London I: Bookstores, Cheese shops and a Mad-Hatter Tea

Spring break and I decided to take the two younger kids to London, to meet up with Irad who was there on a business trip.

The kids and I arrived late Wednesday evening and went straight to the Sofitel at Heathrow airport where Irad was waiting for us—Irad and I have discovered this is an excellent hotel for softening (or sofiteling) the comings and goings from London. It is IN Terminal 5 and is itself an experience, with beautiful glassed in, natural-light lit lobby spaces, top restaurants and even a tea room.

photo from Sofitel site

We had an excellent late night supper before hitting the room to sleep off the trip.

Recovered from our flight, the kids and I set off into London late Thursday morning to set up in our new digs, the lovely Landmark London, with the famous Winter Garden glass atrium. (photo from http://www.landmarklondon.co.uk/en/galleries)

We set out to explore the adjacent neighborhood and began with Marleybone High Street, which is described as a hidden wonder of the West End. Suffice it to say that cute shops and charming architecture abound.








We had the pleasure of visiting a REAL bookstore, which as we all know is a rare experience these days.

 It had galleries and stairs, and stained glass windows and skylights and one could easily imagine spending the better part of a day there. My daughter enjoyed the layout by country, and my son was interested in all the stylish science books.
My find of the day was a really fun book to bring back for Amnon, my graphic artist son. Building Stories

It is the kind of book I would only buy after having had the opportunity to handle it, open the box, and appreciate its 3D qualities. A flat screen explanation of this wonderful book, which contains inside of it 14 separate and distinctly formatted graphic novels, ranging from pamphlet to Game Board, all unified around one subject.

Not a British book, but discovered by route of a bricks and mortar book store, which abound in London.



From there we went on to one of the highlights of our trip, "La Fromagerie." The kids and I love cheese, and this was the ultime meilleur of all cheese shops! We lunched in the tasting cafe on three cheese boards. the "French", the "Irish" and the "Cheese Shop", all including 5 different cheeses beginning with a soft  goat cheese and moving through a range of cheeses to a blue cheese.

We kept a menu with us and carefully notated and rated each cheese. At the end we selected our two favorites and went into the mysterious cheese room, a hermetically sealed climate controlled, odoriferous (ahem) glass walled room to purchase our choices and bring them home to share with Amnon. We all agreed it was the best cheese experience of our lives!

The next stop on our itinerary for that afternoon was the Sanderson Hotel where I planned to introduce the kids to afternoon tea via their Mad Hatter Tea.

The Full Display

 Drink-me Strawberry Juice

Queen-of-Hearts Teapot

Though it gets points for creativity, the scones and sandwiches were inedible. The sandwiches tasted like they had been frozen and not defrosted and were soggy and disgusting and the scones did not resemble any scone I've ever tasted. The tea was made from tea bags and the service was completely indifferent. Nor did it have the grand setting one associates with tea IN LONDON! 

Chocolate Tea cup, Green Tea Mousse and Popping Candy

The pastries were amazing, but the tea is not recommended unless you want a complete meal of sweets at a full tea premium price.

The funny thing about traveling with kids, is you never know what will interest them. You can plan world-class museums, historical monuments, theater and five star restaurants, but they can have more fun just...

Sanderson Hotel Lobby

trying out all the different chairs in the lobby!

NYC: Flowers, Fruit Tarts and Theater

I am catching up on my back log of pictures and experiences, so this trip to NYC was actually two weeks ago.

In the city for work, I finished my meetings early on Monday, at 3 pm, and had until the following morning all to myself. In my younger days I would have rushed through my address book to find friends to meet for coffee, dinner, dessert—whatever I could squeeze in.

But lately I have found that I enjoy being my own travel companion. Of course, it wouldn't be fun if that were all the time, but from a life of people-immersion: colleagues, children, (lovely) husband—there is a novelty to just being by myself.

I started by walking the 45 blocks down Broadway from Columbia to my hotel, taking my time to look in shops. Sigh, what a great city! I bought myself flowers for my room, and then an interesting glass to house them in, a new tradition I am establishing for myself. I love cut flowers, and I love having interesting vases and glassware to do my own floral arrangements at homes, so what better way to indulge than one-arrangement-at-a-time paced with my own travel schedule?

I took a break at one of my favorite cafes, Le Pain Quotidien. I know that it is a chain and not "cool and indy,"but I like the spacious farmhouse interior, the really good food, and great coffee, and since it is only in NYC, Washington DC, LA, London and Philly, for me it is exotic. And I am addicted to their fruit tarts...

This photo of Le Pain Quotidien is courtesy of TripAdvisor

Settled in with my latte and fruit tart, I browsed the theater selections. I wanted something low key and entertaining—not big, blaring, Broadway and loud. Lately, my daughter and I have been watching Ugly Betty together, a fun sit com about the fashion industry that has a tongue-in-cheek template of Mexican soap operas and a wonderful bright color palate. One of its stars, Michael Urie, was performing a one-man play in the Village called "Buyer and Cellar." I bought my single ticket (second row center—the advantage of being a singleton theater goer), and headed back to my hotel for a brief rest.

I was staying at the NYLO again, and I was delighted to discover their redesign. The rooms were bright, colorful, well laid out and full of amazing light and playful modern decor accents. Also had a great work table area for me to set up my flowers and my new vase. Just like home. (Only someone else makes the bed!)

Down to the Village by subway, into the intimate Barrow Theater,  and I had the perfect theater experience!

The play has a very quirky premise based on a riff off of Barbara Streisand's recent book:
in which she describes her house, including, a private "mock" shopping mall in her basement to house all her tchotchkes and collections.

The playwright imagines that if she has a shopping mall, well, she must have a clerk to wait on her when she "shops" and from there the play takes off. Michael Urie plays the out of work LA actor who takes the gig....

 Photo from Broadway.com

The play has a bit of a gay-culture insider's feel, (Barbara is after all a stereotypical gay fetish), but not to the exclusion of the non-gay viewer. It is about loneliness and narcissism and celebrity, about relationships and projection and being genuine. And it works. Wonderful use of a spare stage with projections and very few physical objects, and really brilliant script which brings to life several characters through the auspices of our one man star. But what also struck me was the power of seeing an actor up close and really feeling the power of his art, energy and charm, as opposed to what I had experienced by watching this very same actor on the TV screen.

Long live theater!!!

Book Review: Signature of All Things

 


I was not a fan of Eat, Pray, Love. Well, let me be honest. I was a huge fan of "Eat" but "Pray, Love" got a bit much for me. Too much self-expose and precious prose.

So it was with some surprise that I found myself completely blown away by Gilbert's recent novel (her first fiction since 2000), The Signature of All Things: A Novel.


Now THIS is a book! No cutesy gimmick, no ironic authorial voicing, no sweet and contrived denouement. Just good solid plotting, wonderful characters, rich setting and careful, but submerged, research, and the tremendous act of imagination that makes reading a novel more fun than sitting around having a conversation with oneself!

I loved this book. I loved the botany, the liveliness of the ideas, the wonderful characters, and Alma herself. Set in the 19th Century, it felt like a 19th Century novel in its Dickensian richness and scope, and full and fleshly omniscient narrator.

A perfect anecdote to winter blues, the book is both a journey of the mind and a journey of the globe, evoking the steamy intensity of 19th Century scientific inquiry (Joseph Banks and Alfred Russell Wallace make actual appearances as characters, and Darwin and Linnaeus are in pages), as well as an homage to the sea faring literature of exploration a la Horatio Hornblower and Master and Commander that I also dearly love.

IF I were creating a mini-course on botany and evolutionary biology in literature, I would include this book, the stories of Andrea Barrett (Ship Fever: Stories and Servants of the Map: Stories, and Simon Mawer's Mendel's Dwarf


And as a nascent, extremely amateur botanical watercolorist, I love that one of the characters is a genius botanical artist and that drawings throughout the book as well as the endpapers contain botanical prints. Worth leaving the Kindle in the drawer for this one.

Gilbert spent three years reading botanical works as well as visiting botanical gardens in preparation for this book, and it shows. Following up a mega-seller memoir with a solid work of fiction is no mean feat and I think we have a serious novelist in the house.

Best Breakfast Ever: Mexico City

El Cardenal is legend. And with good reason. It serves the best breakfast I have ever had. There is always a line. Breakfast goes until 2 pm and then lunch until 7 pm.

Maybe it is the setting in a three story french mansion, or the location, one block off the Zocalo, or the white linen table cloths and waiters with bow ties that make this such a local treat. We have never seen tourists there, though it does show up in all the guide books.

This is the third time we've breakfasted at El Cardenal, and it never disappoints. There are three floors of restaurant space with a bakery on the ground floor with dumb waiters sending the fresh baked goods up.

They start you off with a selection of fresh baked pastries brought table-side that are amazingly delicious and unlimited. A house specialty is the bread stuffed with corn meal and cheese.

There are terrific fresh squeezed juices including cactus juice.








But my very favorite thing is the hot chocolate, whipped in a pitcher next to the table and then poured with style.

After the hot chocolate, stuffed bread and pastries, I am pretty much done. But, wait! Here come the entrees: traditional Mexican breakfast, an egg gratin, and a zucchini flower omelet.

 However, let me be perfectly clear. I am here for the hot chocolate. Poured with panache, rich and velvety, and quite simply the best hot chocolate I have ever had, anywhere.  My second cup runneth over...

Mexico City: Lunch

Irad always says I travel through my stomache. Well, duh, right?

Yuval had read up on the best street food in Mexico City, as is his wont to do before going anywhere.  In general, Yuval is the person to travel with if you want to find the best of everything wherever you are.

In Mexico City, Yuval's research lead us to a very non-descript little taqueria called Beatricita.

touted by the New York Times as serving some of the best tortillas in Mexico City.

The tortillas are freshly baked on site

And they come with a seemingly infinite variety of fillings

But they are even good just plain,

 Of course lunch would not have been complete without a really out-of-tune hoarse Mariachi player.

And the grand finale. Flan. Two varieties, one caramel and one coconut.

Mexico City Day 1

Mexico City has an incredible variety of museums. Our first time there, we saw many of the Diego Rivera murals, aa wonderful exhibit of Folk Art and the stunningly vast Museo Nacional de Antropología, which covers the enormous amount of history of the hundreds of unique language-group cultures that have existed in Mexico over the ages and can probably occupy a year of your time. We decided to smaller bites this time.

This trip was a short one. We selected the lovely Four Seasons hotel so that we would have a peaceful reprieve from the craziness of the traffic and crowds.

view into the courtyard from our room

 walking in the courtyard

Last time we were in Mexico City, we saw an extraordinary folk art at the Palaca de Cultural Banamex that we decided to go to the Museo de Arte Popular (Museum of Popular Art). Sometimes when one attempts to recapture a past experience it is a failure, but not so this time. The museum re-created for us the sense of exuberant, abundant color, joy and imagination that characterizes Mexican folk Art.
We were greeted by a fantastical collection of parade-float dragons in the courtyard of the museum:

We were very struck by the plethora of skeletons that are part of the folk art tradition—we theorized it is a way of defusing the fear of death but apparently it has its roots in pre-Hispanic culture and is reflected in the way that the pre-Columbian peoples indigenized Catholicism, replacing Satan with Demon imagery and incorporating the Day of the Dead into christian religious practice.

 Scenes from life inhabited by skeletons, in a wonderful variety of settings. Very macabre to our Anglo eyes

 Even children in school portrayed as skeletons.

Elegant Lady Skeleton.
















At another exhibit (back at the exhibit space in Palaca de Cultura Banmex) we happened on another small exhibition, this time on Mexican architecture, which included this picture of Diego Rivera's studio, which I think adds illustratively to my collection of skeletons, reinforcing what a singularly Mexican trope this is.

The imagination is not limited to the folk art or the museums. The broad avenue of Paseo de la Reforma Avenue, which we walked to and from the museum, alternated its original old stone benches with different contemporary interpretations of the "bench.

Original stonework benches seen throughout the Avenue

Here are some of the new interpretations of a bench:

 Iron sofas

 Curvileinears

Twist and shout

Gin rummy, anyone?

Every other block is back to the original stonework benches that dot the avenue.