OSLO
I remember on my first trip to Europe going alone to a movie in Copenhagen. In Denmark you are given a ticket for an assigned at. I went into the cinema and discovered that my ticket directed me to sit beside the only other people in the place, a young couple locked in the sort of passionate embrace associated with dockside reunions at the end of long wars. I could no more have sat beside them than I could have ask to join in--it would have come to mush the same thing--so I took a place a few discreet ats away.
1记得我第一次去欧洲旅行的时候，我在哥本哈根独自一人去看电影。在丹麦，电影票是对号入座的。(此文来自袁勇兵博客)我走进电影院，发现在我的票对应的座位旁，只有一对年轻情侣。这对情侣如胶似漆地拥抱在一起，如同一场持久战争结束后码头上亲人的团聚。我很不情愿坐在他们旁边，就如我绝不会要求加入他们的行为一样——这两者对我来说并没有什么不同——因此我谨慎地隔几个座位坐了下来。
People came into the cinema, consulted their ticket and filled the ats around us. By the time the film started there were about 30 of us sitting together in a tight pack in the middle o
f vast and otherwi empty auditorium. Two minutes into the movie, a woman laden with shoppinng made her way with difficulty down my row, stopped beside my at and told me in a stern voice, full of glottal stops and indignation, that I was in her place. This cau much paly of flashlights among the usherettes and fretful re-examining of tickets by everyone in the vicinity until word got around that I was an American tourist and therefore unable to follow simple ating instructions and I was escorted in some shame back to my assigned place.
2人们陆续地走进影院，参照电影票找到位子，在我们周围坐了下来。电影开场时，这个宽敞空旷的观众席中间，扎堆地坐了约30人。电影开场两分钟后，一个拎着大包 小包购物袋的女士艰难地挤到我这排，在我座位旁停下，并用严厉的口吻愤怒地朝我用充满了喉塞音的丹麦语说道，我坐在了她的位子上。女引座员马上打开手电筒查看情况，身边所有的人都不安地重新确认自己票上的座位号，直到大家都清楚了，我是一个美国游客，因此没有遵循简单的就座指示。在羞愧中我被送回指定的位子。
So we sat together and watch the movie, 30 of us crowed together like refugees in an ov
erloaded lifeboat, rubbing shoulders and sharing small nois, and it occurred to me then that there certain things that some nations do better than everyone el and certain things that they do far wor and I began to wonder why that should be.
接下来我们坐在一起看电影，30人如同一艘超载的救生船上的难民一般挤作一团。肩膀相互摩擦着，忍受着各种细小的噪声。那时我想，有些国家在某些事情上做的比任 何其他国家都好，然而在另外一些事情上，他们却糟糕很多。我开始思考为何会有如此反差。
Sometimes a nation's little contrivances are so singular and clever that we associate them with that country alone-double-decker bus in Britain, windmills in Holland (what an insprired addition to a flat landscape: think how they would transform Nebraska), sidewalk cafes in Paris. And yet there are some things that most countries do without difficluty that others cannot get a grasp of at all.
单身女子有时候某个国家的小发明是如此独特和精巧，以至于我们总是由它而联想到这个国家——英国的双层巴士，荷兰的风车（给原本单调的景观增添了多么美妙的创意：想想这些风车是如何改变了内布拉斯加州），还有巴黎人行道上的露天咖啡馆。然而， 也有一些事情，
大部分国家能不费吹灰之力地办到，但某些国家却完全想不到。
The French, for instance, cannot get the hang of queuing. They try and try, but it is beyond them. Wherever you go in Paris, you e orderly lines waiting at bus stops, but as soon as the bus pulls up the line instantly disintegretes into something like a fire drill at a lunatic asylum as everyone scrambles to be the fist aboard, quit unaware that this defeats the whole purpo of queuing.
比如说，法国人无法掌握排队的窍门。他们一遍遍地尝试，但这似乎超出了他们的能力范围。无论你去巴黎的任何地方，总会看到整齐的队伍在公交车站候车。但一旦公交车靠站，队伍立刻瓦解，就像精神病院的消防演习一样，所有人都争抢着第一个上车，完全没意识到，这样一来排队的意义就荡然无存了。
The British, on the other hand, do not understand certain of the fundamentals of eating, as evidenced by their instinct to consume hamburgers with a kinfe and fork.To my continuing amazement, many of them also turn their fork upside-down and balance the food on the back of it. I've lived in England for a decade and a half and I still have to quell 新年春联大全
an impul to go up to strangers in pubs and restaurants and say, "Excu me, can I give you a tip that'll help tho peas bouncing all over the table?"好玩的单机
另一方面，英国人则不能领略吃的基本要领。证据就是他们本能地使用刀叉来食用汉堡。更令我惊讶的是，他们大多数都把叉子颠倒放置，将食物搁在它的背上。我已经 在英国居住了 15年，但我仍不得不压制这种冲动，想要走向酒吧或餐馆里的陌生人说：“打扰一下，可以允许我告诉你一个小技巧吗？那样你就不会把豆子散落在整张桌子上了。
Germans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on the invention of the motor car.
德国人被幽默困扰，瑞士人对乐趣毫无概念，西班牙人丝毫不觉得在半夜吃晚饭有什么滑稽之处，而意大利人从不，也绝不会让别人告诉他们汽车是如何发明的。
One of the small marvels of my first trip to Europe was the discovery that the world could be so full of variety, that there were so many different of doing esntially identical things,
马鲛鱼做法like eating and drinking and buying cinema tickets. It fascinated me that Europeans could at once be so alike-that they could be so universally bookish and cerebral, and drive small cars, and live in little hous in ancient towns, and love soccer, and be relatively unmaterialistic and law-abiding, and have chilly hotel rooms and cosy and inviting places to eat and drink-and yet be so endlessly, unpredictably different from each other as well. I love the idea that you could never be sure of anything in Europe.
票房统计
这次欧洲之旅带给我很多惊奇的小事，其中一个就是我发现世界竟能如此多样化，对于本质上相同的事物处理起来却方式各异，比如说吃喝或是买电影票。有趣的是，欧洲人有时可以突然变得如此相似——他们普遍好学而理性，开着小车，住在古镇的小房子里，喜欢足球，不怎么注重物质生活，遵纪守法，而且他们住寒冷的宾馆房间，去温暖舒适的地方吃喝——然而却同时拥有着如此琢磨不透、永无止尽的差异。在欧洲没有什么是百分之百肯定的，对此我十分赞同。
I still enjoy that n of never knowing quite what’s going on. In my hotel in Oslo, where I spent four days after returning from Hammerfest, the chambermaid each morning left m
e a packet of something called bio tex bla, a “minipakke for rerie,hyber og weekend西多夫”怎么盗qq号, according to the instruction, I spent many happy hours sniffing it and experimenting with it, uncertain whether it was for washing out clothes or gargling or cleaning the toilet bowl. In the end I decided it was for washing out clothes—it worked a treat—but for all Ishop know for the rest of the week everywhere I went in oslo people were saying to each other, ”you know, that man smelled like toilet-bowl cleaner.”
