Unit3
奥斯陆
I remember on my first trip to Europe going alone to a movie in Copenhagen. In Denmark you are given a ticket for an assigned seat. I went into the cinema and discovered that my ticket directed me to sit beside the only other people in the place, a young couple locked in the sort of passionate embrace associated with dockside reunions at the end of long wars. I could no more have sat beside them than
I could have ask to join in--it would have come to mush the same thing--so I took
a place a few discreet seats away.
1记得我第一次去欧洲旅行的时候，我在哥本哈根独自一人去看电影。在丹麦，电影票是对号入座的。(此文来自袁勇兵博客)我走进电影院，发现在我的票对应的座位旁，只有一对年轻情侣。这对情侣如胶似漆地拥抱在一起，如同一场持久战争结束后码头上亲人的团聚。我很不情愿坐在他们旁边，就如我绝不会要求加入他们的行为一样——这两者对我来说并没有什么不同——因此我谨慎地隔几个座位坐了下来。
People came into the cinema, consulted their ticket and filled the seats around us. By the time the film started there were about 30 of us sitting together in a tight pack in the middle of vast and otherwise empt
y auditorium. Two minutes into the movie, a woman laden with shopping made her way with difficulty down my row, stopped beside my seat and told me in a stern voice, full of glottal stops and indignation, that I was in her place. This cause much paly of flashlights among the usherettes and fretful re-examining of tickets by everyone in the vicinity until word got around that I was an American tourist and therefore unable to follow simple seating instructions and I was escorted in some shame back to my assigned place.
2人们陆续地走进影院，参照电影票到位子，在我们周围坐了下来。电影开场时，这个宽敞空旷的观众席中间，扎堆地坐了约30人。电影开场两分钟后，一个拎着大包小包购物袋的女士艰难地挤到我这排，在我座位旁停下，并用严厉的口吻愤怒地朝我用充满了喉塞音的丹麦语说道，我坐在了她的位子上。女引座员马上打开手电筒查看情况，身边所有的人都不安地重新确认自己票上的座位号，直到大家都清楚了，我是一个美国游客，因此没有遵循简单的就座指示。在羞愧中我被送回指定的位子。
So we sat together and watch the movie, 30 of us crowed together like refugees in an overloaded lifeboat, rubbing shoulders and sharing small noises, and it occurred to me then that there certain things that some nations do better than everyone else and certain things that they do far worse and I began to wonder why that should be.
3接下来我们坐在一起看电影，30人如同一艘超载的救生船上的难民一般挤作一团。肩膀相互摩擦着，忍受着各种细小的噪声。那时我想，有些国家在某些事情上做的比任何其他国家都好，然而在另外一些事情上，他们却糟糕很多。我开始思考为何会有如此反差。
Sometimes a nation's little contrivances are so singular and clever that we associate them with that country alone—double-decker buses in Britain, windmills in Holland (what an inspired addition to a flat landscape: think how they would transform Nebraska), sidewalk cafes in Paris. And yet there are some things that most countries do without difficulty that others cannot get a grasp of at all.
4有时候某个国家的小发明是如此独特和精巧，以至于我们总是由它而联想到这个国家——英国的双层巴士，荷兰的风车（给原本单调的景观增添了多么美妙的创意：想想这些风车是如何改变了内布拉斯加州），还有巴黎人行道上的露天咖啡馆。然而，也有一些事情，大部分国家能不费吹灰之力地办到，但某些国家却完全想不到。
The French, for instance, cannot get the hang of queuing. They try and try, but it is beyond them. Wherever you go in Paris, you see orderly lines waiting at bus stops, but as soon as the bus pulls up the line instantly disintegrates into something like a fire drill at a lunatic asylum as everyone scrambles to be the fist aboard, quit unaware that this defeats the whole purpose of queuing.
5比如说，法国人无法掌握排队的窍门。他们一遍遍地尝试，但这似乎超出了他们的能力范围。无论你去巴黎的任何地方，总会看到整齐的队伍在公交车站候车。但一旦公交车靠站，队伍立刻瓦解，就像精神病院的消防演习一样，所有人都争抢着第一个上车，完全没意识到，这样一来排队的意义就荡然无存了。
certain of the fundamentals of eating, as evidenced by their instinct to consume hamburgers with a knife and fork.To my continuing amazement, many of them also turn their fork upside-down and balance the food on the back of it. I've lived in England for a decade and a half and I still have to quell an impulse to go up to strangers in pubs and restaurants and say, "Excuse me, can I give you a tip that'll help those peas bouncing all over the table?"
6另一方面，英国人则不能领略吃的基本要领。证据就是他们本能地使用刀叉来食用汉堡。更令我惊讶的是，他们大多数都把叉子颠倒放置，将食物搁在它的背上。我已经在英国居住了 15年，但我仍不得不压制这种冲动，想要走向酒吧或餐馆里的陌生人说：“打扰一下，可以允许我告诉你一个小技巧吗？(此文来自袁勇兵博客)那样你就不会把豆子散落在整张桌子上了。
clothes中文Germans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on the invention of the motor car.
7德国人被幽默困扰，瑞士人对乐趣毫无概念，西班牙人丝毫不觉得在半夜吃晚饭有什么滑稽之处，而意大利人从不，也绝不会让别人告诉他们汽车是如何发明的。
One of the small marvels of my first trip to Europe was the discovery that the world could be so full of variety, that there were so many different of doing essentially identical things, like eating and drinking and buying cinema tickets. It fascinated me that Europeans could at once be so alike-that they could be so universally bookish and cerebral, and drive small cars, and live in little houses in ancient towns, and love soccer, and be relatively unmaterialistic and law-abiding, and have chilly hotel rooms and cosy and inviting places to eat and drink-and yet be so endlessly, unpredictably different from each other as well. I love the idea that you could never be sure of anything in Europe.
8这次欧洲之旅带给我很多惊奇的小事，其中一个就是我发现世界竟能如此多样化，对于本质上相同的事物处理起来却方式各异，比如说吃喝或是买电影票。有趣的是，欧洲人有时可以突然变得如此相似——他们普遍好学而理性，开着小车，住在古镇的小房子里，喜欢足球，不怎么注重物质生活，遵纪守法，而且他们住寒冷的宾馆房间，去温暖舒适的地方吃喝——然而却同时拥有着如此琢磨不透、永无止尽的差异。在欧洲没有什么是百分之百肯定的，对此我十分赞同。
I still enjoy that sense of never knowing quite what’s goi ng on. In my hotel in Oslo, where I spent four
days after returning from Hammerfest, the chambermaid each morning left me a packet of something called Bio Tex Bla，a “minipa kke for ferie,hybel og weekend”, according to the instruction, I spent many happy hou rs sniffing it and experimenting with it, uncertain whether it was for washing out clothes or gargling or cleaning the toilet bowl. In the end I decided it was for washing out clothes—it worked a treat—but for all I know for the rest of the week everywhere I went in solo people were saying to each other, ”you know, that man smelled like toilet-bowl cleaner.”
9我仍然享受着对事情进展的未知感。从哈默菲斯特返回后，我在奥斯陆的宾馆呆了四天，女服务员每天早上都留给我一盒叫做Bio Tex Bla的东西，说明上说是一种“minipakke for ferie，hybelog weekend”。我不清楚它到底是用来洗衣服的，还是漱口的，或是用来淸洗抽水马桶的，我通过闻它的气味，并试验它各种可能的用法，度过了好几个快乐的小时。最后我判定它是甩来洗衣服的——它的确有效——然而就我所知，在奥斯陆度过的剩下几周中，无论我去哪儿，都听见有人互相议论：“你知道吗?那个人身上有马桶清洁剂的味道。”
When I told my friends in London that I was going to travel around Europe and write a book about it, they said, ”oh ,you must speak a lot of languages.”
10当我告诉伦敦的朋友，我将周游欧洲各地并将其写成书时，他们说：“喔，你肯定
会说很多语言吧。”
they would look at me as if I were crazy. But that’s the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don’t want to know what people are talking about, I can’t think of anything th at excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even re liably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series or interesting guesses.
11 “为什么，我不会，”我会带着一点傲气回答，“我只会英语。”然后他们就看着我，好像我疯了。(此文来自袁勇兵博客)但是就我而言，那正是国外旅游的美妙之处。我并不想知道人们在说些什么。置身于一个对你而言完全陌生的国家，能激发一种孩子般的好奇心。除此之外，我想不出还有什么更好的办法。突然之间你又回到了五岁。你无法读懂任何东西，你对事物运行方式只有最基本的感知，你甚至无法安全地穿过马路。你的整个存在变成了一系列有趣的猜想。
I get great pleasure from watching foreign TV and trying to imagine what on earth is going on. On my first evening in Oslo I watched a science program in which two men in a studio stood at a lab table discussing a variety of sleek, rodent-like animals that were crawling over the surface and occasionally up the host’s jacket, “and you have sex with all these creatures, do you?” the host was saying.
12 看国外电视节目，试着想象到底发生了什么事，这让我乐此不疲。比如说，在奥斯陆的第一个晚上，我收看一个科学节目，演播室里的两个男子站在一张实验桌旁，讨论着一种有着光滑皮毛的貌似啮齿目的动物，它们在桌面上爬行，偶尔爬上主持人的外套。主持人正在说：“那么你与所有这些动物做爱，是吗？
“certainly,” replied the guest,” you have to be careful with the porcupines, of course, and the lemmings get very neurotic and hurl themselves off cliffs if they feel you don’t love them as you once did, basically these animals make very affectionate companions, and the sex is simply out of this world.”
13 “当然，”嘉宾回答道，“你必须对豪猪十分小心，当然，旅鼠若是感觉你不再像以前那样爱它们，会变得焦躁不安并跳下悬崖，但总的来说，这些动物是非常亲切的伴侣，并且性也是十分美妙的。
“well, I think that’s wonderful. Next week we’ll be looking at how you can make hallucinogenic drugs with simple household chemicals from your own medicine cabinet, but now it’s time for the screen to go black for a minute and then for the lights to come up suddenly on the host of the day looking as if he was just about to pick his nose. See you next week. ”
14 “哎呀，我觉得那很棒。下周让大家见识一下你是怎么用药柜中的简单家庭用药制造出致幻药的。(此文来自袁勇兵博客)该让荧幕空白几分光突然亮起，然后让灯光突然亮起，照在主持人身；让他看起来似
乎就像正要抠鼻子。下周见。”
After Hammerfest, Oslo was simply wonderful. It was still cold and dusted with grayish snow, but it seemed positively tropical after Hammerfest, and I abandoned all thought of buying a furry hat. I went to the museums and for a day-long way out around the Bygdoy peninsula, where the city’s finest hou ses stand on the wooded hillsides, with fetching views across the icy water of the harbour to the downtown. But mostly I hung around the city center, wandering back and forth between the railway station and the royal palace, peering in the store windows along Karl Johans Gate, the long and handsome main pedestrian street, cheered by the bright lights, mingling with the happy, healthy, relentlessly, youthful Norwegians, very pleased to be alive and out of Hammerfest and in a world of daylight. when I grew co ld. I sat in cafés and bars and eavesdropped on conversations that I could not understand or brought out my Thomas Cook European Timetable and studies it with a kind of humble reverence, planning the rest of my trip.
15 去过哈默菲斯特后，就货得奥斯陆简直妙不可言。天气依然很冷，到处还撒着灰蒙蒙的雪花，但是比起哈默菲斯特来那可要暖和多了，这也让我彻底放弃了想要买毛皮帽的想法。我参观了博物馆，并花了一天时间游览巴度半岛，那里丛林茂密的山坡上矗立着该城市最美的房子，其视野可跨越海港冰面一直延伸到市区，十分迷人。但是大多数时间我就在市中心闲逛，在火车站和皇宫之间来回溜达，在卡尔约
翰街向街旁的商店橱窗里张望。在路边明亮的灯光的照耀下，长长的卡尔约翰步行街富丽堂皇，与健康快乐、不屈不挠又充满朝气的挪威人融合在一起。我很高兴能离开哈莫斯菲特并来到这个充满活力、犹如白昼的世界。当我觉得寒意逼人时，我便进入咖啡馆或酒吧坐下，偷听那些我无法明白的对话，抑或拿出我的《托马斯库克欧洲时刻表》，满怀敬意地加以研究，做接下来的旅行安排。

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