Good old days

Somebody had told me that humble travellers in Holland could doss down in police stations, and it was true... They even gave me a bowl of coffee and a quarter of a loaf before I set off. Thank God I had put 'student' in my passport: it was an amulet and an Open Sesame. In European tradition, the word suggested a youthful, needy, and earnest figure, spurred along the highways of the West by a thirst for learning -- thus, notwithstanding high spirits and a proneness to dog-Latin drinking songs, a fit candidate for succor.

-- Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time for Gifts