Summer in Europe - 1960

 

In 1960, this was the de rigueur trip for upper middle-class white kids to take, a six-week summer tour of Europe.  The University put it together brilliantly.  Three days in England to start with, to get our foreign legs stable and to pass the jet lag.  Then we had a single Belgian bus and driver for the whole continental part, which kept us a tight-knit group.

It wasn't really a group of college kids.  There were two little old ladies, two middle-aged ladies, three middle-aged chaperoning faculty members and four other kids besides me.  I was really two years too old for this trip, being 21.  I buddied up with the driver often, and snuck out after hours, sometimes with him, but always looking for adventure, drinking and girls.  I also wound up deserting the group as we were about to travel back to the States, but I'll get back to that story later.

I was jet lagged when we arrived in London at 3:00 in the afternoon.  These were long flights in those days (1960), 13 or 14 hours with a refueling stop in Shannon, Ireland.  We went straight to bed after an early 7:00 PM dinner in the hotel.  I got up about 3:00 AM, unable to sleep, and just having to see what London was like.  I walked for a bit and then got on the underground, but it was over-ground here and I got off when I passed an open air food market, a large one where restaurants and shops came to get their supplies in the morning.  I had breakfast there and then walked back to the hotel, stealing the best bottle of milk I had ever had from someone's front porch, glass bottle with cream at the top, just like when I was a kid.

I felt like I was home here in England, and I felt the same way when I came back to live there twenty years later.  I don't really know why I didn't lose my way that day; I must have walked ten miles.  But I made it back to the hotel and we embarked on a whirlwind tour of England, which was mostly confusing.  Why Stratford?  This wasn’t a theater arts or English language tour.  It sucked up half our time for a play we didn’t understand.  We visited the Tower of London, where England stores the crown jewels and we saw royal guards in costume.

We took the ferry across the channel to Oostende where we met our driver.  The first town we toured was Brussels, but the first I remember was Paris.  What a fantastic city.  I fell in love with Paris and I have been back dozens of times; I'll never tire of Paris.  I figured out that we were staying in a hotel that mostly rented rooms by the hour.  Our faculty chaperon told us to stay away from the hotel bar downstairs, but of course that only made me more curious.  On one of my escapes from the rest of the group, I found myself talking at a Place Pigalle sidewalk café to a drag queen.  We spoke for over an hour about what it was like to live in Paris versus living in the countryside.  Three hours later that evening, our whole staid group was walking to dinner along a main street, and there, riding a bicycle past us is Etienne in full costume frantically waving and shouting, "Peetaarr."  No one knew what to make of it.

We wove our way down through Germany and Austria finally arriving in Oberammergau, which was supposed to be a high point of our tour.  We were "lucky" because they only performed a Passion Play once every ten years and this was one of those years.  The Passion Play consisted of day after day of reenactment of the tortures of Jesus.  Scenes went on for three and four hours, while we sat outdoors, on hard folding chairs, bored, since we didn't understand German and felt that ten minutes of this was enough. But the worst part was the accommodation and especially the food, or lack thereof. 

When you only get tourists once every ten years (and there were few in 1940, 1930 or 1920) then you only pull together makeshift accommodations.  We were all crammed into two rooms, a boy’s room and a girl’s room.  Meals were twice a day.  A perfunctory continental breakfast, which we learned to stuff up on, and an adequate, but sparse dinner meal.  Lunch was on us to forage for, but there was little available in the town to purchase and no restaurants.  The German attendees to the play brought large picnic baskets from home and munched all day.  Neither our school nor tour guide had planned on this.  No one had any experience with a town that only had tourists once every ten years.  Think Oliver Twist.

We left this place one morning after what we felt was three days of starvation.  We drove through the Italian Alps and descended upon a tiny restaurant that our bus driver knew well.  We proceeded to have the best meal of the trip.  And we were all converted to lovers of Italian food and meals.  They started us off with a pasta course which took off the edge of our hunger.  Then they brought a soup course, more bread and red wine.  Then came a fish course and people were beginning to fall by the wayside.  After that the main entrée of roast beef and more wine.  And, of course, there was dessert to follow.  We were all sated.

Tours like these were expensive, even in 1960 – six weeks, chaperoned and guided, all inclusive – I’m guessing $1,000 a week – these days, at least $50,000, up to a hundred for the package.  So, organizers were always looking for cheap sites – CHURCHES.  As we drove through France and Germany, we’d stop at 3 and 4 churches  day.  Now, “after …”, I tended to hang around, to stretch my legs, with the bus driver, as the others entered the church.  We had many conversations: he had a wife and family in Belgium; tour guides were highly respected for their knowledge and experience; he did three trips a year like this which put him in an middle class tier; he got bored and enjoyed carousing a bit at times.

No cell phones, no Euro, no credit cards, no common market, these things caused us to learn about: international communications, financial rates of exchange and money markets, border and immigration laws, letters of introduction.  For my bus driver, six weeks was like a military tour of duty, a secret mission.  He was out of contact with his family, as we were, for the six weeks.  I sent post cards home – he might have as well  There wasn’t a world-wide telephone network, so no calling home.  There were International Operators, just like there were interstate operators back in America, but they were expensive, slow and ify.

Italy was for us and we thoroughly enjoyed Florence and Rome.  I did my "essay" on Florence; we had to write up the trip or an aspect of it, to get credit.  I loved Florence.  It was a sort of San Francisco sized town that you could get to know easily and feel comfortable about.  I met a Jewish man one day having coffee who said the war had blinded him, but he had been an antiquarian book collector before the war.  He took me up to his apartment where to my amazement, there were thousands of old books, mostly rotting.  He felt sure the Nazis had infested worms in his books on purpose.  He didn't know what he was going to do with his collection.  Italy was colorful and earthy – a painter’s paradise.

There are so many experiences gathered on a trip like this – the 6-week tour is the equivalent of an additional year of study, at an important level – language, culture, the universality of life.  It should be a government paid-for option, like the Peace Corps.

When I was working a prolonged project in England in the eighties, I brought my daughter over to attend a prep school in Oxford.  I took her to Paris twice on 3-day weekends.  I sent her on the prep school summer tour, and she fell in love with Tuscany – didn’t want to leave.

Twenty years later, when my daughter was teaching Humanities at Notre Dame University in San Mateo, she chaperoned an NDU group for the summer tour and took her teenage daughter along.  So, me, daughter, granddaughter – it’s a family tradition.

We took the ferry over to Greece and hooked up with a female Greek guide that was so much fun (think Melina Mercouri).  One day, two policemen got on the bus and rode with us for ten miles or so.  After they got off, she translated that they had asked if they could borrow the two young co-eds for a day or two, they would return them to us on our way back.  She had apologized that they were still virgins and the family would have a fit.  On another occasion, she took only us men into a "special" room where the ancient Greeks had pornographic scenes depicted on the walls as murals.  She loved this kind of stuff.

 

The school tour trip was winding down and we were in Frankfurt planning to return to the States in two days.  I got it in my head that it was too soon to go back and so I went out and bought a Maico motorcycle, 90 cc.  I left a note for the faculty chaperon and set out for Bayreuth to see the Wagner Opera Festival.

 

I had no real plan and I was in no hurry.  I purposely picked small roads and small towns.  I’d pick a town and stay at a gasthaus for three days.  I would read the German newspapers, watch German TV, and talk to whoever could bear to listen to my German. 

I wanted to see if I could get along where they didn’t prefer to speak English.  When I returned to the States, I would be in my 5^th and final year of college and taking my 3^rd year of German.  I had one physics and three math classes to complete to graduate, and the rest, elective courses, to maintain my full-time status. 

 

I made it to Bayreuth, but barely and not successfully.  I was coming down with something, flu-like, but with photosensitivity. 

The town was jam-packed – I had trouble finding a room.  Finally, I got a hotel room.  I just wanted to sleep and stay quiet in a dark place.  At one point, a chambermaid came in, and  noted that I was feverish.  She wanted me to take a bath, insisted on it.  I groggily followed orders.  The bath woke me out of a delirium. 

I suddenly realized that I was thinking in German.  The experiment had worked, in the extreme.  I hadn’t used English in days now, a week.  It was easier for my brain to think in German, because it was out of practice for using English.  I saw how this worked five years later when I brought my stepson to America, after a military tour in Germany.  He was five – had only spoken German all his life, and after one year of school in America, he forgot it all.

 

The hotel people urged me to see a doctor – they made me an appointment.  The doctor examined me thoroughly.  He diagnosed me with “Uveitis”, which translates from the Latin as, “You’ve got an eye problem, but we don’t know what or why”.  They recommended that I get back to the States ASAP and see a specialist.

I did go back – but missed the Wagner Festival.  My Uveitis plagued me every 4 years, for the next 25,-and then magically disappeared at age 45, never it be a problem again.  My guess is it was the switch from hard to soft contacts, or a change in the contact lens wetting solution.