A speed run at London

Well, my previous post on London gets at some of my more broad-strokes impressions of London on this latest visit, so this one will be a bit more of a detailed "what I did on my slightly-over-48-hours-in-London stop en route to Paris" tale. I can't wait to get a little more time to explore this city on a less-crunched schedule. After the jump: blurry exhaustion and fun!

If memory serves, this is where... the queen's... horse... guards... practice? (I actually am not entirely sure this is a joke, somebody's horses had a job to do here, but who can say what this job was?)

First, the video - minus the last day of footage, alas, lost due to pure dopery on my part - cut to music by a fantastic band from Cambridge that I first heard about on this trip. (This week I've found a favorite band and a favorite tailor in Cambridge. Timing is everything!) It doesn't quite capture the magical moments of blue-skied sun, but something about its tone felt right for London (even though the lyrics keep referring to Chicago)...

Stray thoughts on London:

Finally got to eat at one of Fergus Henderson's restaurants! His surprisingly affordable St. John's Bread & Wine does top-notch simple breakfasts, the perfect place to pause after a 6:30 AM arrival on the cusp of a twelve-hour walk around the city.

Boy oh boy if I lived here would I ever be getting my bread from this place on a weekly basis. The sub-theme of this spring break's trip? BAKERIES ARE GOOD.

The Victoria and Albert Museum (the V&A) is delightful. Dedicated to art and design, it functions as a kind of repository for cultural/functional arts, anything from furniture to decorative elements to artifacts of daily life to (yessssss) theatre, having acquired the Theatre Museum's holdings when that space closed a number of years back. They have amazing theatre archives, though half of their permanent display area was closed in preparation for an exhibit starting the following week; for a Sunday stroll, it was nice to get to see a wide range of their holdings, particularly their rotating displays of artifacts of contemporary culture.

The display case next to this had a pamphlet reading "Help protect your local hospital" from the Brexit campaign. 

 I wandered Hyde Park a good bit too - lovely space, with a great crowd out enjoying the sun and warmth. Poked past Speaker's Corner, and made my way around paths before zipping off to do some neighborhood exploring. I swung by Westminster Abbey for evensong, which was lovely, but I was falling asleep on my feet. (Literally. When standing for a prayer I almost fell over as I started to pass out.) Taking the hint, I headed back to the hotel, stopping along the way for some amazing Burmese food, and passed out involuntarily at 8.

Marble Arch, Hyde Park!

I found this newsstand (and a couple others like it) tremendously charming. Throwback vintage charm! TIMEFORM RACING PUBLICATIONS! Lots of awful Rupert Murdoch newspapers! Neato benito.

This lil hero was the champion of Hyde Park, and he did not drop his branch for pretty much the duration of the 15-20 minutes that his owners and I strolled the paths.

Took a one-on-one walking tour of Saville Row, the city's legendary bespoke tailoring district, with a guide who was thoroughly well-informed and also excited to talk about the history of menswear (as opposed to some of her tours, which focus more on shopping or the technical details of stitching and padding and etc.). It was tremendously informative, and I dawdled afterwards to poke my head into a few shops, more to learn about good quality and to daydream than anything else, but found the shopkeeps incredibly kind, generous, friendly, and not at all snobby. (This might have been luck of the draw)

Beau Brummel, who more or less invented men's fashion as it came to be in England. (Edward VII helped, and the Duke of Windsor too, but it started with Beau.) In the background: a shaving company, and one of the best ready-to-wear shoe companies in... the world, I guess? Jermyn Street! You fancy!

Rarrrrrrrrrr (Overcome with happiness to be surrounded by so many flowers edition)

Favorite meal? Probably Regency Cafe, a total throwback formica-tables-and-counter-service restaurant near Westminster serving an incredibly cheap but impeccably-cooked breakfast, helmed by a guy (Marco) who is a master at juggling orders, slinging tea, managing a consistent line of local workers and occasional tourists, remembering everybody's name and generally keeping things smooth and friendly. Loved it.

Marco at the far left, pouring tea. During my visit he teased one of the workmen in the cafe for having stolen his tea - because what self-respecting cafe owner wouldn't be working his own cuppa while managing the flow of customers?

The south bank was cool - definitely an area I want to explore more when I revisit in August this year, as I only had a split second to poke around on my way to the Tate Modern and Shakespeare's Globe before meeting my friend Emily for dinner and drinks.

Not pictured: the Tate Modern, whose exterior is kinda bleh, but who serendipitously had a Bob Rauschenberg retrospective while I was there! Sometimes lucky things happen to dopey fellas. 

Finally: ah transit! My last morning, I was in Chelsea doing some thrift shopping (found some excellent prizes) when I realized I was running late to get back to my hotel and up to St. Pancras for the Eurostar to Paris. Pulling up Google Maps on my phone, things looked dire: With about an hour to go til my train, it predicted a 45-minute drive back to the hotel, and an equally slow mass-transit trip, both of which would definitely make me miss my train. I jumped the next bus heading in the right direction, but something pinged the back of my head and I pulled up the Underground map, realizing that there was an option Google hadn't presented, linking a few different Tube lines that might get me there quicker. I sprinted from stop to stop, making the trip to the hotel in a clean 20 minutes, and one more quick stop had me in the security line at St. Pancras. Just in the nick of time.

My souvenir from this trip: an umbrella from this shop, with a handle made of a single piece of elmwood. It is beautiful and I'mma lose it faster than you can ever imagine.

All of which is to say, there's real magic in a city whose transit system can beat the cars, and it feels really good, in just over 48 hours, to start having my own intuitive sense of how to link things together and make connections. Like I said last week, London is incredibly good at orienting you within its transit system... it's just nice to be a part of it all.

Up next, probably this weekend: Paris! My third visit, second as an adult, after it served as my first solo international destination over eight years ago. Spoiler alert: it was excessively lovely. More on that... soon!

The friendly skies over my favorite neighborhood in Paris. Plus commercial advertisement! Who could ask for anything more etc

Paris Sofar

OK OK, London update coming later - perhaps on my trip back home, as I'm presently hustling to get this chapter into serviceable shape, and it's sunny enough that I refuse to spend more time online than absolutely necessary, but I thought I'd share this li'l fragment o' Paris time before diving back into revisions and sun and life and all the swellness that is this great ol' city.

Sofar Sounds Paris, after the jump!

The crowd a-waitin' for the concert to begin! This was cool. kittens.

Yesterday was kinda gray and I hadn't gotten much work done and had been feeling the crunch of setbacks on a few different fronts, just generally a bit gloomy. But I'd gotten a ticket to a mystery concert in an ad agency and knew I'd regret not going, so I went. It was pretty good - a fun mix of people from all over, friendly and energetic. But it had started late, and the first two musicians were... fine, y'know? And it was getting late, and I thought about cutting out early, before deciding to stick it out.

And that's when the Disastrous Italians showed up. Mattia Caroli & I Fiori del Male, whose frontman alternately kept protesting that he wasn't drunk and asking the crowd for more wine, and whose bandmates repeatedly interjected that they didn't know how to play their instruments, their songs, etc. But they were glorious, and funny, and shot through with a shaggy, joyful energy, and I left to walk home buzzing.

All of which is to say: DON'T GIVE UP UNTIL THE DISASTROUS ITALIANS SHOW UP.

(Those of you who follow me on FB: this video is different than the one I posted there! That's right: MULTI PLATFORM BONUSES UNLOCKED??)

London miscelanea

(Having just seen the news about the attack in Westminster just before posting this feels surreal. I'm grateful that over here these attacks seem limited, whether by gun control or other factors, but it's still shocking and awful. I don't have anything profound to say about it. Londoners have recovered from worse, more harrowing attacks, even in recent history - just before I left I was talking to my barber about hearing stories about their carry-on response to the IRA campaign of violence in the seventies. And as a whole, the city's residents tend to be cosmopolitan, thoughtful, energetic people who, as their mayor put it, wouldn't be cowed by terrorism. In any event, below is the post I cobbled together on the Eurostar to Paris, the first of a couple for the first leg of this trip. You know the drill: jump.)

St. Paul's and the city, as a too-slanted and less-than-ideal panoramic shot taken from the neighboring mall's rooftop terrace. PRETTY AND CLOUDY.

Guys, I know nobody forgot this, but London is just great. This may, as I think about it, have been my first time there solo, and boy howdy could I have spent a week quite happily. Some preliminary thoughts after the kickoff of my trip over there...

I lucked out on a half-empty flight over (if not 2/3 empty, actually). While I didn't sleep much, I was able to lie flat across a row of three seats, and had some of the kindest and swellest attendants ever (leaving snacks for me when I slept through meal service? aw guysss). Still, I arrived in London on probably three hours' sleep at most, and left Heathrow before 7 AM. After dropping my bags, I tromped around the city for twelve hours straight.

It was SO EXQUISITELY partly sunny the entire trip, as this photo only slightly makes clear. A great day to tromp around Hyde Park, and many points beyond, completely destroying my feet but getting me exhausted enough that I fell asleep involuntarily - literally against my conscious will - at 8:30 PM. Jetlag: DONE.

London, oddly, put me in mind of Boston this trip, in its rabbit-warren streets and its blessing-and-curse relationship with history, both giving it a tremendous legacy and sometimes leaving things, well, rabbit-warreny. Its centrality to Europe's financial world gives it an energy that feels akin to Boston's law-and-banking-crowded downtown core, and some of the newer skyscrapers going up wouldn't feel out of place around the Prudential Center.

As usual, though, wayyyyy better street art. This hyar from Shoreditch.

But oh, oh, oh is London ever worthy of its global city status. For one thing, it's incredibly resourceful - where Boston's response to its disorganized layout has mostly been to shrug and suggest you move closer to your job, London has an incredible transit system (odds are it'll save you time over a cab). Its sometimes-quite-complicated Tube stations are exquisitely signed, with Underground employees at particularly confusing junctions in the more gargantuan stations. Very much a city that has asked the question "How do people like to get around, and how can we help them make sense of it all?" (See also their bus stops, prominently marked by letter to help you orient yourself).

It's also got in spades what I've recently seen described as "visible life," public spaces designed to keep you in view of people going about their daily routines and public spaces designed to bring people together. (It's not that Boston doesn't have this, of course, but most of the neighborhoods I lived in up until this year definitely did not, where almost every area I went in London did.) It's also a city that is very much a meeting ground - not a crossroads, not a port of call for people who want to be elsewhere. It's delightful to hear the range of accents and ethnicities as you work through the city, and to find its disparate inhabitants bound together through some strain of humor and energy.

It is, I think, a city that knows its worth. With museums free to all comers (which smartly makes it a high value destination even when the pound is expensive and other costs get steeper), the Brits seem to know that culture is its own reward. Arriving a few days after our President's immoral and cruel budget proposal launched, it was interesting to consider how many people were spending money in England exactly because the government was subsidizing its museums and art programs. (So, add "incompetent" to the list above, if you didn't automatically make the addition.)

Cafe at the Victoria & Albert Museum, which has one of the most impressive theatre collections in the English speaking world, and a lot of fascinating artifacts from centuries (millennia?) of British history. It's: PRETTY?

Okay. Countryside is whizzing my my window (the Eurostar is magic and the Tube is double magic and I almost missed the train but didn't because of combined magic) so these general thoughts and preliminary photos will do for now. Later this week, I'll try to cobble together a post running down how I spent my little-over-48-hours in Jolly Old Engel-land, with a video and everything, but we'll see when I get around to it, as (a) I'm still fixin' to get work done on this trip, (b) also Paris, and (c) not very good at blogging on a regular schedule.

My only regret is that I could not fit more stereotypical London images into this photo than I do here (well, that and that I wish the tour bus was just a double-decker public bus, but I have learned to forgive myself these things.)

Until then: have a swell ol' time, and remember that if somebody recommends you visit a cash-only cafe in London where the owner (Marco) remembers your name by the time you leave even as he's dealing with a swarm of customers (50/50 local builders and tourists), you should definitely do it because Marco is the best and sometimes the world is charming in miniature but perceivable ways.

Past is Prologue: Flashbackery and Foreshadowry

I'm having a bit of a blinders-on week in these parts, pushing to get another chapter of the dissertation off to my advisor before spring break kicks in. (In that sense, pretty excited for the oncoming blizzard, a nice cue to keep burrowing until the task at hand is complete.) But after my last post, my folks dug up photos from my long-ago church trip to France and family trip to London... and since I'll cap this week with another trek to those once-upon-a-time destinations, thought I'd use this space to post a bunch o' them shots. Sort of a "previously on/coming attractions" geegaw. Coming up: the extreme style of the late '90s and early '00s!

A subset of the fam, bein' all British in Britland.

While emphasizing that this was taken in 1998, I have no excuse as to the rest of my tremendously catastrophic fashion choices. On the other hand, Eiffel Tower! A landmark that I did not, come to think of it, revisit when I went back a little over a decade later.

The "lousy teenager" contingent of the gospel choir (possibly including college students? At least one of these cats is way older than yers truly!) with some of us (me included) attempting to be too cool for school in the French countryside. It's as true now as it was then: trying to look cool while exploring is a good sign that you are doing it wrong.

OK, I actually love this photo, also from that trip. My shoes are on the excessively patient shoulders of one of our "responsible" trip leaders, and one of the assigned drivers for the trip, then in his residency (I think?) to be a doctor. Conversations with him (a) taught me at least in theory how to drive stick shift, (b) convinced me never to become a doctor ever, not even a dermatologist, not never, and (c) left me with some truly spectacular stories of relationship drama. He was an extremely cool dude and I am impressed at myself for being such a jerk to him in this picture. Yeesh.

Back to England in '03... My parents, as lovely and loving as ever. I still can't get over all they've done for me, trips aside. It's kind of remarkable how much you take away from your folks, and how impossible it seems to ever thank them properly for all they've given you. (ESPECIALLY when they keep giving you new examples of grace and kindness and optimism and generosity well into your mid 30s! Rude.)

Family default, here in Stratford-upon-Avon, is sitting around a table, laughing and/or annoyed. Dad's not in this because he's taking a picture or POTENTIALLY because he got swallowed up by the wallpaper that rustled and murmured with the voices of those who had come before us.

Siblingssss. It's funny. 2003 was right in the heat of sibling grumpiness, I feel - taking turns being angsty, trying to carve out our own identities, variously fed up with each other or being jerks to each other. (Chris was always the exception, or else found ways to be extremely subtle in expressing how irritated he was by the rest of us.) During this fall's Konmari process, I came across a journal I'd kept from this trip, and was surprised at how distant I had felt from my siblings, especially my younger ones, at this time. It made me grateful all over again for how the long art of family relationships can teach you the ebb and flow of it all. How anger and pride and hurt feelings gain perspective and shading with time, and the common bonds grow stronger over the years - if you let it, and if you are mindful. I feel incredibly lucky that we've all grown closer in the intervening years, to know that each of them has my back (and I theirs), and that we're sharing our lives more now than we were then. I was not a patient dude in 2003. But I'm lucky to be reaping the benefits of what patience can bring.

That's enough of that for now. As I say, the longer I live, on my smarter days, gratitude gets more and more central to my world. And when I remember that - when I take a second to take stock of the thousand miracles of kindness and generosity that have shaped my life to this point - it gets a lot easier to face an uncertain and often-changing future with a sense of hope, openness, and generosity.

And to that end: g'bye til this chapter is done! Hope to have a little something on London in this space next week, and thereafter, Paris! And thereafter, figuring out what the next wave of events will bring! Exclamation points!!

Family! Road Trips! The Making of a Human Brain!

It’s been a solid couple of weeks of dissertation work – proceeding as usual slower than I’d like, but I’m getting better at accepting that progress is progress and keeping it steady as I move forward. Without much to report here, given the lull in travel that this semester has seen (I mean… relatively speaking), and a couple of weeks to go until my next quick trip overseas, I thought I’d toss out a quick li’l reflection on family, travel, and where we get things from. After the jump: memories!

The King Family Van, circa 1995. This thing took us everywhere. Huge, huge thanks to my mom for finding and scanning these photos, memory machines that fueled a lot of these recollections...

Growing up, I didn’t recognize how special my family’s commitment to travel (within our limited means) was. A lot of my childhood memories are from the annual (I think) road trips we took, piling into a station wagon and later a van to trek across America, usually focused on camping in national parks if we weren’t visiting my parents’ friends as they settled across the country.

The station wagon! I remember when we got the van being slightly disappointed that we could no longer sit in the backwards-facing rear seat; this was offset by the EXTREMELY COOL fact that the van had a table with cupholders that we could use to play cards on long trips. Sweet rides were a cornerstone of King family trips.

These are experiences that taught me a lot about travel, but also inevitably about partnership. Most of these trips, my folks wanted to maximize our minimal vacation time at our destination, and so they would tag-team these outlandish, sometimes-24-hour-long marathons driving through the night to get to a family friend’s Florida condo, or to Salt Lake City on our way out to visit friends and see the parks in northern California. It seemed natural at the time (I guess everything does to a kid), but in hindsight it’s striking how clear the values were: sharing the load to make things better for everyone, willing to sacrifice a little comfort or convenience to make exciting adventures possible, and above all a sense of mutual giving that still resonates with me. In hindsight, it’s surprising how clearly I remember my parents really trying to help each other, offering to take over the drive even when the other person said they were fine, making sure everybody was taken care of.

Role models/dream team in Colorado. Crimminy I love these two.

And the memories I have of those drives are vivid. Waking up in the hills of Tennessee with everybody else in the van asleep, listening to folksy Minnesota musicians on our cassette deck, having quiet conversations with my mom or dad at the wheel, watching the landscape slip by. These were my first memories of travel, inextricably linked to music and companionship.

Those trips also grounded me in a love of nature that I’ve at times forgotten in my city-bound years, but that always rushes back when I can get out into it. It’s stunning to me the vistas and environments I got to see as a kid, even growing up in a lower-middle-class household in suburbia. The Smoky Mountains, Mammoth Caverns, Yellowstone, the Badlands, Yosemite, the Boundary Waters, the Redwoods, the Rockies… We kept things simple at home, didn’t eat out much, made do with hand-me-downs, and I’m sure my parents made numerous sacrifices I still don’t know about, all to keep that sense of exploration alive. Those trips served as a reminder that a little shelter (a green canvas tent that held all six of us) and wheels to take you somewhere were all that you needed to open yourself to the world.

The aforementioned tent! This never seemed small to us, save perhaps the one night that it stormed so hard that the tent uprooted its stakes and rolled the lighter kids at the edges toward the middle. Some great, great, storms-while-camping memories, both from family trips and a cycling overnight I took with my dad.

As I got older, a pair of trips expanded my travel horizons: a missions trip to Chicago was my first foray into a major city, and my first real encounter that I can remember with poverty and income inequality – we may well have spent some time in the touristic areas, but I don’t remember it if we did, instead working on service projects in low-income neighborhoods, visiting churches from outside our home traditions, and taking most of our meals either via picnic or in ethnic restaurants, including my first taste of Egyptian food. (At the time, hummus and pickled beets seemed tremendouslyexotic.)

Not Chicago, obviously. A California rock-climbing adventure, though I believe I'm wearing the t-shirt from the Chicago trip in it? Um, nature is great, let's all go hang out in nature.

A few years later, a church trip to France, joining a gospel choir in Nancy, was my first time across the ocean; at the airport, somehow my dad and I accidentally swapped passports, and...nobody noticed. Different times.  I remember on that trip being (a) angsty about the usual teenage made-up problems, and (b) fascinated by all the cultural differences, from food traditions to the way people moved through the cities, to the language. I also had my first brush with globalism: having failed to see Titanic, I still had heard about it nonstop, much to my general irritation, not least when two friends on the trip ran back from the post office excited that they’d heard “My Heart Will Go On.” In the post office. In France. (Later on that trip, the daughter of a family we stayed with sang it on her way down the hallway, marking the first time I heard it myself.)

Also not France. Ten-year-old Pat taking very early to what's going to become a lifelong love of trains and mass transit in general, here in rural Michigan near my grandparents' place. I'm sure there are France photos somewhere in our albums and boxes, but I know I didn't take any when I was there because I was too fascinated by buttered baguettes and hot chocolate as a standard breakfast option. Plus all my teenaged feelings!

In my college years, my family took what at the time we assumed might be our last family vacation – a little over a week in England, split between London and Stratford. Unusually for me, I was fairly cognizant even at the time of what a privilege this trip was: packed with theatre, with a couple of days in which I was allowed to do my own thing (thrilling in that setting, at that age). It probably laid the groundwork for my own international travels, kicking off six or seven years later with a three-week swing through Paris, Amsterdam and Ireland. At this age, though, I was becoming aware of what an investment, what a sacrifice, a six-person trip like this was for my parents, and how much value they placed on togetherness, exploration, and shared experience. It cemented a lot of the things that I think were floating around in my emotional and intellectual DNA, and as I write about it I’m realizing how central that trip – in the details, but more so in the aggregate – was in shaping me.

King Family Kids, hanging out in the Atlantic ocean (or maybe the Gulf of Mexico?), which is a body of water that goes to England? I mean inasmuch as oceans go anywhere. Look, I don't have pictures from most of the specific trips I'm talking about, can't you be happy with what we have?

All of these things stick with you in different ways. I can draw clear lines from my parents’ mode of making travel possible to my own, sometimes quite different, approach to exploring the world. The simplicity of their experience of that travel – to exist in wilderness, or explore a foreign city, content to take joy in the novelty of the horizon and the unfamiliar landscape, ties very much to my preferred mode of travel. Their devotion to long-distance friendships (in a pre-email, landlines-and-long-distance era!) gave them a pragmatic but emotionally gratifying opportunity to see old friends in new places, which is almost certainly my favorite way to organize a trip. And the values of laughter and love that to me define my family taught me that, no matter your surroundings, travel can be pure pleasure if you approach it well.

This felt like the most extravagant splurge at the time: renting a vintage car in northern California, which also rented us driving caps and goggles/various other costume pieces (we had a similar "Wild West" experience in the Badlands, I think) for a couple of hours. Simple, fun, and ultimately just an excuse to have a fresh way to enjoy the world and each other. A++ GOOD FAMILY WOULD RELATE TO AGAIN.
Update: I am informed that the car was a favor-rental from friends-of-friends! Nobody get any big ideas, we were not blowing our life savings on this memorable junket.

As I gear up for a summer spent abroad, not in a (relative) sprint like last year’s but in a trio of long-term stays and a couple of hop-around weeks, I’m glad to have this history to build from, that I can embrace and grow from. As the years go by I’m more and more aware of what a gift, what a legacy, I have inherited from my parents, and I’m more committed to developing and strengthening the best of what they’ve given me. Here’s hoping I can do so in the wide-armed, open-hearted, joy-in-simplicity possibility of the months to come!

Yr humble narrator, 9 years old and already finding annoying ways to be dramatic. Halp.

Postscript: when I asked my mom if she had any digitized photos from these trips, we reminisced a bit about them, and she laughed about our trip through the Smoky Mountains, where my older brother was reading a book in the back of the van. "Wow, look at the mountains!" they encouraged him. He looked up, mildly said "Oh, is that interesting?" and went back to his book. He is currently on a multi-week hiking trip through the mountains of New Zealand, so... apparently some things do stick with you, whether you pick up on them right away or not...