaty dream sequence where you’re chasing a sexy turnip over quicksand. And look, when you pulled back the covers those were a lot of pubes, but we all have them, right? A quick shower will shake off the dust, and you can dry yourself on that fluffy towel with those brown streaks that you’ve worked damned hard to convince yourself are the result of someone’s messy but — and this is critical — chocolatey midnight snacking.

With that (once you’ve watched fifteen minutes of an unintelligible TV panel show where you think successful contestants win a beetroot), you’re off to explore the streets of erm… eh… the place you’re… god damnit, why the FUDGE can’t you remember the name of this city?!

The Sights

Amazingly, you’re not the only misguided fanny walking glumly around an icy eastern European city on an early Friday afternoon in January when you should really be in work putting the finishing touches to that PowerPoint presentation (‘No, JANETTE, Appear is not a more appropriate animation for this slide than Slow Fade!’), and you will in fact need to wait, queue and exercise patience to see, eat, drink and travel on things.

Your partners for most of these escapades will be couples bickering over a wrong turn on Google maps, vaguely threatening stag groups with long pink balloons sticking out of their trousers, and irritated locals trying to shove their child/shopping/grandmother past you onto the tram while muttering ‘Shouldn’t you be working on that PowerPoint, fuckface?’ in the local brogue.

During your whistle-stop tour of the city, you’ll shout at dangerously jaded tourism information staff through perspex windows, fumble around with local coinage like a prick and all to trudge through a grim subterranean museum from which you emerge blinking into the grey afternoon both chastened, depressed and ever so slightly bored after two hours spent imbibing 600 years of unthinkable misery and degradation. Cheer up, though: it’s almost dinner time!

Sigh.. The Restaurant

You won’t choose the worst restaurant, that’s what really hurts. You’ll just choose the average but expensive one. And it’ll be your choice, too. Somehow, even though you both acquiesced to the desperate entreaties from the staff to dine there, you’ll be the one who signed you both up. So, while you’re grimly chewing and avoiding your partner’s murderous gaze by pretending to be suddenly very interested in anything behind or to the side of their head, you’ll be thinking that at least if the restaurant was TERRIBLE you’d have a story to tell. It could amount to an experience you’d both remember fondly (‘D’you… Heh… d’you remember that time there was a barely breathing kitten in your ghoulash? Brilliant!’). To make it worse, the staff are lovely, attentively hanging on your every whim and stealing glances in your direction that convey how much they genuinely hope you’re enjoying the food their 92-year old grandmother spent the last week stewing in a sock or something.

(All that said, even the most popular recommendations for food in cities can result in just as much pain as pleasure. I once spent the best part of fourty minutes frozen at the front of a line waiting to pay for two arancini balls and a Coke from a hole in the wall in Naples that produced food so delicious people on the internet described it as being closer to a spiritual experience than a culinary one. The macho shitbird taking the cash seemed tantrically aroused by ignoring my plaintive attempts to hand him my very own money thus consigning me to a bizarre limbo where I couldn’t leave, nor could I pay. My wife and I spent about thirty of the minutes conferring as to whether he was giving me the food for free, or if there was a sniper in the top floor above us ready to zip a bullet into my soft temple as soon as I moved more than three steps away from the cashier’s window like Colin Farrell in Phone Booth.

Eventually, when the gargantuan prick had emasculated me just enough to unload into his fake Dolce and Gabbana undies, he took my money without daring to look me in the eye and handed me back the wrong change. It was the sort of impressively calculated disrespect that keeps droves of tourists arriving in Naples and spending the rest of their day figuring out the quickest way to leave.)

Going Home

Do the Germans have a word for the sense of regret you experience while you’re wandering around a cold, foreign city, broke, tired and momentarily homeless cursing yourself for saving 30 euros that would have seen you take the 13:00 flight home instead of schlepping around the snowy streets like some Dickensian waif peering closed toy shops until you take an overpriced taxi to the airport for your midnight flight?

They really should, because the sense of parsimonious purgatory you feel during those ten hours before your utterly impractically — timed flight deserves its own word. Up until now I’ve been relying on ‘Jesus Christ, I just want to go HOME!’ and that simply just won’t do.