I made it to Florida!
Blending in
OK, so I made it to Florida in 1993. But that doesn’t count for the purpose of my scratch map since I wasn’t blogging anything at the time, and my main memory is getting yelled at by my parents just because I tried to stick my hairbush into the electrical socket. So last week I tried again, visiting Randi’s cousins in the Miami area. Special thanks to Sandy, Corey, Logan and Landon for hosting us, especially as their back garden looks like this:
Not too shabby
Also pretty nice at sunset
As always, places which are luxurious to visit do not always make for practical living. On the first day we lazed by the pool until lunchtime when we decided to pop out for a bite. The nearest restaurant was an hour’s walk away, during which we saw precisely zero other people on the pavement. (To be fair, at least there was pavement the whole way… I’m looking at you, Skokie.) On the way back, the security guard at the entrance to the estate looked astonished that anyone might turn up on foot, waving us through the gate built for cars with the uncertain salutation to “walk safely, I guess…?”.
I call it the milk test: never live anywhere which isn’t a 10 minute walk away from a shop selling milk.
At the beach
The next day we hung out in Miami Beach, which is technically a different ‘city’ to Miami but is (a) just over the bridge (b) probably what most tourists think is Miami anyway. Unsurprising it is warm, sunny and wonderful to walk down the public beach, admire the historic art deco hotels and wash down Cuban food with a pitcher of sangria. Much more surprisingly, but somehow even better, is the fact that the city is dotted with free public suncream dispensers! Suddenly this seems like the most obvious thing in the world, and I am surprised I have never seen it before.
Miami, you’ve impressed me with your public health programme.
Free suncream!
The Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach
More soberingly, we also visited the city’s Holocaust Memorial. There isn’t much to say abut this other than it’s worth seeing if you are ever in the area. (Especially if you have a job in the Trump administration.)
Later, we briefly stopped by Miami-proper to visit the Wynwood Walls before going home. On Saturday, it was time for a brand new American experience: the high school ‘track meet’. I’m starting to doubt myself, but I’m pretty sure this is not the norm for the UK. I mean, sure, there was a low-key school football team and I’m sure some of their parents and friends turned up for matches. But this is a different level of school pride, which is both kinda nice and rather strange. (Doesn’t school stop at the weekends?) Either way, we got to see Landon’s relay team triumph in their race (go Sharks!) before recuperating from all of this vicarious exercise at the beach club.
Automation in action
Sportz
More sportz
The Cat in the Hat
Wait, who is that adorable child up above? She is Randi’s newest cousin, and reason enough to visit. As a bonus we got to spend our final day with her and her dad Greg at a free Dr. Seuss festival, hanging out with the Cat in the Hat, Thing 1 and Thing 2. I’ll be honest: as a child, I wasn’t a fan of their anarchic ways, and was very much on the side of the law-abiding fish instead. But I suspect we have both mellowed over time, especially now that the Cat in the Hat has all of these public appearances to make.
Florida = done. Again.
Hamilton
I know you read this blog for its hip cultural commentary, so let me take you to the very cutting edge of 2015 and tell you about this musical Hamilton…
Yes, OK, I’m not breaking new ground here. But after picking up some spare tickets from Jason back in August (thanks!) I finally got to see it for myself tonight, and it was totally worth the wait. It’s enormous fun, full of life and takes aim at (highly overrated) Thomas Jefferson… what more do you want from a night out? I highly recommend extending some Hamilton-style credit to secure a ticket and then passing the following months by reading up on The Federalist before you go. (Or you could just listen to the songs like everyone else does.)
Oh, and George III has great dress sense.
Last Friday night I also saw A Disappearing Number, a play about the (entirely self-taught) Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and his collaboration with G.H. Hardy at Cambridge in the 1910s. I haven’t seen such a celebration of pure mathematics since Mr. Bauer jumped on the table of our GCSE class, and it was wonderful. Ramanujan’s most famous equation demonstrates that the infinite sum of 1+2+3… etc. is ‘equal’ to –1⁄12, and I found this baffling enough to do some extensive research ask Katie for help. She pointed me to a controversial Numberphile video, and naturally I shared this with Jason and Carrie the next day (poor things had no idea what they were letting themselves in for). Jason took offence at some of the mathematical slights of hand, and before you know it I had to summon Katie onto Skype and hold up bits of paper with equations written out for her to judge.
Katie tries to bring peace
If you’re out there, theatre people, you should feel very proud of the reaction you caused.
Finally, on Saturday night it was a pleasure to watch The Godfather at Todd and Carolyn’s in a much overdue Salon with Robert and Julie plus the much-missed Shelby and Benno. Todd served us up a delicious meal beforehand, as we sat around a proper table drinking proper wine and talking about proper adult things. And while my main memory of The Godfather from six years ago (I checked) is that it’s a bloody long film, Randi and I both enjoyed it much more than we expected this time around, and we’re already agitating for the sequel.
Addendum
Starved Rock
Some late-night blogging was necessary yesterday in order to jot this all down before flying off to <mystery destination> tonight. Unfortunately, this also introduced a few errors. Not only did I misstate the sum of Ramanujan’s infinite series (now corrected) but I also neglected our weekend trip with Randi’s mum to the Starved Rock state park. We stayed overnight at an AirBnB in the ‘city’ of Henry, Illinois… you can tell it’s not a real city because the owner told us that we were free to lock the front door at night if we wanted to, as if it were a foreign superstition she was happy to indulge but didn’t really understand. Oh, and the park was sunny! Sunny and warm and full of people, only a few of whom choosing to play music out loud from speakers as they walked around.
Donald Trump isn’t good for much, but he has undoubtedly improved Second City. It’s been a few years since I last saw a show there (and yes, that’s a strange thing to write) but I went back earlier this month and the whole thing is much tighter, angrier and more coherent than it used to be. I found it funnier as a result, too, though I’m sure it’s more polarising than the grab bag assortment of sketches which it used to be. Randi and I went with Villy (last seen in London) and her mother, both of whom belong to the comforting class of people who understand visa rules and immigration law in casual conversation.
Randi and Villy and books
In the past few weeks I also made two important introductions which have been a long time in the making. Firstly, at long last, Todd has sat down and watched an episode of Doctor Who. In an attempt to appeal to him as a television connoisseur I opted for the very first one, in all of its magnificent black and white glory from 1963. It’s just so good! While at Todd and Carolyn’s I also fulfilled my completionist desire to finish off the Indiana Jones films with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, even though everyone warned me beforehand that it wasn’t worth it. Everyone was right.
The second introduction needs only this photo:
We finally got Robert to play Carcassonne!
Otherwise I’ve just been catching up on Sherlock with Catherine, booking exciting trips so that future posts can benefit from more interesting photos and celebrating Valentine’s Day at La Scarola, which needs no improvement whatsoever. In a romantic gesture, I muted the ‘glamily’ for the duration of the meal. This is a giant family WhatsApp chat which has also sprung up in recent weeks: 35 somehow-connected cousins around the world draining each others’ battery lives at all hours. It’s great. It’s absurd. This is how cults start. Clearly we need another wedding.
Cross-checking Article V
Did you know that there are two things which cannot be amended in the US Constitution via the usual amendment process? I did, because it came up in The Federalist Papers, and now Todd does too, because I quizzed him on it after he presented me with a pocket copy sometime after Shake Shack on a classy Friday night. One is that the importation of slaves cannot be banned until 1808, which should give pause to anyone trusting in its timeless wisdom. The other is that states cannot be deprived of equal representation in the Senate without their consent.
As far as I can see, there’s nothing to stop you just amending the amendment process itself to remove these restrictions, although at that point it might be quicker and cheaper to just invoke the ‘self-evident’ right of ‘the People’ to ‘alter or abolish’ any government which becomes destructive to their life, liberty or ‘pursuit of happiness’.
If you think this reads a bit silly, and leaves out important practical questions like “well does the government have a lot of tanks at its disposal to crush me with?” and “wait, which people exactly count as the People and who decides that?” then congratulations, you have successfully problematised the Declaration of Independence. You also might be the kind of person who enjoys playing Secret Hitler, an excellent bluffing game which Jason funded way back when on Kickstarter and has finally arrived in our lives in a fancy wooden box. Most players are liberals but some are secretly fascists, and their aim is to manipulate the others into enacting fascist policies and electing Hitler as Chancellor. As I say, it’s great, and their website also has an appropriate level of snark:
Hah.
Commuting life: the Caltrain to Palo Alto
Anyway…. apart from playing board games (7 Wonders! Dominion! Carcassonne, obviously!) and setting up a special mailbox in Germany to forward limited-edition Carcassonne tiles from eBay.de to myself (the less said about this the better) I also spent a week this month working out of the Palo Alto office. Rather than staying in Palo Alto itself, which does have a certain logic behind it, I decided to commute on the Caltrain from San Francisco each day. This came at the cost of early mornings but was otherwise a great move, both because it made an excellent reading time and because I could hang out in San Francisco with both Nolan and Jamie on various evenings after work. (And to see Nolan convene a deputation to the office’s ever-changing frozen yoghurt selection is to watch real leadership in action.)
Jamie kindly shared the last jelly doughnut
Finally, in Chicago I had a good night out with new colleagues Arpan, Pedro, Ibs and Joey and also saw Psychonaut Librarians with Randi at our favourite theatre. It’s about… a group of librarians who must venture into the magical Anyverse, defeat the Sandman and bring a girl and a sort-of-boy-but-not-really-a-person together? Yes, this one was a little too absurdist to be one of my favourites (years and years ago I read a review of a particularly surreal episode of The Prisoner on this topic which stuck with me), but the characters were engaging and it was enjoyable to whizz through.
Last word to the jelly doughnut.
Welcome to Cusco!
Streets not optimised for cars
If you’re looking for the most magical place to be for the first light of Christmas Day, I can attest that it’s definitely not inside an Avianca plane cabin. (For one thing, there are a noticeable lack of chimneys for Father Christmas to use.) But I gladly took the sacrifice when it meant arriving in Cusco on Christmas morning. The capital of the Incan Empire, Inc. for several hundred years before the Spanish arrived, and now in modern-day Peru, Cusco is nestled between mountains at an altitude of 3400m and the very first thing a hotel will give you at check-in – literally before a room key – is a cup of coca leaf tea to help with any altitude sickness. (Fact: the majority of the Wikipedia article on coca tea is dedicated to comparing this to a line of cocaine.)
So we took our first couple of days in Cusco relatively easy, trying alpaca meat (tough and chewy) and Ají de Gallina (absolutely delicious) and pondering why all of the ‘stray’ dogs looked so well fed. (Turns out they’re not stray at all, they just wander freely.) We also took a city tour which included the Incan sites of Coricancha and Saksaywaman, but mostly we prepared for the main event: our four-day Lares Trek with Lorenzo Expeditions.
My favourite wall. (I mean it.)
Amazingly, we were the only people on the expedition… not including our (amazing) guide, Bruno. Or our personal chef Andrés, who made actual magic happen several times a day. Or the two guys who led the horses carrying all of our stuff. Or the dog which spontaneously came along for one of the day hikes. So, OK, maybe we were pampered. But it was still the most adventurous holiday I’ve had, passing through remote Andean mountain villages at a rising altitude until we reached a summit of 4400m and I checked to see if I could still breathe any oxygen. (No such problems for any other adults, or the children who came running at the promise of sweets, or the llamas merrily skipping from hill to hill. Sigh.)
It was all so beautiful, and all the effort so worthwhile, in a way which I really can’t capture well enough on this blog. The only experience I wouldn’t recommend to others is camping during a lightning storm, which terrified my wussy self deep into a sleeping bag for hours until it finally stopped. (Surely you shouldn’t be able to see the flashes with your eye closed?)
Trekking through the Andes
These children had zero problems running around at high altitude
Suave camping selfie
All you need in life is a poncho
At the summit, 4400m up!
This dog won me over with its body heat
Indiana Lawrence
By the time we arrived at the town of Aguas Calientes (by train!) we felt very little pressure about our visit to Machu Picchu the next morning. Everything had already been so breathtaking that ticking off this most-hyped of tourist destinations would just be the icing on the cake, although it’s fair to say that Bruno didn’t share our relaxed attitude and herded us onto the very first bus up the hill at ridiculous am. Also – and this will sound stupid – I don’t think I ever really thought about what Machu Picchu actually was beyond ‘that one photo’ which everyone takes (mine is below, don’t worry). So, expectations nicely lowered, it was even more wonderful to be led around this incredible Incan citadel in the early morning mist.
In case you hadn’t seen this shot before
Not posing – genuinely this steep
A huge thank you to Francisco, who heard about this trip in the planning stage and insisted I book tickets to climb Wayna Picchu too. The stairs were sometimes steep, but behind me was a young American girl who was singing patriotic American songs and wondering loudly if she was the youngest person ever to reach the top, which gave me a great incentive to keep going and never ever turn back. (I promised Savanna I would include my somewhat petulant dig at this perfectly innocent child in this post, which only exposes my ungenerous spirit.) Anyway, the view from the top is suitably fantastic. If you go to Machu Picchu you should do this too.
Misleadingly, this isn’t quite the top of Wayna Picchu
If you’re looking to rev up a party atmosphere on New Year’s Eve, an Avianca plane cabin is again the wrong choice. But arrive in Quito, Ecuador and you will witness a plethora of New Year festivities on the ride back from the airport: men dressed enthusiastically as women, effigies of the old year ready to burn and – somewhat alarmingly – masked children blockading the street with skipping ropes until they are paid off for their ‘dancing’. (The dancing seemed to be mostly nominal – I think it was all about the blockades.) After a quick recce around the historical centre and danced (well, Randi danced) to the rumba music, we partied hard until the early hours went to bed at 8am.
Welcome to Quito!
Most of my advance reading about Quito was of the ‘how to get mugged in the street’ variety, but we had no trouble at all in our (admittedly limited) walks around the small historic district. Quito is really huge in total, however, and the best way to appreciate this is by riding the TelefériQo gondola lift up to the top of the volcano which overlooks the city. You can also hike around in the clouds up here, which was a fine way to spend the first morning of 2017. The next day we learnt more about the history of the city through another walking tour, including a lesson in chocolate making and the weekly changing of the guards in the main square. The President was supposed to come out and wave from the balcony of the Presidential palace at this point, but he failed to make an appearance. Typical Ecuadorian elite.
We got excited by the fast food options
At the top of the TelefériQo
I could go on and on about my first trip to South America, but I’ll stop before I get too sad about being back. tldr: it was great. You should go. Go right now.
Beth E . Dubowe-Lawrence on China, Part 3: Chongqing & Chengdu: “Again an awesome adventure to share this with you” Apr 21, 19:13
