ONE TIME, when I was in Geneva, Switzerland, for a Physical Society meeting, I was walking around and happened to go past the United Nations buildings. I thought to myself, “Gee! I think I’ll go in and look around.” I wasn’t particularly dressed for it—I was wearing dirty pants and an old coat—but it turned out there were tours you could go on where some guy would show you around.
The tour was quite interesting, but the most striking part was the great big auditorium. You know how everything is overdone for these big international characters, so what would ordinarily be a stage or a dais was in several layers: you have to climb up whole sequences of steps to this great, big, monstrous wooden thing that you stand behind, with a big screen in back of you. In front of you are the seats. The carpets are elegant, and the big doors with brass handles at the back are beautiful. On each side of the great auditorium, up above, are windowed booths for the translators of different languages to work in. It’s a fantastic place, and I kept thinking to myself, “Gee! How it must be to give a talk in a place like this!”
Right after that, we were walking along the corridor just outside the auditorium when the guide pointed through the window and said, “You see those buildings over there that are under construction? They’ll be used for the first time at the Atoms for Peace Conference, in about six weeks.”
I suddenly remembered that Murray Gell-Mann and I were supposed to give talks at that conference on the present situation of high-energy physics. My talk was set for the plenary session, so I asked the guide, “Sir, where would the talks for the plenary session of that conference be?”
“Back in that room that we just came through.”
“Oh!” I said in delight. “Then I’m gonna give a speech in that room!”
The guide looked down at my dirty pants and my sloppy shirt. I realized how dumb that remark must have sounded to him, but it was genuine surprise and delight on my part.
We went along a little bit farther, and the guide said, “This is a lounge for the various delegates, where they often hold informal discussions.” There were some small, square windows in the doors to the lounge that you could look through, so people looked in. There were a few men sitting there talking.
I looked through the windows and saw Igor Tamm, a physicist from Russia that I know. “Oh!” I said. “I know that guy!” and I started through the door.
The guide screamed, “No, no! Don’t go in there!” By this time he was sure he had a maniac on his hands, but he couldn’t chase me because he wasn’t allowed to go through the door himself!
Tamm’s face lit up when he recognized me, and we talked a little bit. The guide was relieved and continued the tour without me, and I had to run to catch up.
At the Physical Society meeting my good friend Bob Bacher said to me, “Listen: it’s going to be hard to get a room when that Atoms for Peace Conference is going on. Why don’t you have the State Department arrange a room for you, if you haven’t already made a reservation?”
“Naw!” I said. “I’m not gonna have the State Department do a damn thing for me! I’ll do it myself.”
When I returned to my hotel I told them that I would be leaving in a week, but I’d be coming back at the end of summer: “Could I make a reservation now for that time?”
“Certainly! When will you be returning?”
“The second week in September…”
“Oh, we’re terribly sorry, Professor Feynman; we are already completely booked for that time.”
So I wandered off, from one hotel to another, and found they were all booked solid, six weeks ahead of time!
Then I remembered a trick I used once when I was with a physicist friend of mine, a quiet and dignified English fellow.
We were going across the United States by car, and when we got just beyond Tulsa, Oklahoma, there were supposed to be big floods up ahead. We came into this little town and we saw cars parked everywhere, with people and families in them, trying to sleep. He says, “We had better stop here. It’s clear we can go no further.”
“Aw, come on!” I say. “How do you know? Let’s see if we can do it: maybe by the time we get there, the water will be down.
“We shouldn’t waste time,” he replies. “Perhaps we can find a room in a hotel if we look for it now.”
“Aw, don’t worry about it!” I say. “Let’s go!”
We drive out of town about ten or twelve miles and come to an arroyo. Yes, even for me, there’s too much water. There’s no question: we aren’t going to try to get through that.
We turn around: my friend’s muttering about how we’ll have no chance of finding a room in a hotel now, and I tell him not to worry.
Back in town, it’s absolutely blocked with people sleeping in their cars, obviously because there are no more rooms. All the hotels must be packed. I see a small sign over a door: it says “HOTEL.” It was the kind of hotel I was familiar with in Albuquerque, when I would wander around town looking at things, waiting to see my wife at the hospital: you have to go up a flight of stairs and the office is on the first landing.
We go up the stairs to the office and I say to the manager, “We’d like a room.”
“Certainly, sir. We have one with two beds on the third floor.”
My friend is amazed: The town is packed with people sleeping in cars, and here’s a hotel that has room!
We go up to our room, and gradually it becomes clear to him: there’s no door on the room, only a hanging cloth in the doorway. The room was fairly clean, it had a sink; it wasn’t so bad. We get ready for bed.
He says, “I’ve got to pee.”
“The bathroom is down the hall.”
We hear girls giggling and walking back and forth in the hall outside, and he’s nervous. He doesn’t want to go out there.
“That’s all right; just pee in the sink,” I say.
“But that’s unsanitary.”
“Naw, it’s okay; you just turn the water on.”
“I can’t pee in the sink,” he says.
We’re both tired, so we lie down. It’s so hot that we don’t use any covers, and my friend can’t get to sleep because of the noises in the place. I kind of fall asleep a little bit.
A little later I hear a creaking of the floor nearby, and I open one eye slightly. There he is, in the dark, quietly stepping over to the sink.
Anyway, I knew a little hotel in Geneva called the Hotel City, which was one of those places with just a doorway on the street and a flight of stairs leading up to the office. There were usually some rooms available, and nobody made reservations.
I went up the stairs to the office and told the desk clerk that I’d be back in Geneva in six weeks, and I’d like to stay in their hotel: “Could I make a reservation?”
“Certainly, sir. Of course!”
The clerk wrote my name on a piece of paper—they hadn’t any book to write reservations in—and I remember the clerk trying to find a hook to put the paper on, to remember. So I had my “reservation,” and everything was fine.
I came back to Geneva six weeks later, went to the Hotel City, and they did have the room ready for me; it was on the top floor. Although the place was cheap, it was clean. (It’s Switzerland; it was clean!) There were a few holes in the bedspread, but it was a clean bedspread. In the morning they served a European breakfast in my room; they were rather delighted to have this guest who had made a reservation six weeks in advance.
Then I went over to the U.N. for the first day of the Atoms for Peace Conference. There was quite a line at the reception desk, where everyone was checking in: a woman was taking down everybody’s address and phone number so they could be reached in case there were any messages.
“Where are you staying, Professor Feynman?” she asks.
“At the Hotel City.”
“Oh, you must mean the Hotel Cité.”
“No, it’s called ‘City’: C-I-T-Y.” (Why not? We would call it “Cité” here in America, so they called it “City” in Geneva, because it sounded foreign.)
“But it isn’t on our list of hotels. Are you sure it’s ‘City’?”
“Look in the telephone book for the number. You’ll find it.”
“Oh!” she said, after checking the phone book. “My list is incomplete! Some people are still looking for a room, so perhaps I can recommend the Hotel City to them.”
She must have got the word about the Hotel City from someone, because nobody else from the conference ended up staying there. Once in a while the people at the Hotel City would receive telephone calls for me from the U.N., and would run up the two flights of stairs from the office to tell me, with some awe and excitement, to come down and answer the phone.
There’s an amusing scene I remember from the Hotel City. One night I was looking through my window out into the courtyard. Something, in a building across the courtyard, caught the corner of my eye: it looked like an upside-down bowl on the windowsill. I thought it had moved, so I watched it for a while, but it didn’t move any. Then, after a bit, it moved a little to one side. I couldn’t figure out what this thing was.
After a while I figured it out: it was a man with a pair of binoculars that he had against the windowsill for support, looking across the courtyard to the floor below me!
There’s another scene at the Hotel City which I’ll always remember, that I’d love to be able to paint: I was returning one night from the conference and opened the door at the bottom of the stairway. There was the proprietor, standing there, trying to look nonchalant with a cigar in one hand while he pushed something up the stairs with the other. Farther up, the woman who brought me breakfast was pulling on this same heavy object with both hands. And at the top of the stairs, at the landing, there she was, with her fake furs on, bust sticking out, hand on her hip, imperiously waiting. Her customer was a bit drunk, and was not very capable of walking up the steps. I don’t know whether the proprietor knew that I knew what this was all about; I just walked past everything. He was ashamed of his hotel, but, of course, to me, it was delightful.