HAPPY ROYAL WEDDING DAY!

Happy Royal Wedding Day!  Here we are, waving our Union Jacks, in the Bath City Park with a thousand or so other happy wedding goers.  Bath’s Queen Victoria Park – an aptly royal venue in which to watch the nuptials – played host to two jumbotron screens on which the wedding was broadcast, with a live orchestral accompaniment at strategic points by the Bath Philharmonic Orchestra.  Along with the screens and musicians were a few food kiosks brought in for the event, including a mobile creperie run by two flamboyant Frenchmen and an organic food kiosk with a queue a mile long.  Thronging the area were many happy partying Brits in one big community of wedding well-wishers.  Continuing our pattern in southern England, we were the only Americans in the vicinity.  We have been a trio of Yanks in an otherwise all-British world since we left London.  It’s been lovely. 

 

Our attendance at the Royal Nuptials was ironically threatened by the nuptials themselves, and the designation of the day as yet another Bank Holiday, which reduced the frequency of the local bus service to a near ghostly level.  We have been the King, Queen and Prince (continuing our royal theme) of Public Transportation in our travels.  With the exception of a couple of cabs, we have been As One with buses, trains, subways and our six little feet.  We got all around London on the tube and buses, and had easy junkets out of the city to Warwick Castle and down to Rye, Hastings and Battle on the train.  Once we left London, we continued our partnership with the various train lines that criss-cross England.  It is entirely possible to get around England and see everything you want to see by using public transport, and it’s no more expensive than renting cars – and you can’t read, play cards or just look out the window when you’re behind the wheel of an automobile hurtling down the opposite side of a narrow, curving road encountering God knows what around the next corner. 

 

I must admit that we had planned on renting a car in Bath and later on in York to better explore the two areas of the country, and Jeff had been mustering up his nerve to make another attempt at British style driving.  We were chatting about renting a car as we took the bus into Bath, but when the bus rounded a corner and there was a fire truck screaming down the middle of the road, sirens blazing, with passenger cars diving onto sidewalks to avoid the fire engine coming one way and our bus coming the other, our commitment to public transportation deepened appreciably.  It was at that moment that we decided to make our month in England a carbon-neutral ode to mass transit.

But our vow to bus-train-walk our way across the country was broken by the evil Bank Holiday bus schedule.  The cottage we’re renting in a little village outside of Bath is a 10-minute walk from the local bus stop, and buses are not that frequent, requiring some advance planning to make it all work.  But bus service disappeared on the morning of the Royal Wedding, so we had to resort to calling a cab.  We got a friendly local from Bath – “born and bred here” – with the characteristic Bath accent that sounds almost Welsh, not surprising since we’re close to the border of Wales.  We were whisked into town and arrived at the park at 9:00.  I was anxious to get a good place to watch the wedding and boy, did we ever, since we were among a handful of others who had arrived that early.  No matter.  Within an hour the area was packed, and we’d already gotten our coffee and crepes and heard some lovely pre-wedding music played by the Bath Philharmonic.

 

Most everyone had arrived prepared to make a day of it in the park.   The people behind us not only had folding chairs and blankets to lay on the grass, but a folding table with mounds of food, champagne and glasses, and a small candelabra to decorate the table!  We felt under-dressed, or more accurately, under-accessorized in a picnic kind of way. There were many brides in the park if the plethora of gauzy white veils was any indication.  A trio of brides sat in front of us, their veils flowing onto their parkas, half-obscuring their multiple cheek and nose piercings.  A few steps away was a couple who never exchanged a word, as far as I could tell.  They sat side by side in folding chairs wearing matching plastic hats that looked like the classic British toppers. Dangling from the brims of the hats were red and blue ribbons.  What fit of whimsy made this obviously serious couple decide to venture out in matching plastic beribboned helmets?

 

Maybe it wasn’t whimsy so much as festive patriotism, of which there were many displays.  People handed out little Union Jack flags, and flag streamers and bunting decorated the stage and many houses and businesses in Bath.  For the two weeks we were in London, just weeks before the wedding, we didn’t see a single sign of interest in the upcoming event.  Souvenier shops were selling wedding kitsch and keepsakes, but in terms of any public displays or overheard conversations regarding the wedding, there was nary a one.

 

But in the Queen Victoria Park yesterday, everybody loved the Royals.  There was a man dressed in a morning suit with a grey cutaway coat and a high collar, pressed trousers and shiny shoes, an appropriate outfit for such a grand event.  Little girls ran around in fairy tale dresses.  I can only imagine how many Cinderella Complexes were formed amid the hullabaloo of a beautiful young woman marrying her prince charming.  Adding a bit of historical perspective to the occasion was a little boy dressed in a home-made knight’s costume.  It was formed from the same shiny aluminum-coated posterboard material that Jeff made Max’s Halloween costume from when Max was 3.  The little boy proudly paraded his shiny suit of armor past the glittering girls. 

Many people also came equipped with bottles of champagne, and I kicked myself for neglecting to plan ahead and pack our own bottle of bubbly.  The jumbotron images of the dignitaries and various stars arriving at Westminster Abbey joined us park revelers into a community of fashion critics.  Some of the women’s hats were no doubt imposing in real life, but on the jumbotron screen they were the size of flying saucers or flocks of birds.  Almost indescribably ugly were Fergie’s daughters outfits.  There were Kate and Pippa Middleton, slender swans of women, beautiful and svelte and there were Beatrice and Eugenie wearing dumpy frocks and hats that looked like refrigerator door handles covered in fluff and soddered onto their foreheads, and all enlarged to scary giant proportions on the jumbotrons.

 

But everyone cheered when the Queen arrived, even though she looked somewhat befuddled, as if she couldn’t remember if she’d turned the burner off under the tea kettle before she left the Palace.  No one clapped for Camilla, who looked like she wished she were any place but there, and we all wished she was, too, and that somehow Diana hadn’t died and she was there watching her son get married. 

 

But the biggest cheers came when Kate and William said their “I Dos” or more accurately, their “I Wills.”  Champagne bottles popped, we all waved our flags, and for one moment we were all united in the common bond of happiness.  It was so quintessentially British that I was close to suggesting that we all just shake hands and forget about that 1776 unpleasantness.  Then the Bath Philharmonic began to play as Kate and William got into their horse-drawn carriage for the ride to the palace.  As the first strains of music wafted from the stage, Max and Jeff and I wondered what classic British melody they’d play?  Perhaps Handel’s Water Music?  What suitably royal and celebratory piece of music filled with British verve and pomp would they produce at this auspicious moment as the newly minted Duchess and her Duke-Prince trotted down the street in their crimson carriage pulled by a team of white horses?

 

The notes swirled down from the stage, forming a tune that, to our surprise, we started to recognize.  Jeff and Max and I looked at each other.  What?  Could it be?  Yes, it was.  It was Maria from West Side Story.  What possible connection did that song have to the epitome of white womanhood named Katherine who had just wed her dream man, not lost him in a gang war in 1960s New York City?  Then the song morphed into – wait for it – I’d Like To Be In America, also from West Side Story.  People looked at each other, puzzled, as they tried to clap along to the unfamiliar melody.  Ah, yes, the perfect choice of music for the occasion.  A song sung by Puerto Rican immigrants satirizing the dream of the USA as a color-blind land of opportunity.

 

So join us in singing the tune that everyone’s singing to send the happy couple on their way:

            “I wish we hadn’t lost America,

            I wish it was still a colony

            If it were part of the UK

            We’d go to Hawaii on our honeymoon vacay . . .”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MAGIC MOMENTS

When you travel – for a weekend, a summer vacation, or months at a time – you have a sliding scale of hopes.  There’s the basic one:  you hope nothing horrible happens to you when you’re on the road.  Then there are the next ones:  the house doesn’t burn down while you’re gone, the cat doesn’t die, burglars don’t steal all your belongings, the weather at home isn’t better than where you’ve spent a small fortune to travel to, your destination isn’t boring/awful/disappointing.

Residing among the hopes for safety and basic enjoyment is the longing for magic moments: the unexpected gems that appear like travel diamonds, twinkling in a hidden city courtyard or glistening in fields of springtime green.  You have to keep your eyes and heart open for magic moments.  You can miss them between arguments over map directions or looking for street signs or generally allowing a veil of distraction to form between you and the experience at hand. 

I had the shivery thrill of a magic moment in London, and it involved an old church – as they so often do – and a hidden back-street courtyard.  We were down in the old City, the one-mile stretch that formed the first kernel of what would become the sprawling capital of England.  The entrance to The City was marked by an arch where traitors’ heads would be stuck, the decapitated visages staring down as bloody reminders of the power of the king.  The Strand, a major thoroughfare, connects The City with the city of London.

Just off the Strand is the maze of the Temple area where barristers and legal scholars have worked and studied for centuries among buildings that Shakespeare included as backdrops for scenes in his plays.  You enter the Temple complex through a stone archway and almost immediately, the pounding rumble of the busy streets disappears.  It is astonishingly quiet.

Deep in the maze is a little round church made of time-burnished stone.  It was built by the Knights Templar who were a safe-keeping order of knights formed to escort pilgrims to the Holy Land during the Crusades.  The church was built in the 1100s.  The 1100s.  In the circular part of the building lie 6 stone effigies on the church floor.  They are knights, in full armor, with shields and swords by their sides.  One jousted with Richard the Lionheart, and later served as a mediator between the nobles and Richard’s brother John.  This knight led tense negotiations with fellow lords and King John in this round room in which my 21^st century self now stands.  The negotiations resulted in King John’s reluctant signing of the Magna Carta, a statement of legal rights and guarantees that has influenced western legal systems ever since that knight, surrounded by his fellows, argued with the king one night, more than 900 years ago, in this room.  

Was the king announced with formal pomp as he swept through the huge thick wooden door against which I am leaning?  Were torches flaring in sconces against the cool stone wall at my back?  Did candles glint that night like the sunlight glints today off the cream-colored stone?  What horrible retribution did this knight face as he greeted the king right here, on this spot, with a tense “My Lord,” presenting the requests of the nobles?

His effigy now lies on the church floor, his body angled in formal repose, his face a mask of stone. 

Wooden pews and a beautiful pipe organ are inside the small square of the church that connects to this round room where the knights lay.   On this 21^st century day an organist climbs up a small flight of stairs and takes his place and begins to play.  The music swirls around the room like smoke from guttering candles. 

Outside a tree is in full blossom, its white flowers bedecking the round side of the church like diamonds, brilliant and dazzling, there in plain sight if you only look.

 

HOUSE EXCHANGES WITH EXTRAS

           

 



George Orwell lived for a time on Portobello Road, just a few blocks from the London flat that was our first house exchange in this 4-month series of home swaps.  One of Orwell’s best known works is Animal Farm, and in it the chief pig famously states that, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”  This could also be said of house exchanges.  They’re all equal in that they accomplish the fundamental goal of house exchanges:  you get to stay somewhere else for free, and that “somewhere” is a place you really want to visit and probably wouldn’t be able to experience if you had to pay for a hotel.  You also have a kitchen and refrigerator so that you don’t have to eat out every meal, and a living area so you’re not on top of each other all the time.  This usually results in longer stays in your destination, which is another plus.

But some house exchanges offer extras that go beyond the room-and-board-and-location triumvirate.  Pools, for example.  We stayed in a house in Florida that had an indoor pool.  A pool in your house – it was such a novel concept that I would have signed up for an exchange if the house had been located in West Nowhere and I had to be helicoptered into it.  Then there are the second homes with pools.  We’ve had a couple that were straight out of Better Homes and Gardens or in this case, Snooty People’s Snooty Houses You Could Never Afford No Matter How Hard You Work.  One was in Costa Rica and the pool overlooked the Pacific Ocean.  Needless to say, our grand plans to experience all of Costa Rica’s beautiful nature drowned in that pool.  If we could have slept in it, we would have.

Another place with a pool was in St. Croix.  This one overlooked the Caribbean, and we spent so much time in it that we pioneered a new game: bobble.  Bobble is a physically challenging and deeply complicated game that should be in the Olympics except we’re the only three people in the world who know how to play it. (Which means there is a sporting event in which my family would be guaranteed a gold, silver or bronze medal, so dammit, let’s bring Bobble to the 2012 Olympics!)

Bobble involves catching water-soaked balls in your open palm and bouncing them three times and then tossing them to the next person.  This may sound easy, but believe me, if you’re treading water in the deep end and trying to bounce balls in your hand before, during or after a certain number of pina coladas, it can be quite a challenging exercise.  We became such bobble experts in St. Croix that we hauled the plastic pool chairs into the pool and played bobble standing on the chairs in the deep end, and then standing on one leg on the chair in the deep end, and then hopping on one foot on the chair in the deep end.  I had calf muscles of steel and a liver of mush by the time we ended our Caribbean bobble-fest. 

 

But this London house exchange came with extras I’ve never experienced in our previous dozen home swaps.  The three cats, for example, and the caged gerbils that spent all day, every day, gnawing on the bars of their cage in a hopeless, Sartre-ish “No Exit” attempt to gain freedom.  Their cage was stuck on top of the kitchen cupboards to protect them from the cats, which would have made the gerbils’ freedom short-lived if they’d somehow grown metal files for teeth and managed to saw their way through the bars.  “I’m Free!” the gerbils would have squeaked, shortly before entering the dark tunnel of the cat’s esophagus.  Their hopeless gnawing and rustling around in their pine shavings was a mournful counterpoint to any time spent in the kitchen, and required vigilance about where you left your coffee cup if you didn’t want bits o’gerbil floating in it.

 

The cats were also a fun-filled addition, particularly the kitten who became increasingly animated as the night-time hours passed.  The kitten had a bell on her collar so that you’d hear her jingle jingle jingling up and down the hall all night long like Santa’s reindeer on a bender.  After she’d completed her obligatory seventy-five thousand laps up and down the hall, she’d jump up onto the bed and slowly slink her way up your supine body to your head.  The sight of your slumbering visage evidently filled her with a wild kitten joy because she’d burst into throaty purring that sounded as if a motorboat had just docked in your ear.  If for some unknown reason the jingling windsprints, body slink or roaring purr had somehow failed to wake you, she deployed her secret weapon: the head curl.  This involved curling up on your sleeping head and draping her tail across your face and twitching it in a happy little, “isn’t it grand to be alive?” kind of way until you woke up from restless dreams of things crawling on you to the real-life experience of things crawling on you. 

 

My favorite parts of the flat, though, were the Soviet-era appliances in the kitchen.  You think of London as being a world-class city, which it absolutely is, but it’s a city filled with people who know a little something about deprivation and doing without.  Londoners were on ration cards until the 1950s as England struggled to recover from the enormously damaging and economically costly war.  There’s a photo in the Imperial War Museum of children storming a candy shop on the 1950s day on which sweets rationing finally ended.  They were like sugar groupies rushing the stage of their favorite band:  The Candies.   During the War, Londoners were abstemious in their consumption of food and goods and I think that “make do” attitude still continues, particularly when compared to the typical American super-sized standard of consumption.  This is probably why we saw so few genuinely fat Brits in London– they weren’t super-sizing their way through the day. 

 

You also have to be fairly fit to live in London since 90 percent of the people who work in the City get there on mass transit, and there are a lot of stairs, believe me, in the London underground.  A lot.  It’s like the Andes, only horizontal.  Max’s pedometer informed us at the end of each day how many miles we’d logged, and we averaged 6-8 miles a day and a significant percentage of those miles were generated by climbing the stairs and walking the loooonnnngggggg tunnel halls of the London Underground.  I thought of the fat ‘Murikans riding up and down the escalators on the DC metro, or the many more who eschew public transportation for the ass-widening comfort of their rush-hour-stalled cars.  London is, in many ways, exactly what cities should aspire to.  If 90 percent of the people who work in DC got there on the metro or buses, the air quality of the DC area would be amazingly improved, not to mention the cardio-vascular health of the typical DC worker.  You walk down the street in London and here’s what you don’t see:  SUVs.  Min-vans.  Any car bigger than a mini.  In fact, hardly any cars.  You walk down a DC street at rush hour and here’s what you see:  a roiling cauldron of seething commuters navigating cars the size of small tanks down the street.  Why anyone needs an SUV or Jeep in DC is beyond me:  there are no savannahs across which to wend your way, no rutted dirt roads switchbacking up mountain sides.  There are perfectly flat streets at sea level in a climate where two inches of snow is considered a blizzard. 

 

As the London streets bore few signs of conspicuous automotive consumption, neither did our London flat bear signs of conspicuous appliance consumption.  At least not in this century.  The microwave was the size of a toaster and looked like either Lenin or the Jetsons had built it.  The washing machine and dryer, both of which were located in the kitchen, were gunmetal gray and size-wise, would have been perfect in the home of a Munchkin family.  I started our first load of clothes and a half-hour later went in to check on its progress, and a half hour later checked again, and again, and again – until after a mere 2 ½ hours had passed, our clothes were sparking clean!  The dryer was equally sized and equally efficient.  A long white tube was coiled between the dryer and the wall, and you had to carefully extract the tube and run it out the kitchen window to vent.  You thought twice about washing your clothes, believe me.

 

And maybe that’s just part of the “making do” ethos of London.  Instead of having flashy extras like indoor pools in this house exchange, we had less-tras that encouraged us to focus on why we came to London in the first place.  It wasn’t to swim, or lounge around a house stocked with every new convenience.  It was to stay a 10-minute walk from a mass transit system that could ferry you anywhere you wanted to go around a city pulsing with Roman, medieval, Victorian and 21^st century life.  It was to live, for a slice of time, in a real neighborhood and shop at its grocery stores, visit its flea markets, mingle with its residents.  We exchanged cities this time, not houses.  And that was the best extra we could have hoped for.

 

THE NAME OF THE GAME IS FLEXIBLE

 

One of the secrets of traveling well is to be flexible.  Actually, one of the secrets of living well is to be flexible (and it goes without saying that this is also one of the secrets of doing yoga well.)  When I started planning this grand adventure 14 months ago, I spread out a map of Europe and said, “OK, where would I like to go?”  Or, to be honest, I said, “where would I like to go if I could get a house exchange to go there?”  I had in mind London (which I got to begin our journey) and Greek islands (which didn’t end up in the final itinerary.  No house exchanges. I tried, believe me, I tried.)  I wanted a house exchange in Aix En Provence, I got a nice 2-bedroom apartment in downtown Rennes.  I wanted a flat in Venice or Sorento, I got an apartment near the ancient walled city of Alghero in Sardinia.  At one time I had a 3 bedroom house in Florence with a pool; that disappeared and was replaced by a flat in a small coastal village, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, in Spain.  I tried for an apartment in Rome, I got a beach house outside of it.  I tried for Amsterdam and got it; queried Slovenia on a lark and ended up with a nice home in a tiny fishing village.  And to my unending surprise, wound up with Denmark, which was never on my “what if?” list but is now on my looking-forward-to-going-there list. 

Flexible.  The reason I queried Slovenia house exchanges was because I looked at a map to see what was close to Venice.  Ah, Slovenia.  I’d never even known where the damn country was, and certainly never had an inclination to travel there.  But once I threw out a baited hook and Nina (from Slovenia) swam to the surface and bit, I was hooked as much as she.  Who knew that Slovenia is the “new Prague?”  That it has its own Alps, coast, farms, and castles?  That it’s hip and beautiful and filled with nice people?  I’d never have known if I hadn’t had to expand my horizons past Venice.

 

So for a house exchanger to be successful, she must be flexible.  And for a trip to be successful, it must be flexible. Which brings me to today’s experience.  As I had planned our month in England, I had built almost all of our sightseeing around rail, bus or tube travel.  We’re urban people.  We like to travel by train; we aren’t fazed by subway systems; we enjoy a good city bus ride.  So movement around London, day trips out of it – all by mass transit. 
 

But then I decided we should rent a car to go to a pocket of lovely ancient culture in Southeast England:  the fabled medieval town of Rye, and its neighboring burgs whose lineage are so old that they hail all the way back to William the Conqueror – Battle (as in Battle of Hastings) and Hastings (as in Battle of.)  And the ruined, atmospheric wreck of Bodiam Castle, a scant 9 miles out of Battle.  To experience this wonderland of Norman Conquest history, I figured a car was the best bet. 
 

And so off Jeff and I went this morning to our local Portabello Road car rental outlet to hire a nice little 4-door Fiat manual to tootle down to the Land of 1066 (this is actually what some very savvy marketer has created as the new moniker, the new label, for SE England:  1066 Land.  In America we’d have “Sprawl Land” or “Downtowns Decimated by WalMart Land” or “The Same Damn Stores Everywhere Like We Need Another Au Ban Pain Land.”)  Off we trotted in the warm spring morn and arrived at the car rental shop, ready to roll.  Then we spent 15 minutes discussing ways to avoid leaving London in a rental car that didn’t involve actually motoring over any London city streets since they are crazy.  Then we got into the cute little 4-door Fiat with a stick shift and Jeff pulled out onto the street and . . . .  we started frantically jabbering, “which lane do you go into?  That lane?  No, that lane? Is there anyone coming?  Which way?  I don’t care, all ways!” Then we realized that the stick shift had to be shifted with the left hand, not the right, while guiding the car on the other side of the road than we’re accustomed to guiding a car down (I won’t say the “wrong” side of the road since that’s so judgmental but it’s no freak of fate that only UK drivers motor up and down the “other” side of the road .. . .  and being PC in describing the way they drive as being “otherwise oriented” rather than “wrong side of the bloody road” is nice but it’s not the truth . . . . )  It was a hideous experience.  I was clenched into an S-bend of pure tension, Jeff was trying to guide the car down a street with construction, detours, work lorries, pedestrians, morning traffic and God knows what else – a circus parade, stampeding mustangs, warring wolf packs, who knows?  It was no-holds-barred driving with caution signs and piles of asphalt rubble and the odd jaywalking pedestrian to liven it all up. 
 

After 5 blocks, a few near misses and a sideswiped side mirror incident, we looked at each other and said, “is this fun?  Is this what the words ‘relaxing vacation’ conjour?” No, we said, it is not.  And we did a U turn, drove the car back the 5 blocks, parked it in the rental car lot, walked back into the rental office and slapped the keys and contract onto the counter and said, “we’re TRAIN people” and left.  It was one of my proudest moments:  to not buy into the classic macho American born-to-drive shit, to realize that hours spent in white-knuckled motoring is no fun for anyone involved, and to act on it post haste – all an affirmation of sane traveling.  Yay for us. 
 

So I hit the web when we got back to the flat, found that there are train connections from London to Rye, Rye to Hastings, Hastings to Battle, and Battle to London and that these connections are every half hour or so and that they are fast, safe and enjoyable and  that they would cost less than renting the blasted death trap on wheels, and an hour later Jeff, Max and I are slipping through the turnstiles on the London underground on our way to St. Pancras Station to catch a train to Rye.  And in buying our train tickets, we find out that we can get a round-trip ticket for the 3 of us going to all the places we’d planned on going via car for 40 pounds less than renting a car.  So we picked up some beer, sandwiches and coffees, and slid into a comfortable seat by the floor to ceiling window, and let the fast train hit 130 MPH to ferry us from London to Rye in under 1 ½ hours.  No crazy London streets, no traffic jams, no arguments over which way to turn, which road to take, etc, etc, etc.  Chats, a card game or two, a beer and a snack, and relaxed travel. 
 

Along the way we were treated to vast fields of flowering mustard, swathes of brilliant yellow blossoms stretching for acres.  Interspersed with the huge squares of lemon yellow were brilliant, spring green meadows, that special aching green of spring. The first green, the rebirth-after-winter’s-sepia-tones green.  The shade of green that makes you feel a bit teary-eyed because it is such a vital color.  It shouldn’t even be called merely “green,” it should have its own word because the green of an April field, sprouting with buoyant new tufts of life, is unlike any other green.  It’s spring green – spreen.  Entirely its own shade of emerald.  A statement of continuation, of rebirth, of vitality.  Spreen. 
 

And dotting the spreen fields were the other ancient symbol of fertility and new life: lambs.  Adorable tremulous-legged, inquisitive-faced, scampering lambs, attached by invisible guy lines to their wooly mothers.  Spring lambs, scampering unsteadily away from the sound of the whooshing speed train, white zephyrs across the spreen fields beside the exploding golden swathes of mustardseed.  Spring was having its own parade that had nothing to do with Easter bonnets or the possible rebirth of any poor murdered demigod.  Spring filled the canvas across which the quiet, speeding train moved, a series of impressionistic dashes among the blindingly vivid colors of a warm English April day. 
 

Flexible.

 

 

 

COME TOGETHER

 

 
London is filled with an astonishing number of tourists, mainly European.  Massive groups of Euro kids, mostly tweens and teens, jabber away in Italian, German, French.  Yesterday we were standing at a corner, waiting to cross the street, and a huge group of EuroTeens and their chaperones stood across the street from us.  A big guy led the group, a strapping six-footer with a beer gut and an aggressive look as if getting across the street were a challenge at which he was determined to excel.  The pedestrian Olympics.  How fast can you shepherd 30 restive, unfocused teens across a downtown crosswalk with red double-decker buses bearing down at you at sound-barrier breaking speeds while taxis dart by like spawn-driven salmon headed upstream?  Not something you’d want to attempt without months of careful training beforehand.   

This guy was clearly up to the challenge.  He clutched a map in one hand and with his other he made constant beckoning motions to the milling teens behind him.  He wore a brand new white windbreaker that was stretched across his considerable belly, and shiny new tennis shoes glistened on his feet.  He was poised on the very edge of the sidewalk, itching for the sound of the starter’s gun – in this case, the automated beep beep beep of the walk signal.   We stared at him.  I mumbled to Max out of the corner of my mouth, “what do you think?  American?  Or possibly German?”  Max, always eager for a chance to slam my genetic heritage, said “German, definitely German.”  We waited.  The buses and taxis whizzed by.  Then the beep beep beep of the walk signal blasted.  The German/American – Germerican?  AmGer? – got a fast start, rolling off the balls of his feet, those new tennis shoes giving good traction off the starting blocks.  He exploded into the crosswalk, gaining an impressive yard with his initial thrust, and then pivoted and shouted over his shoulder at the kids, “Peppe La Pew, Croissant, Bastille Day!!!”  Mon dieu, he was no Germerican, he was French!  Those kids blasted en masse across the crosswalk led by this French Carl Lewis of pedestrian Olympics.   

I couldn’t bring myself to move, so impressed was I by the spectacle.  And heartened, too, at the fact that a big, overweight, unnecessarily loud and obviously abrasive man sporting too-white tennis shoes and a beer gut wasn’t, for once, an American.  Or a German!  So much for cultural stereotypes.  There are lots of obnoxious people on the planet, not just us ‘muricans.  Brings a tear to my eye. 

 Looking at the crowds of tourists in London, I started wondering if it has morphed from a gritty, beautiful, historic but working city into a “Destination Metropolis.”  DestiMetro for short.  They are a breed of cities.  Like Florence – it’s hard to think of Florence as a real urban center.  It seems to exist more for tourists to tick it off their must-see list.  And Venice – same thing.  I’m sure there are plenty of Venetians who get up each morning and yawn and drink their cappacino and stagger off to work but it’s work doing what?  Cooking for tourists, selling clothes for tourists, leading tourists on tours of tourist sites?  It would be terrible if London evolved, or perhaps devolved, into a DestiMetro. 

 
The thought depressed me as I sat on the tube (myself a tourist, of course, but that doesn’t count) and glumly listened to the “It’s A Small World” babel of languages around me.  Then it struck me: it’s spring break for British school children, and in fact for schoolchildren around Europe.  The families around me were tied together by the immutable bonds of a common currency – the Euro – and a shared spring vacation.   No wonder London is crawling with Eurokids and their frazzled parents.   

 But then I wondered if London’s popularity as a spring break destination was proof itself that London had entered the DestiMetro category? Has London become the new city of the future, a giant melting pot of an urban center beckoning the tennis shoe-clad hordes to its paved shores?  Beside me on the tube were Germans speaking entirely too loud in what is really, no offense to my Deutsche kinsmen, an abrasive language.  French couples pouted their way through an exchange, Italians gestured their way through theirs.  Should I relish this cultural diversity, this coming together of so many peoples in enjoyment of a shared place?  Is it, in fact, what will save us in the future?  That we’ve all been to London?  Will a breakthrough come in the middle of tense negotiations over nuclear inspections or the treatment of ethnic minorities when someone mentions that www.lastminute.com can get you fantastic theater seats in London and everyone nods and smiles, and suddenly we all see each other as fellow humans again, we are reminded anew that those people sitting across the table are people just like us trying to score good seats to Wicked or Billy Elliot?   

 Will the fact that we’ve all been to the same place save the planet?

 

 

 

 

 



LAYERS OF LIFE

 

There are all kinds of options for exploring London, including walking tours that will take you through Shakespeare’s London, or the streets of Dickens, or to places where ghosts are thought to linger.  I did a private walking tour of London yesterday.  It was the ghosts of Beth past.  There were several bona fide sightings of me.  First at 19, gawking at an urban wonderland so far beyond anything I’d experienced that I might as well have been on a Star Trek mission making first contact with the residents of Alpha Centurion or Blizelspek Prime.  It was the summer after my freshman year in college, and I’d agreed, on a whim, to go to the UK with a dorm friend, her brother and his best friend.  I’d never met the guys and my friendship with the girl was new.  But I conned my parents into buying me a ticket and off I went.

I’d been feverishly in love with England for years, the England viewed through the lens of every historical fiction novel I could lay my hands on in the Grants Pass Public Library, a building that housed the literature that fed my hometown of 12,000 in southern Oregon.  The Readers Digest was Tolstoy in Grants Pass.  Needless to say, I worked my way through all of the historical fiction offerings and back again during my teen years.

London at age 19 was a blur.  Everything about a city was new to me, and London was a city on an epic scale.  The flash of cars and buses, and the throngs of smartly-dressed men and women making their way with casual ease down the crowded streets, making me keenly aware of my backpack-stuffed college clothes which were, themselves, remnants of high school chic.  London impressed as a series of patterns:  vertical heights of buildings, swirling whorls of people, darting cars, rumbling buses.

Then I returned to England to do graduate work and in my early 20s.  I had fled the United States with raw sorrows wailing and biting at my heels.  I was determined to put a continent and ocean between me and these banshees and to invent a new person, one whose world was entirely different:  built on my singular experiences, where admission was granted only to me.

There’s a special love for the places that help form you, and I was putty in London’s hands.  I learned its confident ease, the shortcuts and alleys that allowed me to walk, map-free, urban-savvy, with no hesitation, from place to place.  I was in my 20s, and on my own, and accountable to no one but me, in one of the great places of the world.  Any glance could be returned, any plan changed; it was freedom and ease, the electric thrill up the spine, and I was part of it all.

Now I am back and it’s different as it couldn’t help but be.  Both the city and I are less edgy, me to a much greater extent than London.  Where I walked before loose-limbed and sure in my body, I now walk with some of my attention cast inward, in surveillance of myself, my mind’s eye a security camera to see what thief might be prying open a window or door into my house of health.  If my body back then was a chic, modern and attractive one-bedroom apartment on an upper floor with a great view, it’s now more of a Victorian with occasional plumbing problems, sagging floors here and there and a paint job in need of a touch-up.

I miss the other me and her lithesome comfort in her body, the way she went from one place to another at a whim, on a lark.  London brings her back as does no other place.  It ignites a cellular memory, as well as memories of the other, emotional kind.

Still I realize that people change, cities change, life changes and London is a metaphor for that as are few other places.  Amid the bristling new, youthful buildings that glisten at night, catching the flash and dazzle of the streets, are lovely Victorians in rows of red and gold brick beauty.  Sprinkled among them are stunning medieval edifices, gorgeous paens to earlier times, to strength, and endurance.  Still found are buildings from the 1100s, from times shortly after William the Conqueror’s triumphant march to London.  Hidden in the earth below all these structures are remnants of Roman mosaics, and peeping out among the buildings are remaining bits of the Roman wall that once enclosed the city, that marked its circumference and established its safety zones.

All of these times co-exist in the shiny, youthful London of today.  As do my times, too.  Still present among the various layers of me.

 



LONDON CALLING!

           

We arrived, safe and sound, after an hour spent sitting on the tarmac at Dulles while mechanics “just did a few last minute adjustments” to the plane.  You know that any sentence that includes the words “adjustments” and “last minute” in reference to the gigantic metal container that’s going to rocket you through space and time can’t be good, particularly when the pilot helps pass the time by imparting bits of information, like the fact you’ll be flying at 30,000 feet above the surface of terra firma.  Makes you want to stick your head under the hood right along with the mechanics to make sure that everything is screwed tightly back in place because if airplane mechanics are anything like today’s modern urban auto mechanics, the chances are pretty high that some essential something is inadvertently loosened or removed during the repair of another essential something.  You have a vision of the mechanic standing on the tarmac, holding a long wire and mumbling, ‘uh-oh, where did this come from?” as the plane unsteadily takes off. 

            But no airborne disasters occurred.  Instead, the flight was a blessed vacation in and of itself.  You know your life has been stressful when it’s a downright pleasure to sit in a cramped space with pipe- in air surrounded by strangers because you’re not doing any pre-departure preparations.  The experience of sitting, without making lists or implementing them, was such a novelty I was nearly in tears.  I read a novel.  Watched a movie on the teeny tiny screen. Had myself a screwdriver.  Took a nap.   It was bliss, I tell you, bliss!  As far as I was concerned, I could have just flown around for a few days.  It was infinitely preferable to the panting pace I’ve been keeping for the past few months. 

            But we landed and collected our brand new suitcases stuffed to the gills with the brand new apparatuses – apparati? – that will make our 4-month sojurn through Europe a little easier.  We’ve got the two new netbooks weighing under 3 pounds each, and the wireless mouses – mice? – to go with them, and even the eensy beensy printer that’s 10 ounces in weight and uses heat and perhaps magic to print onto special paper.   We’ve got a Kobo and a Kindle and a Kamera. We’ve got raincoats that roll up into tiny squares and packing cubes into which our undies are stuffed and shirts that double as pants that double as socks that double as reusable kitchenware . . . .  we’ve packed light, baby!  Of course, add up the multiple-use clothing that’s a kicky little skirt by day and a floor-length evening gown by night, and the printers and netbooks and cameras and this and that and by GOD, those damn suitcases are heavy!!!  We packed light if we had the muscles of sumo wrestlers and the stamina of mountain goats.  I for one plan on shipping stuff back by the end of the week. 

            Our London  house exchange partner, Felicity, whose very name exudes the kind of personality trait one wants in the perfect stranger who will be occupying your home for the next 2 weeks, arranged for a cab to meet us at Heathrow and ferry us to her home.   After we stood around for 20 minutes, he arrived and as he drove us to Notting Hill, he asked about these house exchanges.  When we told him that you arrange for a person you’ve never met and never will meet to occupy your home with no supervision or limits on what they could possibly do, with full access to everything in your house, he – surprisingly – voiced some skepticism.  He proceeded to tell us, with evident relish, everything that could go wrong.  First it was the predictable warnings about stealing things from our house, but when we told him we have – sad to admit this – basically nothing of value in our home (except for Max’s framed 2^nd grade art, and anybody touches that and I’ll hunt them down and kill them.)  Aside from a 7 year old’s rendition of Monet’s “Water Lillies,” there’s not much they could steal that we’d really care about.  Warming to the subject of what could go wrong, he then dove into full-scale larceny.  By the time we entered London proper, this guy was vehemently insisting that our house exchange partners would find our private financial papers, rifle through them to unearth our mortgage (good luck getting through my ‘filing’ system), take the mortgage information to a bank and get a second mortgage on our house.  All this in the space of a one to two week vacation in Washington, DC.  Not bloody likely, I thought to myself.  We just re-financed our mortgage and it took a month, a case of Maalox and a few minor strokes to get the paperwork done and the mortgage completed.  If some enterprising visitor can find their way through my files, locate a lender willing to re-finance a loan in the midst of the banking crisis in America, and get the deed done before their visa expires, then I think they deserve our house. 

            Bidding Captain Catastrophe adieu, we entered our house exchange apartment in Notting Hill.  It’s fine.  It’s sort of an upside down apartment, with the living room, kitchen and bath on the street level and the bedrooms downstairs in a sort of English basement – which is really authentic, come to think of it:  where better to sleep in an English basement than England?  What’s interesting is that Felicity and her two kids and husband are of Indian or Pakistani heritage, and the apartment is decorated with a bazillion statutes of that multi-armed goddess, whose name I of course don’t know  being nothing but an ignorant fallen Catholic.   She’s everywhere, little miss multiple appendage.  Her serene countenance looks down upon us in the bedroom, on the bookshelves, even in the wee back yard.  Staring at her in the midst of jet-lagged sleeplessness, I coveted her arms.  How useful to be able to scratch your back, hold a phone, stir a pot on the stove, wave hello, comb your hair, and tie your shoes at the same time!  She’s the goddess of ultimate ambidextrousness.  The princess of hands, the duchess of digits. 

            But the location of the apartment is fabulous.  We’re two blocks off of Portobello Road, which is wonderful to wander along.  It was packed on Sunday, which was sunny and warm, and more manageable yesterday.  It’s everything you want in a cool urban neighborhood:  funky independent stores selling hand-painted purses and groovy clothes and art and all sorts of interesting items.  One place is a men’s clothing store in a long building with big floor-to-ceiling windows and they’ve built narrow wooden shelves on which are displayed hundreds and hundreds of beautiful old sewing machines, with lights mounted below the shelves to illuminate the next row.  It’s stunning.  You walk into the store and it’s Singer Sewing Machine central, with old movie lights dispersed among them.  There are also fabulous funky cafes and restaurants – it’s Adams Morgan with a San Francisco vibe and a New York groove. 

            We’ve been out and about exploring and doing errands.  We went to Victoria Station and picked up rail cards I’d pre-ordered for Max and Jeff and I that save us lots of money and give us discounts to various venues.   We went to Covent Garden and had a glass of wine and listened to street musicians while Max went nuts in a store selling the little Lord of the Rings figures he adores.  And we saw “Wicked” last night, which was a great production. 

            Having trouble adjusting to the time difference and recovering from the pre-departure exhaustion.  Complicating general sleep issues are the 3 cats who live here.  I tell you, the differences between a house exchange and a hotel are myriad.  We went shopping in the local grocery store and explored a neighborhood we’d never otherwise be able to spend so much time in, if we were staying in a hotel, plus had the added pleasure of waking up to a small black cat literally sitting on my head, purring and peering down solicitously at me.  I did a Muti-Armed Goddess move on the cat as I picked her up and dropped her on the floor in one smoothly choreographed movement.  Undeterred, she was back up in a few minutes, serenely purring and kneading the covers.  All right, kittie goddess.  It’s your house, after all.  I’m just occupying it . . . . . and trying to find their bloody mortgage file so I can get cracking on that bank loan application . . . . .