Lovely smog here in Beijing, and a lovely odor, that mix of sweat, heat, garbage, and fried food. In the haze of jet lag and exhaustion the memory of my initiatory foray into the city yields little more than the odor of it. It’s not an unfamiliar smell, peculiar to the air of development. In my experience it is exactly this stale odor that accompanies the clash of construction and decay. Everywhere there are big buildings going up, the twenty-story kind, mostly apartments where I am, and old buildings going down to make room for the new ones and the new international face of the Chinese capital. Many of the construction and destruction workers come from the country and, according to Adam, work until the project is done, at which time they receive a paycheck. They are young and old, some conspicuously skinny, others more robust, all the ones I’ve seen with a certain look that differs from the look of passersby, who are of all types, their range equally dichotic. Skirts and suits and the fashionable mixed among the indigent walking barefoot and riding rusted bicycles from some time more coincident with the idylls of 1950s America.
These depictions are easy and incomplete, as first impressions always are, and so I look forward to spending a week and a half here with a guide as experienced in the language and the culture as Adam. I’m spending today inside to recover from travel and the whir of multiple time zones. I stayed up all day yesterday to shock my body into Beijing time, but my body struck back by sleeping until one o’clock. When I woke up I had the strange sensation that my limbs were attached only tenuously, and that any quick movement might sever their association with my body. So I lay for some time, vaguely afraid of that prospect, drifting in and out of sleep, until my consciousness coalesced and consistent feeling returned to my body. I’ll spend the remainder of the day convalescing, I suspect, and catching up with emails and the business of maintaining the contiguity of past and present to make it all fit under the tiny word “life.”
In the meantime, a shout-out to the Risk Management department of the Credit Union, which provided me upon my departure with a bag of goodies, including the expired instant oatmeal and the unexpirable soup powder that I just had for lunch.
2006.08.08
08 August 2006
07 August 2006
The Potteries, Birmingham, and the Hamlets
We took the long way to Birmingham and various regions of Neal’s mission. We caught a plane from Milan to Liverpool, where we rented a convertible too small for the three of us with luggage, but just right for a vacationer’s ethos, that footloose and fancy freedom that Fozzy made a career singing about.
After a couple of abortive rounds about the parking lot, a little coaching from Neal, and some pop-psychological pep talk (you can do it, you’re good enough, smart enough), I took us and our automatic Saab convertible onto British roads. My job was to drive; Neal’s was to tell me where to drive; Mom’s was to ignore the fact that I’d never driven on the left side of the road and that Neal didn’t really know where he was going. Together, with the help of the Big Atlas of British Roads, we got it more or less right on and in relatively no time found ourselves cruising alongside the rolling hills of rural England with our sights trained on Stoke-on-Trent and the Potteries.
Neal and Mom know more about the Potteries than I, and it is from them that I learned what little I know. Forefather Edward Henry Rhead left here in 1856 at five years of age with his parents to cross the Atlantic and join up with the Latter-day Saints in the States. The local accent in the Potteries, I was told, which is so unique to the region, in large part developed as a function of noise pollution, one of the byproducts of making and firing pottery. In consequence the quieter, shyer vowels got dropped, and the result: Neal had to do some translation work for the poor Yankees he was toting around England with him.
A local bum attempted to instruct us on how to use the self-cleaning public toilet. Neal made the instructions meaningful by essentially repeating them verbatim, and Mom, urged by biological exigency, dropped her tuppence into the slot of the green silo, entered, and turned just in time to see the door slide automatically to shut her in and us out. She looked as if she knew this was no self-cleaning public toilet but the portal to some other world on which there was no Saab convertible, no Nathan to drive it, and no Neal to translate English into American. Neal took it all in stride, no doubt having been in the portal himself in times past, but I credited Mom with more courage than I myself could claim, and by the time she’d emerged I’d gained a temporary stay against the same biological exigency.
We made Birmingham a brief stop: we took the time only of an afternoon to walk about the city center—a pedestrian’s dream—eat lunch on a bench overlooking real teenage British hoodlums, and catch a commercial art museum just before closing. Neal, the artist, was both pleased and perplexed by the museum’s offerings. It exhibited work from famous names, including Picasso, but had made at least one mistake in describing the type of art (lithograph or etching?) and even misattributed a piece. But Neal’s biggest trouble was Mom and I: the undereducated, the laypeople.
Neal sees a painting by Damien Hurst: it’s a largish canvas painted in symmetrical, polka dots of different colors. Mom says, “What’s so important about this? Why is this so valuable?” Neal says, “What’s so unimportant about it? Do you think you could do it?” Mom says, “Sure.” Neal says, “How would you do it?” Mom says, “I don’t know, get some construction paper, make circles, paste them to a poster board.”
Later in the week, in Huntingdon, Mom gets this gleam in her eye. It’s more than a bright idea; it’s a devious one. The three of us are walking down the pedestrian section of the town toward evening when Mom lets out this elated sound, as if she’s finally clapped a pesky mosquito between her hands. We look and follow her pointed finger through a shop window to a collection of wrapping papers. Among the vertical tubes is a roll of large polka dots of varying colors on a white background. The implication is clear: she has found her replica of Hurst, and if the shop were only open she could wrap every present in Hurst this Christmas, and for a very fair price at that.
Huntingdon: the little hamlet next to St. Ives, the little hamlet. The word “hamlet” sounds diminutive and inaccurate, but its connotation does more to describe these quaint, quiet, noncontiguous towns in otherwise rural England than the word “town” itself does. And, besides, I was enchanted. Huntingdon is the kind of place you feel lucky to stumble onto. St. Ives even more so. The quality of the quiet in these two towns is such that a wedge of swans battling over the remainder of Neal’s beef kabob was both the nosiest and most active event the town had to offer. The sun set over the water the canal and the medieval bridge spanning it and tempered everything, even the remaining sounds, and we sat there on a bench alongside the canal, three travelers for a moment painted into a harmonious, panoramic standstill.
If Huntingdon felt pastoral, Birmingham seemed grim, glum, and real. There were no tourists, except us, and so the city center became a place where people came, repeatedly, to enact the rituals of living: shopping, courting, picnicking, rendezvousing and commuting. We suspected nothing of this reality in London, among the countless tourists and the veneer of the capital, and since we liked Huntingdon so much, we decided to stay on at the historic George hotel for thirty pounds per each of three individual rooms. At night we’d part for our quarters with wishes of sweet dreams; in the morning we’d knock on each other’s door to coordinate for a descent to breakfast. Here we were rather unlike tourists, but rather more like borders in a new city, brought together by the proximity of our three doors along a hallway that slanted and creaked with the feeling of a potent, friendly haunting.
We spent as little of the morning of our last full day of the joint trip at another full, greasy English breakfast among other patrons of the hotel restaurant. Shortly afterward, Neal made his only solo flight in the car to chauffeur himself and Mom to church. I stayed back to work on my thesis, which still haunted me from abroad. I walked about to find a hint of Internet access somewhere in Huntingdon only to convince myself that the town has figured out a way, in all its quaintness, to circumvent the computer revolution. I found a supermarket instead, picked up the makings for a fresh salad—what Mom longed for most during all our travels—a Tupperware bowl, plastic utensils, and a whole pineapple to welcome Mom and Neal home with a meal one-third the price and twice the freshness of everything else we’d found abroad.
After the salad, Mom took to carving the pineapple with the two-inch blade of a pocketknife and simultaneously started a conversation on impressions of our travels. She asks Neal first, “Name a couple of events or aspects of your experience that stand out.” He mentions learning to appreciate his family more, making good professional contacts and good art; learning again that he wants to live where he can walk places. I talk of liking the feeling of incongruity when the modern meets the ancient, e.g. photographing the Roman Forum or the Coliseum. Mom talks of the concerts we attended and, despite the heat in the buildings or the discomfort of sitting on hard benches, the beauty of the performances (Vivaldi, Kreisler, Beethoven, Debussy, Chopin, Mendelssohn) and the virtuosity of the players.
And how surreal it was for her to sit with her two baby boys, grown into these foreign adult bodies, in these foreign places.
When we parted at Heathrow airport, we had little to say that our smiles and our tears could not adequately convey. And then they went one way and I went another, they to British Air, I to Turkish Air. And the rest is history.
08.07.2006
P.S. Two days later official at Heathrow airport discovered liquid explosives in baggage, canceled numerous flights, especially to the States, and forbade the carrying of any liquid or paste into the cabin of the airplane.
After a couple of abortive rounds about the parking lot, a little coaching from Neal, and some pop-psychological pep talk (you can do it, you’re good enough, smart enough), I took us and our automatic Saab convertible onto British roads. My job was to drive; Neal’s was to tell me where to drive; Mom’s was to ignore the fact that I’d never driven on the left side of the road and that Neal didn’t really know where he was going. Together, with the help of the Big Atlas of British Roads, we got it more or less right on and in relatively no time found ourselves cruising alongside the rolling hills of rural England with our sights trained on Stoke-on-Trent and the Potteries.
Neal and Mom know more about the Potteries than I, and it is from them that I learned what little I know. Forefather Edward Henry Rhead left here in 1856 at five years of age with his parents to cross the Atlantic and join up with the Latter-day Saints in the States. The local accent in the Potteries, I was told, which is so unique to the region, in large part developed as a function of noise pollution, one of the byproducts of making and firing pottery. In consequence the quieter, shyer vowels got dropped, and the result: Neal had to do some translation work for the poor Yankees he was toting around England with him.
A local bum attempted to instruct us on how to use the self-cleaning public toilet. Neal made the instructions meaningful by essentially repeating them verbatim, and Mom, urged by biological exigency, dropped her tuppence into the slot of the green silo, entered, and turned just in time to see the door slide automatically to shut her in and us out. She looked as if she knew this was no self-cleaning public toilet but the portal to some other world on which there was no Saab convertible, no Nathan to drive it, and no Neal to translate English into American. Neal took it all in stride, no doubt having been in the portal himself in times past, but I credited Mom with more courage than I myself could claim, and by the time she’d emerged I’d gained a temporary stay against the same biological exigency.
We made Birmingham a brief stop: we took the time only of an afternoon to walk about the city center—a pedestrian’s dream—eat lunch on a bench overlooking real teenage British hoodlums, and catch a commercial art museum just before closing. Neal, the artist, was both pleased and perplexed by the museum’s offerings. It exhibited work from famous names, including Picasso, but had made at least one mistake in describing the type of art (lithograph or etching?) and even misattributed a piece. But Neal’s biggest trouble was Mom and I: the undereducated, the laypeople.
Neal sees a painting by Damien Hurst: it’s a largish canvas painted in symmetrical, polka dots of different colors. Mom says, “What’s so important about this? Why is this so valuable?” Neal says, “What’s so unimportant about it? Do you think you could do it?” Mom says, “Sure.” Neal says, “How would you do it?” Mom says, “I don’t know, get some construction paper, make circles, paste them to a poster board.”
Later in the week, in Huntingdon, Mom gets this gleam in her eye. It’s more than a bright idea; it’s a devious one. The three of us are walking down the pedestrian section of the town toward evening when Mom lets out this elated sound, as if she’s finally clapped a pesky mosquito between her hands. We look and follow her pointed finger through a shop window to a collection of wrapping papers. Among the vertical tubes is a roll of large polka dots of varying colors on a white background. The implication is clear: she has found her replica of Hurst, and if the shop were only open she could wrap every present in Hurst this Christmas, and for a very fair price at that.
Huntingdon: the little hamlet next to St. Ives, the little hamlet. The word “hamlet” sounds diminutive and inaccurate, but its connotation does more to describe these quaint, quiet, noncontiguous towns in otherwise rural England than the word “town” itself does. And, besides, I was enchanted. Huntingdon is the kind of place you feel lucky to stumble onto. St. Ives even more so. The quality of the quiet in these two towns is such that a wedge of swans battling over the remainder of Neal’s beef kabob was both the nosiest and most active event the town had to offer. The sun set over the water the canal and the medieval bridge spanning it and tempered everything, even the remaining sounds, and we sat there on a bench alongside the canal, three travelers for a moment painted into a harmonious, panoramic standstill.
If Huntingdon felt pastoral, Birmingham seemed grim, glum, and real. There were no tourists, except us, and so the city center became a place where people came, repeatedly, to enact the rituals of living: shopping, courting, picnicking, rendezvousing and commuting. We suspected nothing of this reality in London, among the countless tourists and the veneer of the capital, and since we liked Huntingdon so much, we decided to stay on at the historic George hotel for thirty pounds per each of three individual rooms. At night we’d part for our quarters with wishes of sweet dreams; in the morning we’d knock on each other’s door to coordinate for a descent to breakfast. Here we were rather unlike tourists, but rather more like borders in a new city, brought together by the proximity of our three doors along a hallway that slanted and creaked with the feeling of a potent, friendly haunting.
We spent as little of the morning of our last full day of the joint trip at another full, greasy English breakfast among other patrons of the hotel restaurant. Shortly afterward, Neal made his only solo flight in the car to chauffeur himself and Mom to church. I stayed back to work on my thesis, which still haunted me from abroad. I walked about to find a hint of Internet access somewhere in Huntingdon only to convince myself that the town has figured out a way, in all its quaintness, to circumvent the computer revolution. I found a supermarket instead, picked up the makings for a fresh salad—what Mom longed for most during all our travels—a Tupperware bowl, plastic utensils, and a whole pineapple to welcome Mom and Neal home with a meal one-third the price and twice the freshness of everything else we’d found abroad.
After the salad, Mom took to carving the pineapple with the two-inch blade of a pocketknife and simultaneously started a conversation on impressions of our travels. She asks Neal first, “Name a couple of events or aspects of your experience that stand out.” He mentions learning to appreciate his family more, making good professional contacts and good art; learning again that he wants to live where he can walk places. I talk of liking the feeling of incongruity when the modern meets the ancient, e.g. photographing the Roman Forum or the Coliseum. Mom talks of the concerts we attended and, despite the heat in the buildings or the discomfort of sitting on hard benches, the beauty of the performances (Vivaldi, Kreisler, Beethoven, Debussy, Chopin, Mendelssohn) and the virtuosity of the players.
And how surreal it was for her to sit with her two baby boys, grown into these foreign adult bodies, in these foreign places.
When we parted at Heathrow airport, we had little to say that our smiles and our tears could not adequately convey. And then they went one way and I went another, they to British Air, I to Turkish Air. And the rest is history.
08.07.2006
P.S. Two days later official at Heathrow airport discovered liquid explosives in baggage, canceled numerous flights, especially to the States, and forbade the carrying of any liquid or paste into the cabin of the airplane.
04 August 2006
To Liverpool, with Homage to Zurich
You’re wondering, why Liverpool? Its airport makes “why Liverpool?” abundantly clear in broad murals: The Beatles were born here, all four of the bright boys. But our reason was simpler, quieter, more practical, less star-struck, hardly musical. Ryan Air with its cheap plane tickets, and a proximal starting block for everything we wanted to see on a southerly itinerary through the Island, ending at Heathrow airport and including, in chronological order, the Potteries (Stoke-on-Trent), Birmingham, Huntingdon and St. Ives, all to the accompaniment of those rolling hills, that misted countryside. It was almost exactly what you’d expect from an American’s film-based perspective of the mother country. In this way England to me is much like Switzerland upon first glance: both countries fit their codified, maybe branded, international images.
Which reminds me, I skipped Switzerland, our first stop, in my writings. I want Switzerland and Sarah--my niece, Mom’s granddaughter and the facilitator of our two, let’s say idyllic, days in Zürich--to know that the oversight was neither intentional nor unintentional but, rather, natural. That is to say my experience in Switzerland was so flawless, relaxing, and easy from a logistical point of view (you might say everything went like clockwork) that it hardly shares the emotional tone of the trip it began. Being something like a dream, Zürich faded into the indelible smile I woke up with in the morning as the train approached Venice.
I recall this dream much in the way one recalls dreams, in fragments of the quotidian overlaid by the surreal. Our arrival at the airport, for example, was, as you would expect in Switzerland, on time, and the airport was also what you might expect of a Swiss airport: spotless, orderly, and convenient. But as the passengers of our flight from London filtered out into the vaulted, windowed space of the terminal it felt as if we’d entered a very clean ghost town, or a postmodern cathedral on a weekday. Besides an absence of vendors, loungers, and duty-free shops, there wasn’t even the usual rush of people to leave bread crumbs from debarkation to baggage claim. Everyone dispersed, and Mom and I found ourselves having to depend solely on signs to find our way to the exit. As we walked I imagined that robots took care of the cleaning at night, or that the floors and benches were self-cleaning, and that the whole airport operation was orchestrated from some central brain in a bunker underground: if I addressed it correctly it might respond. “Computer,” “Captain,” “Giselle, take us to observation deck fifteen.” (Big, powerful central computers are often given seductive female names, much as big boats. Someone once explained this phenomenon to me as the seductive power of all things flashy, or the confluence of a man’s growing monetary power and his waning sexual prowess.)
In such a surreal setting it was feasible to worry about finding Sarah and equally feasible to expect her sudden appearance before us out of molecules in the air. The latter version proved closer to the truth. Following the signs for the exit, we walked through the empty halls almost reverently, as if in a church or a library, and almost slowly, unlike any recent arrival at an airport that I’ve ever seen. We descended on a sporty escalator and entered the smooth, shiny, silent, and self-consciously uncomfortable airport shuttle. Inside, we looked around and wondered if we were moving in the right direction. It seemed appropriate at this point to say, “Giselle, give us Sarah Schofield’s coordinates, please,” but the big brain predicted our concerns and, obviating the need to voice the question, said in a rather seductive female voice to please hold the rail, the train would arrive at the exit in two stops. And, more or less, that’s where Sarah was waiting, one among very few other living people or lifelike robots at the reception area. We smiled, relieved; she smiled, relieved. She piled our luggage into her Audi and swept us off to what I like to call a cottage, because it was in Switzerland, was quaint, and was nestled in the idylls of the rolling hills above Zürich.
From here picture Zürich the way you’ve always pictured Zürich. Do you see a quiet, orderly, cobblestoned city surrounding a sparkling blue lake? Do you see Gothic-style churches, ecologically friendly cars, fashionable boutiques, and a clock tower about to chime the hour? Do you see unassuming European architecture? Classy, unhurried, unfettered pedestrians? Narrow, winding roads so clean one might consider removing footwear to feel the subdued pulse of the earth? A park just over the city where you might find a couple sipping white wine on a blanket or a group of locals gathered around a life-sized outdoor chessboard? Quick, efficient public transport? Public fountains that spout potable water? Rolling hillsides that alternate from forest to well-groomed farm fields? And tidy, inconspicuous cottages dotting the hillsides like wildflowers?
The parts of Zürich I saw made up a photo album for any Realtor looking to entice foreign investment. After we recovered a bit from our transatlantic flight at the beautiful, but unassuming house where Sarah works as an au pair, we drove into the city through a rolling hillside of forest and farmland, ate alongside unfettered, classy-looking Swiss at a charming vegetarian bistro called Tibits, and wandered along cobblestone streets that wound through small, fashionable boutiques and up past those ageless European churches to a park overlooking the center of the city. We meandered back into town and strolled along the flowering boardwalk of Lake Zürich, which winked and prevaricated under a setting sun.
Day two took grandmother and granddaughter on a bonding train trip to Bern, leaving Sarah’s best friend, Mika, also visiting from the States, and me to thumb through the sections on Lake Zürich in the realtor’s album on Switzerland. I felt like we were enacting some modern rendition of those classic impromptu expatriate encounters, such as A Roman Holiday, with paddleboat instead of Vespa, or Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, sans jewel heist. Mika and I trained into town through rolling hills of farm and forest, walked along the boardwalk bathed in midsummer sun, and settled on beach towels among the bronzed and lean of midweek, midday Zürich. Mika fit right in among the beautiful people basking on the banks of the lake, and I did my best to keep up, a phrase I can reuse to describe, vis-a-vis Mika, my swimming. This is how it was thus decided that I would man the paddleboat while Mika swam the width of the lake. She refused my request that she call me “coach,” and so I remained an awed, pale supporter shouting unnecessary calls of encouragement from behind the wheel of the paddleboat.
One farewell dinner of sushi on the bank of the lake and a cool walk to the train station through an impending rainstorm later, plus some adjustment to the idea of bedding down in the train’s cramped coupe-for-four, and we’re back at the next morning’s indelible smile and the start of going it on our own, at least until we met up with Neal, in Florence. But enough about Florence. How about a little Liverpool?
2006.08.04
Which reminds me, I skipped Switzerland, our first stop, in my writings. I want Switzerland and Sarah--my niece, Mom’s granddaughter and the facilitator of our two, let’s say idyllic, days in Zürich--to know that the oversight was neither intentional nor unintentional but, rather, natural. That is to say my experience in Switzerland was so flawless, relaxing, and easy from a logistical point of view (you might say everything went like clockwork) that it hardly shares the emotional tone of the trip it began. Being something like a dream, Zürich faded into the indelible smile I woke up with in the morning as the train approached Venice.
I recall this dream much in the way one recalls dreams, in fragments of the quotidian overlaid by the surreal. Our arrival at the airport, for example, was, as you would expect in Switzerland, on time, and the airport was also what you might expect of a Swiss airport: spotless, orderly, and convenient. But as the passengers of our flight from London filtered out into the vaulted, windowed space of the terminal it felt as if we’d entered a very clean ghost town, or a postmodern cathedral on a weekday. Besides an absence of vendors, loungers, and duty-free shops, there wasn’t even the usual rush of people to leave bread crumbs from debarkation to baggage claim. Everyone dispersed, and Mom and I found ourselves having to depend solely on signs to find our way to the exit. As we walked I imagined that robots took care of the cleaning at night, or that the floors and benches were self-cleaning, and that the whole airport operation was orchestrated from some central brain in a bunker underground: if I addressed it correctly it might respond. “Computer,” “Captain,” “Giselle, take us to observation deck fifteen.” (Big, powerful central computers are often given seductive female names, much as big boats. Someone once explained this phenomenon to me as the seductive power of all things flashy, or the confluence of a man’s growing monetary power and his waning sexual prowess.)
In such a surreal setting it was feasible to worry about finding Sarah and equally feasible to expect her sudden appearance before us out of molecules in the air. The latter version proved closer to the truth. Following the signs for the exit, we walked through the empty halls almost reverently, as if in a church or a library, and almost slowly, unlike any recent arrival at an airport that I’ve ever seen. We descended on a sporty escalator and entered the smooth, shiny, silent, and self-consciously uncomfortable airport shuttle. Inside, we looked around and wondered if we were moving in the right direction. It seemed appropriate at this point to say, “Giselle, give us Sarah Schofield’s coordinates, please,” but the big brain predicted our concerns and, obviating the need to voice the question, said in a rather seductive female voice to please hold the rail, the train would arrive at the exit in two stops. And, more or less, that’s where Sarah was waiting, one among very few other living people or lifelike robots at the reception area. We smiled, relieved; she smiled, relieved. She piled our luggage into her Audi and swept us off to what I like to call a cottage, because it was in Switzerland, was quaint, and was nestled in the idylls of the rolling hills above Zürich.
From here picture Zürich the way you’ve always pictured Zürich. Do you see a quiet, orderly, cobblestoned city surrounding a sparkling blue lake? Do you see Gothic-style churches, ecologically friendly cars, fashionable boutiques, and a clock tower about to chime the hour? Do you see unassuming European architecture? Classy, unhurried, unfettered pedestrians? Narrow, winding roads so clean one might consider removing footwear to feel the subdued pulse of the earth? A park just over the city where you might find a couple sipping white wine on a blanket or a group of locals gathered around a life-sized outdoor chessboard? Quick, efficient public transport? Public fountains that spout potable water? Rolling hillsides that alternate from forest to well-groomed farm fields? And tidy, inconspicuous cottages dotting the hillsides like wildflowers?
The parts of Zürich I saw made up a photo album for any Realtor looking to entice foreign investment. After we recovered a bit from our transatlantic flight at the beautiful, but unassuming house where Sarah works as an au pair, we drove into the city through a rolling hillside of forest and farmland, ate alongside unfettered, classy-looking Swiss at a charming vegetarian bistro called Tibits, and wandered along cobblestone streets that wound through small, fashionable boutiques and up past those ageless European churches to a park overlooking the center of the city. We meandered back into town and strolled along the flowering boardwalk of Lake Zürich, which winked and prevaricated under a setting sun.
Day two took grandmother and granddaughter on a bonding train trip to Bern, leaving Sarah’s best friend, Mika, also visiting from the States, and me to thumb through the sections on Lake Zürich in the realtor’s album on Switzerland. I felt like we were enacting some modern rendition of those classic impromptu expatriate encounters, such as A Roman Holiday, with paddleboat instead of Vespa, or Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, sans jewel heist. Mika and I trained into town through rolling hills of farm and forest, walked along the boardwalk bathed in midsummer sun, and settled on beach towels among the bronzed and lean of midweek, midday Zürich. Mika fit right in among the beautiful people basking on the banks of the lake, and I did my best to keep up, a phrase I can reuse to describe, vis-a-vis Mika, my swimming. This is how it was thus decided that I would man the paddleboat while Mika swam the width of the lake. She refused my request that she call me “coach,” and so I remained an awed, pale supporter shouting unnecessary calls of encouragement from behind the wheel of the paddleboat.
One farewell dinner of sushi on the bank of the lake and a cool walk to the train station through an impending rainstorm later, plus some adjustment to the idea of bedding down in the train’s cramped coupe-for-four, and we’re back at the next morning’s indelible smile and the start of going it on our own, at least until we met up with Neal, in Florence. But enough about Florence. How about a little Liverpool?
2006.08.04
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