Memories long unvisited can startle with their freshness and vividness–and their resuscitated aromas, the fastest time machine being, of course, the sense of smell. A recent visit on a rainy day to a local Austin coffee shop, for example, and its attendant mingled odors of roasted coffee and damp streets, and a whiff of diesel fumes from an adjacent parking lot, brought into ever-sharper mnemonic focus a) Europe; b) France; and c), with that precise olfactory combination, a visit to diesel- and coffee-redolent (and often rainy) Strasbourg, in the eastern quadrant of the Hexagon, back in (I think) ‘77, that Rabelaisian year. This is what I recall: Via several changes of train–-a means of travel I loved and still dream about, shunting from one yet-to-be-discovered city to another and from one Buffet de la Gare to the next, tasting the local beer here, the vin ordinaire there, clicking over the sidings past the windows of people’s briefly-illuminated lives, gloriously at one remove from it all in the snug compartment cars that no longer exist––I went to the Alsatian capital hoping to be admitted as a student at the Institute of Translation of the venerable University of Strasbourg of Gutenberg, Goethe, and Pasteur fame. With my less-than-stellar academic performance in Edinburgh I had no real chance of being admitted, although I went through the rigmarole of interviews and admission exams, abuzz with strong coffee. (I remember fueling up on Fischer beer, too, before one late-afternoon interview, in an art nouveau-style pavilion-cafe in a very fin de siècle park, across from a horsey carrousel which children were riding, to the wheezing accompaniment of a calliope playing The Blue Danube waltz.) The whole episode was, I think, part of a desperate attempt to forestall re-emigration Stateside, in which I failed. But I succeeded in preserving for posterity–meaning now–a small store of hardly-used memories: of that park; of the rain-slicked nighttime streets of Strasbourg; of the bells of the Cathedral ringing Vespers at a quarter to six in the frosty evening, their summons to the dwindling faithful rippling over the venerable city and over the wooded Vosges and across the Rhine into the Black Forest and Baden; of the tar-black canal waters of La Petite France, that medieval quarter that seems as much Little Germany (black-and-white timbered houses, overflowing flowerboxes) as Little France; of drink, of course, mostly Gewurtztraminer wine in tall green-and-gold glasses, or Kronenbourg or Fischer (or Pêcheur) beer in liter-sized mugs called cannettes. And the subsequent fool’s progress through empty nocturnal streets lit episodically in the cold blue glare of tungsten streetlamps, and so to bed--or rather, eventually, back to a hostile hotel night porter and an equally hostile room blinking red and white in the reflected light of a neon advertisement across the square (Place Kléber?), a room in which I had insufficient sleep, being unaccountably convinced that there was someone (or something) in the room with me...but there wasn’t, worse luck (one imagined, hopefully, une belle Strasbourgeoise bien foutue). No; in those primitive days before every hotel was required to boast of color cable TV and a minibar and 24-hour high-speed Internet access and vending machines on every floor, the traveler was impaled on his own devices, for hotel rooms then were just that, rooms, not entertainment centers. You got a bed, a sink, a bedside table, and, if you were willing to pay a little more, a separate bathroom; if not, a shared loo, down the hall. I was going slightly upscale that time, staying at the Grand Hotel Terminus, across from the train station. I recall the hotel as being of the 1950s-modern variety, with marble pillars and blond Swedish wood and a ghostly smell of choucroute in the softly underlit hallways; very much an old-fashioned European hotel for commercial travelers who came and went by train. I walked away with a souvenir: the ancient, picturesque room key, of heavy brass.