Clear as mud

I often think a huge gulf must exist be­tween the thought processes I fol­low and those of my na­tive co-res­i­dents of Cat­alo­nia, which is where much of the con­tent of this col­umn has come from over the years, but I’ve just re­turned from five days in An­dorra, and I have to say that the na­tives of that coun­try ap­pear to be on a dif­fer­ent plane al­to­gether.

Here’s a con­ver­sa­tion I had with a young lady in charge of tourist in­for­ma­tion near a lake:

Me: Hi, how long does it take to walk around the lake?

Tourist info girl: It de­pends how fast you walk.

Me: Yes, of course, but how far is it?

Tourist info girl: I don’t know.

Me: Oh, it’s just that I’m try­ing to de­cide how much to put in the car park meter, be­cause you have to pay in ad­vance for how long you think you’ll be here... I mean is it like an hour, two or three hours?

Tourist info girl: As I said, it de­pends how fast you walk. Maybe half an hour. But I don’t think you need to put more than an hour in the car park meter, it’s not a big lake.

Me: Well we were think­ing we might stay for lunch, and also there’s a zi­pline at one end of the lake, right?

Tourist info girl: Yes.

Me: Can you just do the zi­pline, or do you have to do a whole cir­cuit, like climb­ing trees and stuff?

Tourist info girl: I don’t know, I’m only tourist in­for­ma­tion...

Me: Look, I just need some help to de­cide about the park­ing meter...

Tourist info girl: I wouldn’t put a lot of money in that, I don’t think they’ll fine you if you go over the time.

Me: They won’t fine me if I stay longer than I’ve paid for?

Tourist info girl: I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure...

I’ll stop here, but suf­fice it to say that this con­ver­sa­tion went on for some time and didn’t re­ally get me any­where nearer the in­for­ma­tion I was look­ing for. What I found most be­mus­ing was that most of my con­ver­sa­tions seemed to be in a very sim­i­lar vein the whole time I was in An­dorra. No one re­ally seemed very sure of any­thing.

And just to round off our lake visit, when we re­turned to the car park, where I had ul­ti­mately put lots of money in the ma­chine, not trust­ing the info I’d re­ceived, my travel com­pan­ion and I headed over to the restau­rant, where we were greeted at the door by a big Russ­ian bear of a man, who seemed to speak lit­tle Span­ish and no Cata­lan. So I asked what lan­guage he pre­ferred, to which he said “Russ­ian”. Then a woman ap­peared – also Russ­ian – and pro­ceeded to in­form us that they did not have any of the dishes on the printed menu, re­plac­ing each one with an­other – less ap­petis­ing – op­tion as we painstak­ingly made our way through the menu.

On our final day, the host of our AirBnB pointed out that the coun­try was heav­ily re­liant on tourism. That very ob­vi­ously being the case, I sug­gest they in­vest in a lit­tle train­ing of those peo­ple who come into con­tact with ac­tual real-life tourists, as the im­pres­sion I got from my visit was that I’d en­tered a Terry Gilliamesque fan­tasy world where very lit­tle was as it seemed.