This unabashed, uncensored book is more memoir than travelogue. When playwright-author-actor Rachel Shukert travels to Europe with an experimental theatre group, a customs official in Vienna doesn’t stamp her passport, basically giving her free reign in Europe. After the show is finished in Vienna and Germany, Shukert visits (stays with indefinitely) her friends in Amsterdam who promise they can get her a part in a new play they are hoping to produce. Needless to say, the play falls through. While thinking about what to do next, Shukert explores Amsterdam’s markets, their red light district, buys a stolen bike for a great price, almost turns trying to make a dentist appointment into another one night stand and falls in love. While some readers may be off put by Rachel’s boldness in describing her adventures (she has no compunction about discussing her not one, but two, emergency room visits after drinking too much alcohol, and even includes some helpful tags to carry along, translated in several languages, to help the doctor/patient interaction in a foreign country), there is an honesty to her writing that is very refreshing. Shukert’s memoir is filled with much self-reflection as she recounts being brought up Jewish in Nebraska, her many failed relationships, her one night stands and her quest to be an actress, and as she considers what she would like the next phase of her life to be, she, and the reader, can be quite certain that everything IS going to be great---or at least ok.
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