A Traveler’s Notes

composed on a recent trip

¹If you are offered free beverages on an airplane in America, the default is with ice. On my Swiss International flight to Europe, San Francisco to Zurich, ice was available if you asked for it but only then. In a US hotel you will have ice machines, typically one on every floor, and your room will have an insulated container for holding ice cubes. My room in Prague had no such container and ice was available only from the bar. That fits my impression that iced drinks are viewed in Europe as an odd American obsession.

An American hotel room, even a low end motel, will have both a small refrigerator and a microwave. A European hotel room will probably have a refrigerator but no microwave.

In an American hotel, as in other buildings in America, the first floor is the ground floor. In a European building the first floor is what would be the second floor in an American building. The ground floor is zero, so labeled on elevator buttons.

In an American hotel or an American bedroom, bedding is sheets and blankets. In a European hotel — I have no data on European bedrooms — it is likely to be a duvet, a quilt in a giant pillow case substituting for top sheet and blankets. For anyone who is used to ending the night tangled up in his bedding, it is an improvement.

(Bed with duvet folded in half)

This was the case in the hotels I stayed at in Czechia and Denmark and, I am told, much of the rest of Europe. It was not the case in Portugal or Spain, where the hotels I stayed at had sheets and blankets. The difference may be climate — when it is warm two thick blankets can be replaced with one thin one, a duvet is one size fits all. On the other hand, the duvet has not caught on in England or in cold parts of the US, so it may be in part a cultural difference.

In a laundromat in Madrid I got into a conversation with a German woman who lived in Spain, asked her about European/American differences she had observed. One that had struck her was that in Europe VAT is included in prices, so what you pay is the stated price. In the US what you pay is price plus sales tax, which she found confusing.

Food

A mid-range American hotel, a Hampton Inn or the equivalent, provides a respectable breakfast, a waffle machine, cereal and milk, scrambled eggs, probably bagels although not very good ones, sliced bread and a toaster. The breakfast at the equivalent European hotel is so much better it is almost unfair to compare them — half a dozen different pastries, multiple breads, scrambled eggs that are competently done, with luck soft boiled eggs that are actually soft boiled, yogurt, four or five different jams, multiple cheeses and deli meats, four different juices, … and that is just the Prague hotel I stayed at. In Vienna it would probably be much more, including smoked salmon, pickled herring, Muesli, … . You can make breakfast your main meal of the day. And even outside of hotels, good pastries are much more available in Europe than in America.

England is not, for purposes of the previous paragraph, part of Europe, although it does have the pastries. There is good food in England — good Italian food, good Indian food, good Mediterranean food, good Chinese food — but an English breakfast is something only an Englishman could love.

Some decades ago I was in York with my wife and teen-aged son, who wanted to try Yorkshire pudding. We found a restaurant that specialized in historical English cooking,² I think 18^th and 19^th century, and had Yorkshire pudding. When we got back to London I mentioned to an English friend that we had been in York and had found a restaurant with good English food.

He named it.

Which says something about how common good English food is.

A feature of European hotels that I am less happy with than the breakfast is the control over electricity, a socket next to the door that you are supposed to put your key card in when you enter the room, take it out of when you go out — at which point not only do the lights go out but so does the power in the electric outlets. I first discovered that fact when I returned to the room in which I had left my laptop, I thought charging. The solution if you want to recharge things when you are out of the room is to fool the socket with another card the same size. In my experience it works, but there may be hotels with sufficiently advanced technology that it doesn’t.

The idea is presumably to save electricity by making sure you don’t leave any lights on when you are out. I am told that at least one high end American hotel has adopted the system.

Charcuteria

In a supermarket in Porto, there was an extensive display of animal legs, I think all or most pork, preserved, possibility by salting, so that they did not require refrigeration. A man was cutting thin slices off them. Different legs were of different varieties of pigs, perhaps preserved in different ways, and the slices sold for different prices. He offered me a taste. It was good, so I bought some. I saw a similar display in the Madrid airport.

Part of a dinner I had in Madrid was a dish of the slices, one kind in the center, a different one around the periphery. The picture was taken after some of both had been eaten

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A Portuguese Antique

I stayed in a hotel in Lisbon that did not fit any of the European patterns. The shower had a curtain instead of the glass panel of all other European showers on this trip. Shampoo was in little bottles by the sink instead of dispensers attached to the wall of the shower. The breakfast was at, or below, the level of breakfast in a mid-level American hotel, included crescent shaped rolls masquerading as croissants. It had a slot for the key card but it did not control the room’s lights and outlets.

Strangest of all, the key card for getting into the room was mechanical rather than electronic, a design I had never seen before. It came in a leather case that also contained a second such key for the room’s safe and a remote control for the television. Presumably the hotel was a living antique, preserving a technology from decades earlier. That explains the shower curtain as well but not the breakfast. A possible explanation for that was the price — it was the least expensive hotel I stayed at on my trip, I think 63 Euros for the night. A fancier Lisbon hotel where I stayed a year earlier had a breakfast well up to European standards.

Terminals

The consistent pattern I observed in European airports was a lot of walking; the only time I had to do that much walking in a US airport the airport was under alteration and there were apologetic signs. So far as airports more generally, the worst I observed was in Lisbon; you have to look at the lighted sign listing flights to discover in which of locations A-F your airline’s counter, where you have to go to check in and deposit your checked luggage, is located. Once you find out where on which floor you are supposed to go to check in you wait in a long line in a crowded room to do so, then go through security and wait until your flight’s gate shows up on the lighted board. You go to the gate. Then they change it to another gate at the other end of the terminal, so you go there. Then they change it again, but this time at least to a gate near the one you are at.

If you are in Madrid planning to travel on Spain’s network of high speed trains, it is important to realize that there are two relevant train stations. The station at Chamortin, which the high speed trains leave from, is pleasant and spacious. The larger and much more chaotic Atocha station, which I assume is where many of the slower trains leave from, conceals the sales office for the high speed trains behind multiple misleading signs directing you to places where it is not. When you finally find it you collect a ticket for your place in line. The ticket has two or three letters followed by a number; you have to watch a lighted sign to know when your letter+number combination is up. The numbers are called in order but if there is any logic to which letter combination is having its numbers on the sign to indicate that a ticket agent will see you I could not discover it. Why they do not just give you a number and call the numbers in order I never discovered; my current theory is that they are trying to balance the time saved by the speed of the trains with the time wasted getting tickets for them.

There is a procedure for getting tickets online but after half an hour or so trying to use it, getting repeated error messages, I gave up and went in.

To Atocha unfortunately.

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1. This is a much longer version of something I posted during the trip to accompany a schedule of talks I was giving.

2. I believe it was called The Pines. An internet search some years ago found a Pines in York, probably the same restaurant but without the historical specialty. A more recent search found it in a list of restaurants that were no longer there.