“Coming Home, Coming Home, Tell the World…”

After 111 days away we are coming home.  Temporarily.  And so tomorrow night we will be sleeping in our own beds, driving down our street, seeing our dogs, celebrating a holiday in our home.  And the emotion is pure question mark.

It feels weird to say we’ve been away for four months, when it feels like four minutes. The time has sped up with the impending shift back to Eastern Time.  The calendar filled quickly and the mix of re-integrating plus the rush to complete year-end projects, resolutions and corporate duties has pushed time ahead.

You can see it in the children as they begin to act out, worrying about things that didn’t worry them before and at the first sign of conflict (play-date scheduling overlap, friends who are leaving town as we arrive) there are harrumphs of “I want to stay” or the growl of “I want to go back home.”

There are people to see and friends to embrace, but there is a balance. 

Do they really want to hear about the Christmas Hampers and Canary Wharf, Prince Edward and Paris, my commute and Copenhagen, Eurostar and Espresso, politeness and politics, Camden and Swiss Cottage?  Do they care about St. Pauls and St. John’s Wood, museums and movies, cabs and cars, buses and Brussels, Thanksgiving and Theatre, integration and immigration, pounds and dollars, working and walking, holidays and health scares, distance and getting lost in Dulwich, Facebook and friends, Rugby and relationships, schools and shuls, tubes and trains, of writing and whining of Pubs and Pantomines?

I realize that sometimes reading a blog is like watching a friends’ home movies or those “great” vacation pictures. 

One of the many worries before moving here was that London would lose its magic.  That once I knew the street names, the tube stops, the landmarks that it would become a jumble of people and places no different from home.  But it only grew in my mind and now holds a special place for the five of us.  I’m resistant to saying the experiences have been life changing, but engaging, eye-opening, exciting, intimidating and oh so rewarding. 

As one friend said, “You’ve turned back the clock” in that we once again have time with our children.  Time that we lost when they grew up and away.  And we know now more than ever that it’s fleeting, but the chance to grasp at it one more time is time travel.

Can’t wait until January.

Of Headlines & Hampers

Sometimes headlines whisper, sometimes they hint, lately they shout: “Weak Retail Sales” “Unemployment Remains High” “How to Save the London High Steet” “How Low Will the Euro Go?”

Sitting in the Gallery restaurant at Fortnum and Mason I watch the queues grow and grow until they bleed out of the 300 year-old store onto Piccadilly Street.  And I wonder if the headlines mislead?

Studying the menu the man next to me, with whom I’ve been forced to share a table due to overcrowding, is struggling between the Carpaccio of Sussex Red Beef with Golden Enoki Mushrooms and the hand carved Basque Ham with Wild Rocket and Pyrenees Goat Cheese.

Teeming with customers, the smell of candles and incense, the nutmeg blending with the vanilla, the wood floor polished, but creaky, and a soft version of “I Saw Grandma Kissing Santa Claus” brings a festivity for the holiday that penetrates my Jewish being.

I know that America is blamed for the commercialization of Christmas(s) but the Brits have taken it to a new level.  They forget about the Christ and focus on the Mas, as in Mass Market Consumerism, not Midnight Mass.

Christmas isn’t December 25^th, it’s the whole last three weeks of the year.  When they say have a good Christmas, and everybody does, it's like saying "enjoy everything after December 2^nd."  When you ask somebody what they are doing for Christmas their answer begins around Guy Fawkes day and hits everything from the holiday parties, to the client lunches, the shopping, the drinking, the late starts and early exits, the explanation of Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, who goes where/when and Why.  In a country where 12% regularly attend Church they certainly got religion when it comes to Christmas.

The big Christmas business at Fortnum and Mason is their famed Hampers.   They call it the “most travelled tuck box” in the world.  Coming in all sizes and filled with everything from cookies and jams to fruit cakes and puddings.  The line to buy and send the Hampers snakes around the store, past the ornaments, the properly dressed mannequins and out toward the ice cream parlour.   

These are not small investments, ranging from £50 to £5,000.  The embarrassingly low-end Hamper is meant, according to Fortnum, as the perfect “thank-you gift for a weekend host.”  The classic “huntsman basket” includes a “taste of Christmas” with a “miniature version of our classic Christmas Cake, Christmas Spiced Biscuits, Mulled Wine spices, a jar of our fine Raspberry Preserve and, of course, a helping of champagne.”

But the big boys play in a whole different pitch. 

The “Imperial Hamper” contains only the best:  “Darjeeling’s finest tea, a whole side of wild Scottish smoked salmon, white truffle oil, Beluga caviar, Foie Gras with Truffles, Fortnum’s Cognac Butter, Magnifici Florentines, an amphora of Orange Marmalade with Champagne, an enormous box of chocolates, a magnum each of Cristal 2002 and Dom Ruinart 1993 and a bottle of Dalmore 32-year-old whisky. As if that weren’t enough, this year we’ve included our new Jubilee Queen Elizabeth Christmas Pudding, which takes our King George Pudding as its base and adds macadamia nuts, port and double cream and a crown of glacé fruits, painted with gold leaf. Presented in a hamper made of English willow.”

So not only has Christmas become a train wreck of holiday slobbery (most offices are empty after lunch from the middle of December until January first), but they also have taken hostage of the Queen’s Jubilee to create “one-time only” Jubilee Hampers, Royal Sovereign Strawberry Preserve, Jubilee Musical Biscuit Tin, Jubilee Fudge and my favorite the Jubilee Lion and Plantagenets Mug.

When I ask Customer Service how the economy is affecting Christmas he says he’s never seen it so busy in his 10 years with the company.  However, he admits, business for the Imperial and other high-end Hampers is down because of the “corporates” but the consumer business, “they’re making it a very, merry Christmas for F&M.”

Coffee and Windows

I’m 12 years old and riding in the back of my mom’s car and we pass a huge Dunkin Donuts sign on Telegraph road and the sign reads, “World’s Best Coffee.”  My friend Harley and I crack up.  How can there be good and bad coffee?  At that point in my life, pre-Starbucks, coffee was something that came in Taster’s Choice crystals and measured out into a mug and topped with boiling water and a pink packet of fake sugar that everyone said gave you cancer.

Fast forward 20 years and coffee was a teeth staining, bad breath creating, stomach churning energy source for many, but not me.  But I wanted to be a coffee drinker.  I wanted to sit there with my mug in the morning, steam rising, looking out of my office window.

Like Kilgore in Apocalypse Now: I loved the smell of coffee in the morning, it smelled like victory.  But I never drank the stuff.  Until now.

Coffee in Europe, to me, tastes, looks, smells and feels different and I’m sure it’s in my head.  But I’ve become a serious espresso drinker, once in the morning and again at lunch.

A secondary point.  I am a believer in windows and sunlight and all that comes from it.  I believe in it even more now that we are in London and throughout the short days and long nights of winter people are downing Vitamin D pills like tic tacs.

Our first Washington office of Marketresearch.com was in a windowless building basement.  For the two years we were there we were unprofitable and struggled through the start up phase, cash crunches and funding troubles.  In year three we moved to a first floor, windowed office and the company turned.

There is a Nero Coffee Bar between the tube stop and my London office.  On my way in I stop for a single espresso served to me by a six foot tall Italian woman who spies me from the end of the line and barks, “Single Espresso, stay in.”

I drink it there.  I like my two sips of coffee at the bar surrounded by conversation.  I don’t know why, maybe because I want my espresso hot, maybe it’s the miniature ceramic cups with the tiny spoon that I like, or the way the brown sugar lays at the bottom like wet cement.

And so each morning I stop in, pay my pound fifty and sit by the front window over-looking Fenchurch Street.

And every day it changes.  There are businessmen hustling through the rain or cold or just because they are late to a meeting.  There are people in scarves and hats and tweed jackets and sometimes pretty women pass by in skirts and I watch the men catch an eye-full.  And I watch the thousands of stories in the faces of the people in the store:  The business meeting, the couple having a last conversation before work (they must be newlyweds), the college student struggling through a term paper, the unemployed middle aged man hoping that today will be the day.

Britain-Care (Part I)

It’s all about expectations.

If you fall running in Central Park you expect to go to an emergency room and get treated NOW.  And if it’s broken and you need surgery you want to get it done NOW, by a hand surgeon who has mended the fingers of Yo-Yo Ma.  And because it’s almost Christmas break you need to get the cast on and then off so you can make your flight and your trip and by the way I’m training for a half marathon so when can I run again?

Switch to London.  You’re running on the canal between Maida Vale and Notting Hill and you trip on uneven pavement.  You go to one hospital and get x-rays.  And then you wait.  And they transfer you to a new hospital.  But the tech systems are down so they can’t get the x-rays from the first hospital so you wait and get a second set of x-rays which is OK, because it’s better than the first.

Then they put a big cast all the way to your elbow because you have to see a specialist and he can’t see you until tomorrow.

And so tomorrow arrives but you don’t know whether to eat or not because you don’t know if you are getting surgery or not.  So you don’t eat and you meet in the morning with a 30-ish looking hand surgeon who goes by the name Mr. O’toole. 

So I ask him, sheepishly, “but you are a doctor.” 

“Yes, I went to university,” he replies.

“I realize that, but they call you Mister and your card says Mister, not Doctor, so you passed all the exams, right?”

He doesn’t understand the question.

The room is part office, part operating room.  He hasn’t heard of us or seen an x-ray, we could be coming there for an in-grown for all he knows.  Resting on his desk is a tall clear glass of yellow brown liquid (he claims it's tea) and we hand him our disc of x-rays and he says, “Oh yea, this needs surgery.”

He tells us a lot about what will go on in the “operating theatre” and you might want earphones because the drilling is loud and the pins in the finger, etc.

When Jill asks when she can run again the doctor says, “Well, unofficially, two weeks.  I mean, I am a runner too, but a doctor would say to wait a month.”

Umm???

Then the fun begins and he gives us a code, we then call the insurance company and they give us a code and then we call his secretary.  And he warns us, “It might ring for five or ten minutes, but she’ll pick up, eventually.  We're very busy.”

And she does and we give her our code and she tells us to come back in 3 hours for surgery.

Fingers crossed, at least the ones that aren’t broken.

“And so this is Christmas…”

In America there is atleast an acknowledgement of numerous December holidays, including Hanukah.  But here in London it is Christmas baby, and you can’t help but get in the spirit.

And so we trod off to see the lights on Oxford and Regent Street, we ice skate in Kensington, Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park and then we go to the Christmas Pantomime Show.  Because that is what Brits do. 

What is the Christmas Panto, you ask?  Don’t think Marcel Marceau, think fairy tales with cross dressing step sisters, old women singing Lady Gaga, a gay fellow named Buttons and lots of sight gags that make six year old’s laugh so hard that milk flows through their noses.

My wife got us all tickets for the Cinderella Panto.  As a side note, it just so happens that my wife is out of the country on the day of the show leaving me to explain to my children (11, 13, 15) why we are going to a theatre populated by people wearing big boy pull up diapers and celebrating their 6^th birthday party.

Here is how the Panto game is played:  The evil step-sisters are sleeping in a haunted room and every time they look for the ghost, they can’t find him.  But the ghost is standing right behind them and the crowd screams with vigor, “They’re behind you.”  Or another witty one includes the aforementioned Buttons who yells, “How ya doin?” to the crowd which in turn raises its hands and screams, “Top Bananas!”

The shows run from Late November through January and while not explicitly about Christmas, it is an integral part of the British holiday experience.  The show is not silent, as I expected, instead it is filled with song and silliness that makes the under 7 crowd squeal.  They are always based on traditional stories that the audience is supposed to know, some of the shows this year include:  Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and Jack and the Beanstalk.

There are modern twists to the story, including the fact that everyone calls the lead “Cinders” in this tale, and every year the stories are updated with topical jokes, some here included the Olympics, the press hacking scandal, unemployment and jokes about the dodgy neighborhood in which this particular theatre sat, called Hackney Empire.

The show peaks near the end when the horse, Clapton, saves the day by foiling the evil steps sisters (brothers) from stealing Cinders off in a hot air balloon. At which point the horse, (think horse from an elementary school play, not Warhorse), comes front and center to receive a medal and the entire crowd sings along to “Clip Clop Clapton, the Wonder Horse.”  Not once, not twice, but three times.

This was one of those Christmas traditions that we can say we’ve done, although as the winter solstice approaches next year, we may leave Clip Clop Clapton for the tourists.

 

Distance, Death and Facebook

Whenever I go to Michigan to visit my parents I bump into somebody from my past.  A high school friend at Starbucks, a familiar face at the movie theatre, a wave to someone whose name escapes me at the gas pump.

I hadn’t seen Jeff in years.  My most vivid memories of him are in a hockey jersey when we were ten, maybe some high school snapshots, a moment or two from college.  And then I am back in my hometown for one of those short visits, where you fly in at an un-godly hour so you can squeeze in four meals (lunch, dinner, breakfast, lunch). 

On the way to my parents’ house I stop at Steve’s Deli for a corned beef sandwich.  Walking in my eye catches a familiar face, I stop to say hello.  He is sitting outside at a table with someone having lunch.  I approach him, my hand outstretched and his arms open wide and he welcomes me back as a long lost friend.

He looks healthy and strong and maybe even he didn’t know what poison was moving through his body.  I welcome the embrace.  We talk for a few minutes, exchange family anecdotes, I ask about his wife.  “It was great seeing you, take care.”  “And you too.”

And 24 months later he is dead at 43.  It was the last time I saw him and it is my most enduring memory.  I recall almost nothing from the trip, but I do remember saying to my mom, “Guess who I just bumped into at Steve’s…Jeff Camiener... Yea, Emily Holzman…He’s doing great.”

Living away from your hometown you feel a detachment at first and then a complete dislocation.  You return and the places are familiar, but the names and faces have changed.  No one lives in those houses any more.  You remember the street names, but have trouble finding them from behind the steering wheel.  When you move to a new country the time change makes finding a convenient time to talk impossible, and your efforts to stay connected move online.

When Jeff got sick his friends started a Facebook page and I felt like a voyeur watching his illness, his life and death unfold.  And when it got near the end I checked more frequently for updates.  And then the messages morphed from, “Stay strong” to “the world has lost a mensch.” 

And I wanted to reach out because I felt so close to them, but I was still distant and I knew the closeness was one sided.  And then the funeral was broadcast midday in Detroit and here in London it was closing time and my office mates were going to the pub, but I stayed behind.  And here I sat alone in my office, 4000 miles from home watching the drama of a young man’s funeral as his parents, wife and two young sons escorted his coffin. 

So when the camera pulled back I scanned the crowd for faces of old friends, memories.  And I spotted some familiar people, mostly older, bigger, grayer.  And I was grateful for the connection to these people and places and the technology that allowed me to appreciate a life even in his death.

Is it Still Thanksgiving if…

I have been having Thanksgiving in roughly the same place with just about the same people my entire life.  It is these family traditions and rituals that make life rewarding, fills our heads and hearts with memories.  The sights, sounds, smells and feel of these family events are comfort food.  They have morphed over time.  People have come and gone:  Divorce, death, moves out of state, have transformed these holidays.  The location has scattered from Southfield to the Silverdome, Bethesda, New York, the Poconos. But the basic set up is always the same.  Certain essentials persist.

Until this year. 

Imagine a Thursday in late November with no Macy’s Day Parade, no old-timers football game, no last minute drive to the store, no Black Friday sales.  Imagine the Wednesday before without the office talk of where you are going, the incessant traffic and weather reports.  Imagine no AAA announcements about how many more/less people will be on the road this year versus last.  

Instead an officemate asked me:  "Is it always on Thursday?"

So instead of lacing up the tattered cleats for old guy football, I donned khakis and loafers for an American Thanksgiving Day Service at St Paul’s Cathedral.  Since the Detroit Lion game didn’t start until dinnertime there was no need to be home and eat lunch on the couch.  So we ate out and bumped into a mild UK celebrity who was worldly enough to wish us a Happy Thanksgiving.

My mid-afternoon ritual of running to the store was relatively unchanged except that finding a Whole Foods in London via the tube was a lesson in orienteering.  I needed to buy ten 500 g servings of stuffing since the British chef who was cooking our Traditional Thanksgiving fare refused to make stuffing without pork.

Dinner wasn’t in Manhattan, but Notting Hill.  It wasn’t in a living room, but a pub.  We weren’t surrounded by aunts and uncles and cousins, but by friends. 

Instead of lamenting another Lion Thanksgiving Day collapse at dinner, this year’s point of contention was trying to watch the game on our laptops through the restaurant’s spotty WiFi connection.

And instead of nursing my football injuries on Saturday and watching Michigan/Ohio State, we were on a train headed 2 hours North for the Manchester United v Newcastle football match.

And so back home, this very American tradition lived on with its overdose of football, family and faux pageantry, but without us. And although we love it, we didn’t miss it.  In part because it didn’t feel anything like Thanksgiving here.  In London they call it Thursday. 

And then it hits us.  A delayed reaction perhaps.  Now that we see the pictures and hear stories we realize it really was the fourth Thursday in November, and the parades occurred and the games happened and the traditions carried on. 

But we had something else.  We created new memories and a special day, indeed, but was it still Thanksgiving?  I’m not sure you can have Thanksgiving without being in America.  This was a very special holiday in London. 

Snippets of Copenhagen

The flight to Copenhagen is only an hour thirty, but I fly from one season to the next.  I left the British Autumn and entered the Denmark Winter.

The town has a vaguely East German feel, circa 1975.  The sky is slate grey, the whipping wind made empty bags and burger wrappers dance and the street construction was relentless.  On my way to my first meeting I stop at a small coffee shop for a sandwich.  The entire space can’t be more than 500 square feet, with a big counter and room for six tables and a couch.  It’s in the basement of a building, a few steps down from the main road.  A man in his 40’s is behind the counter, an Iranian who made me egg salad on a bagel and a coffee with the care of an artist.

I am the only one in the place.  The Conversation:

 “Why Denmark?”

“Because Tehran was not a good place to be a young person 20 years ago.”

“Do you like it here?”

“No place is perfect right?”

“Have you ever been to America?”

“No, but I want to go very badly.  I want to go to New York.  I want to see Broadway.  It’s beautiful, yes?”

“It is.”

"The construction (the road and building repairs outside his restaurant) hurts my business.  And so I ask for a change in rent.  And they say:  ‘too bad’.  And I am surprised.  I expect different from a place that calls itself a modern democratic society.”

I am impressed by his English and his manner.  But mostly by his expectations of what a democratic society is.  He wants to be treated fairly.  He feels like the construction is the owner’s way of taking advantage of him.  He wants to trust the government.

At 8:00 at night I finish my meetings and head to see Tivoli Gardens, the big attraction, especially under the Christmas lights.  I walk through the shopping district with a piece of cheese-less pizza and a Carlsberg, it is much prettier at night, but the temperature is dipping.

A block from Tivoli I stop at a Pub for a pint and to warm up, the gardens are open until 11.  There is a guitar player singing “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel.  Just him, a guitar and a harmonica and it’s perfect.  The bar is warm and friendly, everyone is talking and laughing, I forgot, it’s Friday night.

During a break he tells me he is Swedish, but plays all American songs.  The pub smells of stale beer and during a series of Springsteen songs I am transported back to Ann Arbor listening to the songs of my youth, surrounded by drunkards singing and swaying together.  Hours, beers, and a long rendition of Whiskey in a Jar and Proud Mary later I walk past the now closed Tivoli and to my hotel room, which reminds me of a hostel from my Euro-rail days. 

It is good to be in the company and kindness of strangers.  Different language, same songs , just people.

The Process

I’m not a big believer in epiphanies or love at first sight, but I do believe in moments of clarity.  Things take time to digest, to percolate.  And living abroad is no different.  You may be in love with the idea or even the Christmas morning newness (I know I shouldn’t use cliché’s especially this one since I don’t even understand Christmas morning) of the whole thing, but it takes time, especially for the kids.

And so the process completes when they have their first trip home.  The kids were told they could go home for certain special events but we’re not flying across the Atlantic every time someone has a party they don’t want to miss.  And so for daughter number two her big trip was here.  And you could see it in her step in the week leading up.  There was a relief, an exhalation, that finally she would be home, in her bed, with her dogs and best friends and Bethesda Avenue and all that is good in the world.

And the time home does not disappoint.  The dogs are in the car upon arrival, her room looks like it should, the friends are waiting at the door, the hugs, the smiles, the food all make her feel complete. 

It’s a mind-shuffling 70 hours of walking the mall and hugging and bat mitzvahs and brunches and telling everyone the same stories about what’s good and what’s hard.  Amid the love of old friends, however, she sneaks in a moment for something else.  She has a need to reach out to her new friends back in London.  And one of the first things she does, after hugging and screaming and being a 13 year old girl, she gets online and video chats with her London friends so they can see what her room looks like.

And in a blink she is boarding the plane to return.  And she’s tired.  And she loved it.  But she realizes that back home things changed and stayed the same.  She understands that when you leave a place the world doesn’t stop turning.  Especially at her age, people get bigger, taller, fuller, more mature, growth happens.  But she also learned, nothing changed.  Her friends are still there, her room is how she left it, the smell of the house remains.

And she is happy to come home.  Which home?  The home she has now.  It is the air that she breathes today that is special.  And for her the process is complete.  She now understands what it is like to come someplace new and make it your home.

11-11-11

At 11 o’clock in the morning alarms throughout the city rang.  I was in an office building lobby waiting for a meeting to start when the fire alarm sounded and everything got quiet.  Because at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month the entire city pauses for a full two minutes in honor and memory of veterans.

Veteran’s Day isn’t quite the same in the States.  There are people selling Poppies, but here in England the poppy appeal is quite broad with veterans young and old selling them everywhere, at the underground, the stop lights, on the bridge to work.  There was a bit of a row (that’s British speak) here when FIFA, the football organizing body, at first would not, and then did, allow England football players to wear a poppy logo for their game against Spain on Saturday.

While it is a Federal Holiday in the US, schools are no longer closed, like they once were, and most offices are open for business, as are the world stock markets.

The two minutes of silence was interesting in part because it wasn’t a moment, but a full two minutes.  That length of silence can be off-putting.  All I could hear was the drip of the waterfall in the office lobby.  Everyone either stood or sat, looking off somewhere in the distance, not down at their Blackberrys.  Cell phones rang and beeped and let out other burps of noise, but everyone took it very seriously.   The Brits, who oppose most formality and public displays of emotion, took this with a depth that surprised me.

And when it was over, it was as if a game of Simon Says had ended and everybody began moving about, carrying on, the two minutes had passed.

In our house 11-11 always meant my mom’s birthday.  On 11-11-11 it means her 70^th.

Father the Incompetent

The conversation was garbled.  I couldn’t tell if they were speaking softly or whether the distance drowned it out.  The voices had to travel from my daughter’s bedroom, underneath her closed door, down the stairs and into my room.   They weren’t sounds, but words.  I heard things like:  But someone has to get me up in the morning.  Who?  Can you call somebody to help him?

My wife is making her first trip back to the States with daughter number one, putting me in charge of my son and daughter number 2.  When daughter number 2 was told that her mother would not be here for a swim meet and other weekend events, she asked how it will all get done.  And when my wife (still wife number 1) told her “Daddy will be here to take care of it,” there was, for me, a troubling reaction.

The only way to describe it is frozen terror.  She acted as if my wife told her, “You’re on your own for the weekend. See ya Monday.”

Her reasons for my incompetence were many.  Her explanation for my lack of qualification, vast.  She just couldn’t wrap her little head around how I could get her up in the morning, get her fed and off to the meet (or gala as they call them here) on time.  Incomprehensible!

I wanted to go upstairs and explain to her that for years I’ve been waking myself, getting to school/work/gym, whatever the day calls for, with my pants on straight, my teeth brushed and my fly closed.

Her arguments were not made in jest.  There was real concern pouring from this scared child.

I sat there thinking it through.  What have I done to give her this impression? 

I know she has seen me get out of bed without my wife’s help.  She knows I drive a car (licensed by the State of Maryland).  She knows I hold down a job and eat without spilling my food.  Why, when it comes to helping her with tasks, that I’m sure I had a role in teaching her, she thinks my chances of success are so low.

We’ll see.  Tomorrow is the first big test.  I need to be home at four o’clock when she gets home from school.  This is my big chance, my moment to prove to my 11 year-old that I have the qualifications of a high school baby-sitter. This weekend I will do it, without a net.  I will be waking her up (on time), getting her to a swim meet (on time), getting her fed (with real food), filling her back pack with a swim suit.  Wish me luck.

Feeling the Distance

So everything is great in London, yada, yada, but when do you miss home?  When do you feel the distance?

Not at the times you might think.  Not the holidays or the special occasions, at least not so far, but instead when you need that safety net you’ve built around you. 

Walking home from dinner late on a Sunday night we realize no one has a key.  I left early with my parents, so I assumed the others left the house with keys as they set the alarm.  A false assumption. 

Now we stand before this house in the cold darkness, a house that has been our home for three months and suddenly it’s a foreign place.

I don’t know how to break in, I can’t even get around to the back yard to see if there is some secret access.  The second floor now appears miles above our heads and even so the windows only open part way.  The place is an impenetrable fortress.

I disturb our next door neighbors who we’ve barely met, a sweet French/English couple without kids who let me and my son scale their back wall to enter our garden to see if we can get in.  They also welcome and warm my parents.  And while they couldn’t have been more accommodating, I’m fairly certain this is not what they planned for a Sunday night.

I experienced the strangeness of peering in on our lives from the outside.  I see my desk, side lamp still on.  I see the coffee cup on the kitchen counter, the open math book, the resting laptop.  I felt a bit like George Bailey looking down at his life, but none of us were there.

Options: 

1.       Call the owners who live outside the city and may be out of the country. 

2.       Break a window that would set off the alarm and I have no idea what alarm company-police station issues that would trigger. 

3.       I could try to force the back door open, it looks weak, but if it doesn’t work, see number two.

There was a real moment of something, panic is too strong a word, but helplessness.  I had no way of getting in and no idea what to do. We were facing the real possibility of checking into a hotel.

We called a lock smith and he said it would be an hour plus.  We called the owners and they weren’t around.  We had no neighbors with keys or friends we could stay with, nothing under the front door mat, no back-up plan.  How could that be?

But then my wife found a woman we had used as a baby sitter and she found a key and we met her at a local pizza place and we thanked our neighbors and made it inside.

It wasn’t the drama of the story, but rather the fear of where to look. We don’t know a locksmith or even the name of the alarm company or the type of lock or how to reach the landlord or whether our neighbors are home or who they are.  We would have answers to all of these were we back home.  The home we now miss.

The Shrinking World

The times when I am amazed by the shrinking of the world, seems to be growing. 

But when you play “who do you know” you soon realize that in our lives we run in fairly small circles and so the chances of knowing somebody is pretty high.  And when you read Freakonimics or Malcolm Gladwell, you realize that probability suggests increasingly strange coincidences.

But in the larger world, outside our small geographic or socio-economic realms it becomes more surprising.  And I am continually impressed as I travel the small streets, the back alleys, the mews of Europe to find so many people who know, use and rely on http://www.marketresearch.com/.  It is a perspective you miss from the behind a desk in Rockville Maryland.

I have been in tiny offices in Brussels and office shares in London, picturesque buildings on the banks of Lake Zurich and on top of the tallest skyscrapers in Canary Wharf and found our clients experiencing what we hoped they would when we started the company 10 years ago.

I have spoken to people and watched orders come in from all over the world and am amazed at the impact.  When you hear someone at a university in Brussels, in broken English/French using our lingo, KWIC, Kalorama, Profound, I still find it remarkable.

But so far this is the strangest twist. 

My wife goes on an overnight walking trip to the Cotswold’s and meets a woman who tells us she is moving back to the states.  On their 11-mile walk she lets out that there are some things she’s trying to divest herself of.  A week later I am in her packed up apartment picking up space heaters, alarm clocks and half empty bottles of Pimms.

Sad to leave London, but overflowing with praise for the three years, her husband enters the room and we begin talking about his return home.  The job he has in the UK?  Head of Market Research for an international consumer goods company.

And so he volleys back to me "and what do you do?" 

I have a market research company, named Marketresearch.com.  And he returns, I am a customer of Marketresearch.com and I use Packaged  Facts and I know Larry (his sales rep).

Although I receive no further discount on the goods I am buying, walking home down Maida Vale lugging their leftovers I realize again that in this overlapping/combined world the chances of chance meetings are increasing every day.

On the Lam in Zurich

Rugby is an easy game in which to keep score, especially if your child is on the Pitch.  Either he walks off the field without help (a victory) or he is carried off (a defeat).

The past two days were reminders of recent posts combining my travel misadventures with my son’s impossible to find Rugby matches in places far and away.

Perhaps this time the scheduling was my fault, a 10:00 AM flight from London City Airport to Zurich, arriving at 12:30, a 1:30 client meeting and 2:30 rugby game.  Distances on maps don’t look very far, even Google says not to rely on their travel estimations.  But I had little choice.

It starts with trying to get to City Airport.  Why am I flying out of City Airport on SwissAir, because my son is flying out of Heathrow on British Air.  And while he didn’t tell me not to fly with him and his team, he did say I was the only parent coming to the games (Untrue).

The plane was full of the world’s worst parents and the world’s most patient flight attendants, a toxic combination.  We managed to take off on time, but land 20 minutes late, and I forgot to factor in things like customs, and passport control.

By an act of G-d I get through customs and am first in the taxi line which takes me to my client meeting in record time (way faster than Google said).  I sweep into the office at 1:30 with perfection.  I tell them I need to be out of there at 2:30 and again, clockwork, we finish our discussion, have a walk around their picturesque office overlooking Lake Zurich complete with sailboats, swans and birds aflutter. 

My new cabbie tells me we’ll be at the game in 20 minutes, could this be happening?  This cabbie name Yunis tries hard in his broken English to communicate.  I’ve made a friend.  Although he manages, I would later learn, to gladly take my Euros at his own special conversion rate (I have special rate for you Mr. hurried American businessman who doesn’t speak German and forgot that Switzerland isn’t part of the Euro-Zone)

Twenty minutes later he announces we’ve arrived, I’ve only missed half the game.  I look up to see a small house at the end of a small lane.

“What is this?”

“We are here?”

“This is not it,” I tell him.  “I am looking for a Rugby Pitch.  The Zurich International School and again I show him the address.  He shakes his head and pulls over to ask a local.  They speak in quick Swiss German which I don’t understand (I don’t understand slow Swiss German so it didn’t matter) but I do recognize the slow shaking of the head that suggests I am about to miss the match.

I take out two pieces of paper and show him the address and little did I know that Eichweg 2 Adliswil is different from Eichstrassse 2 Langnau.

He tells me he thinks he knows the way and miraculously I arrive in the middle of nowhere, which turns out to be a Rugby field, I see some orange jerseys off in the distance and then my son’s little head running down the way and I want to hug my cabbie, my new best friend.

He agrees to return in an hour, which he does and takes me to my hotel.  We also agree that he will pick me up the following morning take me to the game and then bring me back to the hotel.  He was there in the morning, dropped me off, we made a deal on the round-trip fare, but he doesn't return.

The European tolerance for late cabs far exceeds mine.  In all cities they tell us, “just five more minutes,” but they do this five, six, seven times.  So I wait five, ten, fifteen minutes and still nothing.  I wait 20 and then five more and still no sign of him.  But I am in the middle of nowhere, so what are my options?

I start walking toward town, and walking and walking until I find a hotel.  The hotel calls a cab and soon I am back in my hotel.  For the next two hours while I hunch over my laptop in my room working I await the knock at the door, broken down by the Polizei who are waiting to take me away because of the 30 Francs I owe the cabbie.  And I will tell them I waited and they will ask how long and then they will say incredulously, “only 30 minutes” and into Jail I will go.

But no police come and I even walk the streets although I have this running fear that I will be shot from an apartment window.  I made it to the airport without incident, although I almost confessed my guilt when they asked at customs if I had anything to declare.

Zurich is another place, very different from the economically challenged countries we’ve visited so far.  With 3% unemployment, 65 degree weather and a perfect sun reflecting off Lake Zurich, you’re hard pressed to find someone complaining.  Mostly I saw couples walking along the water, young couples in arms, older folks enjoying the sun, a band of middle aged men playing the accordion and general harmony.

I watched my son’s two games and took enough pictures for a rugby career, because these may be his last.  He scored a try and I saw it.  He made some great tackles and they are on film.  He high fived his teammates and stayed with a Swiss family who offered him ham and cheese breakfast-lunch and dinner. 

One player ended up in the hospital with internal bleeding.  “We thought he broke his pelvis, but it was just bleeding,” the coach told me.  Another 9^th grader had a concussion and I could see from the stands his eyes rolling around his head. 

And while his team didn’t win, getting to watch him run off the field was a victory for this parent. 

In Brussels

Our first impression upon arrival was, where is everybody?

At 1:00 on a Tuesday nobody is on the streets.  No smokers lining the sidewalks, shoppers, people returning from lunch, tourists?

At our first client meeting we ask about the empty streets:  “Nobody lives in Brussels.  Everyone lives outside.  We have the most beautiful towns 30 minutes from here, Bruges, Gent.   So the reverse is happening here, the price of properties in the city are going down.  It’s becoming a place for the poor to live.”

The major technological advancement we saw was the elevator had no buttons.  Halfway down the hall you punched in your floor number on a pad on the wall and it told you which elevator to go to and it took you to that floor when you arrived.  The building which currently houses 3000 employees was made for 2000, so this system improves the elevator wait time.  

I noticed our client, who spoke English to us, spoke French to someone in the hallway and then Dutch to the woman at the conference desk. 

“Which language do you speak around here?”

He told us everyone has to be fluent in all three because he will speak to clients and hear presentations in all three, all day long.  He said his brain is tired at the end of the day switching back and forth, but the real challenge is marketing, his main job.

Imagine having to create a marketing campaign in two languages, French and Dutch.  And if you send the marketing piece in the wrong language to the wrong person, not only might they not understand it, they are offended and will cancel the service. 

Beyond that they need to come up with product names and since the Dutch speakers want nothing French and the French don’t want Dutch, you have to find a meaningless words that interests and attracts without offending.

Hence products with a name like Bizz.

City of Festivals

If Paris is the City of Light, London is the City of Festivals.

Like most large cities the powers that be assume we need a reason to get off the couch and go shopping.  So they create a variety of festivals, events and gatherings that give you something new to do in a city with a million things to do.

Last weekend it was the “International Chocolate Festival” which I think was just a bunch of people trying to sell chocolate.  But they had some cool things, like an expensive entrance fee, a wall of chocolate where you could carve your name and melted chocolate with a paintbrush so you could paint your name on canvas, in chocolate.

Once inside Vinopolis just outside of Borough Market, it wasn’t just a bunch of people selling chocolate.  You also had people who trained you in smelling chocolate, tasting chocolate, and of course eating and drinking chocolate.  The girls loved it, there were more free samples than China Town.

This week we schlepped to Kentish Town on Saturday morning to jump into the world’s coldest pool.  Beyond that, however, we were taking part in a world record attempt at having the most people treading water in one place for one minute.

Two children joined me for this excursion (my wife seemed to have made it to the Chocolate Festival, but I got the iceberg swim).  We jumped into the frigid water and spent the time trying to avoid being kicked and then helping a drowning man to the side because the life guards were too busy counting the number of people in the pool to see if we broke the record.

It was very official, we even had to sign release forms for our photos in case we made it in and the Mayor of Camden pressed the starting button.  I counted about 150 people, the number we needed was closer to 300.  We did receive a certificate which, if you read closely, congratulated us on “attempting” a world record.

And then there are the big events.  For example, this was the weekend for the one and only American football game at Wembley Stadium.  Friday night we sat with Cuba Gooding Jr and a few thousands folks to watch the movie Jerry McGuire outdoors in Trafalgar Square.  They sold plenty of Bears and Bucs hats and shirts but the intermission interview by a local radio host revealed how little our hosts know about football.  And then on Sunday we took the train out to Wembley to watch Chicago and Tampa Bay.

While the purpose of the event is to introduce American football to the Brits, what it has become is a chance for expats to dress up in their hometown gear and root for a good play.  A chance for grown men to wear those cheeseheads and Viking helmets they dragged here from the States.

We waved our Bucs flags and enjoyed some of the British questions (try explaining a safety and why they punt the ball afterwards), but it’s a beautiful stadium and real enthusiasm for a game where very few care who wins.

A couple of very British things while we were there:  At halftime there was an announcement that the game will “re-commence in five minutes, please make your way to your seats.”  There were signs to text the word “issue” to a certain phone number if you see “anti social behaviour.”  And while the Brits laugh at the Americans for our patriotism (they think playing the Star Spangled Banner at the start of games is hokey), when they sang God Save the Queen, at the start of the game, the place exploded in song.