British Humor, Part I

Time Out, the magazine, which is in a dozen major cities and bills itself as the guide to Art, Culture and Going Out, has a distinctly British column called Lies to tell tourists. 

This week the column tells its followers to share this bit: 

"The pigeons of Trafalgar Square have their wings clipped:  legend says that if they ever fly away the monarchy will fall.  They are looked after by a yeoman called the Pigeon Master.  He's the bloke lying in the square with a can of Kestrel, wearing two pairs of trousers."

I will be Trafalgar Square later tonight for a Chinese New Year celebration and I hope to spread the word.

The World is Very Fast

Just the highlights

There is no way to say it without everyone sounding spoiled, but we hear it from every expat family.  The kids are tired of travelling.  They want to stay home and go to a movie, not another church.  So when my daughter whined, "I don't want to go to Greece this weekend," I said, "That's fine because Rome is in Italy."

My memory of Rome from 23 years ago was a dirty mess of broken down buildings.  The Rome we saw this month is a clean and well preserved place of beauty.  Every block is another chunk of history, it's an outdoor museum.

And so we do the quick trip:  Coliseum, Jewish Ghetto, Pasta, Spanish Steps, Pasta, The Vatican, St. Peters, Pasta, Trevi Fountain, Gelato, AS Roma Soccer, Pasta, Home.

It’s nice not to travel in the Summer with the crowd and to see the Coliseum on a mild day in January where you don’t need sharp elbows to get a picture of your family and where you can hear your guide who isn’t screaming above the English/French/German/Chinese guides around you.

The pasta is better, the Chianti sweeter, the roads more narrow, the people happier.

The Vatican and the 500 steps to the top of St. Peters, learning about this Pope and his Prada slippers and his love of Orange Fanta made you feel you could know this man with a billion followers.  This person who lives in Rome where 99% of the people call themselves Catholic, and only 10% go to Church.

This town doesn’t use butter when it makes pasta and cheese is delivered when you ask for it.  They have non-dairy Gelato and 15,000 of the country’s 35,000 remaining Jews.

And while they all sound just like you expect, with heavy emphasis on the final syllable, and you swear you spotted various characters from the Godfather or the Sopranos, one of my favorite encounters was with a Bangladeshi street vendor who sold junk to my children.

“Where are you from?"

“I am from Washington, DC"

 He looked up at me with his gold teeth and smooth face that suggested he couldn’t be more than 25 years old. 

 "I am from Bangladesh.  You are from America.  And here we are.  The world is very fast.”

Roma, Roma, Roma

Soccer explains the world.  And so to understand the Romans we make a trip to see AS Roma and the great Francesco Totti.

It was not a difficult match for Roma beating Cesena 5-1 with Totti setting a single-club scoring record.  So with the game in hand our observation turned to the scene where you learn that an 80,000 seat stadium is unnecessary when you have 30,000 fans.  You see an aging population, mostly men who drink as much espresso as they do beer in a stadium that housed the 1960 Olympics and was built by Mussolini (in front is an obelisk with his name, the only reminder of the fascist dictator).  And what you feel is the need to leave at 20 minute intervals because the thickness of the cigarette smoke, even in an outdoor arena, is eye and throat piercing.

To start the game everyone joins in a raucous rendition of Roma, Roma, Roma by popular singer Antonello Venditti.  This is not a national anthem, as this is not a national team, instead it is a recent song that is as joyful as any we’ve heard.  It doesn’t praise the city's beauty, but the team’s.  "Roma, Heart of this city, One and only love of many, many people who sigh for you...Roma, beautiful Roma, I have painted you Yellow like the sun and red just like my heart."  It is a love song. 

And then there is the Roma crest which consists of the She-wolf and the twins Romulus and Remus for whom the city is named. 

When a foreigner buys a ticket for a soccer game you need a passport to prove your identity.  So we spent part of Saturday night with our tickets hanging out of our passports.

So when we got to passport control to leave Italy on Sunday morning, with the five of us and our 10 carry-on bags the security guard barked out, “Who is Joshua?”  My son peered from behind us and into the box where the guard sat. The guard held up his cell phone, showing his screen saver, the She-wolf and the Roma flag.  Inside of his passport Josh had left his ticket stub.  We passed with no questions asked.

Vignettes

Oxford and Cambridge

Staying at the Beltsville Maryland Crowne Plaza for a weekend swim meet is a pain in the ass.  Staying at the Crowne Plaza in Cambridge for a 3 day swim gala is an adventure, at least for us. 

There were murmurings amongst the parents, even some of the expats, “I can’t believe I’m back in Cambridge…again.”  Some stayed home and took an early morning train, others skipped the Friday night or kept the kids home for that friends’ Bar Mitzvah.  It’s all perspective.

Both Oxford and Cambridge were a bit of a disappointment, I expected old bookstores, not Waterstones, coffee shops, not Pret a Manger, an Apothecary, not Boots.  And while some of the views are magnificent, it is still just a place of learning and a place of commerce.

Pub Trivia

The Lime Street Runners, the name of our Pub Trivia team, had a great showing at our latest event at the City Tavern.  Pub Trivia is another excuse to have drinks with office mates, but under the guise of, well having drinks with your mates.   Nineteen teams pack in a Pub, there are questions and videos on a monitor, you put your answers on a sheet of paper which is then corrected by another team.  Eight rounds later, after food and drink throughout, there is a winner.  The prizes are usually ghastly, but by then no one cares.

The American CEO came along for the ride but was little help for the team as the questions centered on far too many British celebrities, politicians and reality show winners.  Since I can barely tell a Pippa from a Kate.  I was lucky to have a question about the recent Republican to leave the race, John Huntsman (most guessed Ron Paul?)

As we moved our way up the charts, we were in 19^th place (last) after round one, we hit the final round called “twist or stand.”  In this round the questions got progressively harder and at any point you can bow out and bank the points you’d achieved.  But if you stay in and get the answer wrong you lose all points accumulated that round.

After noting that Zagreb was the only capital starting with Z (Zurich is not) the questions presented particular difficulty even for my British teammates:  In what city is England currently playing Pakistan in cricket? What four letters on a British license plate are never used?  Since the inception of the Premier League 20 years ago, name the two clubs that have appeared in 15 or more seasons without being ever presents.

A strong last question (name the two biggest bones in the fore-arm, name the three movies in which Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise co-star) and a wise dropping off point gave us a proud second place finish.

In Paris

There is no one way of doing business in Europe.  You can’t characterize by region.  Every country and every city is different and our client visits in Paris prove they don’t want to do business like the Brits, unlike the US, bifurcated from the Belgians.

Calling on a client for a visit is often not worth their time, unless you have something new to say.  Checking in, how is the service, anything more we can do, does not suffice.  While Parisians love their cafes and their lunches, they do not spend a lot of time socializing after work, they work and they go home.  They do not head out to the Pub and “get to know each other.”  This is not an observation, this is the message from our French customers who are often exasperated at themselves.

While the French do not play to type, Paris does.  The romance of the city is borne of Robert Doisneau photographs of lovers on a bench, women in cafes.  And you can’t walk a corner without this scene playing out.  The city was going through a spot of Spring-like weather and you can’t not be taken in by the Eiffel Tower peering its head outside the window of a meeting or walking the Champs Elysee at night .

But once you get beyond that you realize that the French, of 35-hour work week fame, actually are putting in long hours to compete.  Maybe it’s because we were meeting with International companies, many with a US mindset, but either way, they went back to the office after our drinks ended well past 7 o’clock.

And while they are characterized as not being terribly US-friendly, the streets with names from every president since Wilson, are reminders of the war and the US presence.  Our meeting at the Publicis Group began with a tour of the lobby and the Eisenhower gallery, a tribute to the 34^th US President who used the building as his headquarters during the war while in Paris.

Two un-pleasantries that I might address, were I President of France for a day, after spending some time with Mrs. President of France:  Everyone in France has a dog and everyone’s dog has a digestive tract and everyone’s dog takes a crap on the sidewalk and there is absolutely no inclination or requirement to clean it up.  Everyone in the country is bumping into one another because they are looking at their feet trying to avoid the minefield of doggy doo.  Even New Yorkers curb their dogs.

And second, a small reminder that smoking is bad for you?  A message that does not penetrate the beautiful minds of the students as they walk the grounds of the Sorbonne.  The women are stunning as they sit on the steps and stoops drinking their Cappuccino, reading their Jung and smoking their lungs away.

The French were a surprise, Paris was not.

In January

The streets are empty at seven at night when I leave the office.  Rain is dripping off the Christmas lights that dangle above the pub, some of the lights burned out.  The season is over.  You can see it everywhere, Christmas Trees at the corner, dead and droopy next to the rubbish.  The rain comes in sideways as the wind blows fierce.

The Mannequin in the men’s shirt shop window whose face and limbs were painted red for the holidays looked so festive in December, now it looks like a demented alien.

The pub isn’t brimming, it’s mostly empty, space heaters have been placed outside, but they outnumber the patrons.

It’s quiet on the streets, people coming back and forth, but not with parcels of presents, but briefcases with papers, bills to pay.

Capturing the Day

The first day back is blurry, everyone is tired, heads bob and kids collapse on chairs and in couches like a narcoleptic convention.

But the next day is better, everyone adjusted, and dinner is festive.  We are laughing at something, even a day later I barely remember what:  the spicy chili that came out too hot, tricking daddy into tasting it, a story from school, a funny email.  And I am haunted by the Anna Quindlin column from long ago where she laments not living in the moment enough.  She recounts a moment she can’t remember or forget:

I did not live in the moment enough.  This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less. 

But the truth is we are trying and realizing you can’t because time doesn’t march on, it sprints. 

I can sit and stare and record all I want, but in the end it’s tomorrow.  And January brings our Anniversary and a quick MLK Day trip to Deep Creek, which becomes my birthday in February which turns into Spring Break in March and Passover in April and then Spring arrives and we put away the ski clothes and gloves and June zips by with the end of school, a quick trip and then they are off to camp for 7 weeks.  And when they return in August it’s a race to the beach and Deep Creek and then back to school.  The Jewish Holidays invade and then there is the push to Thanksgiving which turns into a business trip and then a blur until the year ends in a sunny place and we begin planning for the new year.  And we sit here with photographs wondering what it was like. 

“Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.”

Land of Confusion

I was looking for signs of confusion.

Landing at Dulles everything became familiar again.  The same trolley from the gate to the terminal, the baggage claim, waiting at the exit, pulling onto the Toll Road, the same buildings, the same signs.  Construction caused some confusion as we exited to the Beltway but soon we were on terra familiar.  Nothing had changed.  It was as if we’d been away on a week’s holiday, not a four-month absence.

Like an archeologist walking through the rooms of our house looking for something, I find nothing odd or out of place.  The biggest source of confusion was locating ESPN on our local cable box.  At once everything from London became a memory and this was our life again.

And in an a blur of calls and visits, flights to Michigan, Atlanta, Costa Rica, Miami, DC and back to London, bathing suits and tennis and beaches and doctor visits and work meetings and lunches and holiday parties we are back. And as familiar as Bethesda was in the first moments, London is unfamiliar.  In some ways it feels like we never lived here. 

But then we walk in and the sound of the alarm system brings me back.  Soon the house smells of our London coffee and the creaky floors and smallish rooms become comfortable.  Later that day the woman’s voice on the bus, the chime at the turnstile, the tourists at Abbey Road, the taxis and buses, the smell of petrol remind me.

The last time we all came to this house, this place, it was for the first time.  There were tears and cries of home and wonder and worry.  But this time there was none of that.  No tears wetting the fur of our puppies or the house or their bedrooms.  All the goodbyes were said and we turned to discussion of what we had to do once we landed.  It was no longer an unfamiliar place, it was the place where we all lived together.

And the day progressed.  The kids got up from naps, we played some games and met our friends for dinner and took the bus and lamented the bowl games we would miss and watched the ones we could.  And everyone prepared for a new year and a new semester at school.  I reached for the emotion, wondering what everyone was feeling.  My wife grabbed at the process.  Here is what we’re doing, here is where we're going, let’s get moving.

And we did.