As did going through the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie and witnessing the stark difference between freedom in West Berlin, and the drab, oppressively gray atmosphere of communist East Berlin in the mid-1970s.
Writing from British-ruled Sierra Leone, he complains of "little plump men in shorts with hairless legs, and drab women, and the atmosphere of Balham going gay".
(914) 923-3100 GOOD ATMOSPHERE -- The drab dining room falls short of the elegance to which it aspires.
28 Oak Street 28 Oak Street, Ridgewood (201) 689-7313 VERY GOOD ATMOSPHERE -- A drab storefront where the food does all the talking.
Suddenly, the atmosphere changed from drab to delirious.
There are waves of brilliantly orchestrated anxiety and confusion but also long stretches of drab, hackneyed exposition that flatten the atmosphere.
With the exception of its exemplary Bauhaus architecture, the city's atmosphere is grey and drab, often reinforced by the curtness of its residents.
A. O. Scott, writing for The New York Times, admired the moments of "brilliantly orchestrated" anxiety and confusion, but felt that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was vulnerable to the "lumbering proceduralism" that he saw in its literary counterpart, as evident with the "long stretches of drab, hackneyed exposition that flatten the atmosphere".
However the latter, caught as summer was fading, washed in drab "liquid grey" light, gave him a fitting atmosphere, spiced with a big pinch of puritan moral hypocrisy, as he wrote in an essay on the two cities.
Just to give a few quick examples, it's a lesson in the creation of oppressive atmosphere in its physical descriptions of drab bombed-out London, and in the terrifying Ministry of Love.
