Let’s Go Europe 2011: The Student Travel Guide
From Portugal to the Ukraine, from Norway down to Greece, Europe is a lot to take on. Luckily, the student adventurers behind Let’s Go Europe 2011 think you can handle it ? with a little help. Whether you’re whipping through London, Barcelona, and Prague in five days or spending a leisurely year abroad, you’ll get all the info you need from us. Our wit and irreverence can brighten even the drabbest Renaissance museum?if you didn’t take our advice to skip it. From German beer halls to R
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Rendered almost useless through the baffling decision to remove the location of hostels from all maps,
I was very disappointed in Let’s Go Europe 2010 and wrote a 2 star review for it last year. In short: 2010 was the first year for a new company producing these books and it was an almost exact rehash of 2009 with about two thirds of the content. In fact, I wound up using 2009 on my trip last year.
I was looking forward to seeing if 2011 would recapture the glory of this once proud series.
At first glance, the new company seems to have gotten its sea legs: the page total has jumped back up and a cursory look at some of the cities I visited last year showed that hostels are up to date and the writing is original. Some countries are still painfully bare (Ireland has only Dublin and, surprise, Let’s Go happens to offer another book for you to buy with more detail) but at least this new outfit doesn’t seem content to rehash again.
I then started paging through some of my dream destinations for accommodations and was astonished to see that while hostel descriptions were intact, their locations have been removed from all maps. Want to stay at Instant Sleep in Hamburg? Take the U3 train to Sternschanze. Here’s the address. Good luck finding it from there. How about the famous Sir Toby’s in Prague? Sorry, that’s outside the city map provided and there’s no arrow to show as much.
What’s most puzzling is that these accommodation markers were present before and were consciously deleted this year. Simply an awful decision. This is supposedly a book for backpackers, and looking for a place to sleep is #1 on my list for each city I arrive in. What did they save by removing these? If that’s acceptable to them, why bother having markers for museums as well? Why not just remove maps altogether, give us a list of addresses, and sell a Let’s Go map book to boost revenues while we’re at it?
Another gripe is that they’ve completely removed Scandinavian Europe (Denmark, Norway, Sweden). I guess they don’t count, and I haven’t seen a region specific book for those countries either. Good thing I went last year I guess.
I’ll give these guys credit for the content they have packed into this slimmer book with bible paper thin sheets. I could almost forgive the omission of great cities like Copenhagen and Stockholm if they had left the maps as they were. When in a foreign country, you need more than an address to find things with the maps provided. What travel book doesn’t provide at least that? But if you love the writing of Let’s Go, you’re once again stuck with having to carry two books if you think you’ll have to improvise at all on your trip.
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|This Guidebook is Truly Written By College Kids For College Kids,
As someone who is well past my college years, I was somewhat amused by the content of this travel guide. It is highly focused on drinking establishments, where to find affordable lodging near drinking establishments, and how to avoid ending up in an area of Europe that has a lack of fun places to drink.
However, I wasn’t surprised. This is a guidebook written by college students for college students. I can’t be too critical of this book’s focus because I am certainly not among the target audience.
I will say that, since Let’s Go Europe is written by Harvard students, I feel kind of bad for the college kids without trust funds or a parent’s credit card in hand who try to live the lifestyle expounded on in the book. I wouldn’t recommend that kids take out thousands of dollars in student loans in order to finance a “Let’s Go-Style European Vacation.”
The book is written with the expectation that the reader is going on a months-long grand tour of Europe and can spend well over $100 a day all summer long, eating gelato and drinking local beer in picturesque European settings.
Also, one note about the logistics of using this book on the Kindle: although it is easy and convenient to skip around the content of this book with a Kindle, the maps are very, very difficult to read as are some of the icons used in the book. In addition, some of the content’s formatting is lost on the Kindle which makes for confusion, especially when whole pages are rearranged and words are cut off the page.
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|Some flaws, but better than anything else out there,
Admittedly, this guide had omitted some major cities, and the maps didn’t have the hostels or restaurants labeled.
However, to be honest, the listings for stuff like accommodations and nightlife are just UNBEATABLE, so I’m willing to deal with the flaws in order to get those recommendations.
I was trying to keep to a budget, so maybe I’m biased, but when I opened the Lonely Planet and Frommer’s guides in the bookstore, their idea of “cheap” was like…65 euro a night. Even the “shoestring” book was borderline. That’s just not the sort of budget I’m operating on.
Let’s Go, on the other hand, listed hostels and cheap mom-and-pop places that got me through most of Western Europe on 20 euro or less a night. No complaints about those prices.
And nightlife? My friends’ guides had maybe 3 awkward ex-pat bars listed each. And I found that it’s super-tough to come upon a fun, hoppin’ nightlife place that isn’t just full of American study-abroad students without some guidance. Let’s Go provided that guidance, and the places they listed were almost all great! And as for the ones that weren’t – at least the reviews were honest, so I knew what I was getting into if I DID end up in one of those American-students-everywhere clubs.
My friends and I used only my guide to find bars and discotecas, because their guidebooks (from other series) were pretty useless on that front.
So, yeah, I sometimes had to ask a local for directions to my desired hostel, but if you can just buck up and ask someone where the street is, you won’t have any problems. In fact, you’ll have a great time. (At least I did. ^-^)
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