ira

PS,

I remember when the French *were* rude to visiting Americans.

Robespierre

My first car was a 1963 VW that I picked up at Volkswagenwerk Wolfsburg. It cost $1055 US, prepaid at the dealer in Kansas City.

My tour guide was Arthur Frommer's masterpiece, <u>Europe on <b>$5</b> a Day</u>!

cigalechanta

I danced to Stan Kenton in 1951.

Fairhope

Does anyone have a Cunard keyring with a little ship floating in a glass tube?

TravelsWithStDavid

My first trip to Europe was with an Olsen Tour. We sailed on the Queen Mary which had three classes, First, Cabin and Tourist. The first night out, over a third of the passengers got sick from eating lobster, so we snuck into First Class and watched the waves break over the bow of the ship. It was an awesome sight. When we were in Paris, there was a general strike; no Metro, no cabs, lots of places closed. We stayed in a beautiful hotel, and virtually the only one, on the North Sea in Scheveningen, Holland. At breakfast a violinist was playing the Song From Moulon Rouge. That's how old I am!

Gardyloo

I'm so old that...

I visited Les Halles and Covent Garden when they were both markets.

I kept (still have) a red Ten Shilling bank note with a very young QE2 on it.

The Soviet border guards at the Finnish frontier used wind-up telephones to check if they could let you in.

Decent beer was under 2/ a pint (that's now 10p.)

They fed you good food in coach on planes. We're talking <i>old...</i>

elaine

1984:
A double room at the Lenox St Germain hotel in Paris cost the equivalent of $US 30. There were 10 francs to the dollar. I bought an Hermes scarf (still have it) and lots of crystal at the Baccarat showroom on rue Paradis
and saved 30%-40% off New York prices.

And, the Louvre entrance didn't have a pyramid, you entered at the eastern end that is opposite St Germain-le-Auxerrois.

PalQ

Ira: My first guide was Europe on $5/Day and i still have that book in my travelbrary.

cmt

When I was three, someone came along with a horse and cart selling fruit and vegetables one day, fish another.

Margarine (awful stuff) was white stuff in a sealed plastic bag with a little blob of something red, and we had to squeeze it and massage it to make the whole thing turn yellow.

The food stores had cheeses and sausages hanging from the ceiling, fish came from a fish store, meat from a butcher with saw dust on the floor, and chicken from a smelly place where we waited outside and could hear chickens screeching and strange metallic whirring noises and could see feathers fluttering when these machines ran.

Everyone had a fig tree.

Children played with old stuff or things that we found or made, I'd never dream of asking for the latest toy, and I used the same can full of broken crayons for years and years and loved them.

We walked. Families took walks in the evening and greeted other families. Not everyone had a car.

We had to start adding &quot;under god&quot; to the Pledge of Allegiance, after learning it the old way, without those words.

On long long rides from Pennsylvaina to Brooklyn, I counted cows.

Movies had double features.

When my mother went to work as a teacher when I was nine, it was still such a rarity for a mother to be working that I knew she could no longer make my lunch or iron my blouses and I'd better not ask.

I would never call an adult by first name.

Sputnik

People stared at men with long flowing hair or pony tails.

During my first trip to Europe when I was 16, I found that:
the toilet paper in many small public toilets consisted of a chunk of old newspaper stuck on a big nail on the wall,
in a little town that I visited with my parents there was running water for only one hour a day,
there was no autostrada running through southern Italy,
London was clean and sweet, with underground stations decorated with flowers,
just about everyone I saw in Italy was speaking Italian, and everyone I saw in France was speaking French,
Pisa was not crowded, and Paestum seemed to be &quot;undiscovered,&quot; and in Sicily it took many hours on narrow unpaved switchback roads to reach towns that are now reachable in less than a half hour on smooth modern roads.

College dorms all had curfews, electric typewriters were considered modern and fancy, no one had a TV in a dorm room, and only a few had their own record player.

I was in a class where we were discussing how political protest in the USA was generally peaceful, and we rarely had assassinations, when someone came in with the news that Pres. Kennedy had been shot.

Computers were gigantic scary things in temperature and humidity controlled rooms, very few people knew how to use them, and companies would pay recent college grads to learn how to be computer programmers.

When I was a young teacher, it was a big deal when the dress code changed and we were allowed to wear pants.

Patrick

The beers in Torremolinos were about 5 cents.

They hand lit the candles on the Christmas tree in the hotel bar every night in Lucerne.

If someone said they spotted Madonna in London, it had something to do with a church.

There were no such things as non-smoking cars or even sections on trains.

The Mona Lisa wasn't behind glass.

Nobody knew anything about the little island in Paris called St. Louis.

The cost of the programs in London Theatres was in pence, not pounds.

cigalechanta

gads, Carol, you brought back memories. I was raised in an Italian Ghetto and once aweek, this old guy with horse and buggy would ride through the back allys singing out, a&auml;rags!&quot; he'd buy old clothes, papers, tires.
My grandmother walked me to the chicken store where she felt the live chickens to feel how much fat and meat they had.
Took one home and plucked it herself.

FainaAgain

I remember when the first man went in space, Yuri Gagarin, April 12, 1961.

Was I ever a child or was it just a dream

Cassandra

cmt and Marilyn, I think we're about equally ancient.

I remember the margarine, etc., and watching the test pattern on the TV while waiting for the station to start broadcasting at 4 pm until 11 pm.

We got our milk, butter, eggs, cheese, soap, clean laundry, brushes, cosmetics, all from people who came to the door.

We flew from Boston to NYC to San Juan to the Virgin Islands on DC-6s and Martin 440s (which you climbed into from the back).

Later I went to Europe on $5/day and my 10 weeks cost me $1000 including the extra new ticket home I had to buy because I got sick and had to leave early. Still have my log of AmEx travelers' checks -- remember getting my mail via aerogrammes that we picked up at the AmEx office.

A little bit later, we went to Yugoslavia and spent $2/ night for a room right on the harbor at Hvar; dinner cost $1.50. You could go anywhere, into any store in Yugoslavia, and NOT see any products from Coke, Procter and Gamble, or Liggett&amp;Myers. Of course, the Gauloises were ubiquitous.

Anyone else try to impress people with their sophistication by buying and drinking Mateus rose -- and pronouncing it correctly?

justjean2001

...that on my first trip to Scotland,and England while in high school the girls had to wear dresses on the plane and the boys suits. We had to have signed parental permission to see the original &quot;Hair&quot; in London due to the nude scene and drug references. I also remember when
different was way different.English was not spoken almost everywhere,not every big city looked the same,there was no Disney store in Venice!!! The homogenization of the world,which makes me so sad at times, had not happened.

TuckH

cmt: very touching - and beatifully put. Thank you!

harzer

I'm so old that...

...it took five weeks to get to England by boat: Colombo-Bombay-Aden-Suez-Port Said-Naples-Rome-Marseille-Gibraltar-Southampton. And when you were able to fly, the flight took 27 hours with stops in Singapore, Bangkok, Karachi, Dubai and Rome.

... you could just walk across from West Germany into East Germany to take a food parcel to your auntie - but you did that late at night just to be on the safe side.

... you could buy a decent second-hand VW for 2000 marks, drive it around for a year and get 1500 marks back.

... they hadn't excavated Herculaneum yet

... Braunschweig city centre was still a heap of rubble

... you got a hotel room in London for two quid a night.

... you went to Buckingham Palace to see the King.

... the Spanish lifesavers/lifeguards had never seen anyone body-surfing and sent a boat out for you.

... my gums have shrunk and I need a new set of false teeth.

Harzer

RufusTFirefly

I remember taking the train across East Germany to Berlin just before the wall went up. Waking up at 1 am or so with the tran stopped.\

Looking out the window and seeing Russian or East German troops lined up almost shoulder to shoulder on both sides of the train holding submachine guns.

My father (intelligence officer for the 2nd Armored Cavalry) downing a bottle of Old GrandDad with Lt. Dozier--the same Lt. Dozier who was later kidnapped by the Red somethings in Italy when he was General Dozier.

cmt

Those horse and cart salesmen operated in my neighborhood in Brooklyn long after they were gone from many other places, so I'm not quite as old as that particular memory might suggest. Most people my age never saw such things in their neighborhoods when they were growing up, and in fact just a few years later they were gone forever. I moved from an old-fashioned Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn to an old fashioned PA town surrounded by rolling farmland. The food was weird in PA, but I was thrilled with the parks and animals and scenery and farmland. I'm glad I had a chance to experience both when very young.

StCirq

We had a knife sharpener who came by with a cart once a week and everyone ran out to get their knives and tools sharpened.

And of course a milkman delivered the milk in bottles.

ira

&gt;The homogenization of the world,..had not happened. &lt;

Shucks,
I remember when fashons on the West Coast were different from the East Coast.

I remember the taste of ice chips from the iceman's wooden, horse-drawn cart.

I remember that the Saturday movies had a double feature, a cartoon, a serial and the &quot;News of the World&quot; for a dime.

It was the only way my mother stayed sane.