A Tour Guide

She never felt like teaching children. She wanted to be a University professor, preferably at some well-known university. To do that, she would have had to take competitive exams which she might have failed, not only once but repeatedly… She would not have been able to take in the advice and the remarks from her family and friends; therefore, she decided to use in a new way the knowledge she had accumulated: she became a tour guide. She had never tried to figure out how many mornings she had spent guiding visitors for the last twenty years. 

She was now middle-aged, married, had had two children. She was very smartly dressed, wore expensive jewelry, was well made-up and never had a hair out of place. Had she made a fortune out of tour guiding? Not really but she had conveniently married a businessman. 

On that day, she arrived a few minutes late, greeted us and immediately kind of apologized profusely: “It is now so difficult to park in the city center; I don’t understand why the city council is making it so difficult. They should realize that lots of people work downtown and can only commute by car; we don’t have time to wait for a bus that would, in any case, drop us two hundred and fifty meters from here. Oh well, I have been saying this for years but nothing changes…”.

 
When she spoke, she would regularly raise her chin while running her left hand through her hair from her forehead to the back of her neck as a second-rate diva about to sing an aria. She obviously thought highly of herself. 

We had been waiting for her in a chapel, no longer consecrated, but still a very nice and quiet place. The many modern stained glass windows that adorn it made it very bright. As I had come quite early, I had been able to read all the brochures and leaflets available and to look at all the pictures while the place had been filling up with people; there were about twenty of us waiting when the guide had arrived. 

After her explanation for her few minutes’ delay - which no one seemed to be concerned with -, she briefly introduced the places that we would be visiting and what she would talk about for the next one and a half hour – the time allocated to the visit.

 
“Of course, feel free to drop out at any time if you have more urgent matters to attend to”, she added.…I really did not understand why would anyone leave in the middle of the visit; all of us had paid for it, we had booked it because we had free time and were interested in knowing more about the city. I didn’t know what to make of her remark but didn’t think too much about it as our tour guide had already started narrating the story of the little chapel we were in.

 
As I was listening, I couldn’t help noticing how extremely knowledgeable she was about the local events past and present: her presentation was very rich in historical details. “You know, the audience usually only remember between 5 and 10% of what they are told during guided tours, so don’t worry if you don’t remember much” she said quite abruptly.

 
Not only the percentage but also the remark struck me; what a strange way to treat an audience. Anyway, the tour was now in full swing; our guide used the chapel as an example to demonstrate how the city had evolved from a medieval merchant town to a service-oriented and high tech city. Whenever people asked questions, she answered enthusiastically, brought forward more details, examples and counterexamples; this is when I started noticing things were going awry; I was probably not the only one to do so. I checked my watch: we had already been almost half an hour into the visit and we were still at the starting point. Our tour guide’s enthusiasm was a curse in disguise: she was not entertaining us with historical facts and quenching our cultural appetite but lecturing us. She seemed to feel like a professor teaching ex-cathedra; she was instilling knowledge into our ignorant minds. Incidentally, she said our next step would be the nearby cathedral and we had to spend a little more time in the chapel because mass wasn’t over yet there. Oh! Then we were still at the starting point because the next place was not available yet… 

“Let’s now move to the cathedral!” she said after she had taken a quick glance at her watch. The second part of our cultural trip was very close to the chapel; it took us a few minutes to reach it. We entered the 19th century-cathedral and approached the altar.

 
“Now this altar is typical of the 19th century; as you can see…” The lecture had started again. I looked at the other visitors, some of them looked bored and a couple had dropped out without notice. I listened for a few minutes; as soon as our guide stopped talking to inhale some fresh air, I waved her good bye and left. 
It was raining; I found shelter in the nearest café and ordered coffee. I had finally understood why everyone was allowed to drop out when they felt like; I also reckoned I had got my 5% quota of culture. More importantly, if “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes”, as Oscar Wilde supposedly said, I had been offered an opportunity to describe an eccentric whose experience was clearly named vanity.