I’m currently reading this book and it is laugh-out-loud funny. And I’m talking real, solid guffaws here. Not just slight chuckles, no, for that simply won’t justify the hilarity of the writer’s intent. And because I’ve been reading this book in public, I have found myself (and on more than one occasion) trying extremely hard not to let it all out, for fear of attracting bemused stares from the other passengers on the bus. So I bite my lip, allow myself a quick smile and straightaway think of gloomy days and axe murderers, so my body doesn’t go into spasms while trying to contain that boisterous ha ha that is threatening to emerge.
I’ve not even read a quarter of the book yet, but allow me to share these two excerpts, both of which were written about Paris. Both are particularly relatable for me, since I was there just last year. The first one gripes about the questionable lack of lighting in hotel hallways:
The hotel was one of those sterile, modern places that always puts me in mind of a hospital, but at least it didn’t have the 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 go 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 or she spoke English, you could exchange tips.
You soon learn to have your key out and to sprint like hell for your room. The trouble was that when eventually you reemerged, it was to total blackness once more and to a complete and – mark this – intentional absence of light switches, and there was nothing to 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. And from this I learned one very important lesson: The French do not like us.
This second one, is about the difficulties of crossing streets:
At the Place de la Bastille, a vast open space dominated on its northeastern side by the glossy new Paris Opera House, I spent three quarters of an hour trying to get from the Rue de Lyon to the Rue de St. Antoine. The problem is that the pedestrian crossing lights have been designed with the clear purpose of leaving the foreign visitor confused, humiliated, and, if all goes according to plan, dead.
This is what happens: You arrive at a square to find all the traffic stopped, but the pedestrian light is red and you know that if you venture so much as a foot off the curb all the cars will surge forward and turn you into a gooey crepe. So you wait. After a minute, a blind person comes along and crosses the great cobbled plain without hesitating. Then a ninety-year-old lady in a motorized wheelchair trundles past and wobbles across the cobbles to the other side of the square a quarter of a mile away.
You are uncomfortably aware that all the drivers within fifty yards are sitting with moistened lips watching you expectantly, so you pretend that you don’t really want to cross the street at all, that actually you’ve come over here to look at this interesting fin de siècle lamppost. After another minute, 150 preschool children are herded across by their teachers, and then the blind man returns from the other direction with two bags of shopping. Finally, the pedestrian light turns green, and you step off the curb and all the cars come charging at you. And I don’t care how paranoid and irrational this sounds; I know for a fact that the people of Paris want me dead.
You’re not laughing? I guess you need to be there. :p
But for all the humour he injects, there was this one bit that he wrote which completely struck a chord with me:
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 foolish or 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.
That last paragraph right there, is precisely why I love travelling. Sure, I’d do heaps of research prior to the trip but all that preparation is mostly for me to plan my itinerary. Once I’m there, getting myself lost going in and out of streets, then finding my way again, and figuring out how the city and its many systems work, gives me a certain sense of joy (and pride) that a package tour won’t ever provide.
So even though I’ve already travelled twice this year (Germany with my students, and Brisbane to visit old friends) and with one more coming up in December, I don’t actually feel like I’ve travelled. I miss planning, I miss researching with my travel buddies, I miss getting excited about going to a famous attraction, and all because I don’t have the trepidation of not knowing what’s going to happen. Crazy, I know.
Well, at least I know I’m definitely going to NYC next year. And I cannot wait for that. :)
