Remote Location

Sometimes the best travel experience is on your hotel TV

Yes, yes, we all love Rick Steves and his travel philosophy. Explore the world, meet new people, take in peculiar vistas, experience different cultures, open your mind. His books and TV shows share endless details of little-known cafes in Florence, the can’t-miss highlights of the Louvre, bucolic walking routes in the English countryside and colorful folk traditions in Seville – all in an earnest effort to enrich our lives.

Blah, blah, blah…

He might be “America's most respected authority on European travel,” but Rick Steves has neglected to examine one of the most obvious adventures of foreign travel, one that not only opens your mind, but allows you to do so while laying on your back. (And, no, I’m not talking about canoodling with the locals.)

Hotel TV!

Go ahead and laugh. But for me, an hour or so of surfing from channel to channel, through indecipherable German soap operas, French talk shows and insane Dutch motorcycle races on ice is an essential benefit of world travel. Never mind I rarely understand the talking heads; a picture is worth a thousand words about the land I’m visiting.

I know you Stevensonians think I’m wasting precious travel time while watching TV, but allow me to observe that while you were outside photographing your umpteenth sunset over the Mediterranean, I was inside watching a one-legged pole dancer on Italia’s Got Talent. Guess which one they were talking about the next morning in the lobby.

The wonder of Hotel TV is not just about the shows themselves. It begins with the stupid remote, which is usually placed somewhere in a position of honor, perhaps near the card that informs you of the cherished environmental principles of your friendly cleaning staff. Theresa insists I wipe it off with a disinfectant cloth because, well, you know…

It’s my job to figure out how to turn it on, and, no, the Big Red Button is not the answer. It never works and only makes you look stupid while you fire it like Capt. Kirk with a blank phaser. I find the HOME button works, and sometimes the CHANNEL one does the trick. You see, travel is all about discovery!

Now, I used to pack a Roku Streaming Stick, to bypass the local selection. But fumbling behind the flat screen for an open HDMI port didn’t seem to be worth the effort – not when hotels increasingly outfit rooms with Smart TVs. In any case, I could never properly adjust the DNS on my VPN to sync with the room’s Wifi without reconfiguring the router parameters.

[Note about the previous paragraph: Yes, I was the one my father called when he couldn’t turn on his computer.]

But I digress. What’s on?

Inevitably, you’ll stumble across reruns of bad American TV. Two and a Half Men was on a loop during a recent trip to Finland. It was in English because even the Finns don’t think it’s worth dubbing Charlie Sheen into Finnish.

We zipped past that and instead tuned into Vain Elämää which, for no readily apparent reason, means “Only Life.” It’s a reality show that involves aging pop singers sitting around a dining table with plates of lutefisk while one of them rocks out with a backup band. There’s a lot of Botox and fist pumps, but there’s no winner. It’s been on TV for 15 years and has won a lot of awards, which tells me a lot more about Finland than that gray afternoon I spent traipsing around the barren Suomenlinna Fortress (one of Rick Steves’ top Helsinki destinations).

The stars of Vain Elämää

We watched it every night while dozing off, but it was hardly the best TV we encountered in Helsinki. For pure delight, that would be Finland’s official Independence Day Reception, a special featuring the President and his lovely wife shaking hands with the guests.

This year, there were eighteen-hundred invitees, and they greeted every damn one of ‘em.

Handshake after handshake with an occasional curtsey, all televised to the solemn strains of Finnish classical music as performed by an unsmiling military band. We started watching in a small bar where the locals shared inside jokes about the ceremony, and were so transfixed we tuned in again when we got to our room. It lasted for hours.

They’ve been televising the annual reception since 1957, and more than half the country’s population tunes in. (By comparison, about one-third of Americans watch the Super Bowl each year.)

The guest list is the subject of intense speculation by the press in the days before the event. The men wear tails and the women are often dressed in designer gowns (though Theresa thought many of the shimmery dresses came off the discount rack at Hit Or Miss). There’s even color commentary.

This was no red carpet show infested by vapid stars at the Oscars. This was homespun reverence for the nation’s leader – clearly a big deal for the Finnish and one I can’t imagine being duplicated in America.

President Alexander Stubb and wife, Suzanne.

Unlike, say, Big Heads, a short-lived game show we stumbled on during a brief visit to London years ago. My words will fail to give it justice, so I’ll just quote from the show’s IMDB page, which describes it as a “comedy game-show in which eight members of the Great British public compete in bizarre physical challenges while wearing giant model heads of famous people ranging from William Shakespeare to Will.i.am, Queen Victoria to Taylor Swift and Winston Churchill.”

Or maybe I’ll just share a photo…

Big Heads.

Theresa was getting over food poisoning when we tuned in, and thought she was hallucinating.

I suppose I could say that the show offers a unique, richly deserved insight into the British character, but to be fair I should balance it with one of my favorite Hotel TV finds, Walks With My Dog.

It is exactly what it says on the tin: A random British celebrity is filmed while traipsing around the countryside with his mutt. Inevitably, they end up in a pub, and can anyone imagine a better storyline?

Makes you want to turn off the TV and get out there, Rick Steves guide in hand.