Weekend in Andorra and how to write about it

The Art of Writing a Story About Walking Across Andorra
He traversed an entire nation in a long weekend. Now Rolf Potts shows how you can impress members of the opposite sex and write a textbook-perfect travel article in eight easy steps.

I. Many Travel Stories Begin as an Attempt to Impress Pretty Women

A. Once you have walked across the small Pyrenean nation of Andorra, you should proceed to Barcelona. Here, you will look for a nightclub called L’Arquer. According to your guidebook, L’Arquer contains a fully functioning archery range, and you are intrigued by the idea that one can shoot bows and arrows inside a nightclub. As with Andorra, you are attracted by L’Arquer because you find it charming that such a place exists.

B. In actuality, of course, L’Arquer will not likely live up to your expectations. The archery range, for example, will probably be in a separate, cordoned-off area, and your fantasies of chugging beers while shooting arrows over crowds of drunken revelers will not come true. For this reason, you will not look very hard for L’Arquer, and you will end up settling for a pub called Shanghai. This way, L’Arquer will remain perfect in your imagination-unlike Andorra, the memory of which has now been tainted with jagged brown ridges, chintzy souvenirs and drunken Scotsmen.

C. In the Shanghai pub, you will meet a Canadian woman named Lisa, who has come to Spain for two weeks of vacation. Eventually, she will ask you what you’re here for, and you will tell her that you just walked across Andorra. Lisa isn’t exactly sure what Andorra is, so the implicit gag (that Andorra is in fact a very small country, quite easy to walk across) is lost on her. Instead, she asks a neutral question: 'How was it?' You reply that it was quite interesting.

D. After this, there will be a pause, which implies that Lisa wants you to elaborate. This is when the real Andorra story begins. What immediately follows the pause will not be the final and definitive story, but it will set the tone for how you’ll remember Andorra in the future. This is where you begin to pick and choose, to play games with reality, to separate the meaningful from the mundane and hold it up for display. Later, when you are writing the story down, you will add details of history and culture-but for now you just want to hold Lisa’s attention, because she has clear blue eyes and a captivating smile.

E. Skipping over the actual details of the hike, you tell Lisa about the Festa Major celebration in Andorra la Vella. Here, a group of mentally handicapped Andorrans singled you out from the crowd and cheerfully bullied you into joining them in a Catalan dance called the sardana. You choose to reveal Andorra through this story because it’s funny and self-deprecating, and you want to single yourself out to Lisa as a charmed person who is instinctively adored by retards.

F. The story goes fairly well upon first telling, save the fact that: (a) Lisa seems faintly offended when you use the word 'retards'; and (b) You flub the phrasing near the end of the story, inadvertently implying (to Lisa’s ears) that you were insensitive to the mentally handicapped Andorrans while you were dancing with them. You make a mental note to sharpen the clarity of your phrasing, since you were not, in fact, acting insensitive when it actually happened.

You can find the article here.