In the opening chapter of his entertaining travel book Neither Here Nor There (1992), journalist Bill Bryson recalls his first visit to Europe as a college student 20 years earlier. In the following paragraph from that chapter, Bryson uses lists and anaphora to convey how "smitten" he was by his first impression of Luxembourg City.

from Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe*

by Bill Bryson

I had brought with me a yellow backpack so enormous than when I went through customs I half expected to be asked, "Anything to declare?

Cigarettes? Alcohol? Dead horse?" and spent the day teetering beneath it through the ancient streets of Luxembourg city in a kind of vivid haze--an unfamiliar mixture of excitement and exhaustion and intense optical stimulation. Everything seemed so vivid and acutely focused and new. I felt like someone stepping out of doors for the first time. It was all so different: the language, the money, the cars, the license plates on the cars, the bread, the food, the newspapers, the parks, the people. I had never seen a zebra crossing before, never seen a tram, never seen an unsliced loaf of bread (never even considered it an option), never seen anyone wearing a beret who expected to be taken seriously, never seen people go to a different shop for each item of dinner or provide their own shopping bags, never seen feathered pheasants and unskinned rabbits hanging in a butcher's window or a pig's head smiling on a platter, never seen a packet of Gitanes or the Michelin man. And the people--why, they were Luxembourgers.

I don't know why this amazed me so, but it did. I kept thinking: "That man over there, he's a Luxembourger. And so is that girl. They don't know anything about the New York Yankees, they don't know the theme tune to the Mickey Mouse Club, they are from another world." It was just wonderful.
 
Selected Works of Nonfiction by Bill Bryson

• The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America, 1989
• The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way, 1990
• Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe, 1992
• Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States, 1994
• Notes from a Small Island, 1995
• I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away, 1998
• A Short History of Nearly Everything, 2003

 

* From Chapter One, "To the North," of Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe, by Bill Bryson, published by William Morrow and Company in 1992, reprinted in paperback by Harper Perennial in 1999.