Arlon

Town in Belgium’s Luxembourg province, just across the border from the Grand Duchy; see Belgium (Literary) and the Travel note Belgium.

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
Neither Here Nor There	Bill Bryson	setting	First night in Europe, 1972: warm beer, two fried eggs and Gene Pitney with a shoe salesman and his furious wife.

Neither Here Nor There — Bill Bryson (1991)

Source: Readwise highlight

It took half an hour to reach Arlon, a dreary industrial town. Everything about it looked gray and dusty, even the people.

• Role: setting
• In the book: Still in the 1972 flashback. A travelling shoe salesman in a Citroën 2CV picks the hitchhiking Bryson up outside Luxembourg, drives like “an arcade game,” and insists on taking him home to his two-room flat in Arlon: warm lager, one fried-egg plate each, both sides of a Gene Pitney album, and a wife glaring at all of it. He then drops Bryson at a decayed hotel in the centre, where Bryson sleeps eleven hours.
• Why it matters: It’s the book’s first full comic set piece and Bryson’s first night on the continent. The point is the strangeness of being a stranger, not Arlon itself; the “dreary industrial town” works as a deadpan foil to his wide-eyed day in Luxembourg.