One man's trash...

Score! Found at the Hampstead Women's Club Nearly New Sale this past weekend (price: 75p):


I am fairly certain that I am the only person in Hampstead London the UK the known free world who would consider this a treasure.

Do you haiku?

My last few posts have been far too verbose, even by my standards. And so today, I offer you a succinct little 17-syllable summary of our overseas experience.

Expat existence:
Marvel at our foreign life
Then go clean your room

Last call for booking enquiries

I'm busy readying the house today in anticipation of our 28th American visitor, who will be arriving tomorrow morning for a weekend stay. My friend Kari is leaving her children (including a beautiful new 4 1/2 month old daughter) in her husband's capable hands and escaping to London for a weekend of girl talk and sightseeing, and I could not be more excited about her impending arrival. Her visit will be the highlight of my May, just as my parents claimed that honor for April, close family friends for both March and January, one of Julia's best friends for December... the list goes on and on.

I suppose that the fact that we've had so many visitors here speaks as much to the appeal of our current location as to the allure of our company. If we lived in Podunk, USA and people came to visit in droves, now that would be a testament to our friendships and our great charm as hosts, but London's a slightly easier pull. With the price of hotels and the exchange rate being what they are, who wouldn't want to take advantage of free lodging in one of the world's most amazing cities?

Nonetheless, I can't help but feel incredibly touched that so many people have made the transatlantic trip to see us in the past two years. This will be the 15th time in 20 months that I've stocked the fridge and prepared guest linens and laid out extra towels, and each time it's given me a thrill to know that the relationships we hold dear have stood the tests of distance and time. Kari's not the first person to leave a baby behind to come see us. Others have even brought their kids (if voluntarily flying across an ocean with small children for a visit isn't a sign of love, I don't know what is). A few hardy souls have actually come back to see us a second (or even third) time. Each time, our guests are our whole world for as long as they are here, and the warm glow of familiarity and cameraderie that their presence brings to our London home lasts long after they've left.

I will do the Buckingham Palace/Trafalgar Square/Big Ben and Parliament/London Eye loop for about the eighty-fifth time this weekend. I will make yet another trip to Kensington Palace and I'll point out the highlights of my neighborhood for the gazillionth time. We will visit a classic English pub for a pint, a classic English park for the pictures, a classic English tchotchkie shop for the requisite souvenirs. I've got the tourist shtick down pat by now and I'd be lying if I said it still holds the same "wow factor" for me that it did two years ago. I could very nearly give the full Thames boat ride spiel myself. I'm kind of over Diana's dresses. I still don't much care for warm beer. And yet, somehow it's still fun every time.

It was great to see my father in law's delight at the sight of cars with steering wheels on the right. It's been fabulous to watch Julia and Evan show "their" London to other American kids. It was exciting to host our friends who are Giants fans for a game played on London soil. It's been lovely to welcome back people who've come to feel a bit at home here themselves. And most of all, it has been unbelievably important and wonderful for us to discover over and over again that despite the fact that we up and left everyone we cared about to move here, our American relationships remain strong and true and real. The whistle stop tour of London may be getting old, but our guests provide all the "wow factor" we need.

I'm hardly a natural hostess and this is not a huge flat. Our lives and routines are thrown out of whack every time someone turns up on our doorstep. And yet surprisingly, that's been just fine with me. I'm going to miss these intense stints of sharing time, adventures, and tight living space with the people we love. I'm even going to miss the extra meal planning and the schedule juggling and the tour guide routine intrinsic in each house guest's visit. Kari's the last scheduled guest on our calendar, but we've still got a few months left here in London and fares are pretty low right now. The sleeper sofa still has some life to it and there's some more money left on the extra mobile phone and Oyster cards we keep ready for guests. Anyone else want to see Big Ben?

From the diary of a not-so-young girl

I must have read Anne Frank's diary about a thousand times as a child. We were both Jewish girls who dreamed of writing, and in my youthful mind, that made us kindred spirits. Never mind that she faced persecution and eventual death while I enjoyed the privileged of a suburban middle class upbringing; if anything, I thought that I envied Anne her dramatic story and the writing material she was able to extract from her situation. (I may have been lacking in first person experience, but I clearly had the melodrama thing down pat...)

Last weekend, Paul and I took advantage of a visit from my parents and left the kids in their capable hands while we headed off for a weekend trip to Amsterdam. The top item on my "must do" list, unsurprisingly, was a trip to the Anne Frank House.

We followed our guidebook's advice and arrived at the museum late in the day to try to avoid the worst of the queues, but we still had about a 15-20 minute wait before we entered the building. As I looked up and down the peaceful, tree lined street, I kept trying to see it as Anne's last sight when she entered hiding and her first one two years later as she emerged in the custody of the Nazis. I couldn't wrap my mind around any of it. Intellectually, I understood what had happened in the spot where I was standing, but I found myself unable to connect any emotion to that awareness at all.

Numbly, I entered the building and numbly I walked through the exhibits. I studied the model of the annex from above, listened to the recorded interviews with those who remembered Anne and her family after the war and viewed the artifacts on display. "This is the bookshelf I read about so many times," I told myself as I entered the stairwell. "These are the walls the family stared at, this is the attic where Anne and Peter escaped to be alone. This is what I read so much about, imagined in my mind so many times. This is it." They were just words, though, and these were just rooms. None of it was sinking in.

I walked slowly through the annex, careful not to miss anything, as I waited to feel... something. It didn't seem to be happening. After years of imagining a connection based on a book, I felt no connection whatsoever as I finally stood in its setting. This was a museum, carefully staged to convey meaning and evoke emotion. But all of that careful cultivation wasn't working for me. Here in the house where she had lived and written, I could no longer identify with or even recognize the young girl who had captivated me so much in print.

Resigned to a museum experience but determined to make the most of it, I continued on to a room which featured a recording of Otto Frank talking about what it had been like to first read his daughter's diary after the war. He described his surprise at the thoughts and reflections expressed within the pages, so different and so much deeper than the ideas Anne had shared with him in person during their time in hiding. He had thought they had talked about anything and everything, he said, and yet here was so much more to his daughter than had ever met his eye. "From this I can only determine," he said, his face carefully composed around his grief, "that as parents we can never truly know our children at all."

I thought of my own children, of the ways in which they are still transparent and of the complicated layers underneath their surfaces which I am beginning to sense and unable to penetrate. I pictured how completely I had known them in their infancy and how much less I seem to know them with each passing day. I reflected on the odd mixture of wistfulness and pride their blossoming independence sparks in me. I contemplated the experience of watching your child's shoulders hunched over in concentration as she secrets her innermost thoughts away day after day. I thought about what has to go so terribly wrong before you are privy to those reflections. And then -- finally -- I felt my heart break open into a thousand pieces.

At 10, it was Anne Frank with whom I felt an imagined kinship. Twenty five years later, it is her father with whom I identify the most. Anne is frozen in time as a teenager, but I am not, and I should have realized that time would change me and my perspective. What time hasn't changed is the impact this one family's story has on me. I walked out of that house wanting to go back and re-read the Diary for the first time in many years. But as I look at my children and reflect on my obligation to protect them, I wonder if I could even make it through the book now, reading it -- as I surely would -- through Otto Frank's eyes.

Just when I thought I was beyond the challenges of the American/English divide

This was the first week that Julia has not come home with a Super Speller sticker affixed to her school jumper on a Monday afternoon.

The Super Speller stickers are a great example of the English practice of expecting serious academic work from seriously young kids. Julia comes home from school every Tuesday with her list of spelling words for the week. She and her classmates copy down the week's 10 words (often made up of suggestions from the class or taken from a book they are currently reading) and after the teacher has checked their lists for accuracy, they have just under a week to learn the words before their regular Monday spelling test. And then, because they're 6, they get a pretty sticker if they get all of the words right on their tests.

In typical "it's hard to believe we share any genes at all" fashion, Julia adores the very concept of spelling tests and works hard to master her words. Up until this past week, she was one of only two children in the class who had never gotten a word wrong. Trust me to ruin her perfect streak.

There were a couple of particularly hard words on last week's list and a few of them looked to have been fixed when Julia's teacher had checked her list before sending it home. One word still looked wrong, however, and the proliferation of eraser marks and odd letters in and around the word led me to wonder how closely her teacher had looked at Julia's corrections. "In America, this word is spelled with an O that you don't have here," I told her the first time that she showed me her words for the week. "I suppose it's possible that the British spelling of marvelous doesn't have an O in it, but I'd be awfully surprised. You should really check with your teacher."

Julia being Julia, she didn't want to approach her teacher with the question, but she did assure me that she'd checked with her friends and there was definitely an O in marvelous here, too. And so she altered the spelling accordingly, I quizzed her on her words as always, and she went into school on Monday confident in her spelling skills. She did a marvelous job of spelling her words exactly as I had taught her. And that turned out to be her crucial error.

Marvelous, I am now fully aware, does have an O on both sides of the pond. It also (who knew?) has an extra L over here. (Remember all those odd letters in and around the word? Perhaps they were meant to be there after all...) Marvellous. Julia's American spelling did not pass muster in her English classroom this week and I have just officially flunked Year One Spelling. I think I owe my daughter a sticker.

Seen one bridge? Seen 'em all? (I'm not quite sure, really.)

We pride ourselves in being fairly seasoned in the use of foreign public transportation at this point. We’ve ridden busses in Sweden, trams in the Cech Republic, trains in Belgium, subways in Spain… the list goes on and on. Each place has its little idiosyncrasies of course (would it kill the Italians to mention that you have to validate train tickets in those little yellow boxes on the platforms?), but in general, we’ve got the transport thing under control. So when we arrived in the Venice train station loaded down with luggage and tired kids who had not yet had their daily gelato fix, we weren’t too concerned. Paul purchased our vaporetto passes and we were ready to be on our way.

“We need the 2,” he told me squinting at the route map. Looking up, we easily spotted a “2” sign. We were in luck; the boat appeared to be there waiting for us. “Come on kids,” we yelled, grabbing armloads of suitcases and backpacks and breaking into a run. “Wait, wait, no wait,” Paul called to me moments later as I charged down the gangplank. “This one’s going the wrong way.” We re-traced our steps as he studied the signs again. “Do we want that one?” I asked hopefully, pointing off to our right. “Cause it looks like there’s a boat waiting there, too.” Sure enough, that appeared to be our route, and so again we charged, racing to get aboard. “Get seats near the window,” we urged the kids. “Look out at Venice.” And so they did and so we did. They sat and we looked as we bobbed up and down on the big square yellow boat. One minute we sat. Two minutes we sat. The view did not change. The boat did not move. “When do you think we’re going to leave?” the kids finally asked. “I think,” I replied slowly as I surveyed our surroundings more carefully, “that we’re not leaving ever, at least not until we board an actual boat.” We had raced, it turned out, to catch a loading dock.

After that auspicious start, is it any wonder that I felt lost the entire time that we were in Venice?

Venice is without a doubt the most disorienting city I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s all narrow passageways and little bridges and signs that shed absolutely no light on your whereabouts.

Perhaps signs like this are funnier if you have any sense of direction whatsoever? I wouldn't really know.

Bringing kids to Venice, contrary to the “expert” advice, is absolutely no problem; the back alleys and wide canals provide a rich wealth of sights and discoveries for an enthusiastic child. Bringing a geographically challenged adult to Venice, on the other hand, is probably not such a wise idea. I wandered around Venice for 3 days in a constant state of confusion and disorientation. I've never seen lovelier vistas or more charming views, but damned if I could tell one from another. “OK, so we’ve definitely been here before,” I would announce confidently every time we came to a bridge or stepped into a square. I was wrong every time.

Before long, even my kids were laughing at me. (I can only hope that this means they inherited their father's navigational skills rather than mine.) So I left the navigating to Paul and concentrated on taking my photographs. If worse came to worse, I figured, perhaps I could scroll back through my memory card and use the images as digital breadcrumbs to lead us home. Trust me when I tell you I did some serious weeding out before I posted the Venice photos on Flickr.

Did I adore Venice as much as I'd expected? Meh. I was too disoriented by Venice to truly say that I loved the city. There were a lot of tourists and a lot of mediocre restaurants, and that's generally not a winning combination for me, particularly just coming off the high of our Florence adventure. Nonetheless, Venice is a simply beautiful and incredibly unique place and I'm not just trying for the easy, trite blog wrap-up when I say that I'm so glad to have had a chance to seen it for myself. (At least... I think I saw Venice. It's also entirely possible that I just saw one bridge over and over again from different angles. If so, let me tell you, it was one heck of a bridge.)

OK, kids... say "Mommy's lost again!"

Il mio cuore appartiene a Firenze

For the past two years, we've carefully planned our travels with our children's limitations (or at least what we perceived to be their limitations) in minds. Short trips. Single destinations that have plenty of indoor and outdoor activity options within easy reach. Apartments rather than hotels wherever possible so that we can all spread out a bit. Minimal amounts of packing up and moving on.

These guidelines have made for many a successful holiday for us. The formula wasn't really working when I sat down to plan our April trip to Italy, however, and so I had reluctantly booked a different kind of vacation -- a night in Pisa, two nights in Florence and 3 nights in Venice. Our itinerary involved flying in and out of different airports, two significant train journeys, two different hotels and an apartment. We would be on the go, rushing to pack and catch some form of transportation roughly every two days. To say I was nervous about how it was going to all work out would be an understatement.

It worked beautifully. (In fact, it worked so beautifully that Paul and the kids kept asking me why we don't always travel this way. Go figure.)

Despite the fact that the kids were really excited to see the Leaning Tower (the Wonder Pets and the Little Einsteins have been there so it must be great, they figured), even Julia announced after we'd taken the requisite dozen photographs of ourselves holding up the tower that she was pretty much "done with Pisa." We agreed; it's a cute town and we're glad we saw it, but half a day was enough. Fortunately, half a day was all we had, and we set off for Florence the next morning.

Children unclear on the concept: "Does it look like we're holding the tower up now?"

We made our way to the Duomo that first afternoon in Florence and after admiring the gingerbread house-like effect of the massive structure's white, green and pink marble exterior, we went inside. As we stood gazing up at the elaborately painted ceiling, Julia noticed the thin corridors located along the perimeter of the dome. "I want to walk in the ceiling," she announced. Paul and I looked at each other doubtfully. The path up to the dome had 463 steps and no lift. Neither of us were exactly enthusiastic about the prospect of carrying a child up or down any portion of those 463 steps. "I think it's beautiful and I want to see it up close," Julia persisted. "I won't complain about the steps." I shrugged my consent. "If she wants to see the ceiling of the Duomo that badly, I think we kind of have to do this," I whispered to Paul.

Julia's inspiration: the Duomo dome

926 steps later, we had admired the ceiling up close and emerged at the top of the dome, with the entire city of Florence laid out before us. We had taken our requisite photos, admired the view and counted off each and every step as we made our way back down. Neither child had voiced a single word of complaint. They were both high from the experience, incredibly proud of their stamina and excited about what they'd done and seen. "That," Julia told me happily, "was not boring."

Please explain to me how the same children who whine at climbing the single flight of stairs up to our flat were not even winded at the top of this ridiculously high building...

With this kind of motivation and excitement from our kids, Florence was the surprise hit of our trip. I had been unsure how we were going to do in a city so focused on art, but once we completely chucked any museum hopping aspirations, it was great. Art is everywhere in Florence, so why not leave the Uffizi and the Academia with their timed entrances and huge crowds and velvet ropes to the other tourists? We found beauty in other places -- in the Duomo and Baptistry ceilings, which awed and impressed my kids, in the extensive greenery and breathtaking views of the Boboli Garden, in the glittery gold of the Ponte Vecchio, in the markets full of buttery leather and colorful scarves, in a little storefront museum filled with beautifully constructed wooden machines which helped my children to get a hands-on understanding of Da Vinci's inventions, in the piazzas where they played, and most especially in the pizza, pasta dishes and colorful selection of gelato in which we indulged at every opportunity.

David, schmavid. People, this is art.

By the time we left Florence on a train bound for Venice, we were all more than a little in love with the place and I was wishing I'd packed my fat jeans. It was time to move on, though, and we were all ready and excited to keep going. Tune in next time for Venice, where all the bridges looked exactly the same yet I still felt compelled to pause and photograph each and every one of them. And every gondola. And every water view. And every mask shop. (Don't worry. If you skim -- or even skip -- that particular Flickr set, I'll never know the difference.)

Photos from the Pisa and Florence legs of this trip are now up on Flickr if you want to check them out!