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Books Cotswolds

Report from Cheltenham Literature Festival

Posted on October 3, 2015

It’s the most wonderful time of the year: the Cheltenham Literature Festival in the Cotswolds. I spent the first night of the festival at an intimate evening with the bald spot on the back of a gentleman’s head and the much maligned Mr. Franzen.

 
Before he began to read, Franzen noted he was in the fourth week of touring to promote his new novel, Purity, and admitted he he had hit a wall just before the start of this event. Despite his fatigue, he still managed to charm. I particularly enjoyed hearing him read from a scene in the book where a couple has sex on a nuclear missile in Amarillo, Texas.

However, an opportunistic journalist hoping for another Iraqi-war-orphan-esque gaffe would have been rewarded towards the end of the Q&A when a woman in the audience asked him about his relationship with his mother. He started his answer by offering his gratitude for the middle-class privileges his parents had bestowed on him, including an education and disapproval of his writing—which he said gave him “something to prove.” Then he went on to note that on top of all that, they were also nice enough to die when he was in his thirties, liberating him to write things he could have never written when they were still alive, including The Corrections. I can just imagine the headline: “Franzen Glad His Parents are Dead.” The audience seemed to take the answer in the spirit in which he intended, though. No gasps or tutting as far as I could hear, and the line for his book signing was still out the door by the time we finished dinner and moved on to the next event of the evening.

I spent the next hour in a much more intimate setting, just 30 or so audience members, the moderator and Nell Zink, Franzen’s literary protégé who was profiled in The New Yorker earlier this year. My friend headed to the tent next door to see the wildly popular Caitlin Moran, and the uproarious laughter from that crowd occasionally seeped into our venue.

Nell Zink reading from The Wallcreeper

Zink was funny, too. Not necessarily ha-ha funny, but odd and awkward and charming and all over the map. At one point she veered off in an explanation of a character’s hairdo in The Wallcreeper to enlighten us about an eighteenth-century hair condition amongst German peasants that included dreadlocks and was referred to as Plica Polonica (a Polish braid). There appeared to be little filter between her darting to-and-fro mind and her mouth, which was a good thing as far as I’m concerned.She was, in short, exactly how I imagined someone who had written the lighting-paced and weird and wonderful The Wallcreeper to be, and I would have been disappointed if she had been any other way.

Cotswolds Cycling

Playing Dress Up with The Guvnors’ Assembly

Posted on August 29, 2015
All about the details: custom fenders and champagne-cork-topped handlebars

Lastweekend we made a special trip back to Cotswoldia to take part in a “sporting event” I’ve had my eye on since last year: The Guvnors’ Assembly’s annual Jolly in the Wolds. The Assembly is a group of cycling enthusiasts who hail from all over Britain and distinguish themselves with sartorial elegance. This elegance begins with the choice of bike—a Pashley Guv’nor for the men and a Pashley Princess for the ladies—and extends into every other imaginable detail, from cat-eye sunglasses to the waxed tips of a mustache.

My love affair with Pashley cycles began in 2011 in Berlin—somewhat ironically since Pashley Cycles’ headquarters is in Stratford-upon-Avon, which is more or less the north Cotswolds—when I purchased a periwinkle-blue Pashley Poppy. She cost more than was strictly necessary to transport myself around the city, but, at roughly the same price as a designer shoe and infinitely more practical, the purchase was easy to rationalize. I like to think of her as the Jimmy Choos I’ll never own. My Poppy has followed me as we moved from Berlin to Boston and finally back to California, turning heads everywhere she goes. Sadly, when we moved back to Berlin this time around, we left Poppy in our California garage to enjoy a brief sabbatical.

A collection of Pashley Princesses

This left us in a dilemma over what to ride when we joined the Assembly at the weekend. We were in possession of some rather garishly colored road bikes, but we worried they would tarnish the aesthetic of the collective. The Assembly may have been worried about this possibility too, because, despite the fact that we were complete strangers, a longstanding member, Mr. Corky, offered to lend me a Pashley Princess and my husband something he called the tweed steed: a completely custom affair hand-upholstered in the finest Harris Tweed.

Bikes secured, we moved on to the question of what to wear. Berlin does vintage well, and it didn’t take me long to secure a 1950s-style sundress of yellow gingham with a cheerful cherry print. Husband relied on a more traditional Cotswold clothier, Pakeman Catto & Carter, acquiring a pair of tweed plus twos in their summer sale. (Curiously, shooting apparel does double duty very well as vintage cycling apparel.)

1950s me

Despite our efforts, when we arrived at our point of embarkation—a very fine pub called The Royal Oak Tetbury—husband and I were cowed by the collective splendor of the Assembly. The ladies didn’t just have elegant vintage dresses. They had gloves and hats and flowers and bunting strung through their baskets. They wore heels! Standing there in my sundress and very sensible white plimsolls, I felt like Sandy at the slumber party in Grease, only instead of The Pink Ladies I was surrounded by a gang of early-Mad Men Betty Drapers.The Rizzo of the group (I’m only calling her that since she organized the event with her husband, thus making her the gang leader of the Betty Drapers) soon put me at ease by offering me a lucky dip from the assortment of mini-cans of G&T and Pimms residing in her wide-mouthed bicycle basket. Another of the ladies, who goes by the moniker of Sussex Bob, offered to lend me her cycling cape (yes, a cape!) should the weather turn inclement that afternoon.

The men were equally as welcoming and well turned out. There wore braces, flat caps, cravats, and a smattering of the Assembly’s very own custom-made, vintage-style wool cycling jerseys. The bikes wore accessories, too, from bespoke wood fenders to a honking loud horn that, unfortunately for the ears of all those visiting the countryside that day, was attached to husband’s borrowed bike. One of the founding members of the assembly, Gent Cyclist, chose a more subtle attention-getting device: a cylindrical chrome police whistle attached to a perfectly patinated piece of twine.

The Guvnors’ Assemby assembles outside The Royal Oak Tetbury

After posing for pictures, we were off on our jolly. And it was a jolly—speed is not the point of an Assembly outing, although at 35 miles it wasn’t exactly a dawdle either. Manhandling a Pashley Princess up a Cotswold hill in blazing sun is serious business. These substantial bikes are elegant if not agile, squeaking on the ascents like a group of convivial mice at a tea party. Luckily for me the Assembly abides by a policy of “no man or woman left behind,” and regular stops ensured everyone could catch up.

The Assembly waits patiently for me

One such stop was for lunch at the Red Lion in Cricklade, where husband and I chatted more with G., one of The Pink Ladies/Betty Drapers, and learned her commitment to looking this good extended into everyday life. “I get dressed like this to walk the dog,” she told us. “My neighbors think I’m mad.”

Lunch stop at Red Lion Inn Cricklade

Seeing our group trundling around the Costwolds wearing woolen clothes and hats and heels as the temperature swelled into the eighties, you may well have thought us mad. But mostly people who saw us smiled and honked and waved and took pictures. The Assembly seemed to make people happy and the feeling was mutual. Maybe it was the just the tight bodice on my sundress, but as I rode my Princess I found myself sitting up straighter than usual, head held high. The air was filled with streamers of hay from passing trailers piled high with the
stuff and the occasional burst of dandelion confetti. Riding with the Guvnors’ Assembly felt like being in a countryside ticker-tape parade.

The Details

The Group:
To join the Guvnors’ Assembly for a ride, check out upcoming jollies on their website here.

The Gear:
More about Pashley Cycles here.

The Guide:
Our 35 mile loop started by heading southeast out of Tetbury on the B4014, tracing a shallow bowl of a route through Minety and up into Cricklade (about 15 miles). Leaving Cricklade we headed west through the beautiful village of Ashton Keynes, skirting the Cotswold Water Park before passing through the charming village of Oaksey. We continued up to Culkerton before turning left on the main A433, which brings you out just north of Trouble House. Turn right out of Trouble House and continue for 2 miles back into Tetbury.

The Grub:
We lunched at the excellent Red Lion Inn in Cricklade, which conveniently has its own microbrewery, The Hop Kettle Brewery.
Red Lion Inn
74 High Street
Cricklade
Wiltshire SN6 6DD
+44 (0)1793 750776

Refreshment was taken at the best-named pub in the Cotswolds, Trouble House. I stuck to lager and lime, but will be returning to taste the delicious-looking cakes.
Trouble House
London Road
Tetbury
Gloucestershire GL8 8SG
+44 (0)1666 502206

Supper was back at The Royal Oak Tetbury, where both service and food was outstanding.
The Royal Oak Tetbury, aka TROT
1 Cirencester Road
Tetbury
Gloucestershire GL8 8EY
+44 (0)1666 500021

Cotswolds

Garden Party

Posted on August 8, 2015

Our visit to the Cotswolds last weekend happily coincided with Miles’ annual-ish summer garden party. It was a perfect Sunday afternoon for that kind of thing: blue skies and sun bright enough to warm but not wilt the men in attendance, most of whom would deem it unseemly to remove their linen blazers no matter how high the mercury soared.

Summer scene in Cotswoldia

Miles always makes it clear in his invitation that the party’s occurrence depends on the whims of English summer weather, issuing a go or no-go in an email sent out the day before. His excuse is that is his cottage is too small to host the party in the event of rain, but I’m not so sure. As anyone who’s ever hosted a party in their first shoe-box-sized grown-up apartment knows, it doesn’t take a lot of space. I think it’s more that a garden in English summer requires only a bit of bunting to look festive while hosting indoors would require Miles to actually clean his house.

To be clear, I’m incredibly fond of the disheveled interior of Miles’ home. The route to the bathroom—the only reason you’re allowed to enter during the course of the festivities—includes a walk past a small kitchen where the tap is broken and, as a result, constantly running. It’s been this way since at least 2011 when I was last at his house for one of these soirées. In drought-riddled California he would be locked up for this offense, but I suppose it’s less of an issue in this perpetually sodden part of the world.

Next you go up dust bunny-strewn stairs with pairs of his shoes laid out neatly every few steps, each pair pointing in the downstairs direction as if to make it easier to dress on-the-run as he exits the house. A presumably dysfunctional shotgun rests in the corner at the top of the stairs, it’s barrel half hidden behind a white curtain billowing in the breeze. In the current climate of mass shootings in America its presence would be threatening; in England it’s merely decorative, as is the salon-style hanging of photographs and prints and paintings in the interior of the loo. If I wasn’t sure he would like it so much, I would be tempted to call Miles a bohemian.

Who needs a glass?

At first it seemed that Miles’ laissez faire attitude towards housekeeping extended to the selection of hors d’oeuvres, which were strictly limited to squares of plain buttered brown bread with smoked salmon or egg salad. (At one point I did spy something mayonnaisey-looking—prawn?—resting in a fluted edible cup. It seemed out-of-keeping and I demurred on that basis.) On reflection, though, I can see that the choice of food and the timing of its appearance served a very specific purpose, which was solely to absorb the copious amounts of rosé and white wine in constant circulation. One type each of rosé and white were the only options and why not? The whole affair was a lesson in the elegance of minimalism for any hostess who’s ever struggled with being the most-est.

Of course the success of any party depends not just on free-flowing chilled wine and fine weather, but on the congregants. It was as if the characters of Americashire had reassembled unwittingly on my behalf. Amongst the usual suspects of Cotswoldia was a farmer who wore a pith hat without irony. He also wore a rose in the buttonhole of his canvas blazer, and when I complimented him on it, he expounded at length about his daily selection process from his garden and his exasperation with his gender for failing to realize that a flower is exactly what a buttonhole is for. Other topics of conversation included an obligatory WWII story—this one about attempting to blow up Hitler’s bunker, a long ago road trip to a game fair in the Loire, and whether or not the pattern of lips on my dress was indicative of the fact that I would like the gentleman inquiring to place a kiss in every spot where the lips appeared. Charming and creepy is a blurry line, but he meant no harm. There was also a puppy, whose antics provided a useful escape route from at least one conversation.

Escape route to the side garden

Calling on the old adage that it’s best to leave while you’re still having fun, Rupert, Ralph, and I eventually managed to persuade husband it was time to go. As Rupert, our designated driver, chauffeured us back home in his convertible through the nearly harvest-ready countryside, there may have been several wine-soaked exclamations of delight: “Now THIS is summer in England!”

Berlin

The German Way of Death

Posted on July 23, 2015
A favorite monument in Friedhof II der Sophiengemeind

My favorite walking route on my morning commute takes me through a Protestant cemetery. Like much of Berlin the exterior walls of Friedhof II der Sophiengemeind are covered in graffiti, but just inside is a woodland oasis. There are flowers, but they are the flowers of a landscaped yard—rhododendrons and hydrangea—rather than the sanitized cut arrangements you often see in an American cemetery. There are some grand monuments, but mostly the landscape is unruly: full of rambling ivy, shrubs, and, in summer, leafy boughs bisecting your line of sight. Most striking is the contrast of the German predilection for chaos in death versus their stereotypical Teutonic rigidness in life. Perhaps in his final resting place, a German finally lets himself go.

A typical grave

As a non-German speaker, I look for clues about the culture of my host country outside of language: in the aisles of a grocery store (I’m not sure what condiments in a tube tells me, but I’m sure it’s something), the walls of a gallery, and even the paths of a cemetery. Still, the paths of the Friedhof II der Sophiengemeind remind me of one bit of language a co-worker taught me. It’s a Swabian saying, “schaffe, schaffe, Häusle baue” that means “work, work, build a house.” According to my colleague, the saying captures not just the hard-working nature of Swabians, but also the more universally relatable ideal of a house in the country.

In Mitte, the central district of Berlin where the cemetery lies, there’s no such thing as a standalone house; the streets are lined with five-story apartment blocks. But here in Friedhof I like to think the residents have finally built their house. It’s a lovely, rambling affair and as far outside the city as you can get without leaving.

Watering cans near the cemetery entrance
Cotswolds

An Evening at Longborough Festival Opera: Glasto for the Middle-Aged

Posted on July 8, 2015
Opera-goers mill outside the theater, a former barn, during the interval

Last Saturday night I finally did something on my Cotswold bucket list: attend a performance at Longborough Festival Opera. (OK, it’s not actually on that list, but it should have been.) If you haven’t heard about Longborough, it’s in the vein of Glyndebourne’s country house opera and one of those Cotswold gems you wouldn’t believe until you pull into the grounds and see it for yourself.

One of the “guests” roaming the grounds

Upon arrival we were greeted by a rooster strolling amongst the other festival-goers, many of whom—unlike us—were wearing black-tie as they sipped pre-show glasses of wine. Nobody gave our casual dress a second glance, though; they were all too busy taking in the stunning views of the countryside in show-off British summer weather.

Even if the climate hadn’t cooperated, the show would have gone on. Longborough has its own permanent theater in the form of a converted barn complete with seats salvaged from a remodel of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, a pink stucco facade, and statues of Wagner, Verdi, and Mozart. The barn sits right across from the home of the couple, Martin and Lizzie Graham, who are responsible for the whole endeavor and seem to fit the mold of the stereotypical British eccentric rather well (read more about them here).

Despite my enthusiasm for the setting at Longborough, I confess that I’m not particularly interested in opera. Yet for reasons I can only attribute to the lingering effects of my bourgeois upbringing, I keep dragging husband to performances. Most recently we saw A Rake’s Progress in Berlin, which proved to be an excellent opportunity for him to catch up on his sleep. Occasionally he would wake up long enough to wonder aloud if the admittedly bizarre performance had licensed the use of the Disney characters whose likenesses made random appearances on stage. Thankfully the Longborough production of Rigoletto had no such ethical quandaries, not counting the cheating-on-and-murdering-of-an-innocent-young-woman aspects of the plot.

Our new hamper after we’d demolished
everything in it but the Eton Mess

The point is that the draw of an opera at a country house in England is not just the opera itself—which turned out to be stunning even if husband did have a little lie down in the box in the second half—but also the atmosphere: the grounds, the breed of very serious spectators making opera buff small talk that goes way over your head as you murmur affirmative throwaways, and, weather willing, the interval picnic.

Nobody does summer picnicking better than the British, a fact I attribute to the abysmal weather for much of the rest of the year. What else could motivate people to pack up most of the contents of an indoor dining room and transport them to a field in the middle of nowhere? (Things I’ve seen produced out of a British picnic basked include an eight-armed silver candelabra and a garland of paper lanterns “for atmosphere.”)

Rather than be mocked for my lack of proper kit, as I once was when I arrived at a Cotswold picnic carrying ice in a plastic Tesco bag, I opted to order our dinner from The Old Butchers in Stow-on-the-Wold. As if the nuts, olives, charcuterie, smoked salmon, potato salad, Chinese chicken salad, and Eton Mess weren’t enough, I am now the proud owner of the hamper in which it was delivered: a polka-dot-lined affair complete with tea cups, silverware, and china plates. It’ll be just the thing to disguise a Tesco bag filled with ice—and maybe even a candlestick or two—on our next visit to Longborough.

Picnic with a view
Europe Walking

Walking to Paris

Posted on June 20, 2015
Making strides in his campaign
to convert me to his pedestrian ways

Last month we walked to Paris. To be more specific, we walked the mile and a half from our apartment in Berlin to the Hauptbahnhof, boarded a grey and red Deutsche Bahn train to Cologne where we changed to a burgundy-colored Thalys train to Paris, then disembarked at Gare du Nord and walked the two-and-half miles to our little hotel on Île Saint-Louis. Three days later we did the same in reverse.

The decision to walk from our apartment in Berlin to the Hauptbanhof was merely pragmatic; construction in the city has rendered a good section of the route impassable by car. But I had long thwarted my husband’s ambition to walk—he’s an avowed pedestrian—from Gare du Nord into the center of Paris based on the belief that it was too long which, perversely, was a view I had formed while making the same trek through the traffic-snarled streets of the City of Lights in the back of a taxi. When I finally looked up the route on a map, I was shocked to find it was less than three miles. I could hardly say no.

Adding to the decision to make our journey to Paris one in which we cleaved to the earth rather than ascended to the heavens was the spate of recent airline disasters. A German Wings pilot had just crashed a plane into the Alps and I was still unsettled by the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370 a year earlier. Despite the fact that a rail ticket cost about three times more than a flight, I had no problem justifying the expense. In the words of Will Self in his memoir Walking to Hollywood, “I could no longer cope at all with the infantilizing demanded by…air travel. It was over. No more would I dutifully respond to those parental injunctions go here, go there, empty my pockets and take off my shoes. Never again would I take my underpants to see the world, which meant in turn that never would the world witness them espaliered on a hedge.”

Serious walking gear

Instead my underpants would be folded neatly into a sage-green backpack I had purchased for the express purpose of our ambulatory adventure, along with a pair of pink-and-white-striped slip-on sneakers that, while not exactly Parisian in sartorial tone, seemed a better option than the American-in-running-shoes cliché. In addition to being a way to avoid death in the skies, walking to Paris had also been an excuse to go shopping.

***

There is something extremely liberating about arriving at your destination and stepping onto the platform with nothing more than a backpack, a superior smirk your only concession to the lengthy taxi line you pass as you head straight out to the street and on your way. I had hoped to stop for a drink at Albion, a wine bar near the station, but it was not yet open for the evening. Still, I liked the idea that, on foot, serendipitous stops could be accommodated.

Mistinguett at the Moulin Rouge
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Instead we headed down the old Roman route of Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin, dotted with hair salons catering to women of African descent and Turkish coffee shops filled with men playing cards. A lone boutique had raised the flag of gentrification with its window displays of artsy journals and minimalist housewares. It’s the kind of shop you might just as soon find in Portland as in Paris and for which I am loathe to admit I’m a target market, but we had somewhere to be and didn’t linger, even when we passed the spindly beauty of the 10th arrondissement’s city hall or through the arch of Porte Saint-Martin, a war monument erected by Louis IV. After the fact I read about two more landmarks we had passed on the street, the theater Le Splendid, where Maurice Chevalier and Mistinguett (a contemporary and competitor of Josephine Baker) once performed, and Lévitan, once a Jewish-owned furniture store that was turned into the Paris annex for Drancy, an internment camp, during WWII. Along a single street we had managed to walk the history of Paris.

la porte Saint-Martin

Before long we emerged into the piazza of the Centre Pompidou, then zig-zagged through the narrow boutique-lined streets of the Marais and onto the island where, after attempting to check into two hotels that weren’t ours, we finally made it to our room in the Hôtel Des Deux Iles. By five o’clock we were back in the Marais, firmly planted in the brasserie-style chairs in front of Au Petit Fer à Cheval and drinking the pichets of Chablis we ritualistically use to commence a weekend in Paris. We had arrived but, as the saying goes, it was the journey that mattered.

Europe

Weekend in Leipzig

Posted on June 13, 2015

Once part of the GDR, Leipzig played a crucial role in the downfall of East Germany that’s often overshadowed by the symbolism of the fall of the Wall in Berlin. These days, along with Berlin and Dresden, it’s one of the most vibrant cities of the former East.

Courtyard of Hotel Fregehaus

Arrive in style
Leipzig’s grand Hauptbahnhof lends credence to the theory that train stations are the penises of urban planning. It’s a short walk from the city center, where we stayed at the Steigenberger Grandhotel Handelshof. The hotel spans a city block and was impressively remodeled four years ago. While I suspect they will regret some of interior design choices—the black Lucite chandelier over the bathtub comes to mind—there was no faulting the extraordinarily friendly service from the hotel staff. For a more intimate experience, try the stylish Hotel Freghaus situated in a historic house around a courtyard flower shop. Its neighbors include a terrific vintage store and Leipzig’s stunning Museum of Fine Arts.
Hotel Fregehaus, Katharinenstraße 11, 04109 Leipzig, tel: +49 341 26393157

Café at the Museum der bildenden Künste

Neomodern
Regardless of where you’re staying, the Museum of Fine Arts (Museum der bildenden Künste) is worthy of at least an afternoon musing the world-class collection whose origins date back to early nineteenth century. These days the collection intersperses new with old in a stunning modernist setting. The architecture that houses the collection, designed by Karl Hufnagel, Peter Pütz and Michael Rafaelian, is as special as the collection itself, which includes a swathe of contemporary artists who are either from or working in Liepzig. My favorite “discovery” was local painter Neo Rauch, which I promise has only the tiniest bit to do with his first name. Rauch has a studio at the Spinnerei, a former cotton mill that’s been converted to an art complex of studios and galleries in the western Leipzig district of Plagwitz. Both the neighborhood, centered around Karl-Heine Strasse, and the Spinnerei are worth a visit.
Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, Katharinenstraße 10, 04109 Leipzig
Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei, Spinnereistraße 7, 04179 Leipzig

The Spinnerei
City of Music

Our weekend in Leipzig coincided with a festival celebrating the 1,000-year anniversary (yes, one THOUSAND years – in your face, America) of the first recorded mention of Leipzig. The festivities included everything from really bad American rock bands to choral music, only the latter of which is fitting for the city that was once home to Bach, Wagner, Schumann, Mahler, and Mendelssohn. Bach conducted choirs at both St. Thomas Church, where he is buried, and St. Nicholas Church, whose pale pink and green ceiling is as pretty as a box of macarons from Ladurée. Under the parsonage of Christian Führer, the church also played a central role in the 1989 demonstrations that helped lead to German reunification.

Nikolaikirche
Faustian Feasting

Our most memorable meal of the weekend was in Auerbach’s Keller, located at the bottom of a flight of stairs in the entrance to Mädler Passage, a shopping arcade whose roots begin in the sixteenth century when the rector of Leipzig University opened a wine bar in the courtyard (how very civilized). The restaurant is famous for being a setting in Goethe’s Faust, scenes from which are depicted in murals on the restaurant walls. It’s definitely touristy—mannequins of historical characters astride wine kegs in one corner of the building do nothing to lift the tone—but the food and the atmosphere were still hearty. We feasted on soups made from root vegetables, beef roulade, and potato dumplings then immediately went back to the hotel and slept as if we had tilled fields from dusk til dawn. On my next visit, I’m looking forward to trying some lighter fare at the recently opened Tacoholics in the Plagwitz neighborhood.

Auerbachs Keller, Mädler Passage, Grimmaische Str. 2-4, 04109 Leipzig
Tacoholics, Karl Heine Straße 58, 04229 Leipzig
Signage outside Tacoholics

Spy Story
On our final morning in Leipzig we visited the former local headquarters of the Stasi which has remained largely intact as a memorial and museum, the Runde Ecke, since the fall of the GDR. The displays are in German, but 4€ rents an audio guide in English. The technology employed by the GDR to spy on its own citizens is so outdated it looks laughable, but there’s little that’s humorous here—aside from the can of Florena Action aerosol hairspray in a display case dedicated to disguises. The whole experience is more poignant in light of recent revelations about the NSA and makes the Germans’ empathetic view of Ed Snowden entirely comprehensible.
Museum in der Runden Ecke, Dittrichring 24, 04109 Leipzig

“Everything in view” at the Museum in der Runden Ecke

More pictures of Leipzig here on Pinterest.

Cotswolds

Summer in the Cotswolds

Posted on May 25, 2015

Summer in the Cotswolds means Giffords Circus, an old-fashioned village green circus that’s the brainchild of Nell and Toti (yes, Toti) Gifford. You can read all about it here and, better yet, book a ticket. Here are a few pictures from our visit last weekend to see Moon Songs, the title of this year’s sublime show, on the grounds of Sudeley Castle in Winchcombe.

Circling the wagons under the horse-chestnut tree
Dog and a bear on a horse. Just because.
Tweedy the clown gets loaded into the canyon
Europe Uncategorized

Life on the Rails: In praise of the road well traveled

Posted on April 26, 2015

In my last post before we left for a stint living in Berlin, I made a list of all the things I still wanted to do in the Cotswolds. Now that we would be less than a two-hour flight away, I thought I would finally get around to marking some things off this Cotswold bucket list.Our first visit back to the Cotswolds was last weekend, and I managed do exactly none of them. Part of the problem is that we like the things we usually do so much that we lack the motivation to do anything else. With walks through scenery like this just outside our front door, who could argue?

We even like the things we don’t like, or more precisely, we love to hate the same things over and over again. Case in point: we went to dinner with our old chums, Rupert and Ralph, at our local inn, the Wheatsheaf, on the Friday night of our visit. The menu featured a battered brill with petite pois and potatoes that sounded suspiciously like fish and chips for £25. Still, two of our party chose to order it, making a point of telling the waiter they would have the “£25 fish and chips.” It was delicious if ridiculously priced, and for the remainder of the weekend we revelled in repeatedly sharing our outrage. Undoubtedly we’ll eat there again next time we’re in town.

My husband’s and my travel predilections are so strong that our Facebook posts look like they’re on an annual repeat cycle, and our friend Rupert likes to poke fun at our predictability. “Back on the rails,” he’ll note every time he recognizes one of our check-ins at favorite restaurant. “Choo choo” is another shorthand favorite.

He is perhaps to blame for why I am feeling a bit defensive about taking the road well traveled. It is not a fashionable choice as anyone who knows the last three lines from Robert Frost’s famous poem will tell you.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

And everyone knows these lines of the poem because they are ubiquitous. Just yesterday I saw them artfully scrawled on a chalkboard in a Scandinavian clothing store in Berlin. This ubiquity, of course, defeats the whole purpose. If everyone takes the road less traveled, then it’s no longer the road less traveled. The road less traveled becomes nothing more than a formula, the irony of which found expression last year in the normcore movement, an equally self-aware propensity to be anti-fashion (think mom jeans, polo shirts). But I digress from my point, which is the first three lines of the poem. They’re less well known (the road less traveled, if you will), and I take my inspiration there:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood

Of our beloved homes in California and the Cotswolds, my husband has often said how he wants to live in both at once. We long to “travel both and be one traveler,” but, in the absence of the science to enable that, we have settled on trying to craft a nomadic life so that we may spend time in both. The same applies to visiting other places we love and repeating the experiences from previous visits. In doing so, we create a routine that is nothing less than a sense of home. We are carving out a way to “be one traveler” however infrequently we visit.

One such beloved spot is Paris. We have a visit planned in May, but I can tell you now how the weekend will go. We will stay in a charming but microscopic hotel room on the Île Saint-Louis from where each morning we will jog a loop around the islands before breakfasting at the bar at le Louis IX, which seems to be a favorite of Parisian garbage collectors. Then we will rent bikes and ride to the Eiffel Tower before lunching on the terraces of Tribeca on the pedestrianized market street, Rue Cler. There we will admire the manners of small French children out for lunch with their families and envy the achingly chic French teenagers smoking Gauloises between bites of steak tartare.

Picture of Au Petit Fer A Cheval from 2011. Look on Facebook for another one just like it next month.

In the early evening we will head over to Le Marais, where we will drink a glass of wine at La Belle Hortense, a combination bookshop and wine bar. I will wander around the shop caressing the books and wishing I could read French. I may buy one anyway. Once we spy a free table outside at the bar across the street, Au Petit Fer à Cheval, we will rush over and grab it and drink more wine than we meant to before heading to the establishment next door, Les Philosophes, for dinner. The only Parisians in the place will be the waiters, who will accept my husband’s request for his steak to be “bien cuit” with a surprising lack of fuss; I will have the honeyed duck confit. After dinner we’ll stumble back across Pont Louis Philippe and collapse into bed before getting up the next day and doing most of it all over again.

And this road well traveled is how every few years we get to “be one traveler” who lives in Paris, too.

Berlin

Springtime in Berlin

Posted on April 25, 2015

We’ve all been pretending it already happened, but spring in Berlin didn’t officially spring until today. It was warm, almost muggy, and all of Berlin was out to enjoy it. Lines spilled out of ice cream shops onto the sidewalks (I love how Berliners love ice cream) and humans dotted the soft slope of Volkspark am Weinbergsweg near our apartment, reminding me of sheep on a Cotswold hill.

Volkspark am Weinbergsweg, Berlin

I started my day in the café at the bottom of Soho House with a cold-pressed beetroot, carrot, orange, apple, lemon, ginger, pineapple juice (I jest not, have a look at the bottle in the picture below). It was delicious if slightly disturbing to be eating breakfast that was indistinguishable both in content and setting from any restaurant on Abbot Kinney in Venice, California. I guess it’s official: hipsters have homogenized the world and they did it with avocado toast.

Breakfast at ‘The Kitchen’ in ‘The Store’ at Soho House Berlin

Next I did some shopping. That the warm weather went to my head is the only explanation I have for how I ended up with both these pairs of flip flops. Bimba y Lola, where I picked them up, is my new favorite store. Apparently it’s Spanish and there are a few of them in London, but it was new to me.

On my way home I spied these birdhouses in the park and was charmed by the fact that even the birdhouses in Berlin have graffiti. I noticed the inscription “Morgenvogel-Haus 157” on one of them and did a little Internet sleuthing. From what I could tell with the help of Google Translate, the birdhouses are part of a long-running artist’s project to ensure birds retain habitats in Berlin despite the relentless development since reunification. There’s a cool animation of all the birdhouses that were installed as part of the project here. Very sweet. Very Berlin.

Morgenvogel “Real Estate for Birds”