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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Waking up the other day, on April 6th, I didn't know where I was. This is a common occurrence for many people, mainly in the wake of an office party, but at least they could jab a finger at a globe and hit the right country. Even that was beyond me. Some hours before, I had boarded a plane at Stansted, an airport to the northeast of London. My destination was Vitoria-Gasteiz, a place I had never heard of, whose grid reference, climate, cuisine, night life, fauna, and geological foundation I had made no attempt to discover. The name itself was mystifying, starting with a hint of the Iberian but veering off toward the crunchingly Teutonic; it sounded more like a rare medical condition than a popular holiday spot. ("Though left largely impotent by the onset of Vitoria-Gasteiz syndrome, he nonetheless enjoyed a varied social life.") I knew it lay within Europe, but apart from that I was surrendering to what the Defense Department would classify as voluntary rendition. This ominous sensation was hardly eased by the one detail I had learned about Vitoria-Gasteiz as I was booking the flight: nearby lay several natural parks, including "Gorbeia, Urkiola, and Izki." What was I heading for? Mordor?
Nothing became clearer on arrival. I entered the terminal building and found a sign that read "EBtik kanpoko herritarrak." The thought that I had stumbled into a tiny, undiscovered pocket of Inuit culture, guaranteed to throw anthropologists into disarray, was too exciting for words. The translation underneath read "Non-EU residents." So what was the language? The immigration official said "Plizz," and examined my passport with slightly less attention than he would apply to his toenails. I had no luggage, so I walked outside, found a cab rank composed of one taxi, said "Vitoria-Gasteiz," and, fifteen minutes later, found myself in the heart of an indecipherable town. I paid the taxi fare in euros, which were accepted without demur; this proved that I wasn't in, say, Lithuania, but I could still be in any of the twelve countries where the European single currency is used. I meandered along, trying to gauge the accents of passersby. There was a place called Tabakoak, which is enough to make anyone give up smoking. People were drinking in Cafe Dublin, which wasn't much help; nor was the street sign, up a hill, that read "San Frantzisko Xabier Kantoia." Depleted by the onslaught of consonants, I checked in to a hotel, hailing the manageress from the next room, where she was doing the ironing and watching TV. She wrote "31 euros" on a scrap of paper (that would be roughly the same in dollars), and I nodded, hoping vaguely that she hadn't just sold me her daughter. I found my room, kicked off my shoes, and, even though it was midafternoon, fell asleep.
I woke an hour later, opened the cur-tains, and saw a palm tree. My guess had been that Vitoria-Gasteiz was somewhere in the Dolomites, or on the border between the German and Italian sectors of Switzerland, but this was evidently not so. Leaving the hotel, I passed a sex shop, a jeweller's, and a bridal-wear specialist--the story of our adult lives, in the space of fifty yards. Across the road, rearing out of nowhere, was a vision: an art museum, spacious and spotless, that must have been completed no earlier than the previous Monday. Two minutes later, I found myself--the sole visitor in the building--gazing at a Motherwell, a Basquiat, a weird and waxy de Kooning, and an intricate, child-pleasing set of twelve Kandinsky prints, titled "Small Worlds." I could have been in Santa Fe.
Such are the delights of European travel, in its new and loosely regimented form: it spirits us, without ado, from one small world to another, urging us to forge the links between them. On this occasion, I had imposed deliberate ignorance upon myself, but that was merely a hard-core version of the shock--the bewildering, shipwrecked charm--that greets us every time we come ashore in an unfamiliar land and ask, "What country, friends, is this?" The answer came to me as I sat at a cafe table, in the warm afternoon, in an eighteenth-century square: this must be a Basque region of northern Spain. (The Alava, as it turned out.) I listened to the bells competing to strike six o'clock and watched the same procession that I have witnessed, over the years, from Berlin to Taormina: knots of friends and relations, orbited by children, unhurriedly taking the air. More than any other ritual, it marks a division between the Continent and the more headlong purposes of the Anglo-American model--between the why-worry...
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