described as structured on one indignity after another, and putting up with the vagaries of travel is what Twain calls being "foreignized":
We are getting foreignized rapidly, and with facility. We are getting reconciled to halls and bed-chambers with unhomelike stone floors, and no carpets--floors that ring to the tread of one's heels with a sharpness that is death to sentimental musing. We are getting used to tidy, noiseless waiters, who glide hither and thither, and hover about your back and your elbows like butterflies. . . (Twain 57).
In this passage, Twain displays the style that carries throughout this book, a mixture of humor and serious complaint at the same time. Twain writes a conclusion to his book one year after the trip has ended and makes an interesting observation about memory and travel:
Nearly one year has flown since this notable pilgrimage was ended; and as I sit here at home in San Francisco thinking, I am moved to confess that day by day the mass of my memories of the excursion have grown more and more pleasant as the disagreeable incidents of travel which encumbered them flitted one by one of out my mind--and now, if the Quaker City were weighing her anchor to sail away on the very same cruise again, nothing could gratify me more than to be a passenger. With the same captain and even the same pilgrims, the same sinners (Twain 386).
Twain's description of his journey is detailed and offers some of the history of the different places visited, observations on the people, and a comparison of the tourist sites in terms of their reality and their image. Twain is fully familiar with most of the history of Europe before he arrives, just as he is familiar with European literature, legends, and religious beliefs. He often takes a somewhat irreverent view of these elements and conveys this through overstatement, as when he is seeking the resting place of Heloise and Abelard:
I am seeking the las...