Read Online Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Bill Bryson
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Palais de Justice but which proved in the event to be a dog-food factory. I walked and walked down long streets that never changed character or even acquired any, just endless blocks of grey sameness, which Brussels seems to possess in greater abundance than almost anywhere else in Europe.
I hate asking directions. I am always afraid that the person I approach will step back and say, ‘You want to go where ? The centre of Brussels? Boy, are you lost. This is Lille, you dumb shit,’ then stop other passers-by and say, ‘You wanna hear something classic? Buddy, tell these people where you think you are,’ and that I’ll have to push my way through a crowd of people who are falling about and wiping tears of mirth from their eyes. So I trudged on. Just when I reached the point where I was beginning to think seriously about phoning my wife and asking her to come and find me (‘And listen, honey, bring some Yorkies and the Sunday papers’), I turned a corner and there to my considerable surprise was the Manneken-Pis, the chubby little statue of a naked boy having a pee, the inexpressibly naff symbol of the city, and suddenly I knew where I was and all my little problems melted. I celebrated by buying a Manneken-Pis cake plate and a family-sized Toblerone at one of the 350 souvenir shops that line the street, and felt better still.
Fifteen minutes later, I was in a room at the Hotel Adolphe Sax, lying on the bed with my shoes on (disintegrating into a hermitic slobbiness is one of the incidental pleasures of solitary travel), breaking my teeth on the Toblerone (who invented those things?) and watching some daytime offering on BBCl – a panel discussion involving people who were impotent or from Wolverhampton or suffering some other personal catastrophe, the precise nature of which eludes me now – and in half an hour was feeling sufficiently refreshed to venture out into Brussels.
I always stay in the Sax because it gets BBCl on the TV and because the lifts are so interesting, a consideration that I was reminded of now as I stood in the corridor beside an illuminated Down button, passing the time, as one does, by humming the Waiting for the Elevator Song (‘Doo dee doo dee doo dee doo doo’) and wondering idly why hotel hallway carpet is always so ugly.
Generally speaking, they don’t understand elevators in Europe. Even in the newer buildings the elevators are almost always painfully slow and often lack certain features that are elsewhere considered essential, like an inside door, so that if you absent-mindedly lean forward you are likely to end up with one arm twenty-seven feet longer than the other. But even by these standards the lifts at the Sax are exceptional.
You get in intending to go downstairs for breakfast, but find that the lift descends without instructions past the lobby, past the underground garage and basement and down to an unmarked sub-basement where the doors open briefly to reveal a hall full of steam and toiling coolies. As you fiddle uselessly with the buttons (which are obviously not connected to anything), the doors clang shut and, with a sudden burst of vigour, the elevator shoots upwards to the eleventh floor at a speed that makes your face feel as if it is melting, pauses for a tantalizing half-second, drops ten feet, pauses again and then freefalls to the lobby. You emerge, blood trickling from your ears, and walk with as much dignity as you can muster into the dining-room.
So you can perhaps conceive my relief at finding now that the lift conveyed me to my destination without incident apart from an unscheduled stop at the second floor and a brief, but not unpleasant, return trip to the fourth.
Brussels, it must be said, is not the greatest of cities for venturing. After Paris, it was a relief just to cross a street without feeling as if I had a bull’s-eye painted on my butt, but once you’ve done a couple of circuits of the Grand-Place and looked politely in the windows of one or
I hate asking directions. I am always afraid that the person I approach will step back and say, ‘You want to go where ? The centre of Brussels? Boy, are you lost. This is Lille, you dumb shit,’ then stop other passers-by and say, ‘You wanna hear something classic? Buddy, tell these people where you think you are,’ and that I’ll have to push my way through a crowd of people who are falling about and wiping tears of mirth from their eyes. So I trudged on. Just when I reached the point where I was beginning to think seriously about phoning my wife and asking her to come and find me (‘And listen, honey, bring some Yorkies and the Sunday papers’), I turned a corner and there to my considerable surprise was the Manneken-Pis, the chubby little statue of a naked boy having a pee, the inexpressibly naff symbol of the city, and suddenly I knew where I was and all my little problems melted. I celebrated by buying a Manneken-Pis cake plate and a family-sized Toblerone at one of the 350 souvenir shops that line the street, and felt better still.
Fifteen minutes later, I was in a room at the Hotel Adolphe Sax, lying on the bed with my shoes on (disintegrating into a hermitic slobbiness is one of the incidental pleasures of solitary travel), breaking my teeth on the Toblerone (who invented those things?) and watching some daytime offering on BBCl – a panel discussion involving people who were impotent or from Wolverhampton or suffering some other personal catastrophe, the precise nature of which eludes me now – and in half an hour was feeling sufficiently refreshed to venture out into Brussels.
I always stay in the Sax because it gets BBCl on the TV and because the lifts are so interesting, a consideration that I was reminded of now as I stood in the corridor beside an illuminated Down button, passing the time, as one does, by humming the Waiting for the Elevator Song (‘Doo dee doo dee doo dee doo doo’) and wondering idly why hotel hallway carpet is always so ugly.
Generally speaking, they don’t understand elevators in Europe. Even in the newer buildings the elevators are almost always painfully slow and often lack certain features that are elsewhere considered essential, like an inside door, so that if you absent-mindedly lean forward you are likely to end up with one arm twenty-seven feet longer than the other. But even by these standards the lifts at the Sax are exceptional.
You get in intending to go downstairs for breakfast, but find that the lift descends without instructions past the lobby, past the underground garage and basement and down to an unmarked sub-basement where the doors open briefly to reveal a hall full of steam and toiling coolies. As you fiddle uselessly with the buttons (which are obviously not connected to anything), the doors clang shut and, with a sudden burst of vigour, the elevator shoots upwards to the eleventh floor at a speed that makes your face feel as if it is melting, pauses for a tantalizing half-second, drops ten feet, pauses again and then freefalls to the lobby. You emerge, blood trickling from your ears, and walk with as much dignity as you can muster into the dining-room.
So you can perhaps conceive my relief at finding now that the lift conveyed me to my destination without incident apart from an unscheduled stop at the second floor and a brief, but not unpleasant, return trip to the fourth.
Brussels, it must be said, is not the greatest of cities for venturing. After Paris, it was a relief just to cross a street without feeling as if I had a bull’s-eye painted on my butt, but once you’ve done a couple of circuits of the Grand-Place and looked politely in the windows of one or
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