Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
3. Oslo
I remember on my first trip to Europe going alone to a movie in Copenhagen. In Denmark you are given
a ticket for an assigned seat. I went into the cinema and discovered that my ticket directed me to sit beside
the only other people in the place, a young couple locked in the sort of passionate embrace associated with
dockside reunions at the end of long wars. I could no more have sat beside them than I could have asked to
join in - it would have come to much the same thing - so I took a place a few discreet seats away.
People came into the cinema, consulted their tickets and filled the seats around us. By the time the film
started there were about thirty of us sitting together in a tight pack in the middle of a vast and otherwise
empty auditorium. Two minutes into the movie, a woman laden with shopping made her way with difficulty
down my row, stopped beside my seat and told me in a stern voice, full of glottals and indignation, that I was
in her place. This caused much play of flashlights among the usherettes and fretful re-examining of tickets by
everyone in the vicinity until word got around that I was an American tourist and therefore unable to follow
simple seating instructions and I was escorted in some shame back to my assigned place.
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 caf￩s 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 Bl￥, 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.'
