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Remembrance of Things Past

Posted on June 25, 2010

Turns out Proust was an apt choice for my “lite” summer reading. Last weekend’s break in the Lake District was filled with nostalgic musings brought on by the fact that the hotel we have stayed in every year for the past five years has changed hands since our last visit.

On the surface the new owners have made improvements. Paint and soft furnishings have been changed from florals to tasteful neutrals, tongue and cheek taxidermy graces walls and mantel pieces, and vintage accessories of the riding boot and croquet set variety are strategically dotted in corners of rooms. In other words, it now looks like every other country house hotel in England. The menu, previously of the home cooking variety by a lady named Viv, now has the same scallop with pancetta and pea puree type repertoire found in every gastropub in England (not that my scallops with pancetta and pea puree were unenjoyable). Jam served at breakfast comes in shallow porcelain ramekins instead of the foil topped plastic packets of Silver Shred I once paid homage to on this blog. And all these changes are reflected in the average age of the clientele, which used to hover around seventy even when you included husband and me. In a hotel of fifteen rooms I counted only one elderly couple, she sporting the reliable female OAP attire of ped socks in wedge sandals, he nodding off on the couch in the lounge after their 7pm supper.

Husband and I made good sport of lamenting all the so called improvements, the edge of which was taken off by the amazing (that’s an average day to you in L.A.) weather and the splendid isolation of the place, features that a lick of sage green paint and a stuffed owl in a glass box don’t change. Still, I’ve noticed in our middle age we are getting more and more sensitive to changes in places we hold dear. Earlier in the month in Paris we spent the best part of an hour venting our disgust over the appearance of a Lacoste shop on the site of a former crumbling down patisserie in the Marais. It wasn’t even a good patisserie—I once had a very mediocre lemon tart there—and yet there was something unmistakably violating about the appearance of the shiny new global retail brand in its place.

All this longing for the way things used to be makes me feel old and boring. We’ve become the kind of people who like the memory-fueled idea of a place more than the place itself, and, even worse, are prone to wheeze on about it. The only remedy I can think of is rather palatable as far as medicine goes: time to book a vacation to a place we’ve never been before. Then we can complain the whole time about new things.

Cycling England Europe

London to Paris sur une Bicyclette Day 4: Beauvais to le Tour Eiffel

Posted on May 31, 2010

At breakfast on day 4 I noticed that husband and I seemed to be the only couple on the trip. Well, at least the only couple that started the ride that way. The other cyclists seemed to be girlfriends united by a cause—like the Help for Heroes ladies who had sons and husbands in Afghanistan—or a group of men united by their local pub, the beer from which played a pivotal role in encouraging them to think cycling 300 miles would be a laugh.

Within the first 10 miles of today’s ride I realized why couples were so scarce. We were powering up a long incline when husband announced for no apparent reason that he was not going on the f***ing motorway that was running perpendicular to us. Seeing as our route had not yet been on any motorways and the organizer’s insurance premiums almost certainly couldn’t withstand such a decision, husband’s proclamation struck me as nothing more than another moan in what had been a laundry list of complaints over the past 3 days. Thus far I had thought myself rather restrained in dealing with this sort of behavior. Husband would complain, I would grunt some sort of acknowledgment and then let it drop. But this time, what with the sore knees and the aching quads and no end to this hill in sight, I let rip. “Shut up. SHUT UP,” I howled as I hunched over my bike with renewed vigor. There was no more speaking between then and the water stop at mile 23.

Despite the tension, the cycling over the first 30 miles of the day was some of the most rewarding of the trip. The roads were busier than the previous day which precluded riding side by side, and thus conversation (which given our early spat, suited just fine). With the exception of two lengthy inclines the terrain was straight and flat. The combined effect was that I was focused and alert and able to settle into a rhythm. No thinking, just doing.

Closer to Paris it was stop and start as we rode in along the Seine through the industrial northwest of the city, inching towards our Finish line at the Eiffel Tower. Our planned victory lap up the Champs Elysees was nixed by the gendarmerie—it’s a good thing I enjoyed my Tour de France moment earlier in the week in Calais—and so we found ourselves sharing the Eiffel Tower with a swarm of rambunctious Perpignan rugby fans who were in town for the French championship. They were amped up, dressed in their team colours of red and yellow and drinking out of bottles or cups or Davy Crockett style flasks that they tried to squirt in our mouths in some sort of drunken show of solidarity. It looked like Paris had been overrun by a convention of Ronald McDonalds gone bad. We had our obligatory picture snapped in front of the Eiffel Tower and headed for the hotel.

The end of the adventure had been surprisingly unsentimental, flat even. I felt no need to lift my bike over my head in a victory gesture or hug or high five anyone as many of the others in the group did. My lack of emotion bothered me, and for the next few days in Paris I thought about why this was so. The prerequisites for tugging at the heartstrings had all been in place on this adventure: tales of tragedy, triumph over adversity, endorphins, and the city of romance for goodness sake! But in the end this experience was a visceral one for me, not a sentimental one. The value had been in the doing, and I had done what I set out to do. Many others could and would and will and do ride their bikes from London to Paris. And for four days at the end of May, I did too.

Cycling England Europe

London to Paris sur une Bicyclette Day 3: Abbeville to Beauvais

Posted on May 28, 2010

Today’s ride is the most scenic of the trip, with terrain that resembles the Cotswolds without the dry stone walls. Their absence makes me realize how much that stone defines the aesthetic of the Cotswolds, manifest in the churches and cottages and, of course, walls. After three days of eating and riding together, our fellow cyclists are starting to become as much a part of our landscape as those dry stone walls are of the Cotswolds. Not yet knowing everyone’s name, we’ve taken to privately calling them by their defining, sometimes annoying— everything seems annoying when you are going uphill on your third straight day of distance cycling— characteristic. I’ve already introduced smoking man and sweatpants-tucked-into-his-tube socks man, but they have now been joined by a cast of characters including:

    • Foghorn Leghorn, a twenty-something gung ho gal with a plum coloured bob and a booming voice she uses to indicate that she’s very pleased with herself.
    • Australian Man Eater, Foghorn Leghorn’s buddy on this trip who’s clearly on the prowl. I presume the squeaking bed springs coming from next door in the early morning hours of Day 4 mean she was successful.
    • The “Merely-a-Paper-Cut-Gals,” a trio of posh fifty-something birds who are shockingly athletic. My nickname for them hails from the French and Saunders sketch where the duo play a pair of country toffs who constantly sustain dramatic injuries and insist with quintessential English stiff upper lipness that it’s “merely a paper cut.”
    • The Sports Bores, a group of twenty-something uber athletic men who we only see in the morning and evening because they’re always miles ahead of us. They favor achingly tight red lycra and wear their men-from-the-future sports sunglasses with their civilian clothes in the evenings.
    • The Doofus, a ginger haired boy who’s joined Foghorn and Man Eater’s clique, and keeps falling over on his bike.
    • The Doo-lolly, a blond haired, Rubenesque gal who likes to zoom past you on the downhill then suddenly stop her bike in front of you on the uphill so she can get off and walk.

By the time we arrive at our motorway adjacent lodgings, we’ve created back stories for most of the group. We continue this form of recreation over a pichet of the motel’s house rosé. (Being France, it’s quite decent wine relative to what you would expect to find at your average British or American Motel 6. Do they even sell wine at Motel 6?). And just to prove we’re not horrible people we share our pichet with Foghorn’s table.

Cycling England Europe

London to Paris sur une Bicyclette Day 2: Calais to Abbeville

Posted on May 27, 2010

Day 2 and I use every piece of advice, from trite euphemism to true wisdom, to get me through the 78 hilly miles. There’s Larry, my L.A. yoga teacher and former zen priest telling me “so what,” when I complain my feet fall asleep during zazen (and, as it happens, when cycling excessive distances). Richard, the ex-Navy Seal/zen priest in training/workout instructor/and, more recently, cable television host of a program about the weapons of war for which he gave himself the nickname Mack, is also there. He’s shouting “not dead, can’t quit,” at me just like he did when I was doing push ups at 6:30am in the Santa Monica zendo. My colleague Ian is also on hand, nodding approvingly as I wash down my sixth Nurofen of the day with a dose of neat black currant cordial. Ian had advised me painkillers and a slow and steady pace would be my best friends for this bike ride, and so far he’s been right on both counts. The cordial and jelly babies are also reliable acquaintances.

The terrain today is punishing and scenic, and seems to be populated solely by lazy, white French cows who sleep in the meadows like dogs in the shade. The villages we ride through are ghost towns, with broke down mini-chateaus and those concrete bungalows with brightly painted shutters the French seem to favor. Later there are American scale stretches of agricultural land, so vast they make the Cotswolds seem like it’s engaged in boutique farming. Despite all the greenery it somehow feels desolate in these parts.

Over dinner at our hotel we are joined by a man and his friend who are riding for the same charity, the MS Society, that I am. We get to talking and I learn that he suffers from MS and was previously in a wheel chair. His story should be inspirational, but the more he talks the more I dislike him. I find him narcissistic and feel guilty about it, despite reminding myself that disease doesn’t discriminate when it comes to the likability of its victims. When we are back in our hotel room, I ask husband if he had the same reaction and am surprised when he tells me he liked the guy. Husband suggests my reaction might be more about my discomfort with confronting MS rather than the man’s arrogance. I decide to sleep on it.

Cycling England Europe

London to Paris sur une Bicyclette Day 1: Crystal Palace to the White Cliffs of Dover

Posted on May 26, 2010

An inauspicious start to the day when our mini cab driver arrives at our flat early, aborting my attempt to make coffee, then drops us at the wrong end of Crystal Palace park, leaving us roaming for 30 minutes looking for the starting line. Lose luggage tag and woman-from-the-future special bicycling sunglasses (later retrieved in the parking lot) in the process. When we finally do arrive at the check-in point I suggest to support staff they invest in some signage for future events in a tone verging on shouting. None of them gets hooked, which is a good sign: clearly they are well versed in dealing with drama queens, a skill that will come in handy over the next few days.

The whole thing reminds me of the time husband ran the Napa Valley marathon and we drove 26 miles from our hotel in Calistoga at 6am wondering why there was so much traffic going in the opposite direction so early in the morning. When we arrived in Napa we learned we were at the Finish line, so we stormed back up the highway to Calistoga arriving just as they were disassembling the Start line bunting. Support staff telephoned ahead to their colleagues to keep the first water stop open, and husband ran off into the morning mist like Forest Gump. He was so freaked out he finished in his fastest time ever, just over four hours.

Our late start doesn’t inspire such speed on the first day of our cycle ride. 90 miles later we arrive in Dover in the bottom 3 of our group of 70-odd, not counting the handful of people who got a lift in the van. The other laggard is someone I will come to know as smoking man thanks to his habit of lighting up at the top of hills. He and a rotund chap who wears his sweatpants tucked into his tube socks will become my frequent companions at the back of the pack on day 2.

90 minutes later we arrive by ferry in Calais and convoy the 1o or some unwelcome additional miles to the Holiday Inn on the outskirts of town. Young men with long hair and earrings step out from bars with names like Le Crypte, whistling at us and inviting us for a drink in accented English. This is the closest I will come to knowing what it feels like to ride through a French town on the Tour de France, so I savour the moment.

Europe

Return to Hamburg

Posted on December 10, 2009

We kicked off the Christmas season last weekend with what is threatening to become our annual visit to Hamburg. After checking into our Japanese hotel, the Nippon, we were at loose ends before dinner so decided to look around a nearby grocery store. Visiting a grocery store, I thought, is a great way to learn about a culture. And I was validated as we admired the long wall of glass jars holding vibrantly coloured, endless variations of sauerkraut and pickled things. Husband spent a lot of time looking at the salad bar, which reminded him of California what with its bowls of vegetables unadorned with mayonnaise-based dressing unlike the British equivalent. He was so impressed he decided to get a little bowl which he ate as we walked the aisles, an action which seemed to cause consternation among the ruddy faced matrons who were manning the place.

The mayo may not have been in the salad, but it was on the shelves in toothpaste tube packages, one of my favorite continental quirks. I seriously considered taking home a handful for stocking stuffers before my concern that they would exceed the carry-on liquid limit stopped me (lucky for all of you on my Christmas list). Next we turned our attention to the deli counter, topped with a dizzying assortment of cheese samples. Husband and I indulged in several varieties before we realized the wildly gesticulating ruddy faced matron was talking to us, pointing out a well hidden jar of toothpicks intended for use in tasting the samples. Husband smiled and shrugged, responding with an “English” by way of explanation before he speared a smoked Gouda. It seemed we were not so popular at the grocery store, and that was before we tried to pay for our sparkling water and empty salad container with a debit card and were informed of the ten euro minimum, which meant we had to hold up the entire line while we went and found some other things to buy. I suppose in the end the culture exchange of the grocery store went both ways, with the matrons learning as much about the gluttonous, unsanitary “English” as we learned about the Germans.

Saturday morning we got down to the serious German business of Christmas at the main market outside the Rathaus. The Christkindel Cafe & Bar hut was our starting point. There, a helpful, green velvet cloaked young man steered us away from our opening gambit of eierpunsch (creamy eggnog) to heidel beer (hot blueberry wine). Husband got his with a shot of rum, and we enjoyed our first drink to the sounds of a trio of south Asian Santas on accordion, sax, and clarinet. Next up was some nourishment in the form of potato pancakes, mine with sour cream and apple sauce, husband’s with a heady remoulade and streaky bacon. To cut the richness, I enjoyed a traditional glühwein while husband doubled down with the eierpunsch he had foregone in the last round. Our switchback tour of the bar huts yielded the new, vaguely-redolent-of-cat-piss-yet-surprisingly-tasty white glühwein and somewhere along the way we split a bratwurst. There was a deviation to an Alpine theme for a raclette and a welcome glass of almost chilled Beaujolais tasting spirit (at this juncture, I was pointing not asking). We finished with a hot raspberry wine to help brace ourselves against the wind and drizzle we faced on our hotel-lent bike ride home. There the Nippon greeted us with the welcome contrast of tatami mats and low, hard-bedded austerity.

Europe

Helslinky Update

Posted on September 19, 2009

Moi! I am back from Helsinki having unlocked the secrets of the sauna. First, the saunas are, mercifully, segregated by gender. Second, the sauna is optional. In fact, the two other Finnish women attending my meeting suggested we just drink a beer while the men roasted themselves, which we did while watching the sunset over the sea. They promised next time I return we’ll drive up to Lapland for the weekend where they’ll take me to a wood burning—this electric stuff is a sorry substitute for the real thing.

I did a little better at creating an authentic experience when it came to food, although things did not get off to a very promising start. For my first meal I tried to sample cabbage rolls—which sounded suitably traditional—but the office canteen had run out. This left me with something called the American pork sandwich, which turned out to be a pork stir-fry in a bun served with coleslaw and pickles and not as bad as it sounds. Things got better over dinner at the Finnish Restaurant (a name that says it all about the forthright style of Finns), a rustic wood paneled grotto in downtown Helsinki with a menu full of elk and reindeer and schnapps. I started out with an unadventurous Finnish goats cheese salad, but my colleague did share a piece of bear salami from his Finnish take on a charcuterie plate. This was followed by pike perch and beetroot rosti, the first of much beetroot over the trip, washed down by lingonberry schnapps. My Finnish colleagues promise to take me to Zetor, otherwise known as the Tractor Bar, for more schnapps and traditional food next time I visit. I looked at Zetor’s menu on their website and found the following example of Finnish sensibility, as good a reason to return to Finland as a wood burning sauna in Lapland:

Zetor presents: Gone with the broth
(G) EUR 9.50 / EUR 14.90

The movie of the night is the romantic
Gone with the Broth. The events
of this Poscar-winning movie take
place in a bowl where the budding
love of potatoes and onions is tragically
transmuted by a rainbow trout
that cuts in. The blend wouldn’t be
perfect without the mysterious white
wine that creates more of a mix-up.
Directed by Creamy Soup.

Europe

Helslinky

Posted on September 16, 2009

It’s official: summer is over and Christmas will be here in what will feel like three days from now. I know this neither because rust and gold are already sneaking into the Cotwolds foliage (they are) nor because my black turtleneck sweater is in regular wardrobe rotation (it is), but because today I made my first Christmas present purchases. I spent a ludicrous sum on two exquisite, leather-bound notebooks at the Smythson of Bond Street outlet in Heathrow’s Terminal 3, the kind of impulse purchase I can only justify as a gift even when it is VAT-free. The shop assistant spent so much time tying navy blue, grosgrain bows on the various layers of packaging (which no doubt account for a considerable portion of the ludicrous sum) that I almost missed my flight to Helsinki.

It may have been I was subconsciously trying to miss the flight. When the business trip was first suggested a couple weeks ago, I was excited having never been to Finland. Then an Outlook invitation showed up in my inbox requesting my presence for a sauna following the meeting. There are few things I can think of that I would like to do less than see my mostly male work colleagues in a state of semi-undress, a sentiment I am sure they reciprocate. The prospect has been lingering in my psyche like a bad smell for the past week, surfacing occasionally with ill-timed arrivals of mental images of my sweaty, beet-faced co-workers sporting only a thin, white towel.

And should I steel myself and adopt the when in Rome attitude, just what exactly is the etiquette for a sauna? Bathing suit, towel only, is it really mixed gender à la the Ally McBeal bathrooms? As I ponder the smorgasbord of opportunities to embarrass myself, I suddenly feel like a very, very uptight American. The only way through this is going to be with humor, and I resolve to adopt that most admirable characteristic of my fellow Brits: the ability to take the piss out of oneself.

Europe

Malibu with Cows

Posted on May 14, 2009

Help. Someone has kidnapped me (husband, I suspect), and I don’t know where I am. I feel no evidence of tranquilizers or jet lag, and yet I am pretty sure we could be in L.A. It’s sunny, there’s an ocean view, and the woman at the table next to us is wearing pink designer sweatpants and sipping matching pink champagne. Then I notice the lighthouse in the distance and the white clapboard house on the cliff above, and suddenly it’s all seeming a bit more Cape Cod. A Victorian hotel catches my eye, and the thought crosses my mind that this could in fact be Sydney. The Amalfi Coast? Cannes? I’m looking at the clapboard house again, which I see is flying a black flag with a white cross. The waiter informs me this is the Cornish standard, and I realize we are in deepest, sunniest England, a mere four hours from the Cotswolds.

Since our arrival in the tropical pastoral of Cornwall my brain has been issuing a constant “does not compute” message. I recognize the hedgerows and narrow lanes, rolling hills and grazing cows, all familiar enough from Gloucestershire. But as we edge in and out from the coast on the winding seaside road, the familiar periodically gives way to sheer cliffs and scrub vegetation. It’s Malibu with cows.

The names of Cornish villages are as alien as the landscape. My favorite English village names (pre-Cornwall) read like the cast of characters in a traditional farce, with my dream panto production starring Somersal Herbert, Old Sodbury, and the Cold Slag. Cornwall adds two new roles: Goon Gumpas and Goonbell. There is also scandal to be found in these parts: try Watergate Bay, Ventongimps, or just plain old Cocks. And to balance out all this tawdriness, England’s southernmost county hosts a bounty of lost saints: St. Ives, St. Agnes, and St. Tudy among them. (What miracle, I wonder, is St. Tudy known for? Is it as bubbly as her name and did she moonlight in an eighties sitcom called The Facts of Life?)

I never made it to St. Tudy, but St. Ives was the site of our geographically perplexing lunch and the revelatory white clapboard house. While admiring the house’s Cornish pennant, I couldn’t help noticing its glassed in patio decorated with flea market chic precision (straw hats and antique portraits in oils). A woman sat at the desk in the center of the patio overlooking the Atlantic, no doubt putting the finishing touches on her eighty-seventh best selling novel. At that moment I decided I’d have to kill her and take over her life.

This is a phase I seem to go through every year with a woman whose life I decide is highly covetable. My last target was the proprietress of the Cotswold Ice Cream Co., whose life of dairy creativity on a hilltop farm seems pretty near perfect to me. Now I coveted Cornish. Luckily for the lady from St. Ives I subsequently found the house from St. Agnes. It is perched atop a cliff overlooking Trevaunance Cove, and when I climbed the path to take a closer look through its mullioned windows I noticed a sign advertising the house for holiday rental. This is a house where even I might be inspired to write a book. It’s also an excellent excuse to return to Cornwall soon, not to mention St. Tudy.

Europe

Picky and Pristine in Barcelona

Posted on March 14, 2009

In 2008 we only managed to visit the continent twice, enthralled as we were with our new life in the Cotswolds. Every weekend here still feels like a vacation, but nonetheless we vowed to take better advantage of our proximity to Europe this year. We even made a list, top of which coincidentally includes two cities that have recently featured in films, Barcelona and Bruges.

The other night we saw In Bruges, the story of two hit men hiding out in the title city after a job has gone wrong back in London. Colin Farrell plays Ray, who upon arriving in Europe’s hallmark chocolate box city declares it “a shithole.” It was pretty much the same reaction husband had to Barcelona last month as I forced him on a Gaudi death march across the traffic strewn city, taking him past the Palau Musica, to Casa Batlló and La Pedrera, then finally Park Guell. Taking in Park Guell’s unwashed masses and makeshift vendors miraculously hawking the exact same crap as their brethren in Venice Beach, husband could be heard muttering a steady refrain of, “I could be cycling around the Cotswolds right now.”

Husband is a very picky traveler, preferring among other things non-smoking restaurants with dinner available from 7pm onwards (a complete and utter rejection of the 1/8 Basque heritage he has been known to proudly cite in explanation for his perma-tan). I should have realized there were going to be fundamental Catalan culture clash issues, but there were grim moments in store even I could not have predicted. The tapas we ate in La Boqueria was some of the best I’ve had, but husband narrowly averted a pickpocket in the process. We pretended for awhile that a wine bar we found in the Gotic district was quaint, but couldn’t ignore the view across the narrow medieval alley of a souvenir shop selling authentic Catalan memorabilia like a Dolce and Banana t-shirt.

The pinnacle of our Barcelona misadventures was an outing to see Woody Allen play jazz at a swank hotel on Oscar night. When we noticed the signs advertising the event in the hotel window it seemed plausible. It wasn’t much of a leap to imagine that Woody, always a bit anti-establishment, would rather be in Barcelona than in the paparazzi glare of L.A. And hadn’t I read somewhere he regularly plays clarinet in a New York hotel? We were near the end of the Gaudi death march and, having absorbed vitriol from husband all day, I was rather smug that my relentless sight seeing ambition had yielded such a result for the evening’s entertainment. It was one of those divine moments of traveller’s serendipity, like stumbling upon an open air string quartet in an Italian piazza on a starry night.

Of course Woody Allen was by Penelope Cruz’s side in Hollywood that night when she won the Oscar for her role in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. We found out after having taken a taxi all the way back up to the swank hotel. The maitre d’—who spoke much better English than the bellboy we’d spoken to in the afternoon—explained it was a Woody Allen tribute band.

Despite my track record in Barcelona, I am not disheartened from pursuing our European quest. We head for Bruges in April. I could be in for more trouble with husband if what Ray said about it is true: “If I grew up on a farm and was retarded, Bruges might impress me. But I didn’t, so it doesn’t.”