"Auto-Stop"
The coming thing in continental transportation, however, is hitch-hiking. It apparently came in with the G.I's. Its local name is "auto-stop," and differs from the U. S. variety in that it is considered impolite to stick out one's thumb. The proper method is to hold out the whole arm, bout at the elbow. Even girls can hitch-hike without eyebrows being raised.
"Auto-stop" has the advantage of simplifying travel arrangements. Trains and busses mean tickets, and tickets mean the problem of effective communication with the man at the other side of the ticket window, whether he speaks in Cockney or dialect French. Travel is supposed to promote international understanding; it seems to be more apt to produce complete international confusion.
The moment American students were deposited on the shores of the Old World, they began to come scropper over strange foreign customs and to get themselves entangled in other countries' red tape. They ordered the wrong things off the menu, got the wrong directions for the wrong places, overstrained their meager vocabularies, and waved their hands in despair. Occasionally the misunderstandings could lead to ferocious consequences, for instance if you didn't know that when an Italian says "Basta" to you, he means "enough," and not what you thought he meant.
The summer evaporated in no time at all and the thousands of students, minus a lucky few who stayed on to study or work, came swarming back to the Land of the Loud Tie and the Hot Dog. They all had stacks of snapshots of themselves with monuments in the background, suitcases full of bottles of cheap French cognac, and perhaps a "not-to-be-introduced-into-the-United States' edition or two of Henry Miller. And once back at college, they all settled down to pceve their friends no end by comparing everything at home to "the way it's done in . . . ."
(This is the introduction to a series of articles on what American students did and saw in Europe this summer. The later articles will take up the story country by country.)