by Bill Bryson
So we sat together and watched the movie, thirty of us crowded together like refugees in an overloaded lifeboat, rubbing shoulders and sharing small noises, and it occurred to me then that there are certain things that some nations do better than everyone else and certain things that they do far worse and I began to wonder why that should be.
Sometimes a nation’s little contrivances are so singular and clever that we associate them with that country alone – double-decker buses in Britain, windmills in Holland (what an inspired addition to a flat landscape: think how they would transform Nebraska), sidewalk cafés in Paris. And yet there are some things that most countries do without difficulty that others cannot get a grasp of at all.
The French, for instance, cannot get the hang of queuing. They try and try, but it is beyond them. Wherever you go in Paris, you see orderly lines waiting at bus stops, but as soon as the bus pulls up the line instantly disintegrates into something like a fire drill at a lunatic asylum as everyone scrambles to be the first aboard, quite unaware that this defeats the whole purpose of queuing.
The British, on the other hand, do not understand certain of the fundamentals of eating, as evidenced by their instinct to consume hamburgers with a knife and fork. To my continuing amazement, many of them also turn their fork upside-down and balance the food on the back of it. I’ve lived in England for a decade and a half and I still have to quell an impulse to go up to strangers in pubs and restaurants and say, ‘Excuse me, can I give you a tip that’ll help stop those peas bouncing all over the table?’
Germans are flummoxed by humour, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on the invention of the motor car.
One of the small marvels of my first trip to Europe was the discovery that the world could be so full of variety, that there were so many different ways of doing essentially identical things, like eating and drinking and buying cinema tickets. It fascinated me that Europeans could at once be so alike – that they could be so universally bookish and cerebral, and drive small cars, and live in little houses in ancient towns, and love soccer, and be relatively unmaterialistic and law-abiding, and have chilly hotel rooms and cosy and inviting places to eat and drink – and yet be so endlessly, unpredictably different from each other as well. I loved the idea that you could never be sure of anything in Europe.
I still enjoy that sense of never knowing quite what’s going on. In my hotel in Oslo, where I spent four days after returning from Hammerfest, the chambermaid each morning left me a packet of something called Bio Tex Blå, a ‘minipakke for ferie, hybel og weekend’, according to the instructions. I spent many happy hours sniffing it and experimenting with it, uncertain whether it was for washing out clothes or gargling or cleaning the toilet bowl. In the end I decided it was for washing out clothes – it worked a treat – but for all I know for the rest of the week everywhere I went in Oslo people were saying to each other, ‘You know, that man smelled like toilet-bowl cleaner.’
When I told friends in London that I was going to travel around Europe and write a book about it, they said, ‘Oh, you must speak a lot of languages.’
‘Why, no,’ I would reply with a certain pride, ‘only English,’ and they would look at me as if I were crazy. But that’s the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don’t want to know what people are talking about. I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
I get great pleasure from watching foreign TV and trying to imagine what on earth is going on. On my first evening in Oslo, I watched a science programme in which two men in a studio stood at a lab table discussing a variety of sleek, rodent-like animals that were crawling over the surface and occasionally up the host’s jacket. ‘And you have sex with all these creatures, do you?’ the host was saying.
‘Certainly,’ replied the guest. ‘You have to be careful with the porcupines, of course, and the lemmings can get very neurotic and hurl themselves off cliffs if they feel you don’t love them as you once did, but basically these animals make very affectionate companions, and the sex is simply out of this world.’
‘Well, I think that’s wonderful. Next week we’ll be looking at how you can make hallucinogenic drugs with simple household chemicals from your own medicine cabinet, but now it’s time for the screen to go blank for a minute and then for the lights to come up suddenly on the host of the day looking as if he was just about to pick his nose. See you next week.’
After Hammerfest, Oslo was simply wonderful. It was still cold and dusted with greyish snow, but it seemed positively tropical after Hammerfest, and I abandoned all thought of buying a furry hat. I went to the museums and for a day-long walk out around the Bygdøy peninsula, where the city’s finest houses stand on the wooded hillsides, with fetching views across the icy water of the harbour to the downtown. But mostly I hung around the city centre, wandering back and forth between the railway station and the royal palace, peering in the store windows along Karl Johans Gate, the long and handsome main pedestrian street, cheered by the bright lights, mingling with the happy, healthy, relentlessly youthful Norwegians, very pleased to be alive and out of Hammerfest and in a world of daylight. When I grew cold, I sat in cafés and bars and eavesdropped on conversations that I could not understand or brought out my Thomas Cook European Timetable and studied it with a kind of humble reverence, planning the rest of my trip.
The Thomas Cook European Timetable is possibly the finest book ever produced. It is impossible to leaf through its 500 pages of densely printed timetables without wanting to dump a double armload of clothes into an old Gladstone and just take off. Every page whispers romance: ‘Montreux – Zweisimmen – Spiez – Interlaken’, ‘Beograd – Trieste – Venezia – Verona – Milano’, ‘Göteborg – Laxå – (Hallsberg) – Stockholm’, ‘Ventimiglia – Marseille – Lyon – Paris’. Who could recite these names without experiencing a tug of excitement, without seeing in his mind’s eye a steamy platform full of expectant travellers and piles of luggage standing beside a sleek, quarter-mile-long train with a list of exotic locations slotted into every carriage? Who could read the names ‘Moskva – Warszawa – Berlin – Basel – Genève’ and not feel a melancholy envy for all those lucky people who get to make a grand journey across a storied continent? Who could glance at such an itinerary and not want to climb aboard? Well, Sunny von Bülow for a start. But as for me, I could spend hours just poring over the tables, each one a magical thicket of times, numbers, distances, mysterious little pictograms showing crossed knives and forks, wine glasses, daggers, miners’ pickaxes (whatever could they be for?), ferry boats and buses, and bewilderingly abstruse footnotes:
873–4 To/from Storlien – see Table 473.
977 Lapplandspillen – see Table 472. Stops to set down only. On (7) cars run in train 421.
k Reservation advisable.
t Passengers may not join or alight at these stations.
x Via Västerås on (4), (5), (6), (7).
What does it all mean? I have no idea. You could study the Thomas Cook book for years and never truly understand its deeper complexities. And yet these are matters that could affect one’s life. Every year there must be scores of people who end up hundreds of miles from their destination because they failed to notice the footnote that said, ‘Non-stop to Arctic Circle after Karlskrona – see Table 721 a/b. Hot-water bottle advisable. Hard tack only after Murmansk. Return journey via Anchorage and Mexicali. Boy oh boy, have you fucked up this time, pal.’
Hammerfest had been a kind of over-extended limbering-up exercise, but now I was going to get down to some seriou
s travelling – and by that I mean the moving-about kind of travelling. I had an itch to roam. I wanted to wander through Europe, to see movie posters for films that would never come to Britain, gaze wonderingly at hoardings and shop notices full of exotic umlauts and cedillas and No Parking-sign øs, hear pop songs that could not by even the most charitable stretch of the imagination be a hit in any country but their own, encounter people whose lives would never again intersect with mine, be hopelessly unfamiliar with everything, from the workings of a phone box to the identity of a foodstuff.
I wanted to be puzzled and charmed, to experience the endless, beguiling variety of a continent where you can board a train and an hour later be somewhere where the inhabitants speak a different language, eat different foods, work different hours, live lives that are at once so different and yet so oddly similar. I wanted to be a tourist.
But first it was time to go home.
4. Paris
I returned to England and waited for winter to go. I spent an absurd amount of time shopping for things for the trip – a travel clock, a Swiss Army knife, a bright green and yellow rucksack, which my wife assured me would be just the thing if I decided to do any gay camping – and spent a day crawling around the attic searching for my beloved Kümmerly and Frey maps. I bought nearly the whole European set in 1972 and it was one of the few intelligent investments of my younger years. What am I saying? It was the intelligent investment of my younger years.
Printed in Switzerland, with all the obsessive precision and expense that that implies, each Kümmerly and Frey map covered one or two countries within its smart blue and yellow folders. Unfolded, they were vast and crisp and beautifully printed on quality paper. Best of all, the explanatory notes were in German and French only, which gave them an exotic ring that appealed to me in 1972 and appeals to me still. There is just something inherently more earnest and worldly about a traveller who carries maps with titles like ‘Jugoslawien 1:1 Mio’ and ‘Schwarzwald 1: 250 000’. It tells the world, Don’t fuck with me. I’m a guy who knows his maps.
With a stack of K&Fs and the latest Thomas Cook European Timetable, I spent long, absorbed evenings trying to draw up an itinerary that was both comprehensive and achievable, and failed repeatedly on both counts. Europe isn’t easy to systematize. You can’t go from coast to coast. There are few topographical features that suggest a natural beginning and end, and those that do – the Alps, the Rhine, the Danube – were either physically beyond me or had been done a thousand times. And besides, it’s just too big, too packed with things to see. There isn’t any place that’s not worth going.
In the end, I decided on a fairly random approach. I would return to Oslo to pick up the trail where I had left off and go wherever the fancy took me. Then, a week or so before I was due to fly out, I suddenly had the cold realization that Oslo was the last place I wanted to be. It was still winter in Oslo. I had been there only two months before. A voice that seemed not to be my own said, ‘Hell, Bill, go to Paris.’ So I did.
The girl at my travel agency in Yorkshire, whose grasp of the geography of the world south of Leeds is a trifle hazy (I once asked her to book me a plane ticket to Brussels and she phoned back ten minutes later to say, ‘Would that be the Brussels in Belgium, Mr Bryson?’), had booked me into a hotel in the 742nd arrondissement, a charmless neighbourhood somewhere on the outskirts of Calais. The hotel was opposite a spanking new sports complex, which had been built to look vaguely like a hill: it had short-cropped grass growing up its sides. Quite what the idea of this was I couldn’t say, because the walls sloped so sharply that you couldn’t walk on the grass or sit on it, so it had no function. Its only real purpose was to enable the architect to say, ‘Look at this, everybody. I’ve designed a building with grass growing on it. Aren’t I something?’ This, as we shall see again, is the great failing of Paris architects.
The hotel was one of those sterile, modern places that always put me in mind of a BUPA advertisement, but at least it didn’t have those curious timer switches that used to be a feature of hotel hallways in France. These were a revelation to me when I first arrived from America. All the light switches in the hallways were timed to switch off after ten or fifteen seconds, presumably as an economy measure. This wasn’t so bad if your room was next to the elevator, but if it was very far down the hall, and hotel hallways in Paris tend to wander around like an old man with Alzheimer’s, you would generally proceed the last furlong in total blackness, feeling your way along the walls with flattened palms, and invariably colliding scrotally with the corner of a nineteenth-century oak table put there, evidently, for that purpose. Occasionally your groping fingers would alight on something soft and hairy, which you would recognize after a moment as another person, and if he spoke English you could exchange tips.
You soon learned to have your key out and to sprint like billy-o for your room. But the trouble was that when eventually you re-emerged it was to total blackness once more and to a complete and – mark this – intentional absence of light switches, and there was nothing you could do but stumble straight-armed through the darkness, like Boris Karloff in The Mummy, and hope that you weren’t about to blunder into a stairwell. From this I learned one very important lesson: the French do not like us.
That’s OK, because of course nobody likes them much either. It so happens I had just seen a survey in a British paper in which executives had been asked to list their most despised things in the whole universe and the three top ones were, in this order: garden gnomes, fuzzy dice hanging in car windows and the French. I just loved that. Of all the things to despise – pestilence, poverty, tyrannical governments, Michael Fish – they chose garden gnomes, fuzzy dice and the French. I think that’s splendid.
On my first trip to Paris I kept wondering, Why does everyone hate me so much? Fresh off the train, I went to the tourist booth at the Gare du Nord, where a severe young woman in a blue uniform looked at me as if I were infectious. ‘What do you want?’ she said, or at least seemed to say.
‘I’d like a room, please,’ I replied, instantly meek.
‘Fill this out.’ She pushed a long form at me. ‘Not here. Over there.’ She indicated with a flick of her head a counter for filling out forms, then turned to the next person in line and said, ‘What do you want?’ I was amazed – I came from a place where everyone was friendly, where even funeral directors told you to have a nice day as you left to bury your grandmother – but I soon learned that everyone in Paris was like that. You would go into a bakery and be greeted by some vast slug-like creature with a look that told you you would never be friends. In halting French you would ask for a small loaf of bread. The woman would give you a long, cold stare and then put a dead beaver on the counter.
‘No, no,’ you would say, hands aflutter, ‘not a dead beaver. A loaf of bread.’
The slug-like creature would stare at you in patent disbelief, then turn to the other customers and address them in French at much too high a speed for you to follow, but the drift of which clearly was that this person here, this American tourist, had come in and asked for a dead beaver and she had given him a dead beaver and now he was saying that he didn’t want a dead beaver at all, he wanted a loaf of bread. The other customers would look at you as if you had just tried to fart in their handbags, and you would have no choice but to slink away and console yourself with the thought that in another four days you would be in Brussels and probably able to eat again.
The other thing I have never understood about the French is why they are so ungrateful. I’ve always felt that, since it was us that liberated them – and let’s face it, the French Army couldn’t beat a girls’ hockey team – they ought to give all Allied visitors to the country a book of coupons good for free drinks in Pigalle and a ride to the top of the Eiffel Tower. But they never thank you. I have had Belgians and Dutch people hug me round the knees and let me drag them down the street in gratitude to me for liberating their country, even after I have pointed out to them that I wasn�
�t even sperm in 1945, but this is not an experience that is ever likely to happen to anyone in France.
In the evening I strolled the eighteen miles to the Île de la Cité and Notre-Dame, through the sort of neighbourhoods where swarthy men in striped Breton shirts lean against lampposts cleaning their teeth with flick knives and spit between your legs as you pass. But it was a lovely March evening, with just the faintest tang of spring in the air, and once I stumbled onto the Seine, at the Pont de Sully, I was met with perfection. There facing me was the Île St-Louis, glowing softly and floating on the river like a vision, a medieval hamlet magically preserved in the midst of a modern city. I crossed the bridge and wandered up and down its shuttered streets, half expecting to find chickens wandering in the road and peasants pushing carts loaded with plague victims, but what I found instead were tiny, swish restaurants and appealing apartments in old buildings.
Hardly anyone was about – a few dawdling customers in the restaurants, a pair of teenage lovers tonguing each other’s uvulas in a doorway, a woman in a fur coat encouraging a poodle to leave un doodoo on the pavement. The windows of the upstairs apartments were pools of warm light and from the street gave tantalizing glimpses of walls lined with books and sills of sprawling pot plants and decorative antiques. It must be wonderful to live on such streets on such an island and to gaze out on such a river. The very luckiest live at the western end, where the streets are busier but the windows overlook Notre-Dame. I cannot imagine tiring of that view, though I suppose in August when the streets are clogged with tour buses and a million tourists in Bermuda shorts that SHOUT, the sense of favoured ecstasy may flag.
Even now the streets around the cathedral teemed. It was eight o’clock, but the souvenir shops were still open and doing a brisk trade. I made an unhurried circuit of Notre-Dame and draped myself over a railing by the Seine to watch the bateaux-mouches slide by, trimmed with neon like floating jukeboxes. It was hopelessly romantic.