Pavlov/Venice

Most of you know, I think, that I was an exchange student in Belgium when I was young. I was 18 and went abroad for an entire calendar year. I learned many lessons there, and accumulated a lot of stories in the process. The exchange students with whom I lost contact are showing up, one by one, on Facebook, and we are all rekindling old friendships lost but not forgotten.

We all went on a 15-day bus trip around Europe at the end of our year. It just so happens that this trip in particular was, as I am sure for others, emblazoned in my memory. The bus driver of the trip, in a great stroke of genius, decided to gently elicit a Pavlovian response on us by playing loudly, every morning, “Pretty Woman” on the bus’ speakers. At the time, we thought that it was one of the most annoying aspects of the trip, sitting there in the bus, ready for many more hours of travel, groggy and incoherent, listening to Roy Orbison is his beautiful but somewhat extra-terrestrial voice croon Pretty Woman. (This was the same bus driver that, being stopped entering Hungary, played “Radio Free Europe” on the stereo as the communist guards came into the bus and checked our passports.) What a character. As it turns out, a brilliant character, because, even today, every time I here “Pretty Woman”, I reminisce about that trip through Europe, when I was young and my dreams seemed just before me.

Reconnecting with many of my old accomplices, I am reminded about stories that I had long forgotten. I was a bit embarrassed, actually, when a friend read to me what I had written in her year book at the time, something to the order of “to S., the woman with a thousand complexes. Try and get laid sometime.” Nice. I guess I was as blunt then as I am now… After apologizing profusely to S., she said that she remembered me fondly, as a friend who, when we had all run out of money and were craving some Italian gelato, simply put out his hat ad started singing until we had enough liras to buy just a bit more. I had completely forgotten that story. Well, someone unearthed a picture of this. I got such a kick out of it: