On Tour Guides

Typically, I hate tours. I remember one tour during an internship at some old house in DC. When we left the house, I remember realizing that I had no idea whose house it was, and that I learned precisely nothing about it. The tour guide had moved us from one room of the small old house to another, carefully avoided the long lines of other tourists--we would move out of the way, allowing them to pass. She would cough several times in each room, possibly mumbling something under her breath, and then we would move to the next room.

Sometimes tours are necessary. A tour was, for instance, the only way that I was allowed to complete my pilgrimage to Corrie Ten Boom's home in Haarlem. Unfortunately, a Christian American bought the house and uses it to evangelize. It isn't unfortunate that he uses it to evangelize (such a thing couldn't help but happen when Corrie Ten Boom's story is told--goodness gracious, I just read her Prison Letters and few things are more moving; they are remarkably more moving, for instance, than Anne Frank's diary), it is how he uses it to evangelize. The tour consists primarily of repeating that Corrie Ten Boom and her family were Christians, not any old Christians, but ones who loved Jesus.

Well, when I was in Bardejo, a medieval town in Eastern Slovakia, we had a tour of the town. Our tour guide was an 87-year-old woman who had done her doctorate in history and had always had a particular interest in Bardejo. The tour was interpreted for me by Elizabeth Bennett. She was a darling women, wearing all black mourning clothes, with a handkerchief tucked in her sleeve, nylons, black sandals, and some excess concealer left on her nose and cheeks and the lapel of her blouse. She took us through the Cathedral--she knew what every sculpture was on every altar, she knew the name of all of the vaulting on the ceilings, she even knew where to find the ass of the architect of the city hall, who mooned the city in art since he wasn't paid sufficiently. We came to one altar in the cathedral. One of the four women figures had been stolen and subsequently replaced with a copy. She asked me which one. The answer seemed clear to me, so I immediately, self-assuredly pointed to the one that I thought it was, and she agreed. We continued with the tour.

About 10 minutes later, she said something to Elizabeth, who immediately began to laugh. Elizabeth told me, "She said you chose the wrong figure. She told me, 'I didn't dare tell her she chose the wrong one, but if you dare, you can tell her.'"