Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'Uh, no, it's a quarter,' I answered and quickly settled down and pretended for the next six hours to be
asleep, ignoring his whispered entreaties to let Christ build a bunkhouse in my heart.
In fact, I was secretly watching out of the window for Europe. I still remember that first sight. The plane
dropped out of the clouds and there below me was this sudden magical tableau of small green fields and
steepled villages spread across an undulating landscape, like a shaken-out quilt just settling back onto a
bed. I had flown a lot in America and had never seen much of anything from an aeroplane window but
endless golden fields on farms the size of Belgium, meandering rivers and pencil lines of black highway as
straight as taut wire. It always looked vast and mostly empty. You felt that if you squinted hard enough you
could see all the way to Los Angeles, even when you were over Kansas. But here the landscape had the
ordered perfection of a model-railway layout. It was all so green and minutely cultivated, so compact, so tidy,
so fetching, so ... European. I was smitten. I still am.
I had brought with me a yellow backpack so enormous that when I went through customs I half expected
to be asked, 'Anything to declare? Cigarettes? Alcohol? Dead horse?', and spent the day teetering
beneath it through the ancient streets of Luxembourg City in a kind of vivid daze - an unfamiliar mixture of
excitement and exhaustion and intense optical stimulation. Everything seemed so vivid and acutely focused
and new. I felt like someone stepping out of doors for the first time. It was all so different: the language, the
money, the cars, the number plates on the cars, the bread, the food, the newspapers, the parks, the people.
I had never seen a zebra-crossing before, never seen a tram, never seen an unsliced loaf of bread (never
even considered it an option), never seen anyone wearing a beret who expected to be taken seriously,
never seen people go to a different shop for each item of dinner or provide their own shopping bags, never
seen feathered pheasants and unskinned rabbits hanging in a butcher's window or a pig's head smiling on
a platter, never seen a packet of Gitanes or the Michelin man. And the people - why, they were
Luxembourgers. I don't know why this amazed me so, but it did. I kept thinking, That man over there, he's a
Luxembourger. And so is that girl. They don't know anything about the New York Yankees, they don't know
the theme tune to
The Mickey Mouse Club,
they are from another world. It was just wonderful.
In the afternoon, I bumped into my acned seatmate on the Pont Adolphe, high above the gorge that cuts
through the city. He was trudging back towards the centre beneath an outsized backpack of his own. I
greeted him as a friend - after all, of the 300 million people in Europe he was the only one I knew - but he
had none of my fevered excitement.
'Have you got a room?' he asked gloomily.
'No.'
'Well, I can't find one anywhere. I've been looking all over. Every place is full.'
'Really?' I said, worry stealing over me like a shadow. This was potentially serious. I had never been in
a position where I had to arrange for my own bed for the night - I had assumed that I would present myself at
a small hotel when it suited me and that everything would be all right after that.
'Fucking city, fucking Luxembourg,' my friend said, with unexpected forthrightness, and trudged off.
I presented myself at a series of semi-squalid hotels around the central station, but they were all full. I
wandered further afield, trying other hotels along the way, but without success, and in a not very long time -
for Luxembourg City is as compact as it is charming - found myself on a highway out of town. Not sure how
to deal with this unfolding crisis, I decided on an impulse to hitchhike into Belgium. It was a bigger country;
things might be better there. I stood for an hour and forty minutes beside the highway with my thumb out,
watching with little stabs of despair as cars shot past and the sun tracked its way to the horizon. I was about
to abandon this plan as well - and do what? I didn't know - when a battered Citro￫n 2CV pulled over.
I lugged my rucksack over to find a young couple arguing in the front seat. For a moment I thought they
weren't stopping for me at all, that the man was just pulling over to slap the woman around, as I knew
Europeans were wont to do from watching Jean-Paul Belmondo movies on public television, but then the
woman got out, fixed me with a fiery look and allowed me to clamber into the back, where I sat with my
knees around my ears amid stacks of shoeboxes.
The driver was very friendly. He spoke good English and shouted at me over the lawnmower roar of the
engine that he worked as a travelling shoe salesman and his wife was a clerk in a Luxembourg bank and
that they lived just over the border in Arlon. He kept turning round to rearrange things on the back seat to
