In Hemingways's story "Hills Like White Elephants,"what "things" beside tasting absinthe might Jig have been waiting to experience ?

I have
only been to Europe one time, and
truthfully I found it to be a big disappointment. There were a
great many
"things" I expected to find interesting, exciting, edifying, or enjoyable,

and I must have been expecting to discover a lot of other "things" to appreciate
that
I hadn't even expected to encounter.

Paris itself did
not seem especially
beautiful, and the food was mediocre at best. No doubt I
could have gotten wonderful food if I
had been willing to pay an exorbitant
price, but you can get wonderful food almost anywhere if
you pay a lot of
money. The part of the Louvre I saw was a letdown. It seemed to be full of

propaganda pictures, such as that famous one of the Napoleon crossing the Alps on a
white horse.
I hate to say this, but the "Mona Lisa" was a huge
disappointment.

Italy seemed dirty and many of the
Italians seemed loud and vulgar. I was happy to get
out of Italy and back
into France. Many of the French are cold and rude in a peculiarly French
sort
of way--but they are better than the Italians, who think they are doing you a favor to
let
you see their old ruins and stuffy artwork. I learned one thing I could
use if I ever went back
(except that I'm never going back). That is: Never
eat a places that are situated close to
famous tourist attractions. like the
Louvre or the Leaning Tower of Pisa. They are usually
"tourist traps," and
the Italian ripoff artists aren't satisfied with merely
overcharging you;
they want to give you poor food and poor service as well.

Europe is old. A lot of it looks dirty and decrepit. I think Americans are
especially
sensitive to this. People live in buildings we would have torn
down a hundred or two hundred
years ago.

Hemingway
probably liked Europe because the exchange rate made
everything so incredibly
cheap in those days and because he could buy any kind of liquor he
wanted,
whereas Prohibition was the law in America. Europe was a great place for a writer or
an
artist. When the woman in "" asks for "Four reales" for the two beers,
I
think she was charging the equivalent of about two American
cents.