Two Seasons Come to a Close (Part I)

There is nothing like a child’s first love.  Not the one that breaks your heart once.  But the love that breaks your heart again and again your entire life.  In sports your first love is often the one that lasts.


He may not be able to get himself up on most school days without his mother and the promise of chocolate chip pancakes.  But he set his alarm and got himself out of bed at 2:30 in the morning for every hockey game the Washington Capitals played and watched until completion, whether that meant regulation or overtime, or double overtime, or triple.

All over England you can strike up conversation by asking which football club they follow.  And they always have one.  And when you ask why they answer that it was their father’s club.  Or their grandfather's or the place where their first house once stood.  “We’ve always been Arsenal fans,” they might say.  "My dad remembers the plane crash in 1958 and that's how he got stuck on United."

The previous evening my son went to bed with tears in his eyes after his team lost on a long day which ended well past 3:30 in the morning.  There was only pain in his heart.

The next afternoon we watched as the Manchester City fans wept in pain and then joy, the reverse for Manchester United.



The pain lasts and then fades and it's on to next season.


A few hours after the soccer season ended I was riding in a car with a Manchester United fan, whose team had been handed as heartbreaking a defeat as we’ve ever seen.  “Manchester City deserved it,” he said.  “I have to hand it to them.  They played the better football.”


That night I told my son I'd pick him up at eight o'clock the following evening.  


"Please don't say the word eight, dad.  It reminds me of Ovechkin and that the Caps lost."

A Good Stumble

"Not all those who wander are lost"  Tolkien


We don't stumble anymore, we search.


We don't look for old books in old book stores, we search online and find them and have them sent to our house.  I've been looking for a book about a guy who took his family to Paris and wrote about it.  I'd been to a few book stores, unable to find it.  Then a few weeks later I was in an old book shop I'd been seeking out.  I found the store, but alas they didn't have a copy.  They could order it, but I said "no thanks."  I still had an hour before my next meeting so I ambled across the road and found another book store, one I'd never heard of, and there in the travel section was one copy of the book.  Pure delight.


People have been writing about walking and exploring in London since Pepys.  In a city like London anything can be an adventure, or a chore, depending on your perspective.  Virginia Woolf wrote one of her great essays about her adventure to buy a lead pencil as she went "street sauntering" "street rambling" and "street haunting."


For me London is meant to be explored and all the difficulties of city life (the trains, the delays, the jostling, the dirt, the noise, the rain, the mess) is all part of the adventure.  An adventure that must take place on foot.  We have hoofed it from Abbey Gardens to Golders Green, Whitehall to Westminster, from Hampstead to Hampshire, Ealing to Edgeware, from London Bridge to Leadenhall and Lime Street.  No matter the sector of the city, if there are sidewalks we walk it to learn it, to know it, to stumble upon it.

I set out part of every week to walk London and find something.  And it rarely disappoints, finding the great new places which existed, always hiding in plain sight.

One my best stumbles is the English Restaurant.

The English Restaurant is my single favorite place in London.  I go in the morning, they have dairy free cake and tea and banged-up chairs, and knotty tables and funny young people making coffee and a steady stream of world weary walking through.

How I Stumbled:


-One day I went to see "Dickens in London" an exhibit at the Museum of London.  
-After the exhibit I looked through the gift shop finding a book called “Quiet London” which listed quiet places within the city, including libraries, gardens and coffee shops.
-The next week I followed the book to the Bishopsgate Institute Library.  A nice old creaky, dusty library, just North of Liverpool Street.  

-Afterward I walked down a side street until I bumped into Old Spitalfields Market, a Victorian market hall which is now filled with what can only be described as rows and rows of vendors selling bric-a-brac.
-Later as I walked back to the office I bumped into a restaurant called the Grenadier, which of course required me to stop and take a picture.  

-Next to the Grenadier I saw a coffee shop called the English Restaurant.  




As soon as I stepped foot in the place it grabbed me by the throat and pulled me in.  The people kept me there.  A constant stream of clever playfulness permeates this tiny space which to me is everything English.


It's run by a couple who keeps everything, quintessentially English.  The food is well-bragged about, though I've never had a meal.  "You've got to try the kippers with mustard butter for breakfast," they tell me, but I get the bagel and lox.  "Then come back for dinner the venison casserole and pan-friend Guinea fowl with steak and onion pudding is out of this world," and all I ask for is another slice of dairy-free cake.

English food and English service are legendarily bad.  They take pride in this.  However, in my English Restaurant I found only love for the customer and the food.  Food that will never pass these lips.

The Three Vs of Brighton

All of us are confined to a schedule, sometimes of our doing and sometimes not.  But there is a sense of strength, if that’s the right word, maybe it is freedom, that comes from being able to stand at a train station look up at the big board and know you can go anywhere the tracks will take you.   You have 24 hours and they are yours.

I chose Brighton.  Well, I really chose Liverpool, but the tracks were all messed up and a two hour ride was going to take me six.

Brighton did brighten my day, even in the cold and drizzle that has shrouded England for the past four weeks.

Brighton is one of those cities like Portland Maine or Seattle Washington that is heavy on the Three Vs:  Vinyl records, Vegan food and Vintage clothing.

A one hour, ten pound train from London takes you from the city to the seaside with stops throughout South London from Hassocks to Hayward's Heath, through Three Bridges, East Croyden, and Burgess Hill.  But Brighton has all the sights and smells of a beach.  Visually it looks like old-time Atlantic City with the Ferris wheel and the pier, the sound of gulls overhead and the smell of fish (and chips) all around. 

Brighton is on the south coast of Great Britain and like all things in this country has a long history going back to 1086.  It was a health resort kind of place even back in the day, then it went through some disrepair and is now back on the gentrification track with universities and high end stores.

But beyond the sea, the highlight is the visually magnificent Royal Pavilion.   And there are the North Laines, a shopping area like no other with bunches of zig zagging streets and hundreds of shops, none of which exist anywhere else on earth.  From records and turntables, vintage clothing and vintage cameras, from tattoos to typewriters, the streets, even on a rainy day are teeming with tourists and townies all looking for a bargain, a cup of tea and a piece of dairy/gluten free cake.

Awk Sauce

Awk Sauce is a phrase my children use to describe an awkward situation, often involving their parents.  Earlier this week I had a breakfast meeting near my daughter’s school at the end of Regent Street.  So I thought I’d take the occasion to pop by.

At the front desk I asked if she’s around and they wanted to know if this was a scheduled visit.  I told them no, that I was just in the neighborhood and thought it would be nice to see her in her natural habitat away from home.

“Oh, how nice, she’ll be so excited,” the office secretary told me.

So we climbed the three flights of stairs to her Spanish class and looking in I could see her big smile through the sliver of window.  She, however, had not seen me.

The secretary peeked in and asked for Natalie.  A chorus of “woo, woo” went up from her classmates, suggesting she was in trouble.

When she saw me the reaction was pure Awk Sauce: “Whaaat are you dooooing heeere?”

We stood outside the classroom and had our moment:

“I just wanted to see you since I was down the street.”
“Why??”

“Because I missed you.”

“Oh God Dad, really.”

We exchanged hugs and kisses and she was off.  My day was elevated, her day was, well interrupted.

Later that night I heard her re-telling the story to her sister.  “It was total Awk sauce.  When I got back into the class everyone asked if that was my dad.  I told them ‘No.’”

DisneyDubaiVegas

When you arrive in Dubai you immediately notice not only that it's a desert, but it's deserted.  Traffic is light and everything is so huge, that it never feels busy.

The beaches, like the streets are immaculate.

Our hotel has 600 rooms, a nice size hotel, but with 22 restaurants and 40 stores?

The Emirates Mall and the Dubai Mall are so massive that nothing could make it feel crowded.  There are 1250 stores in one mall.  My son wanted sunglasses, we passed five sunglasses stores on the way to the bathroom.

The perfect representation of Dubai is the Mall of Emirates.  It is there that my kids could ski and tube at the indoor ski resort, while it's 95 degrees outside.  As my children played in the snow my wife and I drank coffee at the St. Moritz restaurant, complete with a video of a fire in the fireplace and the smell of burning Aspen trees, which sprayed over our heads via a fragrance pump that hung above the restaurant.

Oh yes, and I finally found an open Borders Book store.

There is no recession here.  The malls are open until midnight, at 11:00 it was well-trafficked.

Dubai is a city of visitors.  With a population of 6 million, 4.5 million are foreigners, mostly Pakistanis, Indians and Filipinos, all looking for work.  The guests are 70% Russian. 

The Barj Kalipha, the tallest building in the world has a telescope where you can find hot spots around the city and then push a button and it shows you what it looked like 20 years ago when it was a wasteland.

Vegas-Style the Dubai Mall has an aquarium and a dancing water show.

When we were told to go to the Souk, I pictured the stone alleys of Jerusalem, but instead I found a dirty street filled with Indian expats selling knock-off Hermes bags.

This place is a combination of DisneyLand without the charm, Vegas without the gambling or alcohol.  It's a Twinkie town.  Tastes good, but feels a bit empty.

Swimming and Snooker in Sheffield

Swim meets, or Galas as they are called in the UK, are long days and sometimes long weekends.  My favorite shirt of all time was found at one of these events, worn by a tired parent.  The shirt read:  “If I only had one day to live, I’d like to spend it at a swim meet.  Because they last forever.”

But they are also rewarding watching your child stand on the blocks in front of hundreds of people and take off into the water as she stretches and challenges herself in a very public way.

Sheffield England is a town a few hours North of London and when I told members of my office I'd be going there they gave me blank stares.  Well known for its crucible steel process invented in the 1740's, it's a city on the rebound from years of decline.  Well known for its University, a soccer rivalry (the Blades and the Owls) and this weekend the World Snooker Championships.

But around the world it is best known as the maker of most of England's cutlery.

When the Holiday Inn Express dinner didn't invite we found a restaurant called Vito's which was well recommended by an online website.  We took a cab to this cozy Italian joint where the pasta is Al dente, the house wines are great and a shot of Limoncello and Grappa are gratis.

After dinner Vito came up from the kitchen in his chef top and black and white checkered pants.  We asked him how he made his way from Southern Italy to Sheffield.  He wanted to learn English and saw that all the knives he was using were made in Sheffield.  So he came there to learn English, and "Here I am 30 years later."

The swim meet was held at Pond's Forge.  Did you know how many cups of tea it takes to fill a pool?  This was a country-wide meet with build up that included singing and grand entrances.  

The final activity before the starting gun was the singing of "Land of Hope and Glory" a song written to the tune of Pomp and Circumstance, so it already reached for the parental heart.  And then the hundreds of parents and athletes stood and sang:

Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free

How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee?

Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set,

God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet,

God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.

And while the song was written in 1902 at the request of King Edward, and was no doubt written about the Empire, the song had special resonance for the parents as so many of them looked down from the stands and watched their children perform.  Big burly men and bright haired women with faces painted the color of their child’s swim club shouted the words in their loudest British voices so maybe their children, and God will hear:

God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet, 

God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.

From the Township to Jumeirah, Cape Town to Dubai

Once my wife convinced me that Dubai was "on the way back" to London I stopped showing her the Atlas. However, the distance between Cape Town and Dubai is so much more than even the 9 hour plane ride suggested.

In Cape Town we had a Seder with 200 Jews, using the same Haggadah, the same text, the same chicken soup as our ancestors back in the old country and our parents back in Florida.  Dayenu.

In Dubai people with Israeli passports are not allowed in the country and even having an Israeli stamp can cause immigration questions and delays.

We left a country that can't house its people or give them jobs, where 70% unemployment in the township is average and 25% HIV infection is progress.  To a place where the wealth is so vast that only 10% of the population needs to work. Where three quarters of its inhabitants are foreigners who they literally had to ship in to fill the jobs.

We left a place without running water, where living in a room with 16 relatives, but is on the "double story," is a high achievement, to a place where the tallest buildings in the world look futuristic, beautiful and empty.

Walking through the Township our gestures feel empty when all you can offer is a pack of chips, some change, and a hug.

The day before we arrive a train came through town and hit four cows that had wandered onto the tracks.  When word spread men ran from their homes with machettes, hacking off what was left of the dying animals.  They came back home and thanked God for the gift of their Easter feast.

In Dubai my children donned heavy jackets and snow skied in a mall in the middle of the desert in 95 degree heat.