Ta-Ta and Hello

Here's a nice piece by a New York Times correspondent about returning to the US after a long-term (18 years!) stint as an expat. Sarah Lyall was based in London, so her most of her anecdotes focus on Englishness, but many of the America-vs.-Europe comparisons would apply to Germany and other countries as well.

Enjoy!

Ta-Ta, London. Hello, Awesome.

Glen Hansard in Berlin

Glen Hansard is a phenomenon every single time. Even in the pouring rain, even in a sea of umbrellas.

I'd try to list highlights, but basically everything was a highlight: the old songs, the new songs, the covers (Bruce Springsteen...Kraftwerk...Van Morrison...The Pixies...the man can quite literally do anything), as well as the strange, wonderful stories he tells as song introductions, and just the sheer fun the band was having together.

Also, this song:

Road or River?

Nonstop torrential rain one morning while I was in Ithaca caused impressive flash flooding on South Meadow Street. (This is Ithaca's unfortunate big-box-store strip, and the flooding is a prime example of why paving over wetlands is never a great idea!)

Anyway, this picture doesn't do it justice, but there were long lines of cars backed up in both directions to ford the section of the road that was under some quite deep water – definitely the deepest I've forded outside of Iceland and an Icelandic river-fording truck!

Ithaca Airport: Now Boarding through the Side Door

 Oh, Ithaca Tompkins Regional Airport. So small that the planes have propellers.

(I gotta say, though, the airline employees at the Ithaca airport are probably the nicest and most helpful I've dealt with anywhere. That's a perk to being tiny! And another one is that there's not exactly a long line to go through security...)


Flight to Philadelphia now boarding through gate... actually, you know what, just come out this side door.

The Comfiest Bus Stop

A bus stop in Ithaca, complete with armchair and lamp (and a friend for scale).

Grassroots in Pictures

Here's the full album of my pictures from the Grassroots Festival:

Grassroots 2013

Including Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell, some amazing musicians from Mali, and pictures of my lovely family.

Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell at Grassroots

Emmylou Harris!


Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell right here at Grassroots, my hometown music festival.

!


I was this close to the stage:

And this close to them:

And right in front of the pedal steel player, unavoidably exchanging the occasional smile as he played, since after all I was right in front of him:

(And I swear there was a point, too, where Emmylou was looking right at me and I just couldn't help starting to smile, and she started to smile too.)

After the show, the mid-40s-ish guy next to me – we were both hanging around, hoping to snag a setlist from the show – told me, about Emmylou, "She's usually happy to chat... You can go on the bus..." Then he shook his head and said in a tone of wonder, "Last time, my wife let me go on the bus."

So I was hoping I'd be able to find her and maybe even ask her to sign a CD, but the backstage area was confusing and performer-wristband-only access, and then the sky opened up and sent an absolutely drenching deluge down, so there was no way anyone was going to be standing outside chatting and signing autographs.

But I got this!

(I also took a video of one particularly lovely duet, but can't get it to post to this blog. Technology fail... as in, I fail at technology and at being of my own generation.)

Kindercafés and Squirrels

Oh, gosh: I'm back at the café a block from my sublet in Ithaca, doing some work on my laptop, and a woman at the next table over is telling a friend this idea she has for a café where you could bring babies and kids, and there would be a corner with toys and things, and the kids could play and the parents could get a chance to have an actual conversation with another adult while the kids are occupied.

...Seriously, does this not exist here?? This is the business model for half the cafés I know in Berlin, everything from regular cafés that also have a small play corner, to dedicated "parent-child cafés" with ball pits and balloons and play equipment and events and even daycare offered during certain hours.

If no one has thought to do this yet in the US, then I suggest someone does, because they could make a killing.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Unrelatedly – but delightfully – the other day I was walking through the neighborhood to my parents' house and passed three people chatting on the sidewalk. Just as I went by, one guy was telling the other two, "I was driving to work and a crow flew over my car... It had a baby squirrel in its mouth and it dropped it on my windshield."

Yes...he was driving to work, when a crow dropped a baby squirrel on his windshield.

I didn't want to hang around the corner too long and too obviously eavesdropping, but I stayed long enough to hear that the squirrel survived the fall, apparently, and the man was on his way to work, but called in some woman he knew of who specializes in wildlife rehabilitation, to see to the squirrel.

!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Come to think of it, those two stories actually are linked, through the common theme of me eavesdropping on other people's conversations. Oops. Time to get back to work!

Ithaca: Hot Days and Cold Coffee

Heat wave, ahoy!

I'm in Ithaca now, and when I got home yesterday around 4pm, it was about 93° Fahrenheit (34° C) but officially "feels like 105" (40.5°C). Oh, so that's why it was so unpleasant this afternoon biking around town doing errands!

Seems like maybe I picked the wrong week to decide I need to get serious about jogging again. Possibly.

(But twice now I've jogged to the top of Ithaca's steep Buffalo Street, just to see if I could. I can. Yay!)

Here and there, I've jotted down thoughts about being back here, but it's been so busy that nothing's really coalesced. So just scattered notes, like:

Heh. Those several moments spent trying to find the stove lighter, before realizing, Oh! This stove lights itself.

An apartment door that only locks behind you if you lock it! Why hasn't Germany caught on to this? (The joke in Germany – where you pull the door shut and it locks, but then you have to use your key to turn the deadbolt, so it's properly locked and harder to break into – is that if you just pull the door shut behind you, you'll be locked out, but thieves will still be able to get in easily.)

Every time I come to the US, I either forget to take ID to bars, or forget that open containers aren't allowed outside. Or both.

High 80s and 90s heat every day, yikes! (How come my building in Berlin is thick-walled, solidly built and cool no matter how hot outside, but upstate New York – which actually needs that kind of construction – doesn't have it?)

Enjoying: Ithaca, friends, lovely neighbors. Wondering: Why have I still not learned that full-time visiting-back-home-seeing-everyone-etc. + full-time long-distance working is not a good recipe for sanity?

Accidentally maximized my July 4th fireworks, since Oberlin's were before the 4th and Ithaca's were after.

Can't take a step around these parts without running into an old friend or aquaintance. Literally! Especially my first day in town: First I did some work from one café, where I saw various folks I knew or recognized, then went around the corner for a bagel and ran straight into an old middle school friend, who I probably hadn't seen in about that long. Reminisced for a bit over bagels.

Weddings count so far: Two down, one to go! (But the one still to go is the one I came here for.)

Oh, and thanks to the weather I've been experimenting with iced coffee – it turns out cold-brewed coffee is really good! – and now with iced Earl Grey tea (normal-brewed, but served chilled, with ice and lemon). Mm. One benefit to this insane heat wave.

Russia=Commies; Romania=Dracula, etc., etc.

Well, this is fun!

A Bulgarian designer has created a book of satirical maps laying out in visual form the stereotypes that different nations hold about each other – you can see them at the Mapping Stereotypes site itself, or a selection in a Spiegel photo gallery (Spiegel understandably focuses on specifically European clichés).

(For example, in "Europe According to the French": traditional enemy the UK="Slayers of Virgins," and Russia="Napoleon's Dream"... Italy="Noisy Friendly People" and Greece="Noisy Hairy People"... while both Switzerland and Belgium count as "Semi-France" and Turkey as "Definitely Not Europeans." All of Northern Africa is simply "France Woz Here.")

The Mapping Stereotypes page also features various permutations of "The World According to the USA," which can seem alarmingly accurate (Eastern Africa="Hunger & Stuff," except of course for the part just labeled "Pirates.")

Take it with a grain of salt, of course, but they're really kinda fun.