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At the first, I think things were a bit testy, the man of the tour guide couple, started shouting at a late twenties couple, the type that one might see where they seem interested in no-one and nothing but themselves, talking continuously face-to-face, eye on eye, like performers in a soap opera. Why was the tour guide wasting his breath if no one ever listened ? Actually someone did listen: the people that founded Fat Tire Brewery in Colorado. They took an extensive Belgian beer-tour, apparently on bicycles, and came back with the formulation for what would become one of the world's best beers. Then I thought of the tour guides. It was late in the season, and he had probably had it with idiot tourists.
Personally I had discovered that if you took the tour, afterwards in a big hall filled with tables, each identical and seating eight or ten people, we got free beer, two good size mugs. And on the table were also mugs full of cigarettes and cut cheese-sticks. After about a half an hour to forty-five minutes they would chase us out. And if there were cigarettes and cheese left in the mugs, and there was because these tourists did not like to seem needy or so pedestrian, I scarfed it all into my pockets. And some approved and encouraged me, the very liberal ones. The expression at the time was "I was young once", generally spoken but not always by a woman.
Normally I did not talk to tourists which you had to classify : American, German, French, Italian or Swiss mainly. The most disliked were the Germans. Probably the second such were Americans.
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