A quick color-blindness demo

If you’ve hung around these parts a bit, you’ve heard that I’m colorblind. My perception of red/green/brown is impaired compared to most people in ways that are hard to describe, and the best example I can usually give people is that I won’t notice small red berries on an otherwise green bush when to most people they would be screamingly obvious.

Today I noticed a terrific example (I think!) of the practical effects of this. (I mean…how often do I need to find red berries in the wild, anyway?)

I use Microsoft’s IM client, and for a long time I’ve been annoyed by how there’s no intelligent sorting of one’s contacts into who’s available and who’s not. To wit, check out this screenshot:

All these contacts are listed under “Available”, but when I would double-click  one to chat, it notifies me that they’re “Away”. “WTF?!”, I think, “How come they were listed under Available, then? And if some are Away and some are available, how come there’s no way to tell their status?!”

My epiphany, which you’ve probably already noticed, is that there is a small orange or green border around the contact’s icon. Green = active, Orange = away. To me, this is nigh undetectable. Even now, as I’m typing this, I keep looking at them and laughing at how impossible it is for me to quickly tell which is which. My advice when implementing color-indicators like this: Make the contrast and/or saturation much stronger.

So here’s a question for my normal-sighted readers: Is this orange/green difference difficult for you to see, too? I assume that it’s thuddingly obvious to y’all, and that the designer thought it would be a clear way to see a contact’s status.

Wear Your Best Socks to the Louvre (Part 7)

8/29/98 – Saturday

Saturday morning I rose up and walked down to the Ile de la Cite, one of the two islands in the middle of Paris. My friends Martine and Donogh had warned me against the foolishness of going to Paris without seeing the Sainte Chapelle, so I decided to go there first in case I got hit by a bus later in the day. The courtyard surrounding the church is part of the Hall of Justice or some such, and it was just opening for the day. There were lots of stereotypical gendarmes strolling around in there funny little boxy blue hats, as well as some more rugged looking army types. Undaunted, I pressed through their midst towards the cathedral.

The Ste Chapelle itself wasn’t going to open for another half an hour, so I wandered around in front gaping up at the gargoyles and the little thin window slits of the stairway. Eventually I thought to step back away from the front of the church, and I couldn’t believe what I saw in through the open doors of the second floor. The sun was coming up behind the church, going through the stained glass windows, through the open door and then hitting my wide, wondering eyeballs. I’m something of a connoisseur of blue, but I’d never seen blues like these glowing jewels. My camera didn’t capture the blue, unfortunately, but my brain did. After a bit of waiting and chatting to Indiana locals out front, eventually we got to go inside. The lower church is nice (~20’ high), with a little bit of stained glass and lots of gold-leaf ceiling work, but the upper church is heavenly.

It must be 70 or 80 feet high, and all along the length of the hall there are huge stained glass windows running up to the ceiling. The predominant color is that cosmic blue, but each panel is a mosaic of red, blue and white telling the stories of the Bible, starting with Genesis at the back left of the church. The story of Jesus’ life, crucifixion and resurrection is at the front of the hall, and the large, swirling rose-shaped window at the back is about Revelation and the last days. Standing in that place was one of the most wonderful parts of my trip. It was particularly nice that morning because I was there early before most of the other tourists showed up with their cameras and noisy chatter. (History note: Sainte-Chapelle was built in only six years, 1242-1248!)

As you can see, the camera really didn’t do a good job with the blue; a pale shadow of that glorious color can be seen in the lower left hand corner of the large picture. In the small picture here I’ve taken the liberty of fooling with the blue to try to show you what it was like. It’s pretty, but it’s a miserable attempt at imitating the real thing.

I’ll pass on the tip: You’d be crazy to go to Paris and not see Ste. Chapelle!

A bit dazed, I moved further north, through the courtyard of the Louvre and towards my first silly stop in Paris: the Musee du Parfum. This was mostly memorable because of Florence, the charming and attractive French girl with the wonderful accent who managed to make herself heard to the 50 or 60 of us who were on her first tour of the day. She told lots of funny, suggestive stories about the various ways French women have used perfume and perfume containers to snare interesting men. One story I’ll relate: during the time of very tight corsets, women would wear a small, beautiful bottle of strong perfume on a necklace such that it would hang down into their décolletage. When an interesting gentleman would get within range at a party, ball, etc., the woman would choose this moment to “faint”, hoping the gentleman would notice and that he would be inclined to note her bosomage as he retrieved the special bottle to revive her. Florence told all sorts of good stories, and as the tour went on I found myself wondering if I was an “interesting gentleman.” “Scruffy tramp” is probably a bit more to the point.

Instead of dropping cash for smells, I headed towards the Jardin du Palais Royal. Along the way a very confused portly couple asked me for directions. Without a map you don’t have much hope in Paris. I helped them out and went on to take a walk through my first formal French gardens at the Royal Palace. French gardeners must be a very uptight lot: the trees are trimmed into perfect uniformity and the flowers are all kept in tight little clusters behind black ironwork fences. The lawns are frighteningly green and lush, but they’re also clipped and edged fanatically, giving the parks a strapped-down geometrical feel. Not my idea of a pleasant, natural environment; I prefer beauty to be a bit more chaotic. The Jardin is noted for its strange “art” installation of many rows of black-and-white striped columns of varying heights. Here again, the Art Philistine in me says, “Yeah, so?”

On I walked, stopping for a while to watch a wonderful classical guitarist entertain at a rather mallish, touristy collection of shops (a 1999 Bruce Willis calendar was available). His music was quite a contrast to the tediousness of the shops, I thought. A little boy with an untied shoe was transfixed by the music, and took about 5 minutes to slowly sway around the musician, finally coming up behind him on his left to look at the pages that the musician seemed to be getting all this wonderful music from. The boy was really cute. He noticed me looking on, and scampered over to say Hi to me. We didn’t have a lot to say to each other – language being a bit useless to both of us – but I pointed out that he had an untied shoe. He didn’t seem very concerned, and finally I figured out that the weary looking fellow who was standing nearby was the father. He was more patient than amused, unfortunately. I guess that having the Little Prince for a son is hard for grown-ups.

Somewhere in here I stopped for lunch at Lina’s sandwiches. A bit intimidated by my experience with the menu and the language the night before, I picked a place where I was confident I would know what I was ordering.

* I tried to order a sandwich in French.
* A weird look passed over the girl’s face.
* She disappeared.

She was replaced by a friendly English-speaking girl. $2 for a 12 oz. Coke. Ow!

I walked by the Georges Pompidou art museum (closed for renovations, unfortunately) and was entreated by a sketch artist to come sit for a free portrait. He said he needed practice on beards. At least two other artists on my trip pointed out my beard as a highly prized/rare feature. Unfortunately, I suspected it was a trick, and moseyed on. There was a yoga master balancing, twisting and contorting himself in the plaza, and a very large crowd was gathered to watch. He was incredibly flexible and strong, but not perfect. He kept trying to balance on one hand and never quite made it. An anatomist could have easily pointed out all of the major and minor surface muscles of the upper body on this fellow, for he had no discernable body fat. Very odd.

On to the Place des Vosges, a very famous public square surrounded by the old apartments of famous folks, Victor Hugo among them. The inside of the park had the same strapped-down look to it, but outside the gate there was a wonderfully funny mime who I watched for a while. He moved like a robot. Move, pause, move, pause, etc., but with a good range of wildly exaggerated facial expressions. Two little old ladies were coming out of the park, and one half-scolded me in French. She had to repeat herself a bit before I got understood, but I think she was saying that watching a mime was (or was not?) like going to a museum, one had to come up with piéces (coins) to pay the fellow. Finally understanding what she meant – and naturally agreeing – I gurgled up “natoor,” which was my spur-of-the-moment Esperanto for “naturally”. She seemed satisfied and they bustled off. I gave him a 5FF coin. He reached out to shake hands, and I switched into my best “robot” mode. He seemed charmed by this novelty, and we made a big to-do out of shaking hands like robots. It was hilarious. I sure wish I’d taken a picture of that fellow.

At this point I felt compelled to comment to FB: “I’ve seen more people kissing here in 8 hours than I have in the past 4 months.” Paris does seem to have that effect on people. I felt like kissing someone, but no one volunteered.

On I went to the St-Paul/St-Louis cathedral, built in ~1600. A fairly major avenue runs directly in front of the church and because the doors are left open all the time you can hear the traffic inside. It’s a bit anachronistic, to say the least. The stone walls of the church are blackening with time, and the place looked very tired to me. Maybe that was because I was tired….! My feet were holding up, but insurrection was rising.

Gas prices in France: 6.95FF per litre for 88 octane. I’ll calculate for you: $4.53 per gallon. Seems like there might be some profit in exporting gas to Europe, no? Most of the cars there are cute little things: Fiat, Renault, Nissan, Peugeot, Honda, Audi. I did see the rare Sport Utility Vehicle and the occasional Ford (a tiny model called the KA?). (I also saw two identical Lotus’ and a Lamborghini, all with Arabic plates and all within 20 feet of each other in the Trocadero.)

I headed back towards the hotel, stopping at a patisserie for a snack. Patisseries are everywhere, along with cafés, restaurants, boulangeries and bistros. The French are professional eaters, and who wouldn’t be in a place with that many good chefs? I bought a rhubarb tart for about $2.50. It was PERFECT! Slightly crisp on the outside with a gently sweet/sour rhubarb center and a dense buttery crust. It had a certain juiciness to it, and I couldn’t understand how it could be juicy without being drippy. I was transported. After that I made it a point to stop at least once a day for pastries. (The rhubarb tarte was the high point, patisserie-wise; the other things I bought were good but not celestial.)

I walked back to the hotel, rested for a bit, and then went down to find dinner. Dinner turned up next door to the hotel. (“Why walk any further?” my feet said, “This place looks great!”) It was great. Restaurant L’Interméde had a very nice French waiter who spoke English with a very heavy accent. He explained all of the different parts of the menu and made several wine suggestions. I was reluctant to spend much on wine because the house wines were just as good, to me. I ordered a salad with garnish of roasted chèvre that was a real work of art: half a dozen different types of lettuce, some kind of strange dressing and topped with little crispy balls of fried cheese. The friendly waiter talked to me quite a lot about America, but I don’t remember much of what we said. I wanted to eat my pretty salad.

The main course was a sea bass pastry surrounded by juicy little mushrooms and decorated with thin slices of zucchini and carrot. This was delicious, but again it was the little vegetables off on the second plate that stole the show: sauteed green beans bundled in bacon, an onion baked in some kind of sauce, and a little pile of flat noodles. The green beans/onion/mushrooms were phenomenal. It was at this point that I decided I didn’t care if I gained 20 pounds in France.

Some other diners came in to eat and promptly lit up cigarettes. I can’t say I understand this sort of behavior at all. I was pleased to note, though, that although they were French they needed help from the waiter to understand the different dishes on the menu.

Dessert was again a visual and culinary treasure. A small chocolate cake, a berry sorbet, an airy cream puff on a pool of rich cream, a thin apple tart slice, a pool of strawberry cream/jam, and a thin slice of apple, orange and peach, all of which was laid out by someone with a degree in Design.

In French restaurants, they won’t bring you the bill until you ask for it, so you need to learn “l’addition, s’il vous plait.” It’s nice to feel like you can strech out for a few hours if you want. I usually made most of my additions to FB while in restaurants.

Showering at the hotel was a race against time. For 15FF you could obtain a jeton that, when put into the slot next to the single public shower in the hotel, would supply exactly 5 minutes of water. (Above is a drawing of the coin, in case you’re interested in committing petty larceny on your next trip to Paris.) Each time I managed to finish the necessarys before my 5 minutes were up, but the whole situation made me jumpy.

8/30/98, Sunday

The plan was to take the métro from my hotel up to the Musée d’Orsay, but that turned out to be a lot more difficult than I expected. “Lost, as usual,” FB remarks, a bit snidely. I ended up wandering through the Jardin des Plantes, which would be nice except that the gardeners there are no less fanatical in their chopping and fencing-in. A large contented-looking cat walked up to me and let me pet him. While I was petting him, a talkative French girl of maybe 10 years of age came out of nowhere. She was quite a ways along in her conversation before I gurgled something up, “je n’parle pas francais.” She seemed a bit let down, said “Oh, well, goodbye then,” with a very natural English accent, and walked off. I walked along the Seine for a while until I came to the Orsay. The museum specializes in French Impressionist art, and I wasn’t looking forward to it, because I prefer the precise surrealists to the blurry impressionists. But I kept my mind open and found a lot that I enjoyed. Some favorites/observations:

Gustave Guillaumet – very large paintings of desert landscapes and bedouins.
Victor Naulet made a huge (30’ x 15’) painting of Paris as seen from a hot-air balloon. It was finished in 1855, so no Eiffel Tower or Arc d’Triomphe is visible.
Favorites by van Gogh – La Salle de danse à Arles (obscure). La méridienne, d’apres Millet, and Portrait de l’artiste, Sept. 1889 [scroll down], not obscure.
Georges Lacombe – a very disturbing bas-relief of a woman squeezing blood from her breasts, called Isis.
Seurat – Cirque, 1890. I like the impressionists when there is a rhythm to their work. The blurriness gets on my nerves, otherwise.
Rembrandt Bugatti – a white sculpture of his wife

Boleslas Biegas – Le Sphinx, a very simple, mysterious face.
Karel Masek – La prophetésse Libuse.

Quite a few rooms full of Art Nouveau furniture and paintings. I used to be irritated by the sight of all the loopy borders and curli-cue lettering, but now I’m taken with it. Lacombe did a less-bloody bas-relief called La Mort that I find very stylish, but I’m not sure if it’s really Art Nouveau. It reminds me of William Blake.

I grew up with the two famous Jean-Francois Millet paintings on the wall, so it was nice to see them in person.

Next up was the Eiffel Tower. I didn’t feel like paying to go to the top, so I just strolled around the bottom and looked up. It’s big.

I walked away from the Tower towards La Trocadero. On the bridge a fellow had set up a boom-box and was selling little dancing Mickey & Minnie Mouse figures. A 3″ cut-out of Mickey, with little string legs and arms. He stood just to the side of the boom box and danced around in time to the music. A crowd was gathered, trying to figure it out. Now and then the fellow would pick one up, demonstrating that it didn’t have any motors or batteries, etc., then set it back on the ground, where it would take up dancing again. I stood there for 5 minutes before I figured out that all of the dancing figures were in the plane of the back of the speaker, getting their energy from the changes in the magnetic field. I’m still a little unclear on the concept. It’s geeky of me to admit it, but I was more enthralled with the dancing Mickey than with the Eiffel Tower.

You be the judge.

I was really looking forward to seeing the Musée d’Art Moderne because I thought they would have a lot of Dalí, Matisse and Magritte. After getting lost for a half an hour or so, I managed to find the museum and get in. (I bought a 5-day museum pass for $40 that got me into a lot of places for free. This was one of them.) I won’t bore you with the details of my silly lunch at the museum café or the saga of trying to deal with the snooty museum personnel. Instead, I’ll bore you with more of my tirade against stupid modern art: Who was this “Braque” character, and why did anyone let him and Picasso get away with their cheap stunts? You can’t just paint a lot of drab geometrical nonsense and call it art. The art seemed to go downhill from there, through the ridiculous valley of Warhol and Rothko to the outright abyss of poorly-videotaped performance art of skinny guys in drag skittering around to unbearable, awkwardly whimsical calliope music. It’s crap! It’s ironic! It’s art!

The good points were few and far between, but here they are:

* Picabia (~1930’s) made a funny painting of a bug-eyed moon man.
* Giacometti sculpted Homme et Femme in 1928. I thought it was hilarious.
* I would like Jean Dubuffet if it were a little tidier. Nice patchwork patterns of colors.

I walked up towards the Arc d’Triomphe, noticing on my way all of the little tiny dogs leashed to women of varying girths. One of the little dogs was particularly charming, and I was so intent on watching him scamper along that I walked off a curb and almost brained myself on the pavement. The couple with the dog thought it was pretty funny. Dogs of all sorts are Uncle Vinny-magnets.

Feeling frisky, I jogged up the stairs of the Arc d’Triomphe until my progress was thwarted by wide, lumbering German senior citizens. I think it’s worth while to walk all the way to the top, because it’s placed at the center of an etoile (star) of avenues that radiate out from it to all different parts of Paris. The most dramatic view is down the Champs Elysees through the Tuileries and the Place de La Concorde to the Louvre, but of course you can also look out to see the Grande Arche de La Defense, Sacre Cœure, Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower.

While people-watching back down at the base of the Arc, where there is a shield set in the ground commemorating the unknown French soldier, I was plagued by more gloomy thoughts on the nature of man. I won’t trouble you with them here.

Instead, I’ll mention that from there I took the métro down to La Defense, a large, puzzling plaza flanked by large French corporate offices and featuring an array of unusual modern sculptures/installations leading up to the Arche itself. I enjoyed one of the water fountains (skinny, spirally flamingoes?) and there was a neat rainbow mosaic covering a huge cylinder, but the Arche itself just confused me. What’s it supposed to be? What’s all that netting for? My little Philistine brain just can’t hack it, but I can’t say that it irritated me. The symmetry between it and the old Arc is rather nice. I wish someone would explain to me why one is an Arc and the other is an Arche when they are both plainly arches.

Dinner that night was a less expensive affair ($22 as opposed to $40), again within a block of my hotel. I had a nice little salad, an entrée of salmon w/ scrambled eggs that was delicate and good, and a main course that I didn’t write down so I don’t remember. I think it was beef of some kind, and that it was good but not stunning. Dessert was a strange sweet porridge of some kind. The Americans at the table next to me were considering whether they should order it, and asked my opinion. I’d only had three bites, but I said it was “unique” so they followed suit. After 7 bites it got a bit repetitious, and as we three left together, we commented on the monotony of it. I apologized for the bum steer, and they said they’d get over it somehow. The music here was an unusual mix of 80’s music. I remember hearing the line “but my eyes are just hollow glass” in a minor key. An atmospheric 3 minutes, that, amplified by nice French table wine. I spent my time making a drawing of the iron-work railings of my hotel across the street. This dinner was remarkable in that I conducted the entire conversation with the waiter in French. (If you think this is impressive, it’s not. Try not saying much to the waiter the next time you go out to eat. It’s easy, because there’s not a lot that needs to be said…)

Editorial remarks, circa 2010: The thing that jumps out at me here is how opinionated I was/am about art. If I don’t like it, it’s crap. If I like it, I probably love it. This is what happens when you’re raised around fundamentalists.

Wear Your Best Socks to the Louvre (Part 6)

8/27/98 — Thursday

The next time I go to London, I’m going to spend all my evenings at the theater and all my days at Kew Gardens. I have Ms. Mara [Redacted] to thank for her emphatic suggestions on these counts, and it turns out that she was absolutely right. If you have a slight interest in strange, exotic, beautiful, huge, small or zebra-striped plants, Kew Gardens has something to astound you. At 300 acres it’s the largest botanical gardens in the world. My tastes run mostly to cacti, alpine plants and ferns, although I do enjoy a pot of fuschia now and then. In the 6 or 7 hours I was at the Gardens I managed to make a rough loop of the grounds and see some parts of the three massive greenhouses.

Highlights from the Fat Boy:

“Lithops” look like rocks, but are actually plants. They sit on the ground in little clusters, looking very much like gravel. They look like they’d grow quite slow.

There are more than 1000 species of begonias! I’m not usually a begonia fan, but I saw several that I like. (They don’t have all 1000 at Kew, by the way…that would be a bit much.)

There are more than 500 species of plants from 8 families that eat animals! Most of these work along the “Venus Flytrap” or “Water Pitcher” idea, but one type I’d not seen before featured thousands of little sticky drops of acid that gnats would get caught in. I can’t remember now how the dissolving gnat gets ingested into the plant…

Kew has a very nice section called “The Senses” where your senses of sight, sound, smell and touch are stimulated. For “smell” they had a small greenhouse filled with aromatic plants. I didn’t get much out of this, unfortunately. It all smelled the same to me! The “sound” area was what I liked best. It was a long pathway through a bamboo field. It was quite a sensual thing to go through and hear all the rustling. In fact, I’ve tried to make it a point to focus on listening to the various sounds in my life ever since. I think I tend to shut out a lot of “noises” that can turn out to be interesting. Try it the next time you’re stuck waiting in line. There’s nothing to look at, so listen!

Lunch: Everything sold at Kew Gardens contains tomatoes. I settled for pizza, where the tomato had at least been eviscerated. Violent things done to tomatoes always make me smile.
This picture was taken in the extremely misty area of one of the hothouses. I like this photo, but any credit for its virtues as a work of art must go to my little automatic Pentax. It did all the work.

Trichomanes speciosum – Each leaf is one cell thick! This little plant is in the “Filmy Ferns” room, a big cold damp place with lots of slippery plants. Very nice for us Pacific Northwest natives.

Looking out over one of the many fields of the gardens, you see what looks to be various ordinary trees dotted through the grass. I walked up to a few to see how “ordinary” they were: Ulmus Dodoens, Quercus marilandica (Black Jack Oak) and chinese elm. You tree experts can contradict me here, but those sound pretty exotic to me.

That's me under the tree!

The gardens have been there for goodness knows how long, and include some very old, very big trees. Two of the biggies were a weeping beech, which curls over on itself and a tree I grew up with, the London Plane, which in this case was at least 150 feet tall.

Some of the idyllic nature of Kew Gardens is tainted by the major flight path that runs directly over the center of the park. Every 10 minutes or so a jumbo jet roars over at about 2000 feet making a tiresome racket. I also found it strange not to see anyone working on the gardens. When I left at about 5:30 there were a few people trickling in with buckets and spades, but I expected to see a battalion of little old ladies swarming all over the place to keep it in line. Maybe Thursday is the battalion’s day off?

Back at Clive’s for the evening, I sat down and watched the BBC. Yes, they really do have Married With Children on and Third Rock From the Sun, but I kept clicking around until I got to a weekly show called “Water”. This time on the show they talked about people who race miniature hovercrafts. It looked like fun, and they said you could build one for £1000, about the price of a cheap motorcycle. In fact, it reminded me a lot of motorcycling…

8/28/98 – Friday

The next morning I woke up and collected all of my stuff together, had another Clive breakfast, took a group photo of all the houseguests, and moseyed out the door. (I also asked Clive to mail home some of my miscellaneous museum guides and my London guide book. Even though I packed very light compared to most people, I still felt that I had too much weighing me down.)

I rode the subway down to the Waterloo Station and eventually got on the famous Channel Tunnel, operated by Eurostar. (The Europeans, incidentally, are hyperventilating over the coming of the Euro and the progress towards European Union; quite a lot like I suppose we would if we were about to get lumped in with Belize, Canada, Cuba and Mexico. The papers have dozens of dull articles about it…this chancellor and what he said to that minister of information, the fiduciary regulations that have Denmark raising a hue and cry, etc. I didn’t follow much of it.)

Anyway, the Chunnel was my first taste of the famed european train experience, and I must say it lived up to its touting. The overwhelming positives: The trains are exceptionally smooth, quiet and fast; and they run on time. The minor negatives: my non-smoking car was right next to a smoking car, and the door between seemed to be stuck open most of the time; and they still allow children on trains. (If Cranky Uncle Vinny was emperor of the universe, children would be kept in sound-proof bunkers four miles underground for the first, oh, 18 years of their life. If any silly adults wanted to go visit them, that would be fine. Adults could bring pictures of the children to the surface, because pictures are quiet.)

Spoiled little golden-haired Edward and Millicent three rows up were moaning and squabbling for the first half-hour, but eventually they were coerced into sleeping and the rest of the journey was pleasant. I had to ride facing backwards, so I didn’t get to see The Tunnel coming. Twenty minutes of dark Whoosh later, out we came and the engineer immediately began speaking in French. Before the tunnel, he made announcements first in English, then in French. I believe he took a particular pleasure in demoting English to second place once on French rail. The other thing that happened once we got on French rail is we sped up. Evidently English Law has a lower speed limit for trains (it will be raised shortly, I’m told), and the difference in speed was breathtaking. FB says it best:

There’s only one way to say it: THIS TRAIN IS HAULING ASS.

Still smooth, still quiet, but moving as fast on land as you can without going pro. It was a little too fast, actually, because I would have liked to take some good pictures of the countryside and the cute little houses that went by. As it was, I got blurry pictures.

A nice multi-lingual fellow came by with a cart, selling all sorts of tomato sandwiches. He had tomato juice, too, and for all I know he had little plastic buckets filled with cherry tomatoes. I declined all of those options, but did manage to get an orange juice without tomatoes. In Europe there doesn’t seem to be an end to the different sort of Coca-Cola products you can buy. The Co-Co Co. sells all sorts of juices (carbonated and not), along with all sorts of weird soft drinks you’ve never heard of. They all had nauseating titles, like “Whoozja” – the sort of sound you make when you’re ill. I tried some kind of orange drink in Paris that came out grainy. I think it was called “Froojit” or some other nonsense title. I got smug laughing at all the silly drink names over there, but now I realize: Sprite, Pepsi, Squirt, Dr. Pepper…Americans could probably be tricked into buying “Deadly Sludge” if it had a suave marketing team.

Soon I was at the Gare du Nord, the main train station of Paris. I stepped out onto the concrete francais, and made my way to the Métro area. It turned out to be twice as complicated as the London system, and I was eventually compelled to stand in line and buy a ticket because I couldn’t figure out how to work the machine. I’m embarrassed to admit that there were instructions in English, and I couldn’t figure them out. For some reason I had better luck with the brusque Frenchman behind the glass.

The Metro and I chugged out of the tunnel into the Light of Paris, and the sight knocked me out, gasping. “Graffiti! Everywhere! Even on the sides of nice old buildings!” As we zoomed along, I tried to remember if I’d seen any graffiti in London and decided that there wasn’t much. French vandals, though, have a certain aesthetic sense that is missing in most Portland, Oregon graffiti.

Finding my hotel was easy, and the fellow at the front desk was very nice to me. He was about my age, and was always smiling whenever I saw him. He became the “good” front desk guy, not to be confused with the “French” desk guy or the “huffy” desk lady…not that the other two were mean, they were just lacking a certain warm effusivity that I look for in a front desk person.

Finding my room was easy, too, but wedging into it was tricky. My little single bed was in there, and a little sink, little cabinet, and the littlest desk you ever saw. There was also a “Grand Causeway” linking these 4 furnishings, a lot like I-5, except only two feet wide and 7 feet long. At the end of this stately thoroughfare hung a tall window, through which I could see a little 20’x20’ courtyard surrounded on all sides by windows like mine. I hung my neck out, hoping to chat up the locals, but no luck. This was probably just as well, because at that point my French mostly went like this:
Je voudrais un confit d’canard.
Je voudrais un eau.
Je voudrais le métro.
Ou est la toilette?
Je ne parlez pas Francais.
Un, deux, trois and not much further than that. Not exactly the vocabulary with which to strike up a conversation on Proust’s handling of the machoire motif in the latter parts of La Recherché de Temps Perdu.

I arrived in Paris at about 4pm and by 5:30 or so I was all checked in to my hotel room, settled, and ready to hit the streets. It was Friday afternoon and I figured the museums were closed or closing, so I decided to walk up and take a look at the Panthéon. As I strolled I kept expecting to see a minefield of Doggie Gifts spread out before me, but that rumor turned out to be false. The horror stories I read in the travel guidebooks made it sound like you can’t make it a city block in Paris without incurring stainage. This wasn’t my experience, so I was free to look up and admire the nice ironwork balconies that decorated all of the buildings on the way north. I walked into the Place du Panthéon and was pleased to see the tip of the Eiffel Tower poking up behind the belle epoque buildings that surround the square. If there had been any doubt, I was now sure I had come to the right place and that the money had been well spent. I must have sat there for almost an hour, watching French cars and people go by.

Eventually I got peckish and started heading back to where I thought the hotel was. Streets in Paris run mostly at anything but 90º angles, and often at very misleading 75º angles so that you end up going NNW or worse when you mean to head N. I was soon lost. I was too proud to check the map and besides, I figured it was fun to be lost. Eventually I merged into hungry from peckish and started looking for a likely place to eat. What we call menus – the list of what’s to eat – are called la carte in France, and it is always posted clearly outside every restaurant, including prices. This was helpful. I had along a little phrase book that helped me decide if they had anything I wanted to eat. They eat lots of ducks and bunnies, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to follow suit.

I chose Le Restaurant E. Marty because it was in my price range and I recognized the word saumon – “salmon”. I poked my head in the door and before long there was a tall fellow talking to me. I gurgled up “un person“, but his “fumeur ou non fumeur” stumped me. He gurgled up “smokhing orr non smokhing” and I replied, barely nicking over my first serious French Hurdle. It turned out that was a pretty easy hurdle, because ordering was a panic: I ended up ordering:

carpaccio de saumon et saint-jacques
raie pochée à l’huile, au vinaigre et à l’échalote

More on this later. The waiter was a bit put off by my lack of French but he bore up OK, even resorting to a word or two of strained English now and then. Much nodding and smiling on my part seemed to help. “Merci” I knew, and used liberally.

It was here that I started my habit of ordering eau minéral gazuese, carbonated mineral water. I drank lots of it in Paris, and it’s fairly expensive. ~$3 for a half liter…ow! But it was always cold and tasted good and I always seemed to be a little behind on my water needs by the time I sat down to eat. One of the waitstaff brought a bowl full of hard, chewy, crispy bread (no butter), my half-carafe of red wine, and I was soon ready for anything.

The entrée arrived with a flourish: a plate-sized piece of thinly sliced salmon with a wonderful olive-oil based sauce, little shavings of green onion over the top and capre. I was amazed to hear that capre, those yummy little bits, were capers…I usually hate capers. The salmon was delightfully creamy. By the way, entrée means “entry” in French, and over there it means “appetizer”. I don’t know why we use it as “main course”, but it says something about our cooking.

Following was the plat principal, which turned out to be catfish. It was good, but the little bundles of vegetables surrounding it were even better. I could eat plates of the sort of vegetables they usually served off to the side. Eating catfish is a structural experience. The bone/cartilage appears in sheets: you eat a slab of fish, you peel off a sheet of bone; you eat a slab of fish, you peel… Very odd, but tasty.

Dessert was as amazing as the rest of the meal. Restaurants in America come up with all these weird plates of cookie/berry/sorbet stuff that I’ve never understood. Now I understand what they’re trying to do. I was served a cookie plate and large main plate. The cookie plate had 4 or 5 each of little sweet raisin cookies (somewhat dry and crispy) and slightly chilled, intense little chocolate ellipsoids with a dusting of chocolate flakes. The chocolate was some of the best I’ve ever had… The main plate had a scoop of good vanilla ice cream over which was poured a perfect, sweet heavy cream. Scattered around the rest of the plate was a collection of perfectly sweet raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, strawberries and cranberries, and gracefully completing the picture was a large, very thin sugar cookie lightly dusted with powdered sugar. This big cookie was placed just so, and the visual effect of the two plates was terribly exciting. This experience can be yours for just $500 RT air to Paris and $6.70 for the dessert. Unbelievable! You know what you can get me for Christmas, now, and I know what to get you.

At a table behind me, a group of older people were celebrating a birthday. The waiter presented a beautiful cake at one point, and then prepared it for serving at the sideboard next to my table. The cake preparation ritual was quite a show for me: each plate was first spread with some sort of fruit sauce he had heated up in a little fondue pot, then he sliced, moved the slice to the plate, and then re-drizzled with a little sauce. Every movement was clearly somewhat difficult, artistic, and flawless. No little dribbles of sauce here, no skewed or misplaced cake slices there, etc. It occurred to me that he was a professional, and that you don’t see professional waiters much in the US.

It was then 8:30 or 9, I was done eating, a little drunk and tired. I realized as I walked out that I still didn’t know where I was, although I assumed I was at least still in south Paris. I was surprised when my hotel turned out to be around the corner from the restaurant! Street names and signs in Paris are tricky: the street name can change every block even though it’s the same street, and the street signs are sometimes hard to find. There aren’t signposts like I’m used to; instead, a plaque with the street name is affixed to the side of the building at most corners.

Editorial remarks, circa 2010: Reading this reminds me vividly how much I loved so much about my trip. Theater in London, outstanding food in Paris… I’m a little numb to massive botanical gardens now, having been to dozens since this trip. But Kew Gardens is really where my love of gardens was emphatically born.

My 15 seconds of fame

One of my favorite internet buddies is Leela, who blogs about edibles at SheSimmers.com. I started reading her stuff by a series of odd coincidences: She’s is a Twitter pal with Sheryl who blogs at Crispy Waffle; Sheryl worked ever-so-briefly with me at Microsoft years ago, and was mostly pals with my long-time real-life buddy Poppa Dee (who holds forth at the mostly-photography-but-also-foodish Noise-to-Signal).

Leela is something else. Not only does she get 1000 page-views per day on her food blog, but she speaks Greek, Hebrew and heaven knows what other sort of languages as part of her grad work in philology, plus Thai (from growing up in Thailand) plus Russian (go figure!).

Anyway! I started following her on Twitter and reading her yummy blog when one day out of the blue she invited me to come up with a recipe to turn into a blog post for SheSimmers.com. Weird, huh!? I mean… I cook, but I’m a dilettante.

We ping-ponged the recipe and post ideas back and forth a bit, and the story is now viewable here. The meta-story is mostly interesting to me and Leela, but I do hope you enjoy the recipe — it was my favorite thing to eat when I was a kid. I’m working on cooking Leela’s version of it this week, and I’ll post later about how it turned out.

Before I go, here are a few of my favorite posts from Leela… Lemon-ricotta cookies (people love these), Mushroom Cigars (really!), an interview with a fella in Bangkok who loves taxicabs and their drivers, a wildly diverse post on scones and Monty Python and something I really need to make soon: grandma’s fried banana cakes with jasmine-infused honey.

Also, if you are interested in language and culture, I’d highly recommend these two posts from Leela’s non-food blog. Funny, complex and informative.

Finally, don’t forget to check out the Vinny-related post! My Mexican-Inspired Lasagna vs Uncle Vinny’s Mexican Casserole.

Wear Your Best Socks to the Louvre (part 5)

8/25/98 – Tuesday

Tuesday morning I woke up late, went to Leicester Square to buy theater tickets and made a beeline for the National Gallery, where it’s paintings galore. I’m going to let FB guide the discussion, here:

Vermeer: Lived to 43, made only 30 paintings. Did two versions of A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal. (The difference between the two, according to the fabulous audio guide, may be revealing. The earlier of the two seems to suggest virtue, patience, steadfastness, etc. while the later Young Woman shows subtle signs of treachery, unfaithfulness, etc.) The version I found on the internet is clearly the virtuous one…

“her traditional attribute” This is the first time I’d run across this phrase, a staple of art historians. Examples: The tiny wooden cross with the long vertical beam is the “traditional attribute” of the infant St. John. Other funny habits of art historians include their looking for associations between various physical objects and intangible things. Quails are traditionally associated with Truth. Dandelions are associated with the suffering of Christ on the cross. Ivy represents steadfastness. A final note on this topic is that “Joseph is often represented as being an old man at the time of Jesus’ birth,” according to one historian, although there’s no reason I know of to assume Joseph was greatly older than Mary. I notice, too, that Mary is often depicted as a young girl in both “Virgin and Child” and “Piéta” settings.

Ovid – The Metamorphosis, is the basis for The Death of Actaeon by Titian. Poor Actaeon is shown transformed into a deer and set upon by his own dogs. This painting has a wonderful and terrifying blurriness to it. I often complain about blurriness in impressionist paintings….so sue me if I contradict myself a little.

Titian’s blues in Bacchus and Ariadne, oxide (cheap) and ultramarine. The beginning of my obsession with ultramarine on my trip. I was stunned by the wonderful blues in this painting, and the audioguide told me about the difference between the very expensive lapis lazuli that had to be mined versus the readily available blue oxide. I got curious about it and later used the Chemistry Library here at UW to find out that the term “ultramarine” can be used to refer to either Lazulite, the chemical name for the types of lapis lazuli that can be mined in Afghanistan and Chile, or the chemical replacement for Lazulite. I bought a bag of “artificial” ultramarine later in Holland. More on that later.

Peter Bruegel – Adoration of Kings. A fresh, twisted interpretation of the boring ol’ Visitation of the Magi. Everybody looks like they’re on the take or on the make. It’s too bad the internet version is so small, because the faces are what makes it unique.

Across the room were two more warped images: Two Tax Gatherers by Marinus van Reymerswaele and A Grotesque Old Woman by some other fellow. It always makes me cheerful to see such abnormality. The latter was social/fashion commentary on the vexing issue of old women exhibiting charms that have long since left the barn. My grandfather is reported to have said, “there’s nothing uglier than a naked old white woman.” I found one example of Marinus’ work on the web. It’s worth a giggle.

Love that Bronzino, Portrait of a Young Man. I think it looks like Art Deco painting, but I’m an ignorant philistine. The award for the painter with the funniest name goes to Filippino Lippi. Love that Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo.

Walking out of the National Gallery, I wandered down skirting the edge of St. James Park, past Whitehall, Big Ben and across the river to….to….well, I didn’t know where I was going, so I stopped and had lunch. Lunch was grand, because for only £2.50 I had a nice simple sandwich, an apple and two pints of milk. I sat for an hour and read another Guardian while I ate, pushing the entire experience to the top of my list as far as “eating in London” goes.

The nearest attraction was the Imperial War Museum, and not having anything else in mind to see, I headed that way. Along the way I saw a group of young boys harassing a red-uniformed parking cop lady. They were yelling things at her as I approached, and when she turned her back one of the kids threw a small rock at her. It missed, but she noticed it and looked at me. I shrugged and said, “I guess kids are the same everywhere….”, and I still don’t know what I meant by that. They didn’t throw any rocks at me when I passed them.

The War Museum was interesting, mostly for the comprehensive exhibits on WWI and WWII. I developed some curiosity about WWI that I had never felt before. It had always seemed too long ago to bother about, but seeing all of the recruiting posters ["Women! Don’t keep your men home when King and Country need them. What will they say when they are asked later what they did during the war?"] made it seem much more real. It’s worthy of note that, at least during the start of WWI, there was no draft in England and the government did not have the power to force men to fight in France to defend France. Germany was hoping to win the war in a month and a half, taking France before the British could come to help. Don’t get me started on WWI, I’ll talk your ears off.

The WWII area had a room on the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen camp, and included a 10-minute video taken at that time. This video was more disturbing than anything I saw at the Holocaust museum in DC, particularly because it showed bulldozers pushing bodies into mass graves. It was a silent video and there was no explanation as to why they treated the bodies this way. My assumption is that the number of dead was too great and/or that the bodies had decomposed too much to handle. In any case, it was a difficult thing to watch and an impossible thing to understand. Beside the video there were stark black and white photos of the 12 Bergen-Belsen guards condemned at Nuremberg, each face fused with defiant, guilty anger.

It was a curious experience to walk out past the 15″ battleship guns that “guard” the entrance the museum after having gone through it in the mindset of a pacifist and a foreigner. They seem to be put there to stir patriotism in the visitors, but they stirred quite a different feeling in me.

Dinner that night was not memorable, but the play was grand and I had pleasant company to discuss it with afterwards. My company was Suwattee, a Parisian who was also staying at Clive’s. She mentioned that morning that she was going to see Major Barbara that night and suggested that I try to get a ticket, too. She was born in India, has lived in France for years and also speaks dazzling English. It’s a fairly rare experience to feel less fluent in your own language because of the extraordinary fluency of a non-native speaker! She came to London for vacation with her Moroccan-born husband Albaz and their charming little daughter Sarah.

We enjoyed the play, one of G.B. Shaw’s more famous works. If you haven’t ever read any Shaw, pick up Saint Joan; that’s how I got hooked. MB was actually written to be filmed, so the version we saw was missing maybe 15% of the action. I was aware at various times during the play that I was in the plush Piccadilly Theater having paid £20 to listen to a high-falutin’ discourse on the struggles of poor, the nature of war and the oppression of the weak by the strong. The obvious, bull-headed argument here is that if any of us really cared about the poor, we’d have given the £20 to a charity. This argument carries a bit less water in the Europe, where they tend to have fairly humane programs set up for the homeless. The contrast between streets in America vs. streets in Europe is almost night and day. Their homeless aren’t desperate like ours, and there aren’t many of them. The few I saw seemed fairly relaxed about my unwillingness to produce spare pence or guilders because there are social programs to keep people from starvation and exposure. Panhandlers in London seemed to do it for a lark, I never did see any in Paris or Brugge, and in Amsterdam the few I saw were obviously going to buy drugs. Back to the play: Shaw being Shaw, we laughed through a third of it and did our best to keep up through the rest.

Suwattee and I debated the highlights of the play on the tube ride home. Towards the end of the ride I was engaged in conversation with an old fellow who asked where I was from, guessing Canada. As a kid he had transcribed letters for wounded soldiers during WWII. Many were American, so he had learned to spell “Massachusetts” and “Connecticut” and knew where Nevada was in relation to California, etc. He said everyone loved the Americans and was glad they were there to help, but he remembered kids like him were especially fond of the US soldiers because they gave away a lot of candy. (“Any cigarettes?” I asked.)

8/26/98 – Wednesday

Morning, and I rush out to the Tate Gallery. I was excited to see two portraits by Meredith Frampton on display, but the rest of the museum is ICKY. It seemed like room after room of Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol. They need to have one painting by Warhol (Double Elvis would do) and one by Rothko (aren’t they all the same?), with a big sign next to the pair that says “Then some charlatans came around and made fools of the art world for a few decades. This embarrassing period is represented by the two crappy works shown here.” Get out the big red IGNORANT stamp and label my forehead. See if I care.

(I do, however, enjoy Giacometti, Francis Bacon and Henry Moore.)

Language note: Here is where I start lobbying for the use of “Mil Zero”, “Mil One” and “Mil 17″ as opposed to “the year two thousand”, “the year two thousand and one” and “the year two thousand and seventeen”. So instead of saying, “I expect to graduate in the year two thousand eight” you can just say “I expect to graduate in Mil Eight”. This thought was prompted by overhearing someone at the Globe Theater refer to “the Millenium Year”, which I thought was quite elegant.

Lunch was, of course, spent reading the Guardian and drinking pints of that splendid British milk. I suppose I should have checked to see if CJD is transmitted through cow’s milk, but….well, if I seem a bit “mad”, you’ll know why.

As You Like It is probably my favorite Shakespeare play chiefly because of the feisty, brilliantly witty Rosalind dazzling us at its center, but it has two other grand characters to recommend it: Jacques and Touchstone.

The Globe was the first place I ever saw a live production of AYLI, and as I’ve said before I’m not a connoisseur of the theater. But, having said that, let me say what stood out in the way they chose to stage the play. First of all, they used the entire building as the stage. During the performance the actors might rush down the front steps into the pit where the 500 or so “groundlings” were standing, pushing them out of the way as they made towards the rear exit. A few moments later they might charge in from one of the other exits, again hollering for the “cheap seats” to get out of the way and let them through. In one instance, a fight between two of the actors was held all over in the pit, and the groundlings had to keep scrambling to get out of the way. It was quite a sight from my “top o’ the Globe” seats. (I would encourage future travelers not to get seats way up at the top, even though these are supposed to be the best seats because my viewing angle was a bit steep. Aim for the first or second tier.) They also used the different tiers of the theater as “speaker platforms”; now and then a sound-effects chap or dame would show up among the patrons (dressed in period outfits, of course) and make little bird whistle calls to simulate the sounds of the Forest of Arden; or an ensemble of five or six players would appear distributed around the seats and begin playing lute, harp, etc. all in sync. It was very nicely done, making for a pleasantly natural “stereo” effect.

In fact, throughout the entire play there was no technology used to enhance the experience. No lighting, no amplified sound and no machines pulling curtains up and down. They only hold plays during the day, and if it rains, the groundlings have to suffer. The actors have to speak fairly loudly to make themselves heard, although I suppose this is true on Broadway, too? They actually built a fire on stage with tinder and flint, or at least it looked like they did.

Whenever I read a play and then see it performed on stage or in a movie, I’m always amazed at the funny lines I’ve missed in reading it. Sometimes I’m a little disappointed that they make us laugh at something I find sad or tragic – players always seem to go for the cheap laugh – but usually I’m tickled to see the off-color interpretations they can bring to seemingly sober material. Touchstone, for example, was a walking bone-machine, not the naughty academic I had him pegged for. The man is so horny, to quote Tom Waits, that the crack of dawn better be careful around him. His costume prominently featured a harlequined 10″ strap-on that he wore and “utilized” each time he appeared. Subtlety? Subtlety is for the weak.

I meandered northwest to see my next play, finding my way through the massive financial district. It was just after 5, so the sidewalks outside the bars were packed with men holding pints, each one of them wearing the same dark blue suit. There may have been some subtle differences in cut and color, but I’ve never seen anything like it here in the States. Our guys are relatively free to slide around in the tan/light blue/grey/black/dark grey areas, staying pretty well clear of the pinks, maroons and greens. But the Brits are hung up on dark blue. Even the women (oh, the financier women!) had suits of the same color, some (Hallelujah!) with short skirts, some not.

Dinner was mediocre. Pasta and broccoli. Yadda yadda. Service was horrible.

The play was Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. I’d never seen it, never read it, barely ever heard of it, but everything except Salomé that I’d read by Wilde was a corker so I was looking forward to a great discovery. Upon arriving at the theater I was told that my expensive ticket had been upgraded to a very expensive ticket due to a light crowd. I wondered if the very expensive ticketholders were miffed by this sort of policy, but I didn’t let it worry me. I had a terrific seat, 4 rows back on the best balcony, a little to stage right. Stage right is my left, right? As I sat there and marveled at the red velvet/gold trim/imperial splendour of it all, the arrival of the rest of the audience was scrutinized by the image of Queen Victoria on a massive medallion hanging as a sort of curtain over the stage. I would say she looked peaceful and queenly, but she didn’t. Shown in profile, she looked imperious and sniffy, as though we ought to be grateful she let the rumpled lot of us tread the pile of her fancy digs.

Various bells dung, the old broad was hoisted up into the flies and the play began. It was really a grand thing, you know. A charming cast, particularly the Oscar Wilde-ish fellow who was a wonderful mixture of smooth, booming, and triumphantly self-confident. One lovely scene had two butlers serving tea to two women who had been avoiding each other throughout the play but who had finally been forced into confrontation. As the two built up towards a screeching fury, the butlers walked back and forth behind them in slow motion with supremely patient regimental precision; every turn a graceful pivot, every step a gently mocking silence. This scene was one of the priceless moments of my trip.

After the play, the fellow in the seat behind me introduced himself, mentioned he was from San Francisco, and said he was on his way over to see a “highly recommended” show featuring Thai transvestites. I declined his invitation and found my way to the subway. “You can see that sort of thing on the subway for free,” I thought, lying to myself. I’ll probably go to my grave without seeing Thai Chicks with Dicks.

Back at home, Clive told me a great ocean story. It won’t be nearly as good when I tell it, so I apologize in advance. He was first mate on a ship off the coast of China (say), headed north. Two deck hands thought they heard someone yelling in the water, and ran to tell their boss. Their boss called his boss, who called his boss, who….eventually, somebody called Clive, and the captain was standing right there, so Clive didn’t have to call anyone. At this point, Clive informed me that the theme of this story is “communication”. The captain immediately ordered the boat to turn around and head back to the area of the yelling. Here Clive made use of some fancy nautical term to describe how the boat maneuvered to turn around…suffice it to say that us landlubbers don’t think much about it, but there are many ways to turn a boat, and this time they did a turn that caused them to head right back the way they’d come. Sure enough, the crew was able to spot a little dot out in the water, so the boat came to a full stop. Clive and a few other guys hopped in a little boat and headed out to him, but the sea was fairly rough and it was hard to get a bead on where the guy was. But, because they had walkie-talkies, the guys up on the big boat with the vantagepoint could tell them exactly which direction to go to pick him up. (See? Communication.) It seems the poor fellow had been floating in the Sea of Japan for about 36 hours after having fallen off the ship he was on. He had noticed that the cargo on the edge of the deck was loose, and so he did two wrong things: he didn’t tell anyone that he was going out to try to fix it and he didn’t make sure to keep a good grip as he clambered around at the edge fiddling around with knots and levers. A big wave came along, he lost his balance and oops! into the drink. Various boats had gone by him, but Clive’s was the only one who heard him yell. Lucky, what?

Editorial remarks, circa 2010: It’s interesting that virtually every one of the hyperlinks I used in the original is now broken. Since then, the number of paintings that are viewable online has exploded, so I’m able to link to the 2nd “Woman at a Virginal” by Vermeer, for example. (I can’t tell which is which, by the way; they both look steadfast to me!)

Also, note the continued vindictiveness against Warhol? Sigh. These days I’m positively affectionate towards Rothko… somewhere in my mid-30s I finally understood what he was getting at.

My complaints about blurriness and impressionism are funny to me now, too. I’ve really come to appreciate the power of vagueness and uncertainty in art.

Today, the paintings on the National Gallery website are available in large sizes so you can zoom in and see all sorts of detail. Back in 1998 it was like pulling teeth to maybe find a small, grainy photo of a lot of the art I fell in love with on this trip.

What’s all this Louvre business?!

I just started posting a batch of stories from a vacation I took in 1998. To start at the beginning, just click here.

Wear Your Best Socks to the Louvre (part 4)

8/23/98 – Sunday

Having landed in London, I made my way through the long passport line, the even longer customs line, and through the long tunnel to the subway. The passport examination was pretty easy. My interrogator didn’t seem to be very curious about me or my political beliefs, and she didn’t ask if I was carrying anything potentially hazardous like a Bon Jovi tape or an Andy Warhol painting. Frankly, I think Britain ought to screen more carefully for that sort of thing. The dupes at the Tate Gallery have obviously been suckered in to the “Andy Warhol is an artist” trap.

I spent a good 45 minutes at the subway station trying to decide how best to get from hither to yon. My destination was Snaresbrook, across London to the east, so I ended up buying an All-Zone, All-Day pass. This cost as much as taking a family of four to Jack in the Box. Well, it wasn’t quite that bad, but £4.30 did seem a bit harsh. I also wasted a perfectly good £ on a map of the Underground, even though I had a perfectly good map in my guidebook and every station has a perfect map of the whole system. The automated ticket machines are dazzling in their complexity, like something out of Star Trek. In France it’s even worse because all the buttons are in crypto-Gallic.

As the train rolled up into the dreary West-London suburbs, I was charmed to note a girl about my age liberally applying deodorant underneath her sweatshirt. I, with my high standards of public comportment, prefer being stinky to public pit-salving. I clutched my baggage tightly, ever watchful for the London Underground hooligans and snatchpurses I read so much about in the guidebooks. Snatchpurses failed to appear. (In fact, I’ll cut the tension right now and let you know that I wasn’t robbed, threatened, intimidated or even slapped in the course of my travels, but I was on high alert for most of my trip. It was only upon landing safely in Portland that I relaxed back to DefCon 1. My attackers may have been affrighted by my tough, bearded, heavily tattooed visage and my habit of clenching a bloody Bowie knife in my teeth.)

Hounslow Central was where I first heard “MIND THE GAP,” and within a few short hours I was sick of hearing it. I won’t trouble you with it more, but I will mention that there’s just as much of a gap in Paris and no patronizing reminder.

I was keenly interested in all of the unusual traffic patterns in London:

* Pedestrian crossings, for example, across small- to medium-size roads are highlighted with a narrowing of the roadway towards an island of black gates, pottery, shrubs, flashing lights, and a brilliant blue circular sign with a arrow pointing down at an angle towards where you’ll hit a small child if you don’t stop. This was particularly interesting for me because the one traffic ticket I’ve received in my lifetime was for violating the right-of-way of a small child.
* You never see a sign marked “EXIT” in London, it’s always “WAY OUT”.
* As you might guess, it’s disconcerting to walk around on London streets because you can never be sure which way the traffic is going to go. One way and two way traffic flows are equally prevalent. My first day walking around I looked both ways three or four times before proffering a footsie to the blacktop, even though there are helpful “Look Right” and “Look left” signs printed on the road where said footsie should go. I could never be sure which way to look, because for all I knew there was some crazy American like me in a rental car who was confused or who was fomenting traffic insurrection. I myself spent a bit of time doing preliminary pencil work on the complexities of re-routing London traffic so that it would conform to the (non-Commonwealth) standard, but decided it was hopeless…the Brits are too far gone with their Wrong Sided Driving Foolishness.
* Other irregularities are the traffic signals that start out with the red on, then the yellow joins in before both blink off in favor of green.

I got to sample London traffic first hand because the Central underground line I was taking from the airport to Snaresbrook was broken in the middle for repairs, knocking out about 5 stops. All the subway riders had to come up to the surface, get on a red double-decker bus and be shuttled through the twisty, logic-defying London roads, to each of the five subway stops. At the fifth stop we got off the bus, went back down the stairs, got back on the tube, and off we went. This little experience pointed out how fast and efficient the subway actually is compared to busses. (The Underground is bad compared to the Paris Métro, though, which is faster, quieter and runs more frequently.)

The double decker bus had a very strange-sounding diesel engine, and because I sat behind the driver I got to watch him fiddle with the funny shifters to make it go. There’s both a driver and a ticket-taker, for some reason.

I stayed at the home of a retired British Navy instructor named Clive. His house has about five rooms that he lets out to world travelers or folks who come to London to learn English. My room was comfy, although it was only 20 yards or so from the Underground that seemed to rumble by every 5 minutes. Clive loves to chat and half the reason I went to Europe was to chat with the locals so we got on splendidly. Upon hearing that I was born in Salem, Oregon, he said he’d often wondered which Salem it was that did the witch burning, OR or MA?  We talked about the BBC versus US television, a bit about his teaching days in the Navy and my virtually accent-free English. On learning that I was a chemist, he for some reason brought up the word “atrophy” as a test of my chemical knowledge. He surprised me by informing me that he’d heard it used to refer to chemicals that had sat on a shelf too long and had been oxidized or otherwise lost their sparkle. I surprised him by telling him the real meaning of atrophy, which is physiological. Various dictionaries were unable to support his use of the word, but the jury is rarely all in when it comes to negating definitions of words…please correspond if you can help, here.

He was quick to point out that the unusual music playing on the radio was that of Northumberland bagpipes as opposed to the usual form of bagpipe, discernable by the lack of the drone underneath and the overall lighter feel of the music. Some in my family have been known to dislike bagpipe music but I enjoyed it.

After having splashed my face a little to wake up, I rode into town with Clive and a Portuguese couple who he was dropping off at the tube station. Much smiling and nodding and gesticulating as they made their way off.  Wearing Clive’s loaner leather jacket to keep off the drizzle, I found my way to St. Bartholomew’s the Great (built 1123 A.D.). It’s a blackened hulk of a thing nestled in among some other, newer upstart whippersnapper buildings a mere century or two old. Standing in front of an Authentic Old Building, survivor of the fires and bombings of London, I felt a bit new. I poked my head in. There was a service going on so I didn’t get to see much of the church, but I left them a pound because they had signs up about going out of business if us nosey tourists didn’t pony up. I scurried off to St. Paul’s Cathedral around the corner, which is in no danger of shutting down.

Everyone has heard of St. Paul’s, everyone goes there and everybody pays through the nose, £4 and change. Except me. I was content to listen to the clangy bells, look up at the blackening stone dome and consider it “seen.” The odd thing was walking away as the bells kept going. Every 20 feet or so the sound would bounce off a different set of buildings….a decidedly eerie effect.

I walked down Fleet Street, intending to see the Temple Church. They must have that thing hidden very well because I made three circles looking for it bootlessly. Instead I found the Thames (big, wet, hard to miss) and the Tower Bridge. Near the TB I bumped into my first Big Group of Elderly Germans, a fairly common sight in the touristy parts of London. By this time it was getting to be 4pm and I hadn’t slept much at all since that morning long ago in Washington DC, so I bought a Time Out magazine (it has all the theatre/club listings) and headed back to Clive’s. I barely managed to stay awake on the bus, I was so tired. That night, lying in bed thumbing through the TO I resolved to see more than just the Shakespeare play. I was at the epicenter of English Language Theater, and by God I was going to make the most of it.

8/24/98 – Monday

I woke up feeling refreshed and almost perky. Breakfast at Clive’s is always the same: You start with boiling hot tea, a slice of very good “Gallia” or honeydew melon fresh from Clive’s garden, cold toast with butter and a rainbow of jams and cereal if you want it. Clive is tireless in promoting the Canadian corn fields, the most sublime ears of which are used to craft the millions of boxes of Corn Flakes served in the UK. I prodded him several times on his certainty of their Canadian origin but he would not yield. As an American I felt obligated to protest that we crank out some damned fine corn in Iowa, too, but the irony of corn patriotism seemed lost on him. Cereal is followed by a hot plate of Spaghetti-O’s, bacon and/or sausage and an egg of some kind. If you don’t watch him he’ll try to give you a fresh sliced tomato, too, but I nipped that in the bud. (One of the first phrases I learned when preparing for my trip was sans tomate.)

That's Clive in the middle, surrounded by guests...

I needed a jacket to fend off the wet and Clive recommended several “charity shops” in the area. These are just like our “thrift stores” only more British, i.e., smaller and commandeered by little old British ladies. I charity shopped fruitlessly for an hour or two, but the experience was worthwhile for the surreal quality of walking around on British streets. Prominently displayed in the window of the Woodford Business Centre was a Dell 486DX/33 with an 82Mb hard drive and 7M of RAM, including that fabulous Win 3.1.1 program for a mere £295, roughly $500. I walked into a little breakfast shop and bought a glass of milk for 45p that was poured for me from a pitcher sitting on the counter. I drank my milk and started in on my first copy of the Guardian, a refreshing newspaper for a young lad fed up with US media.

In the Guardian, for example, I was able to follow the story of the US’s retaliatory bombings of the chemical factory in Sudan and the “terrorist nerve center” in Afghanistan from a balanced/critical perspective as opposed to the “this is what the Government told us” perspective of the US media. The paper was openly skeptical about the truth of the comments and explanations coming from the US State Dept. because of the information that was coming out of Sudan about the nature of the work done at the factory. The paper sent investigative reporters to both countries to get a first-hand look at the sites and ask a lot of questions. It was from this paper that I heard about the cruise missiles that actually missed Afghanistan (“bad guys” according to the State Dept.) and hit Pakistan (“good guys”), and the subsequent protests of Pakistan. I also learned about the several cruise missiles (~$1 million a piece) that failed to explode upon landing. Further, the base in Afghanistan was revealed to be a few dusty shacks harboring a few dusty guys with machine guns, not the “high tech terrorist training camp” and sophisticated military base the US tried to sell it as. None of this information was deemed worthy of column space, apparently, according to a friend who reads the Oregonian front to back every day and didn’t hear a word of it. After reading Noam Chomsky for the past few years and getting cranky about “corporate media,” I was beginning to wonder if I was just losing touch with reality. It was refreshing to have such a concrete example of what I’d been suspecting. (Note: I have yet to actually go through the New York Times for the same period and see if this bears up.)

My charity shopping done, I tubed over to the British Museum. There I took in a series of marble reliefs lifted from the Parthenon that illustrated helpfully the little-known wars between the Centaurs and the Men. I had before been quite skeptical about the existence of Centaurs, but seeing them right there in marble in deadly combat with men in the British Museum was enough to convince me that they exist. I witnessed a charming confrontation over personal space near the Rosetta Stone: a Brit smacked a Japanese tourist in retaliation for his aggressive shouldering attempts to secure an audience with the basalt. I went past the Stone several times and never did see anyone get a good clear picture of the thing. It’s rock! It’s got scribbles! Get over it! Somehow I was nonplussed by the really famous things, like the Elgin Marbles, and was more interested in the bas-reliefs nearby that illustrated the exploits of a little-known Mesopotamian king. As I roamed through the Museum des Brits, I found myself thinking, “I’m not impressed. Why am I not impressed? Good God, this is the British Museum! Show some class!” but I just couldn’t. I kept looking, though, and finally I found two things I thought were really cool:

* George Bernard Shaw’s name inscribed in marble over the grand staircase as one of the major benefactors of the museum.
* The clock room was worth paying £20 to see, and I got into the Museum for free. The room is impossible to describe accurately, so I’m not going to try. But if you like tiny machinery and gold plating turns you on, take a hint: when you get dragged to the BM, let your dragger go spend the day blinking at 600-year-old silverware and 350-year-old hard boiled egg cups while you groove out in the clock room.

Note: I should say that the guided tours and the audio tours of all the Museums I attended added a lot to the experience for not a lot of cash. I hadn’t thought of this plan while I was at the BM, so I didn’t get as much out of it as I should have. If I go back, I’ll pay for the tour and maybe figure out why the damn Centaurs are interesting.

Other interesting sights at the British Museum were a series of Syrian (?) reliefs and the Egyptian stuff.

After leaving the BM I wandered down to the National Gallery just in time for it to close. I wandered around town a bit, had dinner in an expensive but only average Indian restaurant, and headed back to Clive’s. He and I stayed up late talking about literature, drama and the fact that the University of Cairo is the oldest university in the world.

Language notes:

* The tableau at the Rosetta Stone includes the note that the Stone was named for its “find-place,” a word I’d not encountered.
* A girl of 5 on the subway chided an adult acquaintance for some misdeed: “You’re evil!” It was cute.
* British men use several terms of endearment with women they know: “dear”, “love” and, best of all, “petal”.
* Sign in the subway station: “NO BUSKING. £200 FINE” FB says: seems a bit high if I know what “busking” is, and even if I don’t. Clive later informed me that busking is public entertainment in hopes of making cash. While I was in London I saw at least 4 subway buskers, each of them noisy as hell, none of them making anywhere near enough to pay a fine that large. I think I thought “busking” was kissing in public. Go ahead, laugh.

Editorial remarks, circa 2010: Not sure what I had against Andy Warhol back then. I mean, he’s not my favorite these days, but you have to admire his flair.
Also: Was Clive for real?! Who in the UK has even heard of Salem, Oregon? …and if one had, how could one possibly wonder if a West-Coast city was the site of the 17th-century witch trials?!

Wear Your Best Socks to the Louvre (part 3)

8/21/98 – Friday

This was quite a day.

Woke up early, zipped down to The Mall of America, the real Mall of America. Popped out of the tube and blinked in the sun as I beheld the Washington Monument, The Capitol building waaay down the Mall, and the Lincoln Memorial at the other end. The grass was in pretty bad shape, but it was summer and tourists are tramply. Skeptical as I am about displays of patriotism, I was surprisingly excited as I walked along amid the monuments and grandery. My first stop was the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

It’s laid out in an oblique “V” angle. You start at one end of the “V” and walk down to the bottom, which is about 25 feet below ground level. The first panel has three names, the next has 15, then 50, etc., and as you walk down the list of names gets taller until it towers above you. Then you walk back out the other way, and the list comes down to the last few. It’s a very physical approach to bringing home the impact of some 58,000 names of the dead. Just don’t forget that you’d need about 35 such monuments to list the 2 million dead in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, etc. We don’t hear much about them, and a lot of them were civilians: Vietnamese mothers, children, grandpas, etc.

Next was the Lincoln Memorial, a very stirring place and probably the nicest monument I saw on my trip. I was interested to notice that the arms of the chair AL sits on are sculpted in the form of a bound bundle of rods or sticks — it appears to be fasces, the Roman symbol of power and the root of the word “fascism”. The guard told me that the design for the chair was intended to duplicate Roman sculpture, so this would make sense. The monument was built before Mussolini created the term “fascism”, of course. While crouching at the foot of a pillar directly in front of Abe making a sketch of his chair, something fell on my hat and bounced to the floor in front of me. I was surprised to see a wasp and spider, both about the same size (large!), both obviously wounded because they were staggering around trying to recover their senses. I looked above me at the pillar, and saw that many spiders had made webs in the concave sections that run the length of the pillar. The wasp must have been caught and struggled with the spider, each being injured by the other’s sting. The wasp was eventually able to fly away, but the spider stayed groggy for quite a while. I tried to think of a Civil War analogy, here, but couldn’t. Sorry.

I stood in line to get my free ticket for the Holocaust Museum and went over for a quick peek at the M of Natural History while I waited for my entrance time. There I held a hissing cockroach in my hand, saw a 4″ long grasshopper and a spider that was as big as my head.

The FB includes some Holocaust facts you might have missed. I include them here because I think it’s necessary for us not to forget what happened, and I find several of the stories interesting for religious reasons.

* 1937: Sterilization of children of the union between German women and French/African soldiers occupying Germany during post-WWI.
* Nov 12, 1938: Nazis close all remaining Jewish businesses.
* Jehovah’s Witnesses were sent to the concentration camps to work with the other Häftlinge, but had a special status: any time they chose to renounce their religion and join the war effort, they were free to go. Many died, and not a single one recanted. (Never let it be said that Christians or Muslims have the market cornered on suicidal devotion to faith.)
* While most church groups cooperated with Hitler, the individual denominations resisted unification, i.e. Lutherans refused to form a single church with Catholics.
* Himmler suggested that Polish education be stopped at the 4th grade, as the Poles were intended to be used as a “servant race” and had no need of further education. Teaching reading was not advised.
* Connecting paths at Treblinka were paved with Jewish tombstones. Treblinka was staffed with 120 Ukrainian volunteers and 30 SS personnel. Between 750,000 and 879,000 people were killed there. Treblinka was unlike Auschwitz in that it was a “killing center”, not a concentration camp. No work was done at Treblinka.

An additional comment about the Holocaust museum. This was the one place in my travels where I felt that the tourists showed some self-control in a place that called for it. In Ste. Chapelle, St. Paul-St. Louis and Notre Dame I was really disappointed to find people talking noisily, taking scads of flash photos contrary to posted signs and generally being a nuisance. Some places call for a certain amount of gravitas, and most tourists aren’t up for it.

Back to the Museum of Natural History I went. The rock/gemstone collection was fascinating. They had a paper printed on asbestos as a novelty for the 1904 World’s Fair, imprinted with the words “Official Paper of His Satanic Majesty”.

Quartz with malachite looks like broccoli. Cerussite (PbCO3) looks like snowflakes. All the gold in history, melted down, would take up 59’ x 59’ x 59’, point being that that isn’t very much gold…. They had a little rock mounted on a table that you were encouraged to rub. It was a piece of Mars! I forgot to ask how they knew that, but I’ll take their word for it. If anyone needs to know, I touched it with my right thumb and index finger.

I’d been looking forward to “The Smithsonian”. Listening to people talk about it since I was a child, I developed this picture in my head of a single building, five or six floors tall, with each floor having 100 acres of floor space. In the entryway of the building I imagined that they had a complete Saturn 5 rocket and the Wright Brothers’ airplane and, oh, I don’t know, maybe the USS Ohio suspended 40 feet above the Information desk with guy wires. It turns out to be ~18 buildings spread out along the Mall. I managed to hit the Natural History Museum (thrice) and National Air and Space Museum, but didn’t have time for the rest. The Space museum was neat, but not that neat. True to form, I expected everything to be bigger. I want to see 900 yards of the Statue of Liberty, and I want to see a Saturn V rocket. I was almost satisfied to see SkyLab, but it only had one of its solar panels attached. And besides, it wasn’t the real SkyLab; it was the emergency backup SkyLab in case the first one went missing.
I think my favorite part of the Air and Space Museum was a 10’ long model of the USS Enterprise, an aircraft carrier of the US Navy. The model took some poor guy several years and 12,000 hours of work to build. The flight deck was jammed full of model planes and helicopters; the real ship must have some kind of elaborate valet service to jockey the F-14s around. There is also a crane to lift planes up and down from the top deck to the deck underneath. Actual length: 342m, height: 76m. Yow!

There are a lot of noisy cicadas in DC. Cicadas sit together in trees and stridulate; that is, they make noise by rubbing various bits against other bits, and they don’t do it quietly. The stridulation goes in an oscillating cycle that will last for a few minutes and then stop for a few minutes. It can give you a jump if they fire up right as you’re walking under their tree.

From the Flight Museum I wandered up to the Capitol building. It had now become pretty toasty in DC and I was compelled to stop several times during the day to buy cold drinks and ice cream bars. Right in front of the Capitol there was a very happy guy handing out free little cups of ice cold water. I drank two. He was representing some kind of organization for Peace and Brotherhood. I felt a lot more brotherly once I had that good cold water.

I didn’t have much interest in going in to see the Capitol. It had only been a few weeks before that the crazy guy had shot people in there and evidently they had squeezed the security up something fierce. There was a huge line to get in and Congress wasn’t in session, anyway. Or so I thought. At any rate, as I rounded the building and the Library of Congress hove into view, I started whistling “We Are the Champions” by Queen. It seemed a propos.

The L of C was stellar. The interior was all very flashy in a marble-and-gold trim renaissance sort of way, and everywhere you looked there was a noble quotation by some noble Great Thinker engraved in marble like so:

A MAN CAN’T GET TOO FAR IN THIS LIFE WITHOUT GOOD WEED AND A HOPPED-UP ’55 CHEVY –VOLTAIRE

I didn’t see that exact quote.

But it really was a wonderful building, and a few of the pictures turned out great. The central reading room is an enormous circular affair with high windows and a beautiful dome topping it off. It is closed to visitors without a library card (available free to all US citizens), but you can follow the tour group up some stairs and peek in through the gallery. It’s lovely thing to look at and I recommend it, especially if you have a book fetish like I do.

I also swooped in on the Supreme Court and looked at the Big Chairs. The Justices weren’t home. Downstairs there was a museum featuring bits on the lives of the current Justices. All I can say is “What makes a man eternally sour like William Rehnquist? Has the man ever smiled?” He looked grouchy in 1945, too. I would have come up with other similarly deep questions but the security people hustled me out for closing time. 5pm in Washington DC doesn’t mean the end of your tourism day, because The National Archives is open weeknights until 9pm. Huzzah! Knowing that the Archives keeps just about every important piece of paper related to the operation of the US Government, I anticipated being able to spend 4 hours perusing the dental records of President Taft and the Yalta Conference notes of President Wilson. Alas, this was not to be. They have the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights on display along with the Magna Carta (very impressive, but in a mighty dim light), but that was about it. There was a little gallery with a few dozen drawings on display, but I was expecting something gargantuan and again I was let down.

Back to Arne and Iain’s house in DuPont Circle, where we regrouped and headed out to Indian food, again at the expense of Arne the G-man. DC is loaded with every type of obscure foreign restaurant you could hope for. Icelandic? Iraqi? Uzbekistani? “Child’s play!” they scoff, leading you down an alley to a Lichtensteinian Stop-n-Chop Cannibal Buffet.

Walking around DC is a bit surreal. There are embassies stacked up like hotcakes, buttered with suits. You’re walking along the street, minding your own business on a Friday morning, and you glance down, noticing a line of plastic-wrapped copies of The Economist stretching out to the horizon, one in front of every stoop. Everyone in DC reads The Economist every week, or at least everyone who is in The Loop. You look to your left. Yow, there’s the Paraguayan embassy, with a Mercedes-Benz parked in front! Next door, that’s the Albanian embassy, with the unfamiliar flag hanging out front over the Saab with the diplomat license plate. To your right you see a rather ominous looking team: the Tanzanian embassy, two law offices and the Masonic Temple.

We watched The Simpsons that night, and with glee I report the following line:

“Hello, you may not remember me….I’m Homer Simpson, I ‘mooned’ for rebuttal?”

FB also notes here that Mr. Iain claims that due to some perturbation in the jet stream (or was it the Gulf Stream? Either way it doesn’t make sense…) some northernmost part of Scotland basks in semi-tropical warmth, complete with palm trees and white sandy beaches. I rely on my friends with expertise in things geographical and/or United Kingdomy (you know who you are) to come to my aid in dispelling this nasty spot of urban folklore.

8/22/98 – Saturday

Arne and I were up with the chickens (the very sleepy, hungover chickens), heading down to the Mall again to get me some more mental goodies before I left for Europa. We hit M of Natural History (that’s the third visit) in hopes of seeing the Hope Diamond. It had been closed off the day before. My report: it’s a rock and it’s blue and it’s big. I’m just not impressed with big diamonds, and besides, the blue isn’t blue enough and I’ve already described my feelings about size. But still, it was nice to have seen it.

We also zoomed through the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of Art. One of the rooms of the NPG featured robber barons…oh, I mean “captains of industry,” including the scary fellow you see here: John D. Rockefeller.

Before long it was time to head off to the airport. Arne and I said “Adieu,” and I was off. (Thanks, Arne ‘n’ Iain!)

The announcements on the flight to Europe were in English, then German, and then something I thought at first was French but turned out to be Dutch. When I later revealed my ignorance to a French speaker, she recoiled in horror. “Mistaking Dutch for French? Ignorant American swine!” As the days went by on the Continent, I began to see the light. Dutch, if anything, will be confused with German, although on the plane I cleverly remarked to FB that it sounds like German spoken with a French accent. My French interlocutor grudgingly accepted this observation.

The flight left at around 8pm and got into London at 7am, which felt like 1am. I got zero sleep on this flight because I was in an aisle seat with a rather wide lady next to me; my nerves were a bit on edge, this being my first international flight and all. $500 I was paying to be flung across the Atlantic. “Wasn’t it a DC to Heathrow flight just like this one that blew up a half hour into the flight?” I muttered nervously. It didn’t make me feel any better that computer troubles delayed our takeoff by over an hour. I soothed my troubled mind with the occasional Nutter Butter proffered by my large neighbor. It was her 5th wedding anniversary and she and her husband were on their way to London and Paris, two days in each place.

Behind me a squally baby gripped my hair and pounded my seat. His mother and grandmother thought he was a sweetie pie and blamed all of their troubles on the flight attendants who had promised, and failed to deliver, a “bassinet”, whatever that is. It’s a long, dull story and I apologize for having mentioned it, but it put my bottom on the grit slide.

At this point FB reminds me that I’m heading to London without proper equipment:

I will need to buy:
* Watch
* Light raincoat

You read that right: I left for Europe without a coat or a watch. Part of the fun of my trip was hunting around in “ordinary” parts of London, France and Amsterdam to get these items.

Editorial Remarks, circa 2010: Notice the lovely green color used in some of these images? That was the background color for the entire Wear Your Best Socks travelogue. Ugh.

Wear Your Best Socks To the Louvre (Part 2)

8/19/98 – Wednesday

Mark and I arose early, ran down to the Peter Pan depot and nipped onto the NYC bus with just a few minutes to spare. FB records two prize comments from our driver’s intro monologue:

We go New York City.

We gotta garbage can.

More notes from Fat Boy:
* The Ben Franklin bridge looks like the Golden Gate bridge, only less so. Wheat storage bins along the New Jersey Turnpike (I-95) look like they’ve been bombed out. Lots of burned out old buildings everywhere. Mark says, “Looks like Bosnia or something.”
* A sign along the road says: WARNING: Evergreen trees treated with noxious spray.
* I’d seen the G.O.D. trucks before (massive initials on the side of the truck), when I was in Baltimore, but I still laughed just as hard. Guaranteed Overnight Delivery.

We hopped off the bus and started walking at about 5 mph. I laughed, remembering that the bigger the city, the faster the average pace of its pedestrians. It was very funny to see all the hustling, but it suited Mark and me just fine. He’s a tall lad and I’m a masochist, so together we managed to walk about 15 miles in our Manhattaning. We headed south out of the station, walking down 8th Av. It was a very nice sunny day, 75 degrees F. We hadn’t had breakfast, so we stopped for a pastry and coffee. This turned out to be just about our best meal in NYC, unfortunately. I had a huge piece of coffee cake, I think, and I walked down the street with it in one hand, my coffee in another, and 5 pounds of tourism strapped to my shoulder. What with all that and my natural clumsiness I managed to smear cake on my glasses, upsetting my delicate ecosystem and finely tuned psychoneural pathways. Somehow I overcame the crisis, and found myself walking through SoHo, or was it Tribeca? We saw both, but the really memorable part here was Balducci’s, the fabulous exotic grocery where you can buy an unbelievable array of specialized imported foods. Bottled olives from a particular hillside of a particular region of Italy, Belgian butter, Andorran goat cheese and I don’t know what all. The place is packed floor to ceiling with packaged goodies.

Also along the way we saw a statue of La Guardia, one of the old big-shot mayors of New York. This got us talking about the current big-shot mayor of NY, Rudolph Giuliani. I can’t pronounce “Giuliani” so we just called him Rudy. Rudy figured prominently in most of our conversations and by the end of the day I felt like I knew him, or at least I felt like I knew the crazy guy named Rudy we invented stories about. Rudy of our invention was a “get the trash off the sidewalk”, no-nonsense kind of mayor who believed in cracking heads, building condos and putting a happy face on Times Square so you can go there with your wife, 8 year old son and your bitterly judgmental grandmother and while there be so swept up in the tide of good clean Americana you won’t notice that you’ve spent $200 on theatre tickets and $14 a pop for nasty deli sandwiches.

Mark is sick of America: “Enough with the yelling!” I promise him I’ll report on whether things are any better in Europe. (My conclusion: It’s a little quieter in Europe, but it may be that I didn’t notice because the yelling is in a lot of weird languages. The few Americans I bumped into were a mixed lot. Half were obnoxious and half were pokey quiet people like me.)

On we went to Chinatown, Little Italy and into Wall Street, the nerve center of international high finance. I can still conjure up the gestalt: Mark knew roughly where Wall Street was and we were feeling our way towards it, the anticipation gathering as the Suit Density around us rose, the walls of the concrete canyons getting higher and darker and the tinge of fin de siécle panic in the air growing more palpable. Talk turned to our nasty, spiteful un-American hopes that the market would take a big dive just as we were walking through. This was firstly to fulfill our rubbernecking expectations as blinking, photoflashing tourists and secondly as embittered but patient socialists who knew that Mister Wall Street Man Must Also Suffer. We stopped for an ante-Nyssa hot dog and then plunged into the heart of it all. We sat on the steps of the SEC, looking out over the intersection of Nyssa and Wall Street with all of the other tourists and a few floor-trading guys in red or yellow coats. Things seemed pretty calm…no one defenestrated before our eyes, the tour busses moved through slowly, and after a while we gave up waiting for something dramatic. We looked into the procedure for getting into the Tourist Gallery of the NYSE, but the line was forming two hours before it opened. Aye-ya-bubba! That was not part of the schedule, and we moved on.
It was just a few blocks to pick up the Staten Island Ferry, which is free and goes right by the Statue of Liberty. Ms. Liberty is disappointingly small. I wanted a stone Titan 800 yards high, I guess. Those crafty Russians have a butte or hill of some kind towards their western border that is topped by a massive stone woman holding a sword out towards Poland with one arm and beckoning the teeming millions to follow her with the other. I suppose it’s easier to come up with a dramatic pose for “Let’s go sack the Prussians” than it is for “Give me all the poor people you’ve got.” We’re not exactly in the refugee-welcoming business anymore, are we? Haiti, Bosnia, Rwanda…. huddled masses, eh?

Political rants aside, the Ferry was slowed by a mighty big Swedish vessel pulling in front of us. Mark and I were transported into reveries by the notion of Life Aboard a Swedish Transport Ship, imagining the far-flung distant ports we’d visit and then, when it was time to go home, we’d live in Sweden, where everything is perfect! The most beautiful people in the world, the best government in the world, and a long list of other benefits I was a little less clear on. You’ll have to check with Mark.

After some wrangling, we found a subway station that was open and didn’t have a half-hour wait to buy tickets, and zoomed up to Grand Central Station. Wow! You could play major league baseball in there! And the ceiling is covered with a nifty diagram of constellations against a beautiful midnight blue sky. Out to 5th Ave. and Madison Ave. we went, jostling with the nattily dressed power people. When I finally saw a guy in a T-shirt who looked like he occasionally got some exercise it occurred to me that all the people in that area looked effete and pallid. Mark’s theory is that Madison Ave. is stocked with intellectual types, not sinewy types. Rudy brings in vanloads of ‘em every weekday morning, we guessed. Lunch was unremarkable and expensive.

Up through Central Park we went, stopping periodically to watch the natives, the ducks and other assorted creatures. Lots of rollerblading, not much biking. We came out of CP around 80th (stopping to marvel at an extremely tiny dog, the first of a long series of shrimpy dogs I was to discover on my trip) and we tromped northwards along the western edge of the park up to 98th, where the quality of the $400,000 apartments started to deflate. We were itching to find Jerry Seinfeld’s territory, or at least I was, so we headed west through the nice quiet residential Upper West Side. (We didn’t find it, but for future reference, it’s just two blocks west of CP on 81st.) We hit a park on the edge of the water, and there we rested, for my feet were toast. I helped Rudy with his Cleanliness Fetish by chasing a plastic bag for 25 feet. It looked out of place, so spic/span was near/far.

My culinary goals for NYC were Bagel and Pizza, and Mark was lobbying for Deli. As we turned south on Amsterdam (or Broadway?) we walked and walked, hoping to find a place that would give us both pizza and a good deli sandwich. If we would have thought, we would have realized this is like hoping to find a place that makes a killer Pad Thai and can tell you if your Bruegel is a fake, but we settled for Mamma’s Famous Pan Pizza and were sorely disappointed. Mark said mean, dispiriting things about his sandwich, and I said what I always say about bad pizza:

Pizza is like sex. When it’s good, it’s really really good, and when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.

Evening swept o’er our pates, leaving us no time for Times Square. Hopped back on the bus and were subjected to JUMANJI on a jittery, warbly VCR. Robin Williams can be so good (Dead Poets Society, GM Vietnam, Good Will Hunting), but sometimes ya just want ta shoot ‘im. Home at last at 10pm or so. Delirious and feeble, I played another game of Scrabble with Nancy and, for the record, got OBLITERATED. Highlights: three triple plays by Nancy (on, ex, oxen; ad, bids, flaws; jet, top, el), her 60 point zany and my lengthy but low-scoring relieve, worth 6 points. Bell: 323, [Uncle Vinny]: 171.

The phrase that hovered over the Philly/NYC leg of my trip was “Aye-ya-bubba”, a charmer of my own invention. Typically used to express grief, dismay, fatigue, alarm or remorse, just like “Fuck” except with more syllables and flair.

Wednesday night, the heat of Philly had finally broken. It had been hot and humid since I arrived, but that night as I went to sleep I got a little shivery. At 4am I became aware of a mosquito in the room, who by that time had managed to poison me, and good. I went to the bathroom mirror and became alarmed. I had a big ol’ welt on my cheek that made me look like I should change my name to Mr. Puffy. From the size of the destroyed region I suspected the work of a Turbo Mosquito. Cleverly, I did not return to that bedroom, where TM was surely waiting for me…. I slipped downstairs and slept on the couch.

8/20/98 – Thursday

The next morning Nancy loaned me her under-the-pants money belt, a device I hated wearing. I wrestled with it for the next two days, and then submitted to its necessity.

Nancy and I walked to the Amtrak station, said “Adieu” and I rolled south to Washington DC. (thanks, mark ‘n’ nancy!)

In DC I was compelled to grapple with my third subway system in three days, but this crippling onslaught of bizarre conveyance methods was mitigated by the smooth, quiet efficiency of the DC system. All the stations are waaaaay down in the ground, connected to the abovegrounders by looooooong escalators, and have neat little subway slips that get sucked into the gate and get spat back out again. It’s groovy, man. All of the tubes are identical in design: 70’s meets Space Age meets Dune, with huge concrete squares set into strips along the ceiling. It’s almost beautiful, if you think concrete can be beautiful. My friends Arne and Iain live in DC, and they put me up for the two nights I was there. I took a nap the rest of the afternoon, and was in no condition for much tourism until the next morning. Out in front of their house was a church van with a threatening moniker:

"CHARLES H. DOOM, Pastor"

That night Arne took us out to splashy dinner. If you ever have call to go through Washington DC, get ahold of Arne and ask him the name of that Italian restaurant, the one with the Rosemary Fettuccini in Truffle Oil; he’ll know which one you mean. This was one of the very best meals on my trip; dessert was excellent, too.

Editorial remarks, circa 2010: Nancy continues to kick my ass in Scrabble every time we play, although she’s always trying to convince me that this isn’t true whenever she’s wheedling me into playing, much like Lucy and Charlie Brown.

Wear Your Best Socks to the Louvre (Part 1)

August 14^th, 1998

My last day of work at Electro Scientific Industries, Inc., where I’d been a Laser/Optics Manufacturing Engineer for almost three years. The year-end bonus checks were distributed that day. Lucky, what?

8/15/98 – Saturday

My good friend Mara drove me to the airport. We had a few hours to kill, so kill them we did: Snake Eyes, starring the usually reputable Nicolas Cage. It was her idea, and I think I got her to apologize after it was over. I mounted the Delta flight to Atlanta/Philadelphia at about 10pm and was stuffed in the back with family of 8 Philadelphians. Engine noise, squabbling children and not much sleep.

"Fat Boy", the little notebook that could

It was at this point that I broke out the Cambridge “Fat Boy” Personal Notebook (Fred Meyer, $3.89) — hereafter referred to as FB — that was to be my constant companion on the trip.

FB was my daily diary, and came to include notes on unrecognized words, my snide remarks, the occasional sketch of a particularly startling Francis Bacon figure or inscription en langue Sabéenne from the Levant hall of the Louvre…and any other weird thing I felt like writing down.

For example, what the hell does “cross-check” mean? These airline crypto-freaks plague me. The FB also includes the name “Ruudricke Acquenpfleffer,” my own invention, which must be pronounced exactly as it is spelled. (Notes in bold are direct from the FB, to aid future generations of hagiographers.)

8/16/98 – Sunday

I arrive in Philadelphia, my first stop, to see Ms. Nancy Bell and Mssr. Mark Anderson. The plane landed at 8ish A.M., and in my sleepless state I left behind my wonderful, lightweight, bright red waterproof jacket that I had had since high school. I had been told repeatedly by folks with some sense of color that it made me look like a traffic cone on a bright day, but fashion sense is not part of my life. I missed it dearly, and the ongoing quest to find some protection from the rain was to occupy a fair portion of my time in the coming weeks. [Delta promised to send it to me, but it hasn't arrived, the sneaks.]

Woozy, I boarded the llllllovely Lllllllady Llllllliberty shuttle van and zipped off to Nancy’s. She promptly strapped me to Mark’s bicycle (the one with the granite seat) and hopped nimbly onto her bike (the one with the plushy seat) and forced me to ride for 20 or 30 miles to some quaint little part of town where I could pass out from exhaustion. It may have been less than 20 miles; we’ll have to wait for her estimate. Somewhere amid all of the passing out I remember her buying 2 CDs of the History of Funk, a collection that in its entirety is about 10 CDs. My grasp on the Funk World had previously been limited to James Brown and Sly Stone, and later that evening the bright light of Parliament and Rufus came shining in upon my ignorance. While in Quaint Town we also stopped for beer at a place patrolled by exotic bejeweled waitresses, a fiercely competitive lot. After a few minutes of parley and thrown forks our fief was seized and clamped into the estate of the Triumphal One. We just called her Miss, and that timidly.

8/17/98 – Monday

My rickety state continued on Monday. I spent the morning pretending to videotape a group of Nancy’s English as a Second Language class as they did 5-minute skits. I meant to be videotaping, but some technical error foiled my plans. It was cute to watch them leap about, though, pretending to ring, then crack, the Liberty Bell. I, a complete stranger, was the preferred videotaper because they were embarrassed to act in front of Nancy. Puzzling. Then Nancy and I walked through downtown Philadelphia and discussed the large number of Massive Folks in her fair city. She pointed out the phenomenon of the “elbow flap,” seen with some regularity in those parts, where the back of the arm is so generously proportioned that it hangs down over the elbow when the arm is at one’s side. Somewhere in here my feet began to hurt something fierce, and I was nudged by Concern. Various foot ailments that I won’t bore you with here have tormented me in my time, and I feared a waterloo de pied. So I found excuses to sit down while Nancy shopped for glittery brown spandex turtlenecks in the European Knock-off Value Store, where if you were motivated and extroverted you might try on shimmery, zippered, poofy things that were for sale in the Men’s department, but made me blink in wonder. I sat and watched the security guys prowl menacingly in their ill-fitting pants and comfy shoes, often outnumbering the customers. Security guys seem to have an expanding job market in America, have you noticed? This seemed especially true on the East Coast.

Miscellaneous note: Subways in Philly are incredibly loud, unless you’re lucky enough to get on one of the new trains. My lucky:unlucky ratio was 1:5.

8/18/98 – Tuesday

Tuesday morning I slept in, resting my footsies, and lazed around the house all day reading Harper’s magazine, which was new to me. I zipped through most of three or four of ‘em and then Nancy came home. Dinner was a yummy roast chicken with rice, green beans and wine, which put us in the mood for the sensual affair of seeing our Nation’s Leader say “I lied to y’all.” Nancy made very good fruit smoothies with blueberries, kiwi and mango. (If someone you know and trust tries to get you to eat a cactus fruit, don’t do it, unless you are lost in the desert and don’t mind a mouth full of seeds.) Now that we knew that Monica Did Bill, the only thing to do was play Scrabble. Highlights: rhino, caned, and a triple play of soapy, no and knifers. Highly suspect were Ms. Bell’s quasi and Mssr. [Uncle Vinny]’s nubiles. Score: Bell: 294, [Uncle Vinny]: 290.

Editorial remarks, circa 2010: Exhausting, yes? Mercifully, events get a bit more piquant in days to come. My obsession with detail, however, does not wane. Also note that in 1998, no one could predict the ugly spiral that would become Nicholas Cage’s career.