David Bouchier Essay: Europe Shock

No matter how well you think you know Europe, arriving there from America is always a bit of a shock. Nobody captured it better than Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad, where he described it as ?getting foreignized.? We were well and truly foreignized recently when, after a tedious journey on two planes and two trains, we arrived in the small city of Ghent in Belgium. This was a new place for me, and indeed I?m ashamed to say that I knew little about Belgium except that it was famous for beer, waffles, chocolates, and Agatha Christie?s fictional detective Hercule Poirot: nothing wrong with any of those. On the negative side Belgium contains the headquarters of the European Community in Brussels, one of the largest assemblies of useless bureaucrats in the known universe. It is also divided into two mutually hostile language camps, speaking French on one side and Flemish on the other. We were in Flanders, where nobody wanted to hear the French language. Ghent is a delightful place and, as you might expect, very European. So, as usual, it took me twenty-four hours to recover from the trauma that I call ?Europe Shock.? Europe Shock is the result of the sudden appearance in your life of a whole lot of things that are unfamiliar here. Lots of steep stairs with no corresponding elevators, miles of deadly ankle-twisting cobblestones that would keep any American lawyer in business for life, set menus of four or five courses even in small caf?s, large central city areas that exclude cars, numerous pedestrians, outside dining, lots of kisses, thousands of bicycles, horrendous prices (if you are thinking in dollars), and so many slim people that you begin to fear that famine has taken hold. It?s not famine, of course. It?s just that these Europeans are profligate in their use of energy ? not gasoline or electricity, but the kind we most like to conserve, human energy. There?s so much walking and climbing and bicycling going on that it cancels out even the four course meals, and the excellent beer. Cars have stick shifts that keep one foot and one arm constantly busy, burning up an extravagant number of calories, and one hotel even had a TV without a remote. You have to be pretty fit to live in Europe. This is not some kind of innate old-world virtue. Fill up your European car or pay your European electric bill and you soon understand why they live a little differently. Gas is around eight dollars a gallon, with other forms of energy in proportion. So it pays to sweat a little. Ghent is a peaceful city, because so many people walk or ride bikes, and if you don?t want to do that there?s a network of swift, silent electric trams. On Sunday the town seemed deserted. We assumed everyone was in church until we found them all in the huge flower market in the center of town. The whole town seems to come here to buy flowers, listen to the band performing on the ornate Victorian bandstand, and enjoy an outdoor snack of oysters and wine. At noon everyone flooded into restaurants for family meals, and then crowded into slow boats with tiny engines for a ride along the canal, past the beautiful medieval buildings and the herons that live in the town center, next to the castle. There must be a catch to all this, it looks too good to be true. I?d like to get a bicycle and hang around in Ghent for a few years, just to figure out what their problem is.