Writing about small things -- how to travel with a salmon

Well.. to be honest, it's a curiosity how a person can write on the most tedious things. Maybe it makes sense when that person is a professor of semiotics. (which you can find a very detailed explanation in wikipedia)

Although the small things are really samll, the writing itself nevertheless is very amusing.

For example, in the "How to use the Taxi Driver", how Eco writes about taxi drivers in different countries is really funny.

> ... instead of the corner of Seventh and Fourteenth, you want to go th Charlton Street. The driver will then have a tantrum, slam on the brakes, and make you get out, becuase New York drivers know only the streets with numbers and not those with names.

Paris taxi drivers, on the other hand, do not know any streets at all.

In New York, as far as I can tell you can't summon a taxi by telephone to some club; in Paris you can; but they don't come. In Stockholm you can call them only by phone, becuase they don't trust any old stranger walking along the street.

German drivers are courteous and correct. They don't speak, they just press the accelerator. When you get out, white as a sheet, you realize why they come to Italy for relaxation and drive in front of you, doing sixty kilometers per hour in the fast lane.

Nice, huhh?

In the "How to Use the Coffeepot from Hell", he writes about coffee. Here he goes

There are several ways to prepare good coffee.... Each coffee, in its own way, is excellent. American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100 degrees centigrade in plastic thermos cups, usually obligatory in railroad stations for purposes of genocide..

.... Swill-coffee is something apart. It is usally made from rotten barley, dead men's bones, plus a few genuine coffee beans fished out of the garbage bins of a Celtic dispensary. It is easily recognized by its unmistakable odor of feet marinated in dishwater. It is served in prisons, reform schools, sleeping cars, and luxury hotels.