Neither Here Nor There, Bill Bryson
Meghan M rec
9/01
Starts in Hammerfest viewing Northern Lights
Oslo
“There might be certain things that some nations do better than everyone else and certain things that they do far worse, and I begin to wonder why that should be” –p34
Paris with cafes and lines, and then Holland with its windmills look like Nebraska.
The glory of travel “Suddenly you are 5 years old again. You can t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary since of how to cross over a street without endangering you life.
In Spa, BE he speaks of what is learned in grade and high school language classes and how it is of little consequence. Hanging a jacket, erasing the chalkboard. “It is winter soon it will be spring” “In my experience, people know this already.”
P116- Gothenburg, DE – on visiting the islands, “I had a sudden strong urge to visit them all, there would never be enough time. There novelties in life. There wasn’t even enough time for anther cup of coffee”
P131- Rome, “Traveling is more fun- hell; life is more fun if you can treat it as a series of impulses”
P238 – A kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that seems to work is based on self interest and greed
P242 – “You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile effort to recapture the comforts that you wouldn’t have lost if you hadn’t left home in the first place”
Last pg – “Tired above all of my own dull company. How many times in recent days had I sat trapped on busses and trains listening to my idly puttering mind and wished I could just get up and walk out on my self?”
