I am all packed and ready, we leave in a few minutes for the SFO airport. The last few days have been a great catching up period with my friends here in San Francisco (and I have no doubt gained a few pounds from all the over-eating). I will be glad to get back to the familiar surroundings of New York and my apartment, however. I have a ton of work to do, and haven’t been all that productive while here, although I wouldn’t trade the time with friends for it. At the end of our lives, no one regrets working less and spending more time with loved ones. These are the things that really matter. Outside of the friendship and reunions, the things that have impressed me about San Francisco this trip are how much the architecture and makeup of various parts of the city has changed; having my memory jogged about how amazing a place this always is with regard to food; and how very, very much colder 50 degrees can feel in San Francisco compared to any place else.
When you are acquainted with a lot of people who move around a lot, it is always a good idea when arriving in a new place to see which of your friends still live or have moved from the place you are visiting. This is easily done with something like facebook, where you can search your friends by city. Sure, it leaves out people who aren’t on facebook, who don’t put in their current city, or who live just outside the city (yet still in the same general area), but it will give you a general list of who is there. For people like me with a lot of acquaintances and a terrible memory, this is a great tool. And sometimes one is surprised to find that friends from one city have moved into the city one is visiting. Such was the case with my friend Guillermo, who I met in Buenas Aires a few years ago, and have seen at various times in New York where I live and in Barcelona, where he lived until he moved to San Francisco (temporarily) about a month ago. We just had a lovely coffee at Fourbarrel and then lunch at Serpentine (another great SF restaurant). Guillermo is a bit of a nomad like me, and we have lived in a lot of the same places. He lived in Mexico City for a while and spent time in Mumbai, and we even realized we know a person in common from there this morning. All these intersections and commonalities fascinate me, it is so striking how small the world can be.
When I was planning this trip, 5 days (ok, 4.5) in LA seemed like a lot. I thought I could enjoy myself, see a few friends, get some work done, relax. I think that relax part just went the way of the Dodo. I already feel guilty and slightly overwhelmed by how many people there are to see, but such is life. Someone always feels left out, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day to see everyone I know that lives here. Plus, I have actual paying work to do. That said, the climate is beautiful, and I have been working with the door open to perfect weather most of the day. I arrived around 10am and had a lovely lunch with my friend Jose who picked me up from the airport, then came to Dallas’ house (in WeHo where I am staying) to get settled in and down to some work. I have a few client meetings while I am here, but I am determined to have some fun along with. La la la….
I have been in Hamburg enough times, and stayed here at Olaf’s enough times, and long enough, to feel loser to it than most other places. If not exactly home, it is a kind of home away from home, and I always enjoy hanging with Olaf and getting reacquainted with the people I know here (and meeting new ones). This particular trip I have stayed longer than any other visit, and so it is a little sad to say goodbye. That said, I have an exciting few weeks ahead of me. I will leave today for Paris to meet my brother and sister in law, and on Thursday we will take a rental car south towards Nimes for the night, then to Nice the next day. From there we will take a train to Genova (Italy), spend the night there, and pick a car the next day to head to Florence. In a villa just south of Florence, we will be staying a week with much of the rest of the family (My mother, father, sister, brother in law, niece, and nephew). And like us, they are converging from all over Europe on trips of their own this summer. After that, I will go to Florence and Modena to stay with my friend Jonathan for a few days, then fly to London to stay 11 days with my friend Arnaud before heading back to NYC finally on the 8th of August. Whew.
No, it is our scary present. Josh and I had decided to take one of the boat cruises to Alesund from Bergen, as the views were supposed to be quite nice and it was the only way other than by bus to arrive. We didn’t realize that we would be on such a large boat with people who are twice our age, and on a serious 14 day trip to boot. They have meals in the dining room while we eat salami and cheese sandwiches in our room. They are allowed to go on extra excursions while we stay on the boat. They listen to motivational speakers in the seminar room while we explore the many ugly decks of the ship. And they sleep while we take blankets and sit on the deck to bask in the midnight sun (such as it is with the rain and cold, anyway). Josh and I have never felt younger in our lives, as the average age on this ship I would estimate at about 70 or so. During the orientation where they were talking to the normal (full board) passengers about all of their possible eating times, they noted that people gain an average of 4-5 kilos on such trips. That didn’t surprise me much looking at this lot, as they hardly seemed the type to exercise much. They mostly sat on the upper deck, indoors, and stared out the window with a scary passivity. And when you add in how absolutely horrific the interior design of the ship was, the whole scene made me feel kind of melancholy. The weather was pretty bad for most of our day and a half long trip, but there was some pretty nice scenery along the way. We were only onboard for a day, but it somehow seemed like a lot longer than that. Maybe this is why older people take these long cruises; it makes life seem to last a lot longer than it otherwise would.
And this one is a biggie. It all started several months ago, when my parents called me to say they has reserved a villa in Italy for a week in July and wanted everyone in the family who was able to share the rent and come there. Initially, I was hesitant, because outside of the cost of the villa itself, which was somewhat negligible, you really couldn’t pick a worse time to travel to Europe. July and August are bar none the most expensive times to fly there. A quick look at the airfares and I really just couldn’t justify it in any sensible way. Then my parents laid on the guilt about getting older, and how this might be one of our last trips together, blah, blah. And the Jewish guilt in me rose up like a wave and I agreed to figure out how to get there. I had been talking for some time with my friend and sometime client Olaf about updating his website. He is based in Hamburg and I have twice before spent time there working with him on it. Working back from the late July timeframe, I proposed being in Hamburg for a month working on his projects and some of mine, and he agreed. Originally my cousin Josh, who I do yearly trips with, had agreed to meet me in Italy. We would spend time with the family and then take a week or so to road trip in Italy and visit some friends. But alas, Josh then got a gig working in China at exactly that time and had to back out. Since he was in London working until late May, he proposed that we travel before I went to Hamburg, and looking to see something new and close to that part of Europe, we hatched a plan to see Scandinavia. So tomorrow I will head over to meet Josh, and we will spend the next two weeks traveling, and then I will head to Hamburg to work, then a month later to meet my family, then through the cheapest route I can find (probably London, Reykjavik) back to New York sometime in early August. Whew.
Cost of 8-day car rental, Copenhagen, Denmark to Bergen, Norway: $558
Estimated MPG for compact car: 30
Cost of a gallon of gas in Oslo, Norway: $9.28
Estimated total distance of travel if driving: 1078km
Same distance in miles: 670
Estimated gas cost: $205
Estimated tolls: $70
Cost of Eurail select pass for 3 countries (1st class, per person): $481
Cost of Eurail select saver pass for 3 countries (1st class, 2 people) $818
Cost of Eurail Scandinavia pass, per person (2nd class, per person) $351
Minimum cost of a flight from Bergen to Stockholm: $73
Minimum cost of flight from Stockholm to Hamburg: $108
After several days of camping out in my apartment, I finally bid farewell to my guests late last night and early this morning as they took off to JFK and LaGuardia, respectively. Cinzia and Carla are on their way to Miami and Victoria to San Francisco. We all shared a great meal last night at my favorite local Italian restaurant, Mercato, where Josh and Jonathan joined us for dinner. I loved the animated switching back and forth between three languages so that everyone could understand each other. And inevitably, as the wine kicked in, we descended into matching slang in various languages for their respective body parts, trying to get an idea of whose language had the most varied terms for various pubic regions, always a fun game. We then headed back to my apartment to pack things up and get ready to go. Although I was happy to help out and it was lovely to get to know them, I was ready to have my apartment and life back. There is a kind of funny, almost untouchable presence that one’s home has that can disappear when things are not in order. And there is a smell that belongs to us in this order that we find familiar and comforting. I was noticing the other day that my place smelled unfamiliar, with the combination of three other people, their open suitcases, shower soaps and wet towels, and just the way that people smell differently from each other. This slight whiff of combination was unsettling after a few days, more so than the general chaos of three strangers camping out in my living room. Today I will clean and do laundry and reconnect with my own aura. Still it was nice to make new friends, and I have a feeling that our paths will cross again, perhaps in Italy (where I will be next summer) or Spain (where I will probably return one day) or New York, or someplace entirely unexpected.
I spent a good time with Cinzia and Carla, walking around in the blustery white and slush that was Manhattan today. While we were getting them fitted for boots at the sporting goods store, I got a text from my friend Pete in San Francisco asking me if I was in New York at the moment. I answered yes, excited that he might be coming here for work soon, but it turned out that a friend of a friend of his was coming to SF from Spain, and…you guessed it…she was stranded trying to get out of JFK since her flight was canceled. I told him she was welcome to give me a call. When I didn’t hear from her all day, I assumed she had worked out a flight or something, but then the phone rang about 30 minutes ago and it was her. The conversation was quite a blur in Spanish, but I worked out that she couldn’t get a flight out and needed a place to stay, so I gave her directions and told her to come by. It will be quite a full casa tonight, but I figure it is good karma.
I have been back in New York for a couple of days now and inundated with work (thankfully), but I did have a bit of an odd TSA adventure on my way back. I had to walk through one of those new body scanners, so I did. But then when I came out, they told me the image was blurry and they would have to give me the “enhanced” pat-down. The agent helpfully explained everything to me and at no point did I worry about my “junk” being fondled. It did take an awfully long time though, and I kept pointing over to Josh (who for some reason did not have to go through the machine or pat down) and telling them that he was a far more dangerous criminal than I could possibly be. But alas, this fell on deaf ears. The whole thing was a little inconvenient, and I was a little bugged that I had to do both the machine AND the pat-down because of their bad technology. But that was nothing compared to what I saw behind me. They made a little old lady in a wheelchair stand up and get into the machine. When they saw that she was too unsteady to raise her frail arms over her head in the machine, they led her out of it (almost causing her to fall) and back into her chair for an enhanced pat-down. The massaged every part of her and it was embarrassing to watch, so we turned away. But pretty much everyone was horrified. I mean, really…was this frail granny at all likely to be hiding a bomb in her fundament? Maybe a little profiling isn’t such a bad idea after all. Then again, the reason she got the pat down, the reason I got the pat down, and the reason Josh didn’t is supposedly random, and therefore more democratic. Theoretically, we all want to be treated equally and truly random scans such as this enforce fair and democratic ideals. That said, the reality is this is security theater and the aesthetics of security more than it is actually making us safer.
