Thirteen honeymoon memories

My sister saved the excessively long letter I wrote her about my honeymoon, and later gave it back to me. No way I would have remembered half this stuff!

Karen and I did Europe on the cheap in the winter of 1984 (back when Europeans liked us Americans). We rented a car in Brussels, and toodled around Belgium, France, Italy, Austria, and Germany for three weeks. Know what I remember most? Jet lag was a bitch.

Here’s Belgium and France. I’ll leave the rest for some other time.

1. Inflight movie: Irreconcilable Differences, wherein an appallingly cute Drew Barrymore divorces her parents. You don’t want to put this on your next NetFlix list.

2. Musical accompaniment to our first meal in Brussels: Lionel Richie. To this day, I get sentimental when I hear his old stuff (from Can’t Slow Down). Karen doesn’t remember this at all.

3. Our car: a red Ford Fiesta, which looked something like this.

4. Our first pensione (sp?): Hotel la Madeleine at the City Center. Here’s what I said about it, sort of:

Arthur and Hope Frommer have a bad habit of painting an over-rosy picture of anything. If a hotel was “top-of-the-line” to them — what they call a “big splurge” — then it was usually adequate. And, if “adequate,” then you could feel secure that there’d be no bugs and the sheets had been changed.

Jeez. I couldn’t write worth a crap.

5. I didn’t quite understand this business of far-northern latitudes.

When we woke up — it was perhaps 7 or 8 o’clock — it was still dark, and it would stay dark for a peculiarly long time.

6. My idea of a worthwhile tourist destination in Brussels: the Manneken Pis.

7. What a boring letter. I’ll bet my sis never read it all the way through. My favorite punctuation mark, circa 1984, was the semicolon.

8. Paris: the ugly American (me).

We were both coughing pretty good, so I went down to the lobby and asked the kid behind the desk “Ooo ay Pharmacy?” in my shitmouthed version of French. He gave me a confidential smile — I suppose I had a rather desperate look on my face.

9. More sensitive impressions of Paris.

Equally stomach-turning were the halls lined with Smurf posters. Only in Europe they’re not called Smurfs, they’re called “Schtrumpfs.” I guess whoever exported the little blue buggers decided that “Schtrumpf” would not roll trippingly on the American tongue.

10. Most memorable sights from our time in Paris: Sargon’s tomb in the Louvre; the Van Gogh exhibit at the Jeu de Paume; giant stuffed rats in an exterminator’s shop window.

11. The Ugly American’s take on Versailles. (Netta, mentioned here, is my maternal grandma.)

Just imagine lawns that stretch to the horizon, with big fountains and big ugly marble statues everywhere in sight. (The lawns are impressive. The artwork sucked.) Inside, however: just imagine if Netta had billions of dollars, how she would furnish her mansion. Lots of gold. Lots of gaudy shmattah tapestries on the walls.

12. The French death trap. We took a three-lane highway from Versailles to Chartres. The middle lane is a passing lane shared by cars moving in either direction. This stretch of road was so hilly, no sane human being would dream of passing. The French, however, like to play chicken.

13. Arguably the best lunch we had in Paris: purchased from a boulangerie in Chartres, a baguette, a slab of pate, and two pastries. Yum. Close runner-up: a small cafe across from the Amboise chateau, where I ate blood sausage and apple sauce.

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