Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
you fucked up this time, pal.'
Hammerfest had been a kind of over-extended limbering-up exercise, but now I was going to get down
to some serious travelling - and by that I mean the moving-about kind of travelling. I had an itch to roam. I
wanted to wander through Europe, to see movie posters for films that would never come to Britain, gaze
wonderingly at hoardings and shop notices full of exotic umlauts and cedillas and No Parking-sign s, hear
pop songs that could not by even the most charitable stretch of the imagination be a hit in any country but
their own, encounter people whose lives would never again intersect with mine, be hopelessly unfamiliar
with everything, from the workings of a phone box to the identity of a foodstuff.
I wanted to be puzzled and charmed, to experience the endless, beguiling variety of a continent where
you can board a train and an hour later be somewhere where the inhabitants speak a different language,
eat different foods, work different hours, live lives that are at once so different and yet so oddly similar. I
wanted to be a tourist.
But first it was time to go home.
