I am a tourist and therefore I wait. Actually, I wait and I queue. And as I wait and I queue, I ponder if one exists without the other. For one cannot queue without waiting, but one can wait without queuing. However, that one is not travelling, as in all my years of gallivanting this globe, I have never had to just, wait.
In real life one also must wait. The difference as a tourist is that all the waiting and queuing is bunched together. It’s a philosophical juggling act where on one hand “real time” is suspended so you feel as if “holiday time” will last forever and once you arrive in, oh let’s say Paris, you will have endless time to see the Louvre, the Seine, Notre Dame or just loll about and inhale the romance.
But with the mental checklist of must sees and dos, who can afford the exorbitant cost of a hotel in Paris for more than two days. So you dart around along with the swarm of other summer tourists, who oddly enough had the same idea, and queue for a glimpse of Mona Lisa. Yep, tick, and now off to Montmartre for a quick café au lait and croissant, energy food to queue for the Eiffel Tower climb.
I once queued 3 hours to see Michelangelo’s David, with 15 minutes to storm through Firenze’s Galleria Academia, ignoring every other priceless artefact, to find nudie strapping young Dave so that I could say “been there, done that”, whiz off to the train station, for more of the same at next destination.
And here’s another conundrum. It is said that times of trouble build character but I have borne witness to waiting and queuing revealing the ugliest of characters. I appreciate this activity is hardly a dangerous pastime, but humans are a disparate lot. Some of us calmly and orderly bide our time, while others vocalise frustrations, and you can even feel their tension infecting your space. So much so, that I have learnt that the “she’ll be right mate” attitude doesn’t work with a testy yank, who believes in is his American-god-given-right to be serviced immediately or receive a money back guarantee. Not even in Disneyland, buster.
There is a skill and art to the queue and wait. Just head to the Balkans or the former USSR where people once waited days for a stale loaf of bread. Medical conditions were diagnosed, offspring betrothed, recipes exchanged. It doesn’t have to be a waste of time, if you can recognise the value of spending moments with strangers engaged in a mutually intimate experience.
You may consider my situation quite banal, and yes, in the scheme of things, I agree. But I have experienced far too much cosy contact, too near to sweaty Mediterranean types; feel intimately familiar with the layout of transport terminals on four continents; and can say that being within earshot of personal conversations is often too much information, thank you very much.
However, it’s all worth the effort. You’ll have the memories, happy snaps and anecdotes, like my favourite celebrity sighting or the time I met Massimo in Prague and we…
