Adventure as Promised, or “Rough riders and Texas Rangers”

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 10:02:48 +0530

Rough Riders indeed! The particular ride in question was supposed to be a breezy affair involving a nice little overnight train trip to the Kerala Coast for Onam, a particularly Keralan celebration. Our train was to depart at 9:40 on a rainy Friday night from Bangalore’s City Junction Station just north-west of downtown. We set 8 o’clock as our departure time figuring we could be on the road after the peak of Friday rush hour, and still get to the station with a half hour or so to spare for figuring out the station and finding our train. By the time we actually set bum to rickshaw it was 8:30 or so, but we were still feeling reasonably relaxed and looking forward to a fun trip. From here, however, things started to get dicey.
Within minutes, it became clear that our very young driver had no idea where the right train station was despite having quoted a fixed price for the 13km ride (when we agreed to his price I noted mentally how unusually fair it seemed to be, considering tuktuk rates are generally adversely affected by rain). After stopping to check with a few other tuktuk drivers we were off at quite a clip. Directions are always impressionistic in Bangalore, but this guy knew he had some ground to cover to get us to the train on time and limit his losses on the un-inflated fare he had locked himself into. Our little vehicle weaved and lurched, tearing off on any available straightaway and then periodically skidding to a halt sending our stomachs hurtling forward toward our throats before they jerked back down into the seat.
After a number of near misses, and in a moment of inattention, our driver finally did make contact with a rickshaw ahead of us – not too hard, but hard enough that he got out to inspect any damage that might have been done. Of course the other driver did the same, yelling all the while at the guilty party – our guy. When our driver’s psychological defense mechanisms kicked in and he started yelling back it was only seconds before whacks and swats at the opponents heads were being exchanged by both sides. Then, before anyone knew what was happening, the other driver had run around the back of our tuk tuk and a full out fisticuffs ensued in the middle of this main artery, in the rain, in a giant mess of traffic. Eventually one of the male passengers of the other auto got out to break things up before anyone got hurt. As a foreigner, there was no way in hell I was getting even close to a physical altercation between a couple of Indian nationals. Happily the two were not that hard to separate in the end. I guess the furious honking of the traffic all around was enough to convince both men that they would have to postpone satisfaction to a future meeting.
The bad news is that if our young driver was stressed out and driving erratically before the fight, now he gave us a real sample of what a distressed mind is capable of at the helm of a two-stroke engine. At one point he had us hurtling forward through water-filled potholes on two of the auto’s three wheels. Next he ignored one of my directions, which set us disastrously off course and cost us a further ten minutes of travel through dark little back streets to find another main road to the station, but not before he needed to drive a hundred yards or so the wrong way up a major thoroughfare and cross eight lanes of oncoming traffic to get us there. Finally, in the home stretch of the last 1.5 km all the traffic came to a complete standstill. After hemming and hawing for five minutes or so, and at 9:35 we decided that although we probably wouldn’t make the train the only slim shot we did have at it involved making a run for it on foot.
Eliza drew out two hundred Rupee notes from her wallet, and we both agreed that in the interest of time and sympathy for our very stupid driver we would just give him the whole thing and be off. Eliza set off at a trot as I gave him the money and turned to follow. But in the instant it took him to take the two bills he was out of his tuktuk and blocking my way demanding 300 Rupee because it had taken him so long to get us this far! I don’t want to say that I lost my cool at this point, but sufficed to say that after demanding what he mistakenly believed to be an inflated fare for the ride to the station (150 Rupee), scaring the crap out of Eliza for a full hour, needlessly risking our lives, and wasting valuable time by refusing to follow the directions I was giving him off of Google maps despite having no clue where the station was himself…. Well let’s just say he’d spent all of his goodwill credits from the bank of Bevan. Without risking any legal complications I managed to convey this fact succinctly, and he stepped aside, 200 Rupee in hand, leaving me to run like an idiot in slimy flip flops over the uneven and muddy sidewalks of Bangalore to a train that would surely, by now, be gone.
As it happens, on this particular occasion, the general disorganization and chaos of India played to our favor. After Eliza had figured out the track number for our train in a feat of superhuman cognition, we ran up an over the passageways to find our train pulling out of the station about 6 minutes late. But being that this is India, we were able to sprint along side it and actually do that really cool jumping on to a moving train thing that you only see in old movies. All was well…
Or was it? For starters we were not in the right section of the train, which wouldn’t have been a problem except that our 2AC (second class – Air Conditioning) coaches was not accessible from the economy section of the train we were currently in. Not a problem, a half hour later at the next stop we rushed along side the train to the other end and got to do the jumpy-on-the-movie-train thing again (just as fun the second time by the way). After another half hour or so, and over an hour outside of Bangalore we finally gave up on being able to find out which was our berth and enlisted the help of a nice young IT type in our plight. From what he could tell from the printout Eliza had made before we left, we did not actually have tickets for that train… Shock. All of the trains that week were packed to overflowing because any and every Keralan with the Rupees to spare was headed home to celebrate Onam with their families. The tickets Eliza had attempted to purchase were waitlisted tickets, the status of which had changed online the day before from waitlisted to “booked”. Unfortunately, in Indian English “booked” refers to some status between waitlisted and confirmed. As an interesting aside, the guy also noted that the date on the “booked” tickets was for the following day, Saturday…. Shock + Panic. Breath, breath, breath. From her lowest moment realizing and accepting her human fallibility, Lilee was off like a bullet down the train to her highest moment in which, armed with her full arsenal of New England, school girl charms, she sweet-talked the surly train conductor into finding us not seats, but beds, side by each, in the upper-class AC compartment!!! Victory + sleep!
The following morning our friend Rehka picked us up from the train station in her parent’s little town at the foothills of the Western Ghats, and brought us home for what would be a charming couple of days. Meals were lovingly and laboriously prepared by her mom in the finest South Indian tradition, and both her father and brother shared in the entertaining in various capacities without, apparently, interrupting the flow of their days. When we left both Eliza and I had noted separately that we had just felt like part of the family.
On the first day there Rehka, Eliza and I set off to the town of Trissur to take in its two main attractions. The first of these we visited against fair warning from Rehka’s brother that it would be depressing, and it was. Just outside of Trissur there is an elephant stables where the elephants for the many surrounding temples are kept and trained. I’m not sure how many of them there are, but it’s a lot, and as you can imagine it is necessarily a very large operation. Each of these creatures is chained on a very short tether (maybe 2 ft) to a tall concrete post sticking out of the ground. Around them is basically a beaten down pit of earth and mud with a big pile of brush in front of them that they varyingly pick through for the tastier bits, or use to swat the flies off of their flanks. Many of them were shifting back and forth from foot to foot either from boredom or just to move their legs – it was hard to tell which. One particularly tortured soul was a large bull who Rehka (she is a wildlife biologist) informed us was in rut. She pointed out the dripping liquid secretions from glands on either side of his head just behind the eyes. Anyway, this fellow was in quite a state, spraying himself incessantly with water to relieve his hot flashes, grunting, snorting, and generally putting on quite a show. What really did us in emotionally was Rehka’s explanation of what is involved in the domestication of elephants who are naturally very smart, wild and averse to humans in pretty equal measures. I’ll spare you the lurid details but sufficed to say we humans come out looking like the real beasts yet again. The one bright side we observed is that they get lovingly washed and scrubbed down by hand with brushes by their trainers, and this, we observed in two cases, they seem to absolutely adore.
From the elephant farm we went to Trissur’s big Hindu temple right in the middle of town. It’s worth mentioning at this point that Kerala has an extremely pious culture regardless of people’s individual religious affiliations. There is a huge Christian population there dating back to the earliest European contact. It’s mostly Catholic from what we could tell and apparently a very Hindu-ized version with Jesus, the Virgin Mother and all the saints taking the places of the indigenous deities in what are superficially churches and chapels but seem to function more like temples. We witnessed the faithful draping the statues in flowers, burning incense and asking for favours I supposed in dealing with problematic neighbours or unyielding bureaucrats. Back at Trissur’s big temple, unlike in other states, none but Hindus are allowed to enter. Out front there was a line-up of hundreds of people in white sarees and dotis with gold trim waiting to gain access for a moment or two to the deities housed in the inner sanctum. It was explained to us that many thousands of people travel there each day from far and wide to take advantage of these deities abilities to grant wishes and protect from harm. It seems that the actual statues themselves come to possess varying degrees of power so that some temples are more successful/important than others. Outside the outer walls of this particular one, and facing the front door, was a line of brand new cars with their respective owners waiting to be at the front of the line where an arrangement of flowers was made on the ground and coconut oil burned in a husk with incense burning all around and the owner would prostrate himself repeatedly until he was satisfied that the relevant Gods would protect his car and family in it. It was really quite beautiful to see. Another interesting feature of Keralan religiosity is it’s cross-over to Pop culture. Apparently certain South Indian movie stars (as opposed to their Bollywood counterparts in the North) are so revered by some Keralans that they are also believed to have supernatural powers, and so have entire temples dedicated to them along with shrines, statues and the whole kit. Naturally, on our next visit we will be searching out a couple of those!
On our way back through town we also lucked out totally and witnessed, slightly ahead of schedule, on of the lead up parades for Onam. So if I understood correctly, this festival celebrates a Keralan king of prehistory who was said to have been so good to the people of Kerala that he aroused the anger and jealously of the Gods by all the love and respect he earned from his subjects. One of the cleverer and nastier young gods decided to take care of this situation by paying a personal visit to the king. There he asked the king to grant him a small favour – either this guy failed in the omnipotence category of being a God, or he was just really polite, but so the story goes. Anyway the favour was that he be allowed to take three steps in the kings realm and it was of course granted by the very amiable monarch. Unfortunately for the latter, the third of these steps landed on the king’s head crushing him into the ground under the colossal weight of this divine bastard. So every year since, during the five-day festival of Onam, it is said that the king comes back in spirit to see how his kingdom and subjects are doing. To celebrate this and welcome him, people make beautiful mandalas out of flowers outside of their front doors and burn lanterns there throughout the nights. Then these parades, of which we saw just the one, have one guy dressed up in a costume as this king with others dressed as his attendants, a small army of topless guys with elaborate tigers painted on their torsos and tiger masks dancing around in the street ahead of the king, and elephants and drums and basically anything festive that anyone can think of and haul out into the street. Think Hindu Christmas parade meets Carnaval. It’s a friggin’ blast!

Day two with the Warriers saw the three of us, this time accompanied by Rehka’s very cool brother, headed up into the mountains to see a huge waterfall, and further up behind it a massive series of connected lakes behind a big hydro-electric dam. On our way down from the road to the dam we were shepherded into the little mountain home of some guys who worked on the dam. They were so happy to meet foreigners and they fed us bananas from their garden explaining that if they were nice to us then people would be nice to them if they came to visit North America. What a lovely thought. When we left them I realized from a whiff that I caught that the two men had clearly been spending their day off exploring the effects of distilled fruits of some variety or another -all good, and very funny. Down at the dam we hired a motorized pontoon boat to take us out into the lakes and waterfalls that feed them. We caught our first sight of a king fisher with its brilliant blue and yellow plumage. The biggest treat of all, though, was seeing a guy on a weird sort of canoe made of four big bamboo trunks about 20 ft long and lashed together every few feet. This guys boat was cool enough, but it was explained to us that he was one of the tribal people still living secluded out there in the hills, and then we were brought by the shore close enough to see a couple of their tiny lean-tos that they build and live in right along the shore. It made me imagine a life-long fishing trip in Algonquin Park. Pretty sweet. Anyway, I guess they’ve made peace with the presence of the dam and the two powered boats that ply their waters with occasional tourists, but beyond that, I guess they’re really not interested in contact with outsiders of any description.

On the third day we packed up our belongings, had a nice goodbye with the Warriers and headed off with some of Mama’s sweet rice treats to find the famous Kerala Coast and its backwaters. This journey taught us something with brutal clarity, which is that moving from place to place in India is always and everywhere a deeply draining adventure. By the time we’d taken an auto to the train, the train to the coast, walked through the city to the ferry, ferried first to the wrong island and then to the right one, taken the bus to the other end of Vypeen Island, and caught an auto through the backwaters to the beach house, all we could manage was that most basic act of human abandon. We fell helplessly into the first available bed and slept away most of the afternoon. When we finally came to, we found that we had landed on a perfect little spit of unpopulated beach between the pastoral backwaters and tiny fishing huts behind us, and the vast expanse of the Arabian Sea out front. Our cook made us a delicious dinner that we preceded with a nice walk and a dip in the water for me.
As the main purpose of this leg of our trip was scouting possible locations to come with visitors, the next day we made a bee line for Fort Cochin on one of the neighboring islands. This is the main tourist destination of the area and has many claims to fame, some of them historic – for instance Vasco da Gama was buried there for a decade or so before his remains were brought back to Portugal, and others contemporary – the little town boasts a peerless array of amenities from ayurvedic spas to craft shops and cafes. I’m pretty sure anyone reading this blog would be sweet on it, so we reckon we found a winner.
On our last day we made further inroads on Vypeen and then spent the afternoon in Thiruvankulam, the closest big town on the coast before catching the overnight train back to Bangalore. Now back to work for both of us, and there’s more to tell on that front, but not just now. This blogger’s all blogged out.
But before I go a word about the second part of the title of this entry – The Texas Rangers are what I call my new footwear. Lilee will have appended a picture of them here, and all I can say is that if you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand.

Street Dawgs

Thu, 8 Sep 2011 18:26:27 +0530

India Part 1: The Good, the Bad & the Funky

Thu, 1 Sep 2011 12:49:35 +0530

We have been in India now for nigh on two weeks now. Most of that time has been spent trying to get our feet on the ground and figuring out the lay of the land, so our impressions thus far are necessarily pretty sketchy. Here are some things that have jumped out at us along with some illustration since most people have probably heard the same kinds of observations lots of times.
-The disparities of wealth in the population are incredible. The poor here are certainly as poor as you’re going to find anywhere in the world. We have it from an Indian economist that the rates of malnutrition in India are still on par with sub-Saharan Africa (though I haven’t fact checked that, so don’t hold me to it). In the poorer areas you see mostly small, skinny people. On the other end of the spectrum India’s elite lives a lifestyle second to none anywhere. Though it is a gross generalization to say that there are two Indians, it is a pretty useful schema. The international India of educated Indians pays western prices for its clothing, cars, electronics and fancy supper clubs, and lives in beautiful homes and apartment buildings that are air conditioned and pristine. The traditional and demographically much larger India just keeps on trucking along the way it always has. And between the two is a layer of service staff and entrepreneurs of various descriptions. It’s very confusing to navigate, as we must, between the two worlds without coming across as boorish North Americans. Lilee’s probably better at it than I am.
-Sensory overload: A good friend back home once described India to us as a very colourful sewer. That may be a bit of an overstatement, but it’s also not that far off the mark from what we’ve seen/smelled. I should also add that it has not been quite the sensory assault I was bracing myself for, so I’ll try to give a balanced account -of Bangalore anyway. For one thing the air here is thick with smog pretty much all the time. The city has doubled in size in the last 10 years or so and public transportation has been very slow to catch up resulting in constant traffic congestion all over the city 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There is always a background smell of exhaust here. Bangalore also has quite a few lakes (we actually live on one) that seem to be relatively clean, though I can’t say as I’ve gotten up close and personal with any of them yet. The little rivers and canals running through the city, however, can only be described as open concept sewers. One needs to block one’s nose for a good 20 meters before and after crossing one to keep from gagging. Of course walking along one is right out of the question unless you’re unlucky enough to live there. We still haven’t quite got the skinny on garbage disposal yet, but in Indian (as opposed to international) neighbourhoods like the one we live in, there are sort of empty lots that seem to serve as community dumps where the piles of garbage wax and wane between deposits and with the efforts of stray dogs, cows, and individuals savaging for recyclables. These of course also add to the olfactory texture of the place. On the plus side, Indians love their incenses and perfumes, and these waft through the air in unexpected gusts. Also, the south is predominantly Hindu which means that on every second street corner is a group of ladies making delicious smelling flower garlands to be brought into the neighbourhood temples and shrines. Indians also tend to enjoy cooked snacks throughout the day, so one is seldom far from the delightful aromas of South Indian food. The visual field of Bangalore is analogous to its smellscape. The piles of brown and black, rotting garbage often contain discarded piles of colourful flowers. Hindu culture is also super into decorating right now. Dirty though the city seems in general, everything from the interiors of tuktuks, to the sidewalks outside of homes, to just about anything you can think of is painted, anointed with pigment, draped in flowers, or in some way adorned. It all sort of blurs together in a smelly, dirty, technicolour dream. Right now is a particularly great moment because we are entering the festival of Ganesha. He really seems to be pretty much the biggest deal in the Hindu pantheon. Weird scaffoldings and lights and things are going up everywhere as the city prepares for an all out humdinger.
-Indian Bureaucracy – Wow! Right off the bat, here, a distinction is in order between our experience of this phenomenon and that of the average Indian citizen. We are foreigners, and right now the Indian nation is pretty freaked out about national security what with the terrorism and what have you. I suppose this is true everywhere, but when you add India’s 19th century bureaucratic apparatus to the mix, you’ve got Kafka basically. I won’t bore you with the particulars of our experience, but sufficed to say, even though we’re here under the auspices of a joint Indian-US federal research and diplomacy program, to get registered with the Foreigner’s Residency Registration Office took 4 visits and about 16 hours. I have since witnessed Indians dealing with other arms of the government, though, and it’s easy to understand why Anna Hazare has drawn so much support for his reform bill. In line at a notary’s office I witnessed three men trying to ratify some deal that required three ½ inch thick, spiral bound stacks of documents. The three men leaning over the desk of this rather heavy-set and self-important, middle aged gentleman, were furiously flipping through pages having him sign as many as three places per document, none of which he took the trouble to read mind you. When they had finished with one volume it was then handed back to a young man at a little high-school type desk with a box of about 20 rubber stamps. He proceeded to stamp, flip, stamp, stamp, stamp, flip, flip, stamp, flip, and so on until he began at the beginning again with a new stamp. Again, nothing was actually read. When he was done with this process the volume went back to the desk of the notary who began again signing wherever he was instructed. What this whole process was costing them I have no idea, but I could see that this was by no means the beginning of it since every single document had at least 15 stamps and 15 signatures. As you can well imagine, in all of this there is an awful lot of room for officials demanding redundant stamps and signatures from all over the city, and an awful lot of room to streamline the process if the paper $ can make its way $ into the right hands $$$ at the right $ time. In all this process, computers seem to be used simply as word-processing tools to print up documents. Filing happens in big stacks with pieces of string. Fortunately, for us, we have become friends this great guy Rajeesh who was our real estate agent. He is a wiz at navigating the system, and has friends in all the right places. For the motorcycle license I need to ride here, for instance, he’s told me what documents to give him copies of, and he’s going to have a friend get my license for me. I don’t even need to go to the government office myself or write a test or anything. Given all of this, it isn’t surprising that Ganesha who is touted as the remover and placer of obstacles is such a freakin’ big deal. I just hope my motorcycle license guy is up to date on his puja devotions.
Well this is going to be it for now… There’s more to tell of course, but I’m going to try to do more shorter blog entries so that there are regular tidbits for those keeping up. And the next entry should have more adventure, Indiana Jones-type content with Eliza playing the whip smart, sometimes sultry female lead who gets really freaked out by rats (she does by the way – product of her NYC upbringing).

Times of India, Education Times Supplement

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 21:54:29 +0530

Europe before India

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 22:55:51 +0530

Here goes nothing….

Let me begin with a brief apology for taking so gosh darned long to start this blog, and also for sparseness of the photo documentation to go with this first entry. We’ll get on that, but one step at a time.

England:
As a back drop to our English adventures it should be noted and remembered that we were blessed with near-perfect weather nearly the entire three weeks we were there. Anyone who’s spent any length of time there, even in the summer, will appreciate the relevance of this meteorological anomaly.
We were picked up from Heathrow airport by cousin Gavin (actually married to Eliza’s first cousin Melissa, so I’m not sure what the proper relationship title is there, but I’ll abbreviate throughout to make things simpler – authorial license). He brought us back to their house in Berkshire for the first of many great days with he and Melissa and their three boys George, Julian and Sam. We had a relaxed afternoon reconnecting that included a crash course in Cricket given by Gav and the boys while we watched England deliver the first blows of its crushing victory over India to become number one in the world. All very good.
The following day we were very generously equipped with a car, and set out on the wrong side of the road to Cornwall in the south of England to visit with Eliza’s great aunt Charlotte in her beautiful home on the coast. There the four days we spent with her flew by. Her daughter Lulu was there at first with her son max and two nieces Mary and Lily. Croquet was played (extreme croquet thanks to Max’s artistic arrangement of the pitch). Some hiking along the costal trail was done. There was some puzzling and card playing, there was much eating of Cornish treats like clotted cream covered sweets and periwinkles collected off the rocks at low tide. Then on the third day Charlotte’s son Martin, Lily and Mary’s dad, arrived with a friend and got the motor boat up and running for some tearing around in the frigid waters of the Atlantic. Eliza and I discovered that we can add tubing off the back of a motor boat to a short list of things you might say we have a knack for. If all else fails we may go pro.
After a very warm send-off from the Petherick clan we made our way back north through the countryside to Bath. For anyone who is unfamiliar with it, Bath is so named for the Roman bath complex that has been there since… well Roman times anyway. It was already used before that by the local peoples as a place of healing and rest very much as the Romans did, you might say the latter just spruced things up a bit with an extensive system of ducts and runoff pools and temples and so on. Then, x number of years later, the Victorians (latter day Romans) got hold of it and spruced things up still further. The site is continuously being excavated and it seems each passing year they find some new chamber or pool or foundation. Who knows how big this thing was. As beautiful as the Bath’s are, what brings throngs of Britons and sundry Euro-folks to Bath is actually the town itself set against a hillside with beautiful winding streets and tiny pubs tucked in among the shops and cobble-stoned streets. Of course like everywhere else it’s getting quite touristy, but you can certainly see why, and such is life.
Later that afternoon we pulled up the drive of Rushall Manor to begin our long-anticipated and much-hyped visit with Eliza’s aunt Caroline. It did not disappoint. Rushall is in Wiltshire and just outside of a village called Pewsy. The house’s gardens are just what you’d expect for a house in the English countryside. Against all of Caroline’s claims to the contrary we thought they were perfect. Actually, I believe I’ve detected a pattern in the way people discuss and describe their gardens – it combines the systemic criticality of the connoisseur and the English penchant for understatement. Basically if you only ever heard their descriptions of their own gardens you could be forgiven for assuming that the English were clumsy bunglers in the garden rather than the artists that they really are.
Our time with Caroline involved a trip in to visit Salisbury cathedral, a wonderful pub lunch, a healthy dose of dog walking, and a trip to Stonehenge. This last item is worth some further discussion, not so much for the henge itself, impressive though it was, but because of our venture out into one of the neighboring fields to see a real, live crop circle. Now neither Lilee or I had ever seen one before in real life, but once it was brought up that we were into crop circle season we started to get a better picture of what to expect. They are found in wheat fields, and if you believe the lore, they appear quite unexpectedly over night and no one knows how! They vary in size, but even the smallest ones are dozens of meters large and involve perfect geometric formations where the wheat lays down flat and directionally, following the contours of the shapes. They really need to be seen from above to be fully understood, but they are all the more mysterious at ground level because the logic of their design is only dimly discernible. Anyway we got lucky with this one, because once we had made it out to the site, we discovered that we were not alone. There was with us a tall, slim, middle-aged gentleman wearing jeans and a t-shirt decorated with a picture of two wolves howling at a full moon. Around his neck hung some beads and crystals, and in his hands he carried a little scrapbook with photos printed off the internet of this year’s bloom of crop circles in Salisbury and the surrounding area. Being the only four people in the middle of this big wheat field we naturally struck up a conversation wherein he informed us that he had been “studying” crop circles since 1997. What luck, a crop circle complete with a crop circle scholar. Anyway he explained to us that in his opinion this was a legitimate crop circle executed by, and I quote, “our friends out there”, as he motioned toward the heavens. Illegitimate crop circles, he explained, were created by tricksters using stomping boards to lay the wheat flat and ropes as tethers to describe the greater and smaller arcs that make up the patterns of most crop circles. According to our new friend, the illegitimate ones can be recognized primarily by the rough and jagged contours clearly executed by primitive human means. So there you go. The jewel in the crown of our stay with Caroline was still yet to come. But not before a quick jaunt into Londontown.
It is with shame and downcast eyes that I must inform you we did absolutely nothing of cultural substance the entire time we were there (unless you take the most empty, postmodern interpretation of our activities). Basically we met up with an old fried from McGill (Kensey) who now lives in London with his best friend Elina who is Russian, a model, and a very tall drink of water. They live in 2000 ft sq of very fancy penthouse loft space complete with terraces and glass walls that slide away to open the space to the London sky line. Being that it was Elina’s birthday during our stay and we had no special plans, the days and nights all blurred together in a whimsical romp through London’s party life. The only low point was getting pulled over by a bobby and chastised at very publicly for having too many people in the back seat. We kind of think that he suspected we were drinking in the car, and something other than our esspressos. In the end it was no harm no foul, and Lilee, Kensey and I walked back to the flat through the financial district. The morning of the third day we peeled ourselves up out of bed and spooned ourselves into a commuter train headed back to Pewsy.
That weekend Caroline had organized a special weekend with some friends who would be coming to stay at Rushall. We tag-teamed the cooking with Caroline and put together some delicious meals. Eliza and I partnered with a charming couple for some tennis on Saturday afternoon, and Sunday morning was taken up with a nasty little croquet tournament that contained much cutting commentary back and forth on the relative deficits of each teams play. As I always say, my favourite part of most games is the smack-talk. Sunday afternoon came and went sprinkled generously with rosee. The party scattered, and the evening found we three picking at leftovers and snuggled up on couches in the living room chatting our way through to bed-time…. bliss.
The last real phase of our England journey found us back at Meliss and Gav’s place with the boys for a week of fun and games. Added to the mix were our dear friend’s Bruce and Cecile with their new baby Margaux who had generously made the trip over from Paris to spend some of their summer holiday with us. There was more tennis, and some failed attempts to teach the Canadians how to bowl a cricket ball – no fault of the teacher’s of course. More dog walking and eating and just generally hanging out in the country filled our days and we were all glad of it. I think it’s safe to say that the most impressive feature of this leg, was a visit to and lunch at a place called Englefield Manor. It turns out that one of Meliss’ school friends fell in love with and married a man who would later inherit his family’s estate- maybe one of the largest privately owned ones in England for all I know. The interior of their home served as the setting for all the indoor scenes in The King’s Speech. The grounds include massive stables with what looked like 50 horses. The park out front had 150 or so head of deer and the walled in kitchen garden is the stuff of dreams. It sounds like the down side of living there is the extent to which their lives and home are a public space with all the staff humming about, and coming and going all day. Lately it’s even gotten less pleasantly public with people turning up assuming that it’s a public museum and wanting to see the rooms used in the movie in real life. It was all quite otherworldly until we set up around the pool with various friends who had come over with their kids for a picnic and a swim. From there, sadly, Bruce, Cecile and Margaux made off to go home via Brighton where they were scheduled to let the light of their company shine on old friends of Cecile’s before getting back to work in Paris. As Bruce quite rightly put it, visits like these, no matter the length, are never long enough.
This is a long blog post. I expect at this point I’ve lost my audience, but I’m quite happy typing away so I’ll just carry on.
On the Saturday we made our way back into London this time to stay with a different friend and determined to experience some of the cultural treasures of the city. As it turns out our plans were mostly thwarted. Being that the contemporary art galleries are generally scattered around that very big city, we decided to research them and just pick one that seemed especially promising. That was the Saatchi Gallery, and after a long bus ride across town through the zoo that is Oxford square we were crushed to learn that the gallery was closed to the public for a series of parties to do with fashion week. By the time we made it out to the East End where there are other interesting galleries they were all in the process of closing. Tempis – diner, drinks, walking around. The day wasn’t lost for all that. Sunday we had an afternoon to try again and we made our way to the Tate Modern. Not quite as exciting as we had hoped, but hey, now we can say we’ve been to the Tate Modern, and that’s not nothing. Sunday evening dinner and off to the hotel we had booked at Gatwick airport to be ready for our early morning departure time to Copenhagen airport.

Denmark:

Our landing in Copenhagen was greatly softened by our greeting and accommodation from our friend Sine. Sine imported my old friend Steve to Denmark as Canadian husband material. She brought us back to their place, set up with a map of the city and instructions on how best to navigate an introductory walking tour. Our first goal was, of course, Christiania, the weird pot-smoked, barely-legal commune district of Copenhagen still occupied by all manner of interesting character. Not all that surprisingly, it didn’t hold our interest for all that long. A couple thousand stoned people living in a gated community can get up to some pretty unusual shenanigans, but ultimately they’re quite repetitive.
On day two we had diner plans with family north of the city so we thought we’d combine it with a visit to Louisianna, Denmark’s premiere art museum. Actually, we both though that it was one of the best art museums we had ever been to anywhere. The building is a sprawling labyrinthine structure built into and on the coastline looking out at Sweden, and is surrounded by a rolling sculpture garden complete with the necessary Calder, some Henry Moore and even a site-specific Serra. An absolute must for any Denmark visitors I say.
That evening we made our way south a little and where picked up by Henrik who is the husband of Anne Sophie, the daughter of Stuzie’s (Lilee’s grandmother) first cousin Bente, and brought to their beautiful contemporary home that was built (to the dismay of some neighbors) to replace their quaint little thatch-roofed cottage that burnt to the ground some years back. The dinner prepared by Anne Sophie was delightful, and made even more so by the presence of Gustav Lassen and his wife Lisa. He is another family connection who is in investment banking in Copenhagen. I mention this last detail because the conversation turned around the European, Asian and American markets as well as the state of the world generally, and it was fascinating to hear the thoughts of someone who works in that world daily. As a funny aside, Lilee and I were reminded of and conveyed an amusing observation that Gav made back in England (he’s also a banker). He observed that perhaps the greatest irony of the whole EU debacle is that after trying really really hard twice to gain control of Europe, now Germany may have to take control of it, only this time they don’t want to- das Blatt hat sich gewendet!
The following afternoon Bente Bernstorf, the same Bente as mentioned above hosted yet another family function in her beautiful flat on the water in downtown Copenhagen. It has a full-frontal view of the new opera house “anonymously” donated to the city by Mearsk, the Danish shipping magnate. Unfortunately for him, his net worth is somewhere in that zone between mere financial mortals like myself on one the one hand and major world powers on the other that makes anonymity of action completely impossible. But I digress. Bente, who is as spry and charming woman who ever was, made us a beautiful cold lunch with a lovely salade Nicoise. From white wine we eventually moved on to coffee, and several hours flew by without anyone noticing. In the process we made new friends with Peter and Sarah Bernstorf who now live in DC. That will have to be another trip for another day.
After we walked the city streets looking at art galleries and also made a trip to the Rosenborg castle that houses the Danish crown jewels as well as an astonishing collection of antiques belonging to the royal family extending back 500 years or so. The whole thing is arranged so that the rooms are decorated in chronological order along with the appropriate portraits and so on all the way up to the present. In the evening we met up with Steve and Sine for some food, catching up, and hanging out around the apartment.
For our final day in Copenhagen, Steve was able to take some time off work to bounce around town with us. We went off to investigate some galleries we had heard about in another part of town, discovered one or two things that were new to Steve, and stopped for coffee in an impossibly hip bar that could easily have given anything in Williamsburg or Berlin a run for its money. As a for instance, the bathrooms were a maze of white hallways and white doors behind some of which were individual toilets, while others revealed yet more white hallways and doors hiding some toilets and some more hallways and doors, and so on. Not the most conservative use of real estate, and I was quite glad that I was only consuming coffee for that little trip down the rabbit hole. At night the four of us set out to a very special little Thai restaurant where we treated ourselves to a prix-fixe deal that lasted two hours. It also happens to be the restaurant where Steve proposed to Sine that fateful night a year and a half ago. We were as charmed by it as she clearly was. A perfect crowning evening to a perfect visit.
Friday found us back at Meliss and Gavs for one final hoorah with the family and Sunday we made our way to Heathrow for the big flight south east and another adventure…….