Neither Here Nor There

by Bill Bryson

  The sole virtue of the room was that it had a balcony with a view over the main church and town square (really just a strip of lawn with a car park) and beyond that a handsome prospect of mountains. By leaning perilously out over the street and craning my neck at a peculiar angle, I could just see the Schloss high above me. It is still the home of the Crown Prince, one of the richest men in Europe and possessor of the second-finest private collection of paintings in the world, outdone only by the Queen of England. He has the only Leonardo in private hands and the largest collection of Rubenses, but a fat lot of good that does the eager visitor, because the castle is completely off limits, and plans to build a modest national gallery to house a few of the paintings have yet to get off the ground. Parliament has been debating the matter for almost twenty years, but the thought of parting with the necessary funds has proved too painful so far and evidently no one would dare to ask the royal family (worth an estimated $1.3 billion) to dip into their treasure chest and pass down some bauble to get the ball rolling.

  I went out for a walk and to check out the possibilities for dinner, which were not abundant. The business district was only a couple of blocks square and the shops were so pedestrian and small-town – a newsagent’s, a chemist’s, a gift shop selling the sort of gifts that you dread receiving at Christmas from your in-laws – that it was impossible to linger. Restaurants were thin on the ground and either very expensive or discouragingly empty. Vaduz is so small that if you walk for fifteen minutes in any direction you are deep in the country. It occurred to me that there is no reason to go to Liechtenstein except to say that you have been there. If it were simply part of Switzerland (which in fact it is in all but name and postage stamps – and even then it uses the Swiss postal service) nobody would ever dream of visiting it.

  I wandered down a pleasant but anonymous residential street where the picture windows of every living-room offered a ghostly glow of television, and then found myself on a straight, unpaved and unlit road through flat, still-fallow fields. The view back to Vaduz was unexpectedly lovely. Darkness had fallen with that suddenness you find in the mountains and a pale moon with a chunk bitten out of it hung in the sky. The Schloss, bathed in yellow floodlights, stood commandingly above the town looking impregnable and draughty.

  The road ended in a T-junction to nowhere and I turned back for another look around the town. I settled for dinner in the dining-room of the Vaduzerhof Hotel. Two hours earlier I had been solemnly assured that the hotel was closed, but the dining-room was certainly open, if not exactly overwhelmed with customers, and people also seemed to be coming in through the front door, taking keys off hooks in the hallway and going upstairs to bedrooms. Perhaps the people at the hotel just didn’t like the look of me, or maybe they correctly suspected that I was a travel writer and would reveal to the world the secret that the food at the Vaduzerhof Hotel at No. 3 Städtlestrasse in Vaduz is Not Very Good. Who can say?

  In the morning I presented myself in the dining-room of the Engel for breakfast. It was the usual continental breakfast of bread and butter and cold cuts and cheese, which I didn’t really want, but it was included in the room charge and with what they were charging me I felt bound to empty a couple of little tubs of butter and waste some cheese, if nothing else. The waiter brought me coffee and asked if I wanted orange juice.

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said.

  It was the strangest orange juice I’ve ever seen. It was a peachy colour and had red stringy bits suspended in it like ganglia. They looked unnervingly like those deeply off-putting red squiggles you sometimes find in the yolks of eggs. It didn’t even taste like orange juice and after two polite sips I pushed it to one side and concentrated on my coffee and cutting slices of ham into small, unreusable pieces.

  Twenty minutes later I presented myself at the checkout desk and the pleasant lady there handed me my bill to review while she did brusque things with my credit card in a flattening machine. I was surprised to see that there was a charge of four francs for orange juice. Four francs is a lot of money.

  ‘Excuse me, but I’ve been charged four francs for orange juice.’

  ‘Did you not have orange juice?’

  ‘Yes, but the waiter never said I’d be charged for it. I thought it was part of the breakfast.’

  ‘Oh no, our orange juice is very special. Fresh-squeezed. It is—’ she said some German word which I assume translates as ‘full of stringy red bits’ then added – ‘and as it is razzer special we charge four francs for it.’

  ‘Fine, splendid, but I really feel you should have told me.’

  ‘But, sir, you ordered it and you drank it.’

  ‘I didn’t drink it – it tasted like duck’s urine – and besides I thought it was free.’

  We were at an impasse. I don’t usually make a scene in these circumstances – I just come back at night and throw a brick through the window – but this time I was determined to take a stand and refused to sign the bill until the four-franc charge was removed. I was even prepared to be arrested over it, though for one unsettling moment I confess I had a picture of me being brought my dinner in jail and taking a linen cloth off the tray to find a glass of peach-coloured orange juice and a single slice of ham cut into tiny pieces.

  Eventually she relented, with more grace than I probably deserved, but it was clear from the rigid all-is-forgiven smile she gave me as she handed me back my card that there will never be a room for me at the Hotel Engel in Vaduz, and with the Vaduzerhof also evidently barred to me for life, it was obvious that I had spent my last night in Liechtenstein.

  As it was a Sunday, there was no sign of any buses running, so I had no choice but to walk to Buchs, half a dozen miles to the north, but I didn’t mind. It was a flawless spring morning. Church bells rang out all over the valley, as if a war had just ended. I followed the road to the nearby village of Schaan, successfully gambled that a side lane would lead me to the Rhine, and there found a gravel footpath waiting to conduct me the last half-mile to the bridge to Switzerland. I had never crossed a border by foot before and felt rather pleased with myself. There was no border post of any kind, just a plaque in the centre of the bridge showing the formal dividing line between Liechtenstein and Switzerland. No one was around, so I stepped back and forth over the line three or four times just for the novelty of it.

  Buchs, on the opposite bank of the river, wasn’t so much sleepy as comatose. I had two hours to kill before my train, so I had a good look around the town. This took four minutes, including rest stops. Everything was geschlossen.

  I went to the station and bought a ticket to Innsbruck, then went and looked for the station buffet. It was shut, but a news-stand was open and I had a look at it. I was ready for something to read – Ziegler’s relentless body-count of fourteenth-century European peasants was beginning to lose its sparkle – but the only thing they had in English was the weekend edition of USA Today, a publication that always puts me in mind of a newspaper we used to get in primary school called My Weekly Reader. I am amazed enough that they can find buyers for USA Today in the USA, but the possibility that anyone would ever present himself at the station kiosk in Buchs, Switzerland, and ask for it seemed to me to set a serious challenge to the laws of probability. I thought about stealing a look at the paper, just to check the Major League baseball standings, but the kiosk lady was watching me with a look that suggested this could be a punishable offence in Switzerland.

  Instead I found the way to my platform, unburdened myself of my rucksack and took a seat on a bench. I allowed my eyelids to droop and passed the time by composing Swiss riddles.

  Q. What is the best way to make a Swiss roll?

  A. Take him to a mountaintop and give him a push.

  Q. How do you make a Swiss person laugh?

  A. Hold a gun to his head and say, ‘Laugh.’

  Q. What do you call a great lover in Switzerland?

  A. An immigrant.

  Q. How can you spot a Swiss anarchist?

>   A. He doesn’t use the post code.

  Q. What do you call a gathering of boring people in Switzerland?

  A. Zurich.

  Tiring of this, I switched, for no explainable reason, to multiple-choice Adolf Hitler-Eva Braun jokes, but I had only completed one—

  Q. What were Adolf Hitler’s last words to Eva Braun?

  a. Did you remember to cancel the milk?

  b. Bang! OK, it’s your turn.

  c. All right, all right, I’ll see to it that they name a range of small electrical appliances after you.

  —when the train pulled in. With more than a little relief, I boarded it, pleased to be heading for yet another new country.

  19. Austria

  I walked through the station at Innsbruck with an almost eerie sense of familiarity, a sensation half-way between déjà vu and actual memory. I hadn’t been to Innsbruck for eighteen years and hadn’t thought about it more than once or twice in that time, but finding myself there now it was as if it had been no more than a day or two and the years in between had never happened. The station appeared not to have changed at all. The buffet was where I remembered it and still serving goulash with dumplings, a meal that I ate four times in three days because it was the cheapest and most substantial food in town. The dumplings were the size of cannonballs and just as filling. About as tasty as well.

  I took a room in a small hotel in the centre, the Goldene Krone, and spent the dying hours of the afternoon walking through slanting sunshine that bathed the town in golden light. Innsbruck really is an ideal little city, with solid baroque buildings and a roofscape of bulbous towers. It is carefully preserved without having the managed feel of an open-air museum, and its setting is as near to perfection as could be imagined. At the end of every street you are confronted by a towering backdrop of mountains, muscular and snow-peaked beneath intensely clear skies.

  I walked the paved footpath along the River Inn, swift and shallow and clear as polished glass, passed through a small park called the Hofgarten and drifted out into the residential avenues beyond: long, straight, shaded streets lined with stolid three-storey houses that disappeared in the treetops. Many of them – too many surely for such a small city – contained doctors’ surgeries and had shiny brass plates on the walls or gates announcing DR G. MUNSTER/ZAHNARZT OR DR ROBERT SCHLUGEL/PLASTISCHE CHIRURGIE – the sort of offices where you know that you would be ordered, whatever the complaint, to undress, climb onto the table and put your feet in the stirrups. Bright trams, empty but for the driver, trundled heavily past from time to time, but all the rest was silence.

  It occurred to me that one of my first vivid impressions of Europe was a Walt Disney movie I saw as a boy. I believe it was called The Trouble With Angels. It was a hopelessly sentimental and naff fictionalized account of how a group of cherry-cheeked boys with impish instincts and voices like angels made their way into the Vienna Boys’ Choir. I enjoyed the film hugely, being hopelessly sentimental and naff myself, but what made a lasting indent on me was the Europeanness of the background – the cobbled streets, the toytown cars, the corner shops with a tinkling bell above the door, the modest, lived-in homyness of each boy’s familial flat. It all seemed so engaging and agreeably old-fashioned compared with the sleek and modern world I knew, and it left me with the unshakeable impression that Austria was somehow more European than the rest of Europe. And so again it seemed to me here in Innsbruck. For the first time in a long while, certainly for the first time on this trip, I felt a palpable sense of wonder to find myself here, on these streets, in this body, at this time. I was in Europe now. It seemed an oddly profound notion.

  * * *

  I found my way back to my hotel along the city’s main street, Maria-Theresien-Strasse. It is a handsome thoroughfare and well worth an amble, so long as you don’t let your gaze pause for one second on any of the scores of shop windows displaying dirndls and lederhosen, beer mugs with pewter lids, peaked caps with a feather in the brim, long-stemmed pipes and hand-carved religious curios. I don’t suppose any small area of the world has as much to answer for in the way of crappy keepsakes as the Tyrol, and the sight of so much of it brings a depressing reminder that you are among a nation of people who like this sort of thing.

  This is the down-side of Austria. The same impulse that leads people to preserve the past in their cities leads them also to preserve it in their hearts. No one clings to former glories as the Austrians do, and since these former glories include one of the most distasteful interludes in history, this is not their most attractive feature.

  They are notoriously red-necked. I remember that Katz and I, while hitch-hiking through Austria, made friends with two Germans of a similar age, Thomas and Gerhard, who were making their way by thumb from Berlin to India with a view to finding spiritual enlightenment and good drugs. We camped together in a high Alpine pass, somewhere along the road between Salzburg and Klagenfurt, and in the evening walked into the nearest village, where we found awaiting us a perfect inn, full of black panelled wood and a log fire with a sleeping dog before it and ruddy-faced yeoman customers swinging steins of beer. We ate sausages with dabs of mustard and drank many beers. It was all most convivial.

  I remember sitting there late in the evening, glowing with drink and thinking what a fine place this was and what good, welcoming people the Austrians were – they were smiling warmly at us and occasionally raising glasses to us in a toast – when the Germans leaned forward and told us in low voices that we were in danger. The Austrians, it seemed, were mocking us. Unaware that two of our party could understand every word they said, they were talking freely – every one of them: the men, the women, the landlord, the landlord’s wife, the whole fucking village – about taking us out back and, as Gerhard translated, ‘of giving us a hair-cut and running us through with zer pitchforks’.

  A roar of laughter passed across the room. Gerhard showed a flicker of a smile. ‘Zey say zat perhaps zey should also make us to eat of zer horse dung.’

  ‘Oh, swell,’ said Katz. ‘As if I haven’t eaten enough shit on this trip already.’

  My head swivelled like a periscope. Those cheery smiles had become demonic leers. A man opposite toasted me again and gave me a wink that said, Hope you like horse shit, kid.

  I turned to Gerhard. ‘Should we call the police?’

  ‘I sink zat man over zere is zer police.’

  ‘Oh, swell,’ said Katz again.

  ‘I sink maybe we should just go to zer door as quietly as we can and zen run like, how you say, zer clappers.’

  We rose, leaving behind unfinished beers, strolled casually to the door, nodding to our would-be assailants as we passed, and ran like hell. We could hear a fresh roar of laughter lift the inn roof off its moorings, but no one followed us and the soft squish of horse shit between the teeth remains for me – thank you, God, thank you, thank you, thank you – for ever in the realms of the imagined.

  As we lay in our sleeping bags in a dewy meadow beneath a thousand stars, with the jagged mountains outlined against a fractionally less black sky and the smell of mown hay hanging on the still night air, I remarked to no one in particular that I had never seen such a beautiful place as this.

  ‘Zat’s zer whole trouble wiz Austria,’ said Thomas with sudden passion, in one of the few times I actually heard him speak. ‘It’s such a lovely country, but it’s full of fucking Austrians.’

  I travelled the next day to Salzburg. I found it hard to warm to, which surprised me because I had fond, if somewhat hazy, memories of the place. It was full of tourists and, worse still, full of shops selling things that only a tourist could want: Tyrolean crap and Alpine crap and crap crap and, above all, Mozart crap – Mozart chocolates, Mozart marzipan, Mozart busts, Mozart playing-cards, Mozart ashtrays, Mozart liqueurs. Building and roadworks seemed to be in progress everywhere, filling the town with dust and noise. I seemed to be forever walking on planks over temporary ditches.

  The streets of the old town, crammed into
a compact space between the River Salzach and the perpendicular walls of the Mönchsberg mountain, are undeniably quaint and attractive, but so overbearingly twee as to bring on frequent bouts of dry heaving. Along Getreidegasse, the site of Mozart’s birthplace, every shop had one of those hanging pretzel signs above the door, including, God help us, the local McDonald’s (the sign had a golden-arches M worked into its filigree), as if we were supposed to think that they have been dispensing hamburgers there since the Middle Ages. I sank to my knees and beat my poor head on the cobbled pavement.

  I’m all for McDonald’s in European cities, I truly am, but we should never forget that any company that chooses a half-witted clown named Ronald McDonald as its official public face cannot be relied on to exercise the best judgement in matters of corporate presentation.

  The people of McDonald’s need guidance. They need to be told that Europe is not Disneyland. They need to be instructed to take suitable premises on a side street and given, without option, a shop design that is recognizable, appropriate to its function and yet reasonably subdued. It should look like a normal European bistro, with perhaps little red curtains and a decorative aquarium and nothing to tell you from the outside that this is a McDonald’s except for a discreet golden-arches transfer on each window and a steady stream of people with enormous asses going in and out of the door. While we’re at it, they should be told that they will no longer be allowed to provide each customer with his own weight in styrofoam boxes and waste paper. And finally they have to promise to shoot Ronald. When these conditions are met, McDonald’s should be allowed to operate in Europe, but not until.