previous | next

No, the best thing in life, the very best thing, is to arrive in an unknown city, to find a hotel, to go to bed and to wake and find yourself there, surfacing through layers of consciousness. I am not in my own bed: why is the window on that side of the room? Where am I?…, I'm in SAO PAULO! Yes, it is on that first morning you wake in a city that you are really there.

So there, feeling good in bed in my arbitrarily starred hotel, time then to sally out for breakfast, Time in short to go out and make mistakes: mistakes of orientation, language mistakes, mistakes of dress, "It's the little differences" (as Travolta says to his colleague in Pulp Fiction after his visit to Paris and Amsterdam)….

A. It's the little differences. I mean they've got the same shit over there as you get over here. But it's just there it's a little different. You know what they call a Quarter Pounder with cheese in Paris?"
B. They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with cheese?
What do they call it?"
A. They call it Royale with Cheese
B. What do they call a Big Mac?
A. Big Mac's a Big Mac but they call it Le Big Mac.
B. Le Big Mac! (incredulous and derisory laugh)

We may gloomily despair at the cultural homogenisation of cities (nuances of culture expressed only through the taxonomy of fast food as Tarantino wittily suggests) but we find that however close city cultures may seem to be we can always get it wrong; it doesn't matter how travelled you are you will always get it wrong in a new place.

I am 17 and doing the kind of thing you do when you are 17. After sleeping on the beach at Nice for a week I am now in a sleeping bag under the Pont Neuf in Paris (and how curiously sweet is the smell of six centuries of urine). My friend is also in his sleeping bag but he has a blow-up mattress. Ah,la vie de boheme! But as we settle down to sleep we hear a laconic Parisian voice from the Quai above: "Oh, oh, regarde le bourgeois avec son matelas pneumatique!"

previous | next