Walking down memory lane

 Hi! This is just to say hi, and I am still here. I'm glad my writings for over a decade are still out there.   I feel lucky to have been born when I was, as I got to experience traveling in a world without the internet and iPhones.  In 1996, I traveled the world for six months, carrying what was known as the Orange Bible.  If I recall correctly, the Lonely Planet Guide had an orange cover covering the world on how to get places and where to stay inexpensively.  I had access to one through Greece, Egypt, and for a bit on the West side of India.  In my head, it belonged to my friend Joanne.  When we parted ways in India, she went to Nepal, and I continued through Northern India, but I no longer had access to it.  Having no guide in India was an adventure all its own.  But I befriended fellow mostly Australian travelers and other Indians who helped me find my way.  I can see the caves of Ajanta of large painted Buddhas in colors like those found in the Egyptian pyramids.  And getting to Udaipur, watching women with blue-covered heads and tiny babies sitting beside them doing dishes outside their homes in a blue plastic tub.   I can also vividly see the water lilies in the ponds in Udaipur.  It's also where I was bitten by a bug on my neck.  The bite started out small but seemed to be burning through my skin and getting larger and larger.  I was adopted by an Indian couple who provided an ointment and told me I needed to go to a big city for an English-speaking doctor.  Udaipur had million people and recall needing to ask what is a big city to them - of course they meant Dehli. In traveling to Dehli, I remember seeing jewels in Jaipur, a tiger in Rajasthan, the Taj Mahal, of course, and Diwali celebrations where the maharaja on horseback rode down from the mountain amid thousands to send a flaming bow into a huge paper mache like a monster.  The owner of the house I was at took me in a 1950s American war jeep, and there I met some boys who were on an international exchange from the University of Iowa.  It can indeed feel like a small world at times.  The crowd was big and large and uncontrolled, it felt dangerous but freeing in a way.  I remember talking to a researcher studying the caste system and having Indian guides show me kingfishers snakes, and tigers.  I sat with them as they drank chai - chai had not come to America quite yet so it felt foreign and it was good.  They showed me American Express travelers checks they had been given - one was 1000 dollars!  They had no way of getting the money from these travelers checks themselves.  I sometimes remember the smells being sweat-putrid with a hint of incense and roses and being invited as a guest to a wedding where they wanted me to drink some water from the tap which would have made me very sick. Or the bus rides where they played Bollywood movies with the women in wet saris all night.  Having blonde hair, I would get asked to be in family pictures of Indian families on vacation.  In one place, I was surrounded by 100's of kids yelling at me, and this old man came and shooed them away so I could be on my way.  I am not exaggerating here. I am unsure what would have happened if he had not come.  I think the best memories are the ones where Indian families were invited for dinners - this happened at least three times.  It was interesting to see how they shopped, cooked, and the customs of kindness and politeness.  My biggest regret was turning down the opportunity to travel with an Indian who wanted to show me his hometown where the Dali Lama was staying. Still, at that point, I knew my senses had been assaulted enough, and being younger, I may not have had the resilience I know I have today.   The biggest takeaway was seeing how people in Indian befriended strangers to help them when they neeed to help, to care for strangers and they would their families.  I remember returning to San Fran stateside and to an Iowan San Fran, which was a strange place.  A place where they had magazines with psychics.  I remember being on a small white tour bus to see the city, and an American family got on and took all the window seats and were very loud  And I recall thinking - the Indian families I had met would not have done that.  They would want to sit together as a unit and share. 

From termites to antibiotics

While sipping coffee and admiring another beautiful sunrise, J & I noticed some strange small tubes growing out of the ground. We had never seen anything like it before and I instantly thought termites! Not being a big fan of bugs I instantly called Terminex. I described to them these clumps of tubes about four centimeters, gray and brown with something that looked like seeds in them surrounding our baby lemon tree. The person on the phone sounded skeptical regarding the identification but proceeded to arrange for an appointment later in the week.

I then snapped a photo and submitted to google search and this returned nothing but pictures of rattlesnakes. Admittedly for a few minutes I wondered if the black specs could be rattlesnake eggs. Quickly moving past this irrationally, I returned to learning all that I could about termites for the better part of the afternoon. Unfortunately nothing about termites matched the description of our mystery tubes. I had to resign myself to waiting for Terminex's arrival.

Alas our neighbor walked by and I had an "aha"! He happens to be an expert in microbiology and bugs in our area and I urgently expressed we were in need of his expertise . After a few moments of digging, smelling, poking, pulling, crushing, he said, "Um I think this is just a fungus and this looks to be the kind that produces antibiotics. I might have my students come back and take a sample of it. We are studying this sort of thing." He later confirmed this later and told us the common name of it was, "Dung lover's bird's nest." A fungus that grows in soil with manure just like the name suggests. Well I did mix in compost with our regular soil this year and I will reluctantly leave it there for the students to test aware. Maybe one day I can garden and grow my own antibiotics just like lettuce.

Wishing I were in Paris!

Hi Just revisting my blog and enjoying the memories. This is the first summer in Santa Cruz. It's been very very nice.

Sunset beams over Paris

From our beautiful Paris balcony, this beautiful sunset on our last weekend here.

Today is also a very special day for the long - awaited LHC. (link here) The first beam will happen today at 9:o6 Paris time. There is live coverage all day. The Paris news has had been reporting about it for the last few days. Yesterday there were three articles in Le Monde. It's an exciting day for the scientists.

This is my last entry reporting about Paris and France from Paris as I leave in a few hours or as the French say, I will be starting my rentree. Undoubtedly at home we will still be basking in the afterglow and there is still is so much to tell! I hope I find the time to share those stories with you. The things I know I will miss the most can't be packed in a suitcase.

Signing off at 8:11AM.
A bientot!

Start Spreading the News!

Start spreading the news, Im leaving Wednesday!
I want to stay apart of it - Par-ee, Par-ee
These vagabond shoes, are longing to stay
Riding the metro every which way. Par-ee, Par-ee

I wanna watch strangers in the park, soak in the art
And find I'm on top of the Eiffel!

These Eiffel tower blues, are sparkly at night
I'll savor every last bit of it in old Paree, Paree!
If I can eat creme brulee and soak in champagne
It's been fun in - Par-ee Par-ee

Credits - Inspiration given to Frank Sinatra's NY, NY.

You can find a little bit of New York in Paris but the city does sleep. After 7PM you have to travel to the airport's 24 hour grocery store to buy milk or any other forgotten item or wait until 9AM tomorrow. There are laws on how many hours people can work and this is taken very seriously.

To make you feel top of the heap there is nothing else like the champagne bar at the top of the Eiffel Tour. You feel you are in the heart of it from the top seeing that white city on a sunny afternoon. On the way down you can take your tea on the first floor, sunbathing on the teak lounge chairs and palm trees and the view will continue to remove any of the blues that may be left in you.

The Eiffel is blue with the stars on it for the next six months in celebration that France is the President of the E.U. I call this the Eiffel's blue period. On the hour in the evenings for 10 minutes the sparkles go! It's the most sparkling thing I have ever seen!

Martian Invasion!

Beware! Martian men and women wearing green suits and ties may invade the Paris metro, bus or tram you are on! As the tram or bus stop, the martian gang will swarm the entrances like bees to honey looking for passengers without a valid ticket. In an almost orchestrated dance they board and demand you show a valid boarding ticket. Some escape and some do not. These martians will lurk in the metro halls and block all the unsuspecting humans until a valid ticket is produced. None can escape their clutches. Even those who start to run the opposite direction. I had watched many attack on the metro and trams. It's quite a site to see! A few times this summer, J. & I have had our close encounters and with their fancy machines checked our Navigo passes. Luckily we passed and we were set free.

Gotta Share an Eclair! - Act 2: From Gilded Eclairs to the Golden Arches

This blog entry is in honor of the new little one in the family, Madeline! (for those not in the know, my cousin had a baby early last week.)

On Saturday, J. & I metroed over to Place de la Madeleine to review the Fouchon eclair weekend. See previous blog entry Gotta Share an Eclair. In summary the eclairs' taste and presentation lived up to its promise but the in-house dining experience was disappointing. Fouchon's is an upscale gourmet shop where all the food is displayed like art and treated the same.


After a week of dreaming about the aromas of fresh baked eclairs like in an American donut shop when the donuts are fresh out of the fryer, it was disappointing to enter through the pink tinted sliding glass doors and smell something akin to the humidity of museum air. The pink tinted sliding glass doors was like looking through rose colored glasses. So what the shop lacked in aromas, they made up for in the presentation. The eclairs sat as art protected behind a clear plexi-glass counter-top like the Mona Lisa in the Louvre behind her bullet proof shield. This eclair art was priced like art too and cost as much as our bottle of Head & Shoulder's at $7/piece.



For breakfast we ordered a coconut ganache eclair, chocolate mousse eclair and gilded eclair! I don't believe I have ever had the opportunity to eat gold. We decided to eat in the outdoor street - side cafe with pink tables and chairs. The eclairs were laid out on a pink plastic tray and we were given two silver plastic forks. It just didn't seem right to be eating an eclair frosted with gold upon a plastic tray and with plastic forks. It just didn't do justice to the beautiful regal eclair. That's all the gold did for the eclair too. The gold did not add a metal crunch nor add any flavor. The fork easily cut through like a lightly frosted cake. The taste of the eclairs was good but not out of this world.

For lunch we ordered a chicken curry and smoked salmon with peas to go. Each eclair was crated like a piece of art into their own special pink boxes and wrapped in pretty packages.

Afterwards, we walked around Place de la Madeleine. It's a square with a big church in the center surrounded by upscale gourmet food shops. The front steps of the church are flowers. All around the square are upscale shops of mostly gourmet foods from mustard shops to truffle shops. You can find 5000 Euro phones and truffles for 490 an ounce. There was a wedding at the church and we watched the bride and groom arrive in a white old fashioned Rolls with a green striped Lotus and red Ferrari close behind. From the steps of the church you can look down the Boulevard to the gold topped Egyptian obelisk on Place de la Concorde and further along the road to Invalid's gold dome. The sun really made them shine!

In the morning it was gilded eclairs and gold domes and in the afternoon it was back home to the golden arches of the Denfert -Rochereau Metro stop. Behind the pointed golden arches of the metro sign is the rounded golden arches of McDonald's. Here you can order via the kiosks shown below, log on to the free wifi or choose between beer or Pierier as your beverage. You can order the American, Canadian, British or Australia burgers, regular fries or thick fries, ketchup or pommes-frites sauce which is a sweet mayonnaise. Among the desert options are chocolate mouse and citron topped pies. The burgers come with a spicy sauce as opposed to plain ketchup. J. said he just read an article in the NYTimes that said almost everything in the French MickeyD's is made in France. This might explain why the price tag of eating at McDonald's is like $25 for two meal deals. In perspective of of the eclair breakfast which did not include a beverage or a side dish only fancy boxes, this felt like quite a deal.













This is only one weekend's food adventures in Paris. It only gets better from here! So more to come on the food adventures in Paris this summer.