by Bill Bryson
Cologne is a dismal place, which rather pleased me. It was comforting to see that the Germans could make a hash of a city as well as anyone else, and they certainly have done so with Cologne. You come out of the station and there, at the top of an outdoor escalator, is the cathedral, the largest Gothic structure in the world. It is awesome and imposing, no question, but it stands in the midst of a vast, windswept, elevated concrete plaza that is just heart-numbingly barren and forlorn. If you can imagine Salisbury Cathedral dropped into the car park of the Metro Centre you may get the picture. I don’t know what they were thinking of when they built it. Certainly it wasn’t people.
I had been to Cologne briefly once before, the summer I travelled alone, but I could remember little of it, except for the massive presence of the cathedral, and staying in a guesthouse somewhere on a back street in the permanent shadow of an iron bridge across the Rhine. I remembered the guesthouse much better than the city. In the hallway outside my room stood a table stacked high with German weekly magazines, all of which seemed to be concerned exclusively with sex and television, and since television in Germany seemed also to be concerned almost exclusively with sex, sex was something of a feature in these publications. There was nothing pornographic about them, you understand. They just covered sex the way British magazines cover gardening. I spent much of an afternoon and a whole evening travelling between my room and the table with armloads of these diverting periodicals for purposes of cultural study.
I was particularly fascinated by a regular feature in, I think, Neue Review, which focused on a young couple each week – a truck mechanic from Duisburg named Rudi and his dishy librarian wife Greta, that sort of thing. Each week it was a different couple, but they all looked as if they had been squeezed from the same tube of toothpaste. They were all young and good-looking and had superb bodies and dazzling smiles. Two or three of the photographs would show the couple going about their daily business – Rudi lying under a DAF truck with a spanner and a big smile, Greta at the local supermarket beaming at the frozen chickens. But the rest of the pictures treated us to the sight of Rudi and Greta without any clothes on doing things around the house: standing together at the sink washing the dishes, sharing a spoonful of soup from the stove, playing Scrabble buttocks-up on a furry rug.
There was never anything overtly sexual about the pictures. Rudi never got a hard on – he was having much too good a time drying those dishes and tasting that soup! He and Greta looked as if every moment of their existence was bliss. They smiled straight at the camera, as happy as anything to have their neighbours and workmates and everyone else in the Federal Republic of Germany see them chopping vegetables and loading the washing machine in their birthday suits. And I thought then what curious people the Germans are.
That was about all I could remember of Cologne, and I began to fear, as I lingered on the precipice of the cathedral plaza looking down on the grim shopping streets below, that that was about all that was worth remembering. I went and stood at the base of the cathedral and gazed up at it for a long time, impressed by its sheer mass. It is absolutely immense, over 500 feet long and more than 200 feet wide, with towers that soar almost as high as the Washington Monument. It can hold 40,000 people. You can understand why it took 700 years to build – and that was with German workers. In Britain they would still be digging the foundations.
I went inside and spent a half-hour looking dutifully at the contents, but without feeling any of that sense of exhilaration that the vastly smaller cathedral at Aachen had stirred in me the day before, then wandered back outside and went to the edge of the terrace overlooking the Rhine, broad and brown and full of long fleets of barges. This done, I wandered over to the main shopping street, Hohe Strasse, a long, straight pedestrian artery which is one of the two most expensive streets in Europe on which to rent retail space (the other is Kaufingerstrasse in Munich). It’s more expensive even than Bond Street in London or the Rue du Faubourg-St-Honoré in Paris. Bernard Levin wrote glowingly of Hohe Strasse in To the End of the Rhine, but to me it just looked like any shopping street anywhere – a succession of C&A-type department stores, shoe stores, record stores, places selling cameras and video recorders. It was aswarm with Saturday shoppers, but they didn’t look particularly discerning and nothing like as well-dressed as the citizens of Aachen. I could have been in Milton Keynes or Doncaster.
I stopped outside one of the many electronics shops and looked over the crowded window, idly wondering if the goods on offer would be German-made, but no, they were the same Japanese videos and cameras you see everywhere else, apart from the odd Grundig slide projector or some other relic of a simpler age. Having grown up in a world dominated by American goods I used to get patriotically chagrined seeing Japanese products appearing everywhere and I would read with sympathy articles in magazines about how these wily little orientals were taking over the world.
Then one time, while I was flying on a Boeing 747, I plugged in a pair of earphones that offered the audio quality of a paper cup at the end of a length of string and watched a film that looked as if it were being projected onto a bath mat, and I had a shocking thought – namely, that this was as far as American consumer electronics ever got. We got up to about 1972 and then just stopped. If we had left the field to RCA and Westinghouse and the other American companies we would now all be wheeling around personal stereos the size of suitcases and using video recorders that you would have to thread yourself. And since that moment I have been grateful to the Japanese for filling my life with convenient items like a wristwatch that can store telephone numbers, calculate my overdraft and time my morning egg.
Now my only complaint is that we have to live with all the embarrassing product names the Japanese give us. No one ever seems to remark on this – on what a dumb and misguided name Walkman is, for instance. I’ve never understood it. It doesn’t walk, it’s not a man. It sounds like something you’d give a blind person to keep him from bumping into walls (‘You want to turn up the bleeper on your Walkman, Harry’). If it had been developed in America it would have been given a name like the SoundBlaster or MuzixMaster or Dynam-O-Box or something with a little zip to it. But these things aren’t developed in America any longer, so we have to accept the sort of names that appeal to Japanese engineers – the Sony Handy-Cam, the Panasonic Explorer, the Toyota Tercel. Personally, I would be embarrassed to buy a car that sounds like a new kind of polyester, but I imagine that to the Japanese these names are as exciting and stellar as all-get-out. I suppose that’s what you have to expect from people who wear white shirts every day of their lives.
I returned to the station, where I had left my bag in a locker, and couldn’t decide what to do with myself. My intention had been to spend a couple of days in Cologne going to the museums – it has some excellent ones – but now I couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for the idea. And then I saw something that gave me an instant urge to get out of there. It was a non-stop porno cinema, and quite a gross one at that to judge by the candid glossy pictures on display by the ticket booth. The cinema was in the station, one of the services permitted to travellers by the thoughtful management of Deutsche Bundesbahn. I don’t know precisely why, but I found this hugely repellent. I have no especial objection to pornography, but in a station? There was just something so seedy about the idea of a businessman stopping off at the end of the day to watch twenty minutes of heaving bonking before catching the 17.40 to his home and family in Bensberg, and there was something seedier still in the thought of a national railway endorsing it.
Just then the huge timetable board high above me went chickata chickata in that appealing way of theirs, announcing an express train to Amsterdam. ‘Hold that train!’ I muttered, and scurried off to the ticket window.
8. Amsterdam
Arriving at Amsterdam’s Centraal Station is a strange experience. It’s in the middle of town on a sunny plaza at the foot of the main street, the Damrak. You step out of the front door and there in front of you is �
�� gosh! – every hippie that’s left. I had no idea there were still so many of them, but there were scores, if not hundreds, lounging around in groups of six or eight, playing guitars, passing reefers, sunning themselves. They look much as you would expect someone to look who has devoted a quarter of a century to lounging around in public places and smoking dope. A lot of them seemed to be missing teeth and hair, but they had compensated somewhat by acquiring large numbers of children and dogs. The children amused themselves by frolicking barefoot in the sun and the dogs by nipping at me as I passed.
I walked up the Damrak in a state of high anticipation. Amsterdam had been Katz’s and my favourite European city by a factor too high to compute. It was beautiful, it was friendly, it had excellent bars and legal dope. If we had lingered another week I could well be there yet, sitting on the station plaza with an acoustic guitar and some children named Sunbeam and Zippity Doo-Dah. It was that close.
The Damrak was heaving with tourists, hippies and Saturday shoppers, all moving at different speeds: the tourists shuffling as if their shoelaces were tied together, looking everywhere but where they were going, the hippies hunched and hurried, and the shoppers scurrying around among them like wind-up toys. It was impossible to walk with any kind of rhythm. I tried several of the hotels along the street, but they were all full, so I dodged behind the prison-like royal palace at Dam Square and branched off into some side streets, where I had vague recollections of there being a number of small hotels. There were, but these too were full. At most of them it wasn’t even necessary to enquire because a sign in the window announced NO VACANCY in half a dozen languages.
Things had clearly changed since my day. Katz and I had stepped off the train at the height of summer, asked our way to the Sailors’ Quarter and got a room in the first hotel we came to. It was a wonderful little place called the Anco, in a traditional Amsterdam house: narrow and gabled, with steep, dark staircases and a restful view of the O.Z. Voorburgwal canal four floors below. It cost $5 a night, with an omelette for breakfast thrown in (almost literally), though we did have to share a room with two slightly older guys.
Our first meeting was inauspicious. We opened the door to find them engaged in a session of naked bed-top wrestling – an occurrence that surprised the four of us equally.
‘Pardon us, ladies!’ Katz and I blurted and scuffled backwards into the hallway, closing the door behind us and looking confounded. Nothing in twenty years of life in Iowa had quite prepared us for this. We gave them a minute to disengage and don bathrobes before we barged back in, but it was clear that they considered us boorish intruders, an opinion reinforced by our knack, developed over the next two days, of always returning to the room in the middle of one of their work-outs. Either these guys never stopped or our timing was impeccable.
They spoke to us as little as was humanly possible. We couldn’t place their accents but we thought the smaller one might be Australian since he seemed so at home down under. Their contempt for us became irredeemable in the middle of the second night, when Katz stumbled heavily from his bed after a gala evening at the Club Paradiso and, with an enormous sigh of relief, urinated in the waste-basket.
‘I thought it was the sink,’ he explained, a trifle lamely, the next morning. Our room-mates moved out after breakfast and for the rest of the week we had the room to ourselves.
We quickly fell into a happy routine. We would rise each morning for breakfast, then return to the room, shut out every trace of daylight and go back to bed for the day. At about four o’clock we would stir again, have a steaming shower in a cubicle down the hall, change into fresh clothes, press our hair flat against our heads and descend to the bar of the Anco, where we would sit with Oranjebooms in the window seat, watching the passing scene and remarking on what fine people the Dutch were to fill their largest city with pleasant canals, winsome whores and plentiful intoxicants.
The Anco had a young barman with a Brillo-pad beard and a red jacket three sizes too snug for him who had clearly taken one toke too many some years earlier and now looked as if he should carry a card with his name on it in case he needed to remember it in a hurry. He sold us small quantities of hash and at six o’clock we would have a reefer, as a sort of appetizer, and then repair to an Indonesian restaurant next door. Then, as darkness fell over the city and the whores took up their positions on the street corners, and the evening air filled with the heady smells of cannabis and frites, we would wander out into the streets and find ourselves being led gently into mayhem.
We went frequently to the Paradiso, a nightclub converted from an old church, where we tried without success to pick up girls. Katz had the world’s worst opening line. Wearing an earnest, almost worried look, he would go up to a girl and say, ‘Excuse me, I know you don’t know me, but could you help me move something six inches?’
‘What?’ the girl would reply.
‘One and a half fluid ounces of sperm,’ Katz would say with a sudden beam. It never worked, but then it was no less successful than my own approach, which involved asking the least attractive girl in the room if I could buy her a drink and being told to fuck off. So instead we spent the nights getting ourselves into a state of what we called ACD – advanced cognitive dysfunction. One night we fell in with some puzzled-looking Africans whom Katz encouraged to foment rebellion in their homeland. He got so drunk that he gave them his watch (he seemed to think that punctual timekeeping would make all the difference in the revolution), a Bulova that had belonged to his grandfather and was worth a fortune, and for the rest of the summer whenever I forgot and asked him the time he would reply sourly, ‘I don’t know. I have a man in Zululand who looks after these things for me.’ At the end of the week we discovered we had spent exactly half our funds of $700 each and concluded that it was time to move on.
* * *
The Dutch are very like the English. Both are kind of slobby (and I mean that in the nicest possible way): in the way they park their cars, in the way they set out their litter bins, in the way they dump their bikes against the nearest tree or wall or railing. There is none of that obsessive fastidiousness you find in Germany or Switzerland, where the cars on some residential streets look as if they were lined up by somebody with a yardstick and a spirit level. In Amsterdam they just sort of abandon their cars at the canalside, often on the brink of plunging in.
They even talk much the same as the English. This has always puzzled me. I used to work with a Dutch fellow on The Times, and I once asked him whether the correct pronunciation of the artist’s name was Van Go or Van Gok. And he said, a little sharply, ‘No, no, it’s Vincent Van – ’ and he made a sudden series of desperate hacking noises, as if a moth had lodged in his throat. After that, when things were slow around the desk, I would ask him how various random expressions were said in Dutch – International Monetary Fund, poached eggs, cunnilingus – and he would always respond with these same abrupt hacking noises. Passing people would sometimes slap him on the back or offer to get him a glass of water.
I’ve tried it with other Dutch people – it’s a good trick if you’ve got a Dutch person at a party and can’t think what to do with him – always with the same result. Yet the odd thing is that when you hear Dutch people speaking to each other they hardly hack at all. In fact, the language sounds like nothing so much as a peculiar version of English.
Katz and I often noticed this. We would be walking down the street when a stranger would step from the shadows and say, ‘Hello, sailors, care to grease my flanks?’ or something, and all he would want was a light for his cigarette. It was disconcerting. I found this again now when I presented myself at a small hotel on the Prinsengracht and asked the kind-faced proprietor if he had a single room. ‘Oh, I don’t believe so,’ he said, ‘but let me check with my wife.’ He thrust his head through a doorway of beaded curtains and called, ‘Marta, what stirs in your leggings? Are you most moist?’
From the back a voice bellowed, ‘No, but I tingle when I squirt.’
/> ‘Are you of assorted odours?’
‘Yes, of beans and sputum.’
‘And what of your pits – do they exude sweetness?’
‘Truly.’
‘Shall I suckle them at eventide?’
‘Most heartily!’
He returned to me wearing a sad look. ‘I’m sorry, I thought there might have been a cancellation, but unfortunately not.’
‘A smell of petroleum prevails throughout,’ I said by way of thanks and departed.
There were no rooms to be had anywhere. In the end, despondent, I trudged back to the station plaza, to the office of the VVV, the state tourist bureau, where I assumed there would be a room-finding service. I went inside and up some stairs and found myself in a hall that brought to mind Ellis Island. There were eight straggly lines of weary tourists, with at least thirty people in each queue. The VVV staff were sending people all over – to Haarlem, to Delft, to Rotterdam, to The Hague – because there was not a single hotel room left in Amsterdam at any price. This was only April. What on earth can it be like in July? They must send people to Iceland. A big sign on the wall said NO TICKETS FOR THE VAN GOGH EXHIBITION. SOLD OUT. That was great, too. One of the reasons I had come when I did was to see the exhibition.
I took a place in one of the lines. Progress was glacial. I was hot, I was sweaty, I was tired, I was hungry. My feet hurt. I wanted a bath. I wanted a large dinner and several beers. There wasn’t a single part of me that was happy.
Almost every one of us in the room was an American. Upon reaching the front of the line, each new customer had to be interviewed regarding his or her requirements in terms of toilet facilities, breakfast arrangements, room amenities, accessibility by public transport and price. This took ages because of all the permutations involved. Then almost invariably the customer had to turn to his or her mate – who had been standing there all along seeming to take it in but evidently not – and explain all the possibilities all over again. This would prompt a lengthy discussion and a series of supplementary questions – Can we get there by bus instead of by train? Are there any vegetarian restaurants near the hotel? Does the hotel have no-smoking rooms? Will there be a cab at the station when we get there or do we have to call one, and if we have to call one can you give us the number? Is there a laundromat in Delft? What time does the last train run? Do you think I should be taken outside and shot for having such an enormous butt and asking so many stupid questions? It just went on and on.