Time once again for the annual Jose Feliciano post

I usually repost this post when I hear the song on the radio for the first time of the season. This year that happened before Thanksgiving, which was crazy -- being bid "feliz navidad" when I still had uneaten Halloween candy in the house.

We had a major snowstorm this weekend. Everything's white and navidadish, so today's a good day for the annual tribute to Jose:

We were at the airport in Lisbon waiting to board our plane home from a Christmas-week family trip to Albufeira, a seafront resort-cum-fishing town in the Algarve. The gate area was packed with travelers, and all seats were taken. Dana was two, Adam five, both seasoned travel vets. They sat in the plastic chairs we'd managed to snag, swinging their legs and sipping juice. A group of tall men milled around, looking for a seat for a smaller, blind companion. Mike offered his chair, and the blind man sat down next to me.

We'd overheard the men, musicians, talking about the bad flights and lousy hotels they'd endured on their current tour. I leaned over and asked the quiet, blind man, "What kind of music do you play?" All the men looked worn and tired, a littled rumpled and disheveled. I figured they played low to middle-tier clubs and bars. The Zildjian cymbals they kept at closer than arm's length were the only hint of the possibility of something bigger.

"All kinds," he said. "Maybe you've heard me on the radio at this time of year singing a song I wrote..."

"!You're Jose Feliciano!?!" I launched into "Feliz Navidad" and called Adam over between notes. "Adam! This man wrote the Christmas song that mommy sings all the time!" I sang some more. Adam joined me on the "prospero ano y felicidad" and let loose on the "I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas." Jose was pleased.

We talked with Jose for a half hour. His big, serious, but very gracious manager hovered protectively. The band was on its way home from a sold-out New Year's Eve concert in Estoril, and Jose was eager to get home to Connecticut to his pregnant wife and two young children. A loving, involved dad, he talked about his kids. "I try not to spoil them," he said.

Although he couldn't see them, Jose was keenly aware of Adam and Dana. He sensed their movements. He used their names when he spoke to them. He told Adam to "enjoy being a kid, because it goes by so fast." He told Adam jokes: "Adam, why did the turtle cross the road? He wanted to get to a Shell station." And, "Why did the chicken cross the road, Adam? To get away from Colonel Sanders." Dana was cranky, and Jose gve me parenting tips: "Change her diaper before you get on the plane, and give her a lot to drink so her ears won't hurt from the change in cabin pressure."

We boarded. Jose crossed the Atlantic in first class, and we sat in steerage, narrowly escaping the flood of red wine that burst from the overhead bin when a Portuguese woman's straw-bound jug of homemade vinho de mesa popped its cork. A nearly eight-hour flight. Adam and Dana handled the marathon transit like pros. They played with Legos, colored, ate stuff, and scanned the headset stations. Henry the Navigator would have been proud of their endurance.

When we landed in Newark, I noticed Jose sitting alone on a windowsill in a corner, waiting for his men to pull the luggage from the carousel. I told Adam he could go over and say good-bye.

Thousands of miles, eight hours, two movies, two meals and one ocean had passed since we'd shared polite conversation with Jose Feliciano back in Lisbon, which seemed a lifetime away. As Adam walked toward the tired man, I realized Jose might not remember Adam. And Adam didn't know Jose was blind. We hadn't mentioned it, and Jose wasn't wearing dark glasses. Jose wouldn't see Adam coming. He wouldn't see Adam at all. He might not be able to put a name to this little person he'd never seen, only heard. Adam was a voice from another time zone, another continent, another reality. Would Adam's five-year-old feelings be hurt? Should I have left well enough alone?

I stood nearby and listened. "Bye, Jose," whispered Adam.

Jose looked up and smiled. "Take care, Adam."

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Keebler, fire your ad agency...

What's wrong with this coupon?

It appears in the November issue of National Geographic.

To redeem the coupon and get a buck off a box of crackers one must take a pair of scissors to National Geographic magazine.

No one does that.

This is a magazine that is kept, treasured, proudly displayed, passed down to the kids or sold to other geo-buffs as an entire decade- or century-spanning collection. No one cuts stuff out of a National Geographic. This cracker coupon belongs in magazines of the Family Circle or Ladies' Home Journal ilk.

In a study of supermarket coupon redemption rates I'd wager that this National Geographic cracker coupon would top the charts as the least-redeemed coupon in the history of modern consumer marketing.

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Journey through the night sky

Give your optic nerves some nighttime exercise at a college observatory near you. Most college observatories offer public viewing nights that let you scan the cosmos with high-powered telescopes and reflectors, and there's usually an eager physics student on hand to act as tour guide, pointing out sights like the Moon's seas and craters, the rings of Saturn and the jewel-like stars that arc through Orion's belt.

For college observatory and other space-viewing venues near Boston, click here to read an article I wrote for a recent issue of Boston Parents Paper.

To infinity and beyond!

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Meals on the midway: Deep-fried and supersized

File this under "Only in America."

A short piece in a recent issue of The Economist chronicled a visit to the Texas State Fair. The reporter focused not on rides and games but on the frightening foods on offer. The reporter (whom I'd credit, but The Economist doesn't use bylines) writes, "People were queuing up for an unusual delicacy: balls of butter, dipped in dough and cooked in a vat of boiling oil. Fried butter, in other words."

I am disgusted but not surprised.

America, land of the free and home of the fat.

The journalist goes on to note that "fairs are known for their decadent snack offerings" and then enumerates several: Meat Lovers' Ice Cream, fried guacamole, fried Coke. (No, I've no idea.)

Happy Thanksgiving. Go slow.


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McDonald's gives Iceland the cold shoulder

The collapse of Iceland's economy from the arguably worse-than-Wall-Street shenanigans of Icelandic fishermen who woke up one day and became "bankers" and who are now likely fishermen again has deprived Iceland of more than just the integrity of its currency and the life savings of its citizenry: the monetary magic tricks and fiscal legerdemain have left the volcanic nation without access to Big Macs.

Citing soaring costs for imported beef patties and the plummeting value of the krona still kicking around in people's pockets, McDonalds closed its three Iceland franchises last month.

That's Adam and Dana, circa 1997, posing in front of the McDonald's in icy downtown Reykyavik. We'd just eaten a meal of burgers and fries because that was the cheapest food I could find in all of Iceland. Food prices -- along with the prices of everything except heat (geothermal energy Iceland's got aplenty -- notice the open McDonald's window, in February) were chokingly expensive.

Breakfast at our hotel was $28.00 per head. (I paid for me and spirited stuff out in my backpack for the kids...) Granted, that breakfast included herring and other luscious seafood, but when the first meal of the day costs $28.00 -- and this was 12 years ago -- you can guess what lunch and dinner ran. And going into a grocery store for provisions helped not a whit, the store being stocked as it was with mundane items that had, despite their boring ordinariness, been imported by plane and ship at great expense, duly reflected in the astronomical retail price.

I am no fan of McDonalds, but I pity the poor Icelanders the loss of a place to get cheap food. I imagine rows of Reykyavikers lining the city piers holding baited poles, pulling up personal halibuts and slogging home through the gray slush to make fishwiches.

Fries with that? A sack of imported potatoes will set you back a day's pay. Ketchup? Forget it. Those good old days are gone.


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A tapeworm grows in Brooklyn

I have a story in a book that hit store shelves in October. Chicken Soup for the Soul: All in the Family promises to be a hot seller: it's already in a second printing. Fun book. (Get it at Amazon, and while you're there, throw Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America in your cart. If you don't love it I'll buy it back.)

My Chicken Soup story, "The Sauerkraut Cure" takes you to Grandma Fink's kitchen in 1930s Brooklyn:

A recent genealogical expedition into my dad’s childhood yielded a folk remedy brought by his grandmother to Brooklyn from her native Alsace. I’d asked my dad to spend a day sharing memories of growing up in New York in the 1930s and ‘40s, and he had tales to tell, the most colorful of which involved Grandma Fink, the tender-tough matriarch of the extended family that shared her six-unit Brooklyn apartment building.

The close quarters of the Lincoln Avenue tenement were, thought Grandma Fink, a breeding ground for germs, critters and other unpleasantness, so she maintained vigilant guard over her clan’s health, administering poultices, plasters, salves and syrups and occasionally calling Dr. Hantmann in for a 25-cent kitchen table consult (the patient laid on the table for examination). And, she did seasonal cleaning, not just of the house, but of her grandsons’ insides as well.

Grandma Fink counted tapeworms among the potential threats to her family’s well-being, and twice yearly she waged war on any that might have found their way into my father and his two older brothers. Her weapon? Sauerkraut.

“One day each spring and fall, Grandma Fink would call me, Henny and Eddie into the kitchen," recalled my dad. "On the stove was a huge pot of water in which cabbage had been cooking for hours, made into sauerkraut. We knew from the towels and blankets covering the pot that it wasn’t for consumption. It was to attract tapeworms.”

The boys took turns standing on a stool that Grandma Fink had pulled to the stove. She’d lift the heavy towels that covered the steaming pot and push the boys’ little heads into the stinky steam. "We," said my dad, "were told to inhale the sauerkraut aroma, which Grandma said would ward off colds but most importantly, lure out any tapeworms growing inside us.”

Grandma Fink knew that tapeworms loved sauerkraut, especially kraut as delicious as hers, made from an old family recipe, and that, to get some, the parasites would swim up through the intestines to the mouth and try to jump into the sauerkraut pot.

As the boys sniffed the pungent mash, Grandma stood close by, waiting to pull out any tapeworms that might emerge. “Grandma was ready to capture them,” said my dad, “and we thought she was quite brave, because she told us they could be thirty, even up to eighty feet long.”

As far as my dad knows, Grandma never did catch a tapeworm. “I cannot recall a single one ever coming out of us,” he chuckled. But Grandma never let her guard down, pulling out the pot and firing up the semi-annual sauerkraut boil year after year after year, releasing each grandson from the ritual only when he became a young man and moved, for work, marriage or the military, out of her Brooklyn tenement and into the wide world.

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The Lipstick Building: Shades of Bernie Madoff

I must have 50 pictures of this building.

This is the view we've snagged nearly every time we've stayed -- for free, with Mike's frequent guest points -- at the Lexington Avenue Marriott in New York City. I've shot this building at every time of day and night, in all kinds of light and weather conditions. I think it's a cool shape and color, worth multiple takes.

Like the rest of the world, I didn't realize what was going on on the 17th floor.

Towering over 53rd Street and 3rd Avenue on midtown Manhattan's east side, it's called the Lipstick Building. I always thought Mike made the name up, and thought him terribly clever to have done so, until Bernie Madoff became an unwelcome household name and reports revealed that, while Madoff ran his legal enterprises from the Lipstick Building's 18th and 19th floors, the 17th floor was ground zero for his massive evildoings.

Had I any idea of what I was really looking at I would have used my highest-powerered telephoto lens to take those 50 shots. Might've captured something the feds could use...

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College visits: Very educational

Dana's well into her college selection process, and in the past six months we've visited over a dozen schools. We learned early not to schedule more than one per day. If you try to tackle two (and trust me, more is physically and mentally impossible), around 2 PM the campus and commentary of the second start to get squishy and indistinguishable from the place you visited in the morning and you end up shortchanging yourselves and both institutions. Better to start fresh each day with a single target you can really focus on. With private higher ed ringing in at about 50 grand per annum, it's nice to be as certain as possible that you're sending both your kid and your money to the right place.

You learn interesting things on college visits. That Columbia has a swimming requirement, for example.

This news caused me and Dana, well-rounded athletes but not keen waterbugs, to exchange raised eyebrows. Maybe she was thinking, Whoa. This is Columbia. This is New York. I could be doing so many things with my time here besides doing laps. I was thinking, Whoa. This is Columbia. This is New York. My money could be doing so many things here besides paying for Dana to do laps.

Were there a great reason for withholding a student's nearly quarter-million-dollar degree until she or he demonstrates prowess in the pool I'd think, OK, Columbia's smarter than other colleges. But the closest attempt I could find at offering a good reason to mandate student-body-wide swimming skills (after confirming with snopes.com that no, it's not because the child of a wealthy Gilded Age benefactor drowned at college, and rejecting as probable cause our Columbia tour guide's quip that "Manhattan is an island") is the description on Columbia's website of its core curriculum, which includes passing the swimming test: "These requirements describe an education of exceptional depth and rigor. They constitute the essence of the liberal arts tradition as well as the intellectual signature of a Columbia education." If I were a Columbian, unless the deans let me use my Aqua Jogger, the depth of the pool and the rigor of a semester-long attempt to navigate 75 yards of it "without resting" would indeed be an exceptional education -- in terror.

But, lest this weird, wet anachronism scare anybody off from applying to Columbia, diving a little deeper into the school's website reveals that you don't really have to know how to swim to get your sheepskin: you just have to show up at the pool. The requirement's evidently been watered down to accommodate those who've never been and never will be marine mammals -- and, I suspect, their bill-paying parents, who expected their college kids to have intermittent struggles keeping heads above water, just not literally.

So, unlike the watertight requirement in effect in, say, 1913, when the New York Times ran a lengthy piece about a student who spent four years trying and failing to pass the swim test and was therefor denied his degree, the current requirement offers trickle-down options that allow, in the end, just getting your name ticked off on the swim class attendance sheet.

When you arrive at Columbia, you can take a swim test. If you pass, you're good to go, perhaps with a little fish-shaped lapel pin to wear around campus. If you fail, you must take a beginner swimming course. If, after taking the course, you still can't pass the test, "the requirement is waived." Nor will your failed, flailing, semester-long aquatic efforts damage your GPA: "Students who fulfill the attendance participation requirements for the course will pass the course." Other obligations satisfied, you will get your degree, presumably alongside your natatorially superior classmates and not at a separate graduation ceremony for non-swimmers.

A few weeks after we visited Columbia, while on a tour of another college, a prospective applicant asked the student guide, "Does this school have a swimming requirement?" When the guide announced loudly to the group, "No! You do not have to take a swimming test to graduate," I saw a half-dozen teenagers and their parents raise their eyebrows at each other in relief. The school moved up on Dana's list.



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Happy Birthday to Gandhi and me

I was happy to discover that Gandhi and I share the same birthday, October 2. Happy birthday to us.



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Carrion call

Carrion eaters is not a subject that flies across the radar screen of most people's daily lives, but on a recent day I encountered the subject of giant, flesh-eating birds not once, not twice, but three times (one of those times in the flesh).

In the morning Dana handed me her college application essay, the piece of work that will, if done well, convey to admissions officers something true and real about her that other components of her application may not.

Her essay is about our trip to Uganda and its effect on her life. It's beautiful, and I love it more with each reading. Near the beginning she makes a reference to the big birds that lurk in and circle over Kampala:

"There were differences between their world and mine: four-foot-tall marabou storks don’t rest on my neighbors’ satellite dishes, ubiquitous signs warning about the prevalence of AIDS don’t mark my Boston streets, whole families don’t navigate the city on a single, chugging motor scooter, and women don’t sit by the side of the road selling bananas and spreading sorghum out to dry..."

A few hours after Dana's essay had plucked Uganda memories from the back of my mind and put them up front, I sat down with a book, the 2002 edition of The Best American Travel Writing. I'd picked up the anthology the week before at a used book sale and was half-way through. The next story on tap was Edward Hoagland's "Visiting Norah," originally published in Worth magazine. I almost dropped the book when I read the first sentence:

"Two pairs of marabou storks, each of them five feet tall and battleship gray with a pink neck and a wattle pouch, proudly posing and croaking, were raising chicks in bulky nests in the flame trees that overlooked the swimming pool at the Fairway Hotel in Kampala, Uganda."

Where Dana's marabou storks stay benignly in their satellite dishes, Hoagland's fowl are ready to swoop down and feed:

"... marabou storks... are carrion feeders and offal scavengers, similar to but larger than the most no-nonsense vulture, and in famine territory they of course will eat children who drop by the wayside. In the chaos of modern Africa, they have moved from the veldt and forests into the cities, wherever garbage and death and anarchy erupt. They are tolerated because, as they stalk around, gobbling refuse, rodents, fruit rinds, rotting vomit, dog carcasses... with their thick, scary beaks, they fend off disease. But when I saw them roosting in the downtown parks... as if watching for any homeless person who might be staggering or bleeding, they looked like undertakers to me."

They are hideous and huge, and they are everywhere in Kampala. It took me and Dana about a day to get used to their wheeling, squawking, hulking forms as just another routine piece of the urban puzzle.

So, it's lunchtime in my little Boston 'burb, and I've had two carrion encounters. Odd.

After lunch I go off for a slow run. A mile from my house, above the well-trafficked, densely-built route I've been running for 15 years, a giant bird circles above my head and lands on an antique Cape's peaked roof. His wingspan stretches at least three feet. I stop in my tracks and stare. What is that bird? An eagle? He opens his wings, stares directly at me, and keeps his awesome wings open, as if to dry them in the sun that's beating on the black-shingled roof. A second bird flies up a side street, rounds the corner onto the street I stand on, and joins his friend on the roof. Their great wings are outstretched. I am transfixed.

They are magnificent -- from the neck down. No, these are not eagles. These have hideous heads.

A man and his son ride toward me on bikes. "We saw you, and wanted to see what you were looking at," said the dad. I asked if he knew what kind of birds these are -- some type of giant hawk, perhaps?

"Turkey vultures. They're around here, but they don't usually come out into the open like this. They're usually in the fields."

Vultures. "There must be dead meat around," I said, and a second later we spied half of a dead, bloody fox lying near the side of the road.

I continued my run, again with thoughts of Africa in my head, Kenya this time, where, on dawn game drives in the Masai Mara we'd watch scavengers -- jackals and hyenas -- fight over the remains of kills that the lions had brought down and feasted on through the night. Predators kill at night; scavengers feed in the morning. The sated, fat-bellied simbas were asleep in the grasses, leaving wildebeest haunches and zebra heads for the dawn patrol, animals lower on the food chain. Hyenas ruled the carcass-cleaning chaos, and they chased and swatted the jackals who darted fast and low into the feeding frenzy to tear off small chunks of flesh and spirit them away.


The vultures were too smart, too patient or too lazy to fight for their food. They simply waited on the sidelines for the others to finish, then swooped or waddled over to the carcass so many animals had already dined on, spread their wings over it, then hunched down to pick every crevice clean.


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Beautiful obit for a Scottish Traveller

I recently traded some you'll-never-actually-be-able-to-fly-with-these-because-we-have-365-blackout-dates-per-year frequent flier miles for a subscription to the British publication The Economist, arguably the best and best-written English-language weekly news magazine. Along with its crisp, no-nonsense reporting and analysis, I enjoy the British English: no periods after Dr or Mr, spellings like tyre, favourite and honour, words like dogged, nipped and tinter-sticks, and letters to the editor that all begin, "Sir." The prose, besides being informative, is great fun to read.

A recent issue contains an obituary of Scottish storyteller Stanley Robertson, one of Scotland's Travellers, "... that mysterious band who were neither true Romanies, nor settled citizens, but roamed the roads of north-eastern Scotland in tents and carts." Robertson died on August 2 at age 69.

The language in the obituary is so rich and evocative, it transports the reader to the underside of Aberdeen and into the swirly, gritty, texture of Stanley Robertson's life. I have to share it (and wish I could give a proper attribution, but The Economist doesn't use bylines):

"The fish-hooses of old Aberdeen were dark, reeking places, and the work was scabby. But it was all Stanley Robertson could get. At 15 he started, 48 hours a week chopping up fish in some poky hole, getting shocks from the finning machine, steeping his skinned, sore hands in brine or pickle-juice. The smell was so scunnering it made him want to puke up, and the lassies on the next bench thought it a great joke to throw fish eyes in his face. When he finally caught the bus home to his dinner, still with his wellies on, croaked after hauling wooden boxes of haddock or hanging kipper kilns in the roof, other passengers would say, 'What a horrible smell of fish!' and change their seats. "

Once a year Robertson's family -- he was one of 13 children -- left their lives of fish-hooses, flax-gathering and rabbit skin-hawking to go up into the country's far reaches and tell stories. Robertson's hands, writes the author of this flowing obituary, were always careful and busy, but "his head was in Fairyland."

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Journey

Although my kids and I didn’t climb into the van and drive off until nine months later, our 12,000-mile American road odyssey began on September 11, 2001. Where I was and what I was doing when the planes ripped through New York are part of my life’s fabric. I was outside painting the fence brown, telling my neighbor Donna that I’d plenty of time now to do the job my 13-year-old son was supposed to have finished because I’d just been laid off. We groused about the economy’s sorry state and mused over whether things could get any worse.

In the next instant, they did. The kitchen phone rang. It was my husband calling from the car to tell me one of the twin towers had been hit. Mike was on the road, making sales calls, and hadn’t seen any pictures yet. He’d only heard the radio reports.The paintbrush hardened outside in the sun, pieces of cut grass sticking up like spikes in the brown mess.

When Adam and Dana came home from school, we gathered around the table on the deck, and began, as a family, to sort through facts and feelings and fears. The kids’ teachers had done a good job dispensing comfort and assurance before sending them home. By the time they got to us, we’d decided we had three things to communicate: they were safe and loved; America was strong; the world’s people were good.

To our family, this last point was as important as the others, because our kids have been traveling the world since they were babies. Respect for the world’s people is part of their upbringing. This is a gift, and we’d allow no senseless act, however brutal, nor any retaliatory distrust or intolerance, to steal it.

My mind’s eye called up images: two Turkish teenagers kicking a soccer ball with a 5-year-old Adam on the grounds of Topkapi Palace; Adam joining a group of Bolivian boys in tabletop foosball during recess at Copacabana’s school, Lake Titicaca shining at the end of the street; the kids building sand castles with Javier and Daniel, two Belizean brothers who’d pass our hotel each day on their way to class; Dana setting off for a bird walk, in the shadow of Kilimanjaro, with Mike and Masai chief Zapati. These experiences enrich life and must continue.

As the painful, numbing slowness of the weeks immediately after September 11 yielded to something approximating normalcy, I regained enough focus to give the future some thought. That future had us traveling again, but this time, we’d get to know our America.

Introduction to Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America. To purchase, see right sidebar.

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A feast: Boston's North End

Mike and I went into Boston tonight to stroll around and dine in the North End. I'm glad I don't live in the North End because I would want to eat constantly. There's an eatery every hundred feet. And they're all awesome.

There were giant lines outside Mike's Pastry, famous for cannolis, and Giacomo's, a cash-only restaurant on Hanover Street. I heard a guy say that the ATM across the street from Giacomo's "is the busiest ATM in Boston." I asked somebody in the Giacomo line what the attraction was. He didn't know. He was standing in an hour-long line for Italian food in an area with scores of places to eat Italian food, most without lines, and he didn't know why, exactly, he was standing there. His wife said, "It's good food."

We'd just feasted at Assaggio on Prince Street. Good food. No line.

And the line at Mike's Pastry? You don't have to stand in it. "That's the tourist line," said a local, when I asked out loud on the sidewalk in front of Mike's whether the cannoli within could be worth that kind of wait. "You don't have to stand in that line," said the North Ender, holding a white and blue Mike's Pastry box secured with string. "Just go in and go up to the counter."

The North End's a feast.

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Run the planet: Weird marathons

Marathoning has become such an everyman's sport that there's a marathon in nearly every nook and cranny of the planet. A whole segment of the travel industry has been built around leading tours to so-called "destination marathons," races in exotic or exciting locales. You pay a few grand to a company that secures hotel, airfare and a space in the race. After the event, you and the low-body-fat group you came with enjoy the sights.

Of course, for most (but not all) foreign marathons you don't need a tour company. Just sign up, book your own air and hotel, run your race, then recover in Rio, Vancouver, Stockholm, Bangalore or wherever it is you flew to to run 26 miles.

I would never sign up for a marathon that involved a substantial investment in tour costs and/or airfare because marathon training is a crap shoot. And if the die don't roll in your favor and you get injured before race day, well -- I wouldn't want to fly to Antarctica in a boot cast just to watch folks who dodged a bullet this time run around the icy landscape, however awe-inspiring that landscape might be.

Nope, I only sign up for marathons I can drive to. Then, if the grand croupier of running deals me some peroneal tendinitis or a stress fracture, I simply cancel my hotel reservation and leave the car in the driveway. I'm only out my race fee.

Were I 20 years younger, a finely-tuned superwoman, or just a bigger risk taker than I am, I'd check out some of the planet's far-flung marathons, including these, which sound beautiful, intriguing, weird or improbable:

1. Chott Marathon Xtreme, Tunisia -- on the Chott El Jerid Dry Salt Lake
2. Monaco Marathon -- through Monte Carlo on the French Riviera
3. Pisa Marathon & Wine -- "Run under the Tuscan sun... Drink at wine refreshments along the course and finish under the famous leaning tower!"
4. Midnight Sun Marathon, Tromso, Norway
5. Santa Claus Marathon, Rovaniemi, Finland -- "Why to run THIS marathon: You will cross the Arctic Circle by racing and get official certificate about that signed by Santa Claus."
6. Loch Ness Marathon , Scotland
7. Venice Marathon -- "Emotions On Water: Run between earth and sky"
8. Poznan Marathon -- "The Best Marathon In Poland: All finishers can win a car in the lottery draw..."
9. Nightmarathon -- in Mestre, Italy, near Venice. Starts at 8 PM. Pre-race information includes reports on temperature, humidity and phases of the Moon.
10. The Great Wall Marathon -- "Course not measured to AIMS standards." (Must be all the stairs. I've heard this called the world's toughest marathon.)
11. Egyptian Marathon -- held in February. If you survive that, come back in November and run like an Egyptian in the Pharaonic 100km
12. International Alexander the Great Marathon, Thessaloniki, Greece
13. Great Tibetan Marathon -- "Course not measurable to AIMS standards" (Too many Himalayas in the way to get an accurate reading.)
14. Tiberias Marathon, Israel -- run in the footsteps of Jesus
15. North Pole Marathon -- in this case, we can probably blame the "Course not measurable to AIMS standards" on global warming; hard to measure something that's melting
16. Old Mutual Two Oceans Marathon, Cape Town, South Africa
17. International "White Nights" Marathon, St. Petersburg, Russia
18. Kigali Peace Marathon, Rwanda
19. Kilimanjaro Marathon, Tanzania
20. Standard Chartered Stanley Marathon, Falkland Islands -- "Officially the World's Most Southerly AIMS-Certified Marathon: An opportunity to test yourself, to prove to others what you are made or, or simply to add 'the most southerly' to your collection of races run..."

And here's a race if you just want to tackle a half-marathon:

Pardubice Wine Half-Marathon -- "It is time to visit heart of Czech Republic, capital city of gingerbread. Each runner obtain: medal, diploma, starting number, T-shirt, bottle of wine, race newspaper, wide refreshment, nice sport experience..."

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The Jersey (and Delaware) Boys of Summer

I just spent a few days driving up the mid-Atlantic shore from Assateague Island, Maryland to Atlantic City, New Jersey, following the coastal road -- bits of US 1 and other oceanside stretches with names like Coastal Highway, Ocean Boulevard and Atlantic Avenue. I cut some driving miles out of the trip by taking a ferry across Delaware Bay from Lewes, Delaware to Cape May, New Jersey.

I stopped at as many beaches as I could stand on my way north and invariably found fit, attentive lifeguards scanning the water for wayward swimmers.

A lifeguard's job may look easy -- sitting in the sun on a beautiful beach, girls, bikinis, tanned muscles -- but when a rescue situation arises, these people deliver the goods.

In every town I visited, from the gorgeous Delaware resorts of Bethany Beach and Rehoboth Beach to New Jersey's Stone Harbor, Avalon and the Wildwoods, next to most of the lifeguard stations sat large, wooden rowboats with the town's name painted in capital letters on the sides. The boats -- lifeboats -- sat on wheels so the guards could maneuver them quickly into the water in an emergency.

The boats I saw sat picturesque and quiet. Until Atlantic City.

As I stood on the Atlantic City boardwalk I watched two pairs of lifeguards jump from their stations and launch two lifeboats into the roaring, riptide-ribboned surf. Two kids were in peril in six-foot-high waves a hundred yards farther out than anyone else. One hung to a plastic float and one was all alone in the sea. The gigantic waves crashed onto them and tossed them like toys.

The four guards rowed those boats against the crushing, heaving sea -- they were catapulted nearly vertical a half-dozen times, and I don't know why they didn't fall out into the ocean -- and reached the kids. They pulled one into one of the boats but couldn't get either boat close enough to the other kid because of the violent surf and the riptide that took their vigorous rowing effort and spit it out in a direction that put them farther away with each pull of the oars.

The guards in the boat that had scooped the first kid threw an orange life ring on a rope to the boy still in the water, who somehow found the will and energy to push through the sea, grab hold and latch on. He was pulled to shore behind the lifeboat, his friend shivering and shaking in the bow.

Lifeguard at an ocean beach resort. Nice gig.

Until someone's drowning. Then you kick it in and do what few people can -- go into the water and save a life. Or two. And hopefully come out with your own.

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White House doorbell

Set into the fence surrounding the front side of the White House is this curiosity. An old doorbell?

I pushed the white button, which obscures words underneath that read, "Push Button." Dana said, "Think Obama heard the buzzer?"

After I'd pushed the button a few times and called attention to the oddity, bunches of tourists gathered round to photograph the weird welcome plaque. I hadn't taken a picture yet.

I had a telephoto lens on my camera and had to change to a 50mm, but as I fished around in my bag for the lens a police officer shouted, "Ladies and gentleman, this area must be cleared. Please move to the other side of the barricade. You can take pictures from there."

I couldn't take a photograph of this DC doorbell from anywhere but right where I was standing, so I hung back, changed my lens and took the picture. Other folks hung back, too.

The officer was not happy. "Ladies and gentlemen, I SAID, 'This area must be cleared.'"

I gathered my stuff and left. About a dozen people stayed at the fence, looking at the contours of the Oval Office and admiring Michelle Obama's vegetable garden off to the left of the cool old entry buzzer.

"PEOPLE! I'VE ASKED YOU TWICE. THE THIRD TIME, I WILL TAKE POLICE ACTION, COURTESY OF THE SECRET SERVICE."

The people moved.

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Scuba Lisa: Paris for heretics

I may catch some merde for this from tourists whose itineraries are ruled by generally accepted and rarely questioned must-see lists gleaned from all the guidebooks and articles and websites ever written about a place and who feel incomplete if they leave items unticked, but I suggest you skip the following Paris sights should you have but a few days to a week to spend in the City of Light in high season.

In my humble but well-traveled opinion, the return on time required to see these sights like the guidebooks say you ought is low.

Unless you're an early riser and can get on line at these places well before they open so you can get in and out before the rest of the world shows up, don't see:

1. Versailles -- First, there's an hour train ride. If you're not on one of the first out of Paris in the morning, you're already behind the eight ball. Second, those incredible gardens that all the guidebooks say are free? They're not. On top of the 20-odd bucks you pay to tour the palace you pay another 11-odd bucks to walk around the kings' old backyard. Third, the only thing in Versailles with eye-popping, knock-your-socks-off "wow!" factor is the Hall of Mirrors -- it's what you go for, right? After I spent five-plus hours of my life and precious Paris time to see its chandeliers and dusty, etched-with-graffiti mirrors (I kid you not) I found myself wishing I had those five hours back, to do something else with.

Better idea: Google it.

2. The Eiffel Tower -- I'm not suggesting you miss the Eiffel Tower; in fact, it's impossible to miss, towering as it does over the city. Do take the metro to the Trocadero stop, where, from the elevated steps of the Palais de Chaillot, you get a superb view of the tower from top to bottom. Walk across the Seine to the tower and stand under it, admiring its lacy, iron skeleton.

But don't get on the line to climb the tower. You'll be on that line for so many hours before you finally reach the ticket kiosk from where you buy a ticket that lets you stand on another line to either climb the stairs or wait for a crowded elevator that you'll wish you'd a) packed several meals and b) skipped that extra cup of coffee at breakfast.

Better idea: Go to the top of ugly Tour Montparnasse. The skyscraper is an eyesore, but the views from its observation floor are the best in the city -- and include a full-on view of the Eiffel Tower.

3. The Louvre: I know I'm treading on super-sacred ground here, but I've come this far, so I'm going all in. Forget the Louvre. The inside, anyway. As Dana and I watched the thousands who were spending almost an entire day to see three things -- the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory; nobody really comes for the Egyptian stuff, and Paris's best paintings are in the Musee d'Orsay, which we did visit -- we chuckled as we enjoyed sunshine, architecture and people-watching in the adjacent Tuileries garden, concluding that "the best way to see the Louvre is from the outside."

Better idea: When you're at home, spend a day marvelling at the great art that's no doubt housed at a major metropolitan museum close to where you live -- art you've maybe never seen. When you're in Paris, get your Da Vinci fix from the hundreds of Mona copies smiling coyly from t-shirts, posters, billboards, fancy art reproductions and the sides of buses and thank your stars that you haven't lost hours making your way into the Louvre to stand, likely at the back of a crowd that can get ten deep, to peer at a small, dark painting under Plexiglas and then leave wondering what the fuss is all about.

Dana and I found a plethora of fake Giacondas around the city. Our favorite was Scuba Lisa, smiling from the wall of a bridge over the Canal Saint Martin in a fantastic neighborhood we wouldn't have had time for had we spent the whole day in lines at the Louvre.


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Happy Bastille Day

Bastille Day is technically over where I'm at, although the Champ de Mars under the Eiffel Tower, and the Place de Trocadero across the Seine from it, will be hopping until well into July 15th. It's 12:30 AM on the 15th now in Paris, and Dana and I are happily ensconced at our Maison Zen digs after having participated in some of the Bastille Day festivities.

In the morning, the French air force, including several squadrons of sound barrier-busting Mirages, flew over the city -- and our building.

Then the army came out. As regiments and platoons waited their turns to make their way to the military parade down the Champs-Elysees, the soldiers posed for pictures and let little boys climb up on the tanks and look through the machine gun sights.



Night brought fireworks over the Eiffel Tower.

Paris: Random samples

I said I wouldn't blog from Paris, but since we ended up with an unexpected free internet connection in our cozy digs at the Maison Zen, I can shoot a few pics your way.

Today's random samples:


So many sardines, so little time...



With owners away, Smart Cars will play

Paris, zen and now

Dana and I are off to Paris tomorrow. I can't wait to see our apartment at the Maison Zen. (Click on France in the right sidebar for previous posts on our unique accommodation choice. I've decided I will definitely partake in some of the meditation sessions while at our Om Away From Home.)

I won't be blogging from Paris. Time spent blogging is time spent not seeing Paris.

I will, however, be seeking out free WiFi hotspots so I can check out the capabilities of the tiny new netbook I just bought. I bought an Asus, about the size of a paperback. Fits in my purse and weighs almost nothing, so I can tote it around all day and check my email or jump online anywhere in the city with an open connection. Even has a webcam. Two hundred and fifty bucks.

An editor I'm working with sent me a restaurant suggestion that sounds intriguing. She wrote in an email, "Have a great time, Lori. Do you know the restaurant Chartier? ( 7 rue du Faubourg in Montmartre). We spent a lot of time in France when my boys were small and before coming home we always had a week in Paris. We all came to love this old-fashioned place, which still has the wooden napkin boxes lining the walls. It’s not fancy...a big boisterous joint with great French waiters. Good poulet and very basic bistro stuff. It’s very popular even with the natives and there can be long lines. We learned to go on the early side (6:30 ish) to beat the crowds. The street is funky... we discovered some terrific costume stores. Bought a few masks that we still treasure. "

(How's your French? Visit Chartier via YouTube here. At least you'll understand "l'atmosphere historique," non?)

I've put Chartier on the list.

A bientot, mes amis. Jusqu' a la semaine prochaine.

www.LoriHein.com

Bulgaria on my mind

There's a town in Bulgaria that took up residence in a tiny corner of my mind some 20 years ago and still lives there. Over the past two decades I've thought of it hundreds of times, the fairy tale town I looked down on but never entered.

I was in a speeding bus on a high, smooth highway, enroute from Sofia, Bulgaria to Bucharest, Romania. I looked out the window and saw a magical, red-roofed town nestled between and climbing up hills covered in deep forest. I snapped one photo.

The sight of the town made me hold my breath, hoping that the highway we were riding on would curve down and to the left and that we would enter this beautiful place, if only to ride through it without stopping. That would be enough. To enter it and roll through some piece of it, so I could take it in up close.

But the bus kept speeding along the elevated highway, and the town was gone from my sight within a minute.

"What was that place?" I asked my busmates. Someone said, "Veliko Tarnovo."

Veliko Tarnovo, ancient town, capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire, bursting with history and superb architecture and one of the foremost tourist destinations in Bulgaria.

I have never forgotten its name. I did not go there. But I know it's beautiful.

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Latacunga Apothecary

Dana's friend is leaving soon for Ecuador, where she'll spend most of the summer traveling through the Andes with an educational tour outfit that brings teens and chaperones to small villages in need of free labor. The travelers roll up their sleeves and participate in building and cleanup projects.

Hopefully the group will stay healthy. If they get sick, they'll likely be bussed to Quito for a dose of modern medicine, but villagers might suggest a trip to the local shaman for some traditional healing.

In Latacunga, an Andean town near magnificent Cotopaxi volcano (which has twice wiped out Latacunga), I was fascinated by the block-long selection of traditional remedies spread out by vendors at the outdoor market in the town's main square.

Like many Central and South American countries, Ecuador takes traditional healing seriously. Indeed, within the country's health ministry there's a Bureau of Indigenous Health that respects the place of traditional healing in the lives of populations like the Quechua while providing access to and education about modern medical resources.

In Latacunga I ate guinea pig -- cuys -- which, of course, tasted like chicken. I later learned that cuys is also used in traditional medicine. A healer passes guinea pig innards over a sick person, then examines the innards for nasty or unhealthy-looking spots. The corresponding spots in the person are then treated. Herbs, amulets, cinnamon, dried banana peels and chocolate are used as remedies.

In Ecuador, over 900 plants are used in traditional medicine, mainly to treat psychological ailments, respiratory disorders, urinary tract problems, fever, malaria, rheumatism and conditions of the nervous system. Indigenous Ecuadorans believe that illness is primarily a social phenomenon brought on by poor relations with friends, family, one's community -- and with nature. Not properly honoring Pacha Mama, Mother Earth, can make you ill.

Your shaman might prescribe a trip to the local healing vendors for a pinch of this and a pinch of that. While you're perusing the aisles of bright-colored bags stuffed with plants and herbs, be careful not to trip over the 12-foot-long dried snake skin or the jaguar pelts.

I was saddened to see the pelts. There are only some 50,000 big cats of the species Panthera Onca left in the Americas, and I was standing in the Latacunga market staring down at the remnants of at least a dozen of them.


Made me feel sick.




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Alpena: Dairy Queen and mini-golf

In this excerpt from Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America, the kids and I make ourselves at home at a funky hotel in friendly Alpena, Michigan:

"You are an intrepid woman!” said Susan, as she pushed her chair back from the desk in the small office of her Water’s Edge Motel to get a better look at me and the kids. We liked each other instantly. She was a 50-something pistol with firecracker-red hair. She talked fast when she wanted to, slow when she wanted to, and she looked you right in the eye. Her drapy cotton clothes- loose trousers and shirt in a turquoise print more Maui than Michigan – were the sartorial equivalent of downtown Alpena’s crayon-colored homes and businesses.

Susan sized us up and rented us a room, the $60 end unit closest to Lake Huron, with a bench outside. She wanted to know where we’d been, what we’d seen. She asked the kids what they thought of it all and smiled knowingly at the “It’s okay,” and “I like it. It’s good.” She looked back up at me and nodded. As I signed the credit card slip, she pushed her chair back again, and looked at the three of us. Then she looked Adam and Dana in the eye. “These are times you’ll never get back with these kids,” words aimed at all of us.

The Water’s Edge sat at the water’s edge, on its own stretch of sand, and right next to the public beach at Mich-E-Ke-Wis Park. We saw Susan all the time, as she lived in a green cinderblock bunker-like structure to whose rear was attached the straight line of modest motel units, of which ours sat closest to Susan’s personal space, closest to the lake. Susan’s house, which looked homemade, was a beautiful thing to me. The funky bunker sat right on the beach and had a killer view of Thunder Bay, and Susan had a big rectangular window from which she could watch the moods of Lake Huron at all hours, in all seasons. I imagined a conversation between Susan and her husband 10, 20, or however many years ago, after they’d tapped the last cinderblock into place and nailed down the roof. Susan would probably have started the conversation.

“We should paint it.”

“What color?”

“Green.”

“Dark green?”

“No, something wild and sea-foamy, like Huron all whipped up. I’ll go find something.”

And then, I imagined her in the paint store, passing the quiet greens, and emerging with gallons of something called, maybe, Tropical Great Lakes Green, like the color of the Maui-Michigan pantsuit that worked so well with her blaze of orange hair.

We made the Water’s Edge and the spaces and places near it our little universe. The kids were free to roam around, up to but not including stepping into Huron unless I was with them. There was plenty to keep them busy while I brought my journal up to date and did laundry. The park, the beach, a Dairy Queen, and, the mini-golf that I could see from our room’s bathroom window.

Every half hour or so, Adam, Dana or both would burst into the room (made into a commodious accommodation by the keep-door-open-park-New-Paint- right-outside method) and ask for more money for golf and video games. Adam spent a fortune in quarters in the arcade, trying to win a free round of golf. When they were all golfed out, we went to the beach, just as the lifeguards were calling it a day and packing up the rescue surfboard. At 7 p.m., it was still over 70 degrees, and a big ball of orange sun the color of Susan’s hair still lit the calm, indigo water. “You can wade out there for quite awhile,” she’d told me, “before you have to make any decisions.” Dana, who’d been our official Great Lakes water temperature tester, pronounced Huron, “this part of it, anyway,” the warmest of any she’d sampled.

Susan’s big, logy dog had pooped all over the little patch of grass that separated the motel parking lot from the beach, grass which served as a parking lot for her motorboat, the Susan. We picked our way carefully around the boat and the dog droppings as we came and went. Susan took note of our comings and goings.

“You have great kids.”

“I do. Thanks for saying so. They are pretty cool. The kind of kids you can live in a minivan with for a whole summer. We’ve made it to Michigan, and we still like each other.”

“I wish they’d gotten to see the turkey vultures we’ve had lately. Or the deer. I get deer on my lawn sometimes. And a great blue heron my husband calls Mister Blue. And, I hoped you’d be lucky enough to see a freighter. They call regularly, and it’s quite impressive as they come into the bay.”

I wished we’d seen all those things, too, and said so, but added, “The Dairy Queen, the mini-golf and the beach were enough for the kids. Just what the doctor ordered at this point in the trip. They had a lot of fun.”

“The mini-golf is a good neighbor. Nice and quiet.”

I told Susan I loved Alpena and felt lucky we’d come upon this fine place as we came into the homestretch of our American journey. It was a perfect near-ending, an ideal finishing touch. (Had we invoked the interstate escape clause when we’d reached the mitten, we would have missed it.) “I’ll always remember Alpena. It’s the kind of place I could live in.”

Susan smiled and looked out at Huron. “People say kids from Alpena spend their first twenty years thinkin’ about how to get out, and the next twenty years thinkin’ about how to get back in.”

Other people think about getting in, too. “We get lots of retirees movin’ in, because it’s cheap. They’re all snowbirds. Drive their RVs to Arizona in the winter.” She shook her head. “I can’t see sittin’ around in a lawn chair.” No, Susan’s ideal winter is spent right there in Alpena, watching out her big rectangular window for the Great Lakes freighters that anchor close to Thunder Bay to wait out the freeze in Superior. An ice cutter could make Alpena’s Huron port accessible, but they don’t bother, because “the water starts to flow again in February.”

In the morning, I sat on the bench outside the room and laced up my sneakers in the still-dark, and, by the time I’d stretched, a glorious red-orange sun had started to ascend from the watery horizon. I ran to the orb’s rising and watched it gain height, degree by degree, splashing magnificent shafts of colored light across Huron’s surface as it climbed, slowly turning dawn to day. I watched it detach itself from the horizon and become a full and colossal tangerine, a blood orange hanging great and ripe over the gentle swells of the vast lake.

After the run, Susan caught me leaning against New Paint, stretching. “My, what a fit specimen.” That made an old chick feel good. I’d loved her when she’d called me intrepid. Now, I wanted to take her home. She asked if we’d slept well.

“Slept well, and rose well. I just watched a magnificent sunrise.”She turned to the lake. “That’s why we could never leave.”


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www.LoriHein.com

Tiananmen: Don't sit down

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Chinese government crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, a crackdown that killed hundreds.

June 4, 1989 was a bad day in Tiananmen, but the vast space, the largest city square in the world, is strange and unwelcoming even on its best.

If the builders' intent was to create a space that glorifies government power and makes people feel small, insignificant and even intimidated, they succeeded.

You can't get comfortable in Tiananmen Square. Its endless, nearly-benchless concrete screams, You can't relax here. It's forbidden. Keep moving! Don't gather. Don't congregate. Don't stop to chat. The folks in the photo at left had nabbed the only bench I saw in the square's entire sterile 440,000 square meters.

The only places in Tiananmen where I saw people congregating were in the long queues outside Mao's tomb.

I'd planned to picnic in Tiananmen but found no comfortable place to sit, so I squatted on a concrete curb near the mausoleum and ate my can of sardines while watching uniformed attendants with megaphones shout orders to the waiting tomb-goers to keep them in straight lines.

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Kids'-eye view of Europe

Dana and her friends enjoy camaraderie and a view of Venice.

Click here to read a story I wrote for the local paper about some of the high points of the kids' recent European adventure: cute gondoliers; rest areas with fresh fruit and pastry; never giving up on using Spanish with Austrians and Italians; and listening to "sick" chamber music in Mozart's hometown.



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