Small Incidents Make Memories For Tourists

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30302, 30 November 1963, Page 2

Small Incidents Make Memories For Tourists

No matter how many colour slides, diary notes and travel brochures a tourist brings home to ponder over in the years to come, it is usually the small human incident that brings back the most vivid memories of another land.

London’s Trooping the Colour ceremony, San Francisco’s Fishermen’s Wharf, the boutiques of Paris, the art of Florence and the canals of Venice are communal attractions, however impressive. It is the traveller’s own collection of personal snippets that gives colour to a holiday abroad in retrospect.

Mrs J. M. Caffin, of Fendalton, who recently returned from an extensive tour of Britain, Europe and the United States with her husband, will always think of Salt Lake City, primarily, as the place where she was asked if she spoke English when introduced as a New Zealander.

Mention London and she recalls a preview of the Antique Dealers’ Fair and a remark overheard from a •'sweet young thing” with a blase voice: “I don't know v.hy he wants to buy me more diamonds: I have plenty." And there was the immaculately-dressed woman ■who came out of a greengrocer's shop in Maryfebone High atreet carrying a cabbage, roughly wrapped in Dr vspaper, threw it into the b . k of a chauffeur-driven car and drove nonchalantly away. To Carol Caffin, London seemed familiar from the pictures and films she had seen of it and the books she had read about it. But it was •till a city of surprises. She recalls particularly the

big store sales, "where you literally fight your way in and out. using your elbows and knees,” and where noone thinks it incongruous to see a hansom cab and the latest luxury car pulled up •ide by side at a Paddington intersection. “In Paris you walk round looking through restaurant

windows to see where the Parisians are eating to find the places for real French food.” She found in a hotel bedroom there a big brassknobbed double bed, whitecovered and “puffed up Like a huge menmgue " Ghosts of Borgias Of Siena, she recalls the narrow streets and the eerie feeling that “the ghosts of Borgias were still trapped there.” In Rome, she sat on the steps of the ancient Colosseum drinking “coke” from a bottle in a temperature of 90 degrees. "I felt rather ashamed, but we consoled ourselves by thinking the Romans of old probably did much the same when waiting for Christians to be brought out to the lions,” she said. From St. Peter's Cathedral comes the memory of a guide outside saying: “Ladies, keep your shoulders and arms covered and beware of the pickpockets;” and inside the magnificence of Michelangelo's “Pieta.” Other memories include: Lucerne ... the sight of a radiant young bride driving away in a wedding car,

throwing sweets to children along the way. New York, a city of affluence which serves as an order for tea “a dead animallike bag for dunking in a cup of warm water.” “You have to go back to Boston for a decent cup of tea,” she says. San Francisco, with its own indefinable character and beauty, the best-groomed women in the United States, and a plump white fox terrier which dresses for town in a white, green-plumed hat with chin-strap, sun glasses, and a pipe between its teeth. “Don’t stand there laughing at him, lady. Give him a light.” the owner remarked to Mrs Caffin. Horses’ Hats Horses also wear hats in many parts of Europe to take tourists on sight-seeing drives, she remembers. They are little white linen hoods to cover the ears and trimmed with bobbles in Switzerland (“I’m sure they’re laundered daily”). In Salzburg they are of much the same design, but leave the ears exposed (“The better to hear the sound of the glockenspiels”). In Italy the smart carriage horse steps out in a straw model, adorned simply with one rose. In London? “Well, there it seems to be standard headgear. I think a horse would feel a fool in a hat in London,” Mrs Caffin says.