Flügger Färg'd

There’s a unique kind of emotion while traveling sometimes that combines fatigue and disappointment in oneself. It usually emerges when a bunch of otherwise normal tasks have gone awry and piled up over the day, and giving up sounds like the best option emotionally but the poorest option realistically. The context of these moments often includes transportation. 

I once literally stood at the doors of a mostly empty Austrian train waiting for the doors to open at my stop – a smallish mountain town --  only to feel the train start moving again, onward to the next station at the next town, a good ways down the line. A nicely dressed older woman looked at me, I gave her a "help me" look, and in response, she shrugged her shoulders. For 20 minutes until the next stop, I stared at those doors, wondering what kind of super basic maneuver I had overlooked to simply open a door on a train. There was a red unlabeled handle next to the door, which I had earlier dismissed as an emergency handle of some kind, similar to the one Lucy pulled accidentally multiple times in an I Love Lucy episode and wreaked havoc. The image of an angry conductor on Lucy's train entered my mind as I pondered if the red handle had something to do with how to exit. It seemed risky, if I was wrong.  

The older lady undoubtedly understood my predicament. These were not hard dots to connect when someone looks distressed standing a train door with their bags in hand. Every time I looked in her direction, she was observing -- and maybe enjoying -- watching my internal deliberation. To this day I am certain she must have known what I was supposed to do, or she would be facing a similar fate at her stop, and her expression didn't show the slightest concern. Her body language was clear, though: she was an audience member, not a cast member, in my problem-solving theater.   

We arrived at the next stop and my assumption was that it would cause less harm if I pulled the red handle while the train was already stopped. I was not confident, but given the other option to continue moving further away from where I needed to go, I pulled the red handle and sure enough, the doors opened. A suggestion for the Austrian train companies: label the handle! 

Alas, I regained control and freedom, and could catch a train going the opposite direction to my intended stop, and so down the stairs and under the tracks and back up the stairs I went to the opposite platform, and promptly learned that the next train would be a nearly 3 hour wait. It was Sunday. Trains run less frequently. Cafes were closed. It would be me, a Clif Bar and my book for the next 3 hours. Only hours earlier I was enamored that some parts of the world still slowed down on Sundays to invest in family, leisure and/or spirituality. And now my affinity for this part of Austrian culture was besmirched. And in my laser focus of deliberating a red handle, I realized I left my book on the previous train, and it was well on its way further south with the unhelpful woman. Just me and a Clif Bar, and then a Clif Bar wrapped for pleasure reading.

It’s THAT feeling, the feeling of sabotaging your own travels by failing to figure out simple tasks such as how to open a train door, and then it snowballs into hunger, boredom and more missteps, and you are powerless to do anything about it.

A similar sequence unfolded in Gothenberg, Sweden on a different trip. My only motivation for staying a night in Gothenberg was to break up a long journey from Copenhagen to a small town on the upper region of Sweden’s west coast. A houseboat I found on AirBnB seemed like a novel option. A houseboat! I gave into that emotion without a lot of thought or further research, and booked it. With locations and routes marked on Google maps, I ventured from the bustling and happening district around the train station to a less bustling, and then darker, and then quietly gritty industrial part of the city that lacked street lights, sidewalks, restaurants or any retail option. Every actual step was a further figurative step into regret as the best part of the city for a tourist or anyone that values safety seemed to be falling further and further behind me. With my head down begging Google maps to own up to a mistake and reroute me, it instead gave me its happy update that I had arrived at the destination. I questioned its accuracy. Nothing looked right about this, such as the complete absence of anything that resembled a houseboat. I peered closely, pressed up against an iron gate at the water's edge. Sure enough, a houseboat was sandwiched between larger boats in an active shipyard. Not larger houseboats, larger boats that had that blue collar / hard work look to them. If my arrival had occurred during the daytime, I would unquestionably be looking at heavy duty dockyard activity and maybe would have asked a forklift operator if he knows the location of a cute little houseboat from AirBnB.  

The location lacked any sort of obvious point to check-in, though if I needed to clock in for a shift or pull up to a loading dock, those locations were very obvious. But it was after work hours and there was not a human in sight. I thrive in most problem-solving scenarios, but in this moment I felt the self-defeat -- and humor -- of the moment, as I peered through the irons rods of a fence and wondered how to get myself on the other side and into a shipyard so I could settle in for a good night's rest. 

I sent a message via the AirBnB app and fortunately and what felt like miraculously, someone appeared from the darkness, spoke enough English, and we sorted it out. We zigged and zagged to the entry of the houseboat, maneuvering around pallets, buoys, hand trucks and more. The orientation was simple: things will get noisy in the morning, stay out of the way best I can, and be careful about using the toilet, and "be careful" was not further explained. I was hungry and sweaty, dropped my bags, and aimed to take care of the hunger first, falsely believing something must exist in the vicinity for buying food. I ventured back out, found no café, restaurant, market or convenience store. Google had shown me there was nothing, which I refused to believe, and sure enough, there was nothing. All of this could have been known via an entirely simple step of looking more closely at the houseboat location before I booked it, when I would have noted the complete void of anything other than marine supply shops and similar shipyard stores. I thought back to the bustling train station I left about an hour prior and its dozens of cafes, restaurants and food kiosks. 

It started raining -- because of course it did -- and while en route back to the houseboat in a malaise of defeat, head down and hungry, I passed a shop with big blue and green letters across the front that read “Flügger Färg." Although those words mean something in Swedish about paint and color, and have nothing to do with fatigue, disappointment or incompetence, the sound and cadence of the words “Flügger Färg” captured how I felt in that moment. It is now part of my travel vernacular. 

Just the other day, I felt Flügger Färg'd (pronunciation: floo-ger faarg, with a hard "g" in both places, by my version) when I bought not a salmon sandwich, but a herring sandwich. I ended up at a cafe after missing a turn, a mistake that would sentence me to an additional 16km before the possibility of any viable turnaround on a winding and narrow highway in the Lofoten Islands, an now extended drive which also led to rock dinging the rental car windshield. At the next town, I resolved to eat lunch and reset, both mentally and geographically.

Somewhere in a long and doomed-from-the-start interaction with the cafe attendant, I gave up and agreed to whatever the smiley person was telling me, which I now know was along the lines of “we're out of salmon, how about herring?” Feeling hopeless and apathetic to get my phone out for another Google Translate, I had given up instead of indulging in the minor cross cultural effort the moment needed. I tried herring a few days earlier, and will stay respectful and simply say at least I tried it once. As a result, I ate bread crusts and a pickle for the Norwegian Krone equivalent of $18. I was hit by Flügger Färg emotions and ventured off to a store to buy a box of granola bars and some $4 each apples. Sometimes you gotta manage Flügger Färg with less adventurous cultural moments where you know exactly what you're getting.

Cover image AI generated via Canva Magic Media.