This book was my biggest disappointment when I read it, something like 12 or 13 years ago. It was before I first went anywhere outside my country, so I was really thrilled to read any travel books. Even though the book looked good at the beginning, soon it began to become annoying. The author tries to make the book funny, but it still is not. It looks very shallow, the jokes are no better than high-school level. The profusion of toilet humor is truly disheartening. Oh man, you’re in Paris, you go to Louvre and all you tell us is: 1. Mona Lisa is small, far-away and hard to see; 2. I found a painting where one lady “plugged” her finger into “the other’s fundament”; 3. I went to find my friend to show him this, he was drinking Coke and told me he had to pay two francs to go and pee in men’s room; 4. I told my friend that a bird shit on his head, but then a bird really did it. Seriously, why? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a stuck-up or some kind of arty person, nor am I a prude. But there is too much of this stuff where there shouldn’t be. Or maybe, it’s just American humor that I don’t get.
Anyway, I expected way more from this book. I was looking for interesting experiences and observations but not those inappropriate stories and weird judgements of a person who comes to a different continent and complains about places being different from his home.