Oxford, this time with 3o ducklings

So this is out of order. So sue me. I'll talk about my friend Warnaby's guest lecture another time, which is actually the chronological way to go.

Had a stunningly successful trip to Oxford on Friday the 10th, despite missing the first bus at Marble Arch which just blew past us despite my pounding on the door. I did, I'm afraid, say a Bad Word, in front of some kidlets. Quietly but unmistakeably. [Why were we taking public transit? Because for the price we were quoted for a coach and driver we could pay for all 30 students to make the bus trip (at varying times depending on what they wanted to do) AND pay for a punting excursion on the Cherwell in the afternoon AND make a donation to Oriel in lieu of a guide / entrance fee!] But we got the next bus, and all was fine. I should add that any and all of such moves that we make as a group have to be previewed and prepared for, sometimes by little half-page notes or cribsheets slipped under students’ doors, after having gone through the outlines of the trip in class; part of my panic here is that I never seem to be ahead enough to distribute stuff in advance—some things change the afternoon before the trip, and there’s no other way of reaching everyone reliably, especially since we cannot count on hotel Internet routers. One is constantly playing chicken with chaos….

Despite the slight glitch getting up there, by the appointed time of 11 AM (well, 11:13) the group was gathered on the cobbles of Radcliffe Square, looking in at the same place where I spent sooo many of my days studying away. Well, we were the group minus one: since she had complained of a sore stomach and wanted to nap or got to the doctor, so I left Andrew behind and told him to look in on her in an hour. I later learned that she had had too much to drink the night before. Welcome to my nightmare—that someone would jeopardize the day’s activities in this way, and not even apologize for the monkey wrench thrown in the works; as it turned out, she felt better, and she and Andrew only missed our little swing by 4 Alfred Street, where Oriel had located the American Graduate Ghetto back in 1979-80.

In stark contrast to my own time there, the porter at the college gate was friendly and well-informed, and though my original contact had been called to London on business unexpectedly, I got a wonderful surprise: my old tutor Glenn Black was around and helped squire us around, as did the development director's assistant Hannah. Introducing Glenn to the group after all these years kind of got me choked up: after all, it was his encouragement (in his incredibly low-key way, I might add) that led me to apply to graduate school at Oxford after my Semester Abroad my senior year at Pomona, and it’s likely that it was his recommendation (that I could hang with the program) that helped to get me in when I applied for my place a year later.

After some lemonade / orange squash in the Hall, which elicited some remarks in the key of “It’s like Hogwarts, only smaller!” we were then led around the quads, finishing in the narrow hallway with stairs leading up to both the undergraduates’ study area and the much less accessible Senior Library.




Much to my surprise we actually spent a half hour in this tremendous room, twenty feet high and modeled on a country-house library by an Orielensis who probably did a Grand Tour of his own, and the librarian couldn't have been nicer and more accommodating. I overheard one of the whispers as we entered: “This smells like learning!” Unless I am completely clueless, the chillin's was blown away.

In the late afternoon after our lunch break I walked most of them through the colleges and the Parks and into North Oxford (except for four who inexplicably wanted to hurry back to London for some inane thing called the Ice Bar) so that we could spend a chunk of our gray but not rainy afternoon punting on the Cherwell. With five people to a boat and many of them relentlessly not listening to the directions or explanations of me nor the punting station captain, there was a certain amount of spinning around and weed-catching before we successfully made our way up to the Victoria Arms for a quick light refreshment on the lawn. Please do not tell the UC but some of them drank a beer (as did I, a small one).

After that it was home, in my case a purgatorial coach ride with six refugees from Bridget Jones "friends" reject pile, but in the end I think everyone was truly tired but satisfied.

Next up, Cricket lowlights that began with a phone call: "Stenzel. Warnaby. File this one under "Your college need you."

Shakespeare at the Globe, Indeed

After Wednesday’s class (July 8th) I worked on marking, then made my way to the Globe Theater in Southwark to distribute thirty-one tickets to a touring production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The fact that it was a touring production (limited cast) meant the tickets were cheaper than budgeted AND we could finance some other group activity with the excess. This is my life.

Harrowing to wonder about timing and possible tube maintenance, since I had all the tickets; not unsurprisingly I was there in plenty of time, then waited and waited as my students started showing up in varying degrees of lateness for the 7 PM rendezvous. The last of them trickled in at 7:27 for a 7:30 show, having conveniently ignored both of our admonitions about eating near the theater—I just finished reading some journal accounts of them leaving some pub near Piccadilly at 6:55, not having read that Blackfriars station is closed until 2011. So I was fully prepared to leave Andrew outside with the remaining tickets, but they all got in.

The show was great—flapper era costumes and seersucker, little swing band set-up and deck chairs, and the added enjoyment of eight actors playing 21 roles, using the music and dance to make the transitions utterly entrancing. Puck being played by a stunning dancer done up “Cabaret”-style complete with garter belt and derby hat definitely made the guys pay close attention, and from what I can tell the whole class found themselves much more able to follow the action and get the jokes than they had ever expected. Hard seats (but boy was I glad not to have made them stand—GT’ers would never have stood, would they?), some minor pissing and moaning about blocked sight lines (though of course that was covered in the warning), but overall a great experience. Especially pleasurable to watch these talented folks work out problems that I had written about in my dissertation, and have my facial muscles sore from smiling.

Also glad I found the John Cleese fundraiser / supporter stone in the courtyard: he actually paid for two, just so he could mis-spell his friend’s name for perpetuity next to him—and there it is, “Michael Pallin.”

--sent in from Paris on Bastille Day after marking papers all afternoon. Will try to get an update on Friday's Oxford trip soon.

OK, Teaching. I can do that.

Each evening I checked e-mail, spoke to various folks via Skype or my cell phone, and prepared / decompressed. My sleep was often very spotty, which disturbed me, as the morning light woke me at 5. Every time I thought I was done, a bunch of new lists or planning tasks would pop into my mind, and sometimes the wireless connection would make sending an e-mail into a ten-minute struggle of logging out, waiting, opening a new window, logging in again, and waiting some more as the message dribbled out byte by byte; moving the computer around the room sometimes helped find a sweet spot, but sometimes it would crap out altogether.

Monday was the first day of class: we had to get 30 students across town and into the classroom building at Kings College that’d been arranged for us by our none too accommodating agents in London. Being told by one that “I’ll meet you at 9 at the entrance to Waterloo station,” I was unimpressed when the time came: she was nowhere to be seen, the rush of people was unbelievable, and after several orbits of the complex station I was secretly relieved to get a call from a couple of students who had arrived early, bailed on the assembly point (bad) and navigated over to the building (good). “Stephanie” showed up in my classroom at 10 AM, fifteen minutes after we had arrived 15 minutes later than our 9:30 official start time (and of course we had to ask the security guard to unlock our classroom). Not having gotten her cell number nor insisted on clarifying the meeting point, I chalked it up to “live and learn”—and I trust that there won’t be a “next year” when it comes to these agents who shall remain nameless but not blameless.

A portion of each class has to be given over to organizational matters, and I'm also making them journal informally every day; I sit in a cafe, usually, and quickly mark and comment on their short pieces; generally the quality isn't too bad, and there are occasional insights and gratifying breakthroughs. Walking across the Millennium Bridge afterward, I felt as I belonged here a little bit--I had a function other than tourist--which was a good feeling. I'll be curious to see the new Harry Potter movie, which I am led to believe has a scene on this bridge.

Next up: teach, walk, mark journals, eat cheaply, mark, plan, sleep, wake up, sleep, make lists. Repeat until done.

The ducklings have landed--now what?

Sunday 5 July—We had a coach tour in the afternoon followed by a “welcome dinner” at an “English” restaurant in Covent Garden—ultra Brit food (steak and Guinness pie with “spotted Dick” for afters). The coach tour started inauspiciously, as the volume level was deafening and I had to quiet them down; visions of high-school disciplinarian routines flashed through my mind, but I worked to chalk it up to first-day amplification of chatter. Abby and Brian, our guide and driver, did a beautiful job of coordinating an efficient trajectory featuring a good balance between stops and movement. We were abetted by it being Sunday AND the day of the epic Wimbledon final: streets that normally would have been clogged were flowing well, and both of them seemed to work together in predicting the closures and detours that are a daily part of London driving.

I’d been worried that this would be boring for students who’d done a tour already, but I was mistaken: their previous sightseeing outing had been on a doubledecker with headsets and recorded commentary / music that they could barely hear, and there was no stopping to explore on the ground; I was happy to see many of my students jotting notes on places they wanted to visit on their own!

It was interesting to undergo unexpected little trials-by-the-unknown: since I never had been in this position, I had no idea whether or how much to tip the driver and guide, who I know had been paid for their services. Luckily Andrew had overheard them talking amongst themselves, and slipping them each a 10-spot seemed the right thing to do. On the other hand, after the dinner I elected to take the direct approach and simply ask the servers of our meal whether a tip was expected, and they said the service charge was included, they didn’t expect anything extra, and so I left it at that: their service was nothing special, in a downstairs dining room with food flung quickly and with a certain brusque efficiency. Here and elsewhere I am disconcerted at not knowing what the appropriate custom is, neither wanting to be a boorish skinflint nor a stereotypically profligate Yank.

Walking back through the still-bustling streets and again through the park, I had a nice call from Amelie on my cell, and further on, an unexpected great little contact with a trash-picker-upper with whom I commiserated about the Slobbovian nature of too many park-goers (stretching near Round Pond later in the week, I marveled at the sheet number of cigarette filters and plastic caps and wrappers and twisties that I inventoried in the square meter around me): touching on the “music,” our conversation diverted to his old favorite, Captain Beefheart, and migrated to none other than Frank Zappa. An unexpected pleasure to break into “Cosmik Debris” and have him fill in the chorus! Yet more evidence of why one should occasionally walk alone, and make eye contact…

Living in a Shoebox--at first

I thought blogs were supposed to be “web logs” like “Captain’s Log—Stardate: 7.8!” This has been such a week that I haven’t had the energy to share a bit. So here’s a quick hit, typed as I sit in a coffee house near the hotel. My goal is to devote 10 minutes to each day and catch this up, go back to the hotel, upload it, and then fill in some details as time allows.

Saturday 4 July—I did something unusual for me that morning after my meager breakfast in the café downstairs: I saw the maid cleaning the room next door to mine, saw that it looked like a single, and then asked whether it was; turned out it was. The unusual thing? I went downstairs and asked if I could change rooms from my glorified closet to this comparatively spacious squarish layout, where I could actually not touch two walls from my desk chair. Amazing how that improved my mood!

The first students (and Andrew) started arriving around 9, dumping their luggage and going off for adventures despite their exhaustion, as they couldn’t check in til 2 PM. The routine of the day became established: I’d be tapping away on my computer in my 3rd-floor room, get a call from the desk that another arrival was waiting, I’d walk down, introduce myself (trying desperately to match face to name to photograph on the mug shot I’d been given), briefly orient them to the various streets and shopping possibilities, given them their 7-day transit cards, and tell them to come back later. The luggage room became ridiculously cramped and I stored several suitcases in my room; as the afternoon wore on they were checking into their rooms, becoming roommates pretty randomly, and getting roughly settled in.

By 7 PM all my ducklings had landed and we had our brief orientation in the far end of the café, and I passed out directions for getting to the Waterloo campus of King’s College for the first class next morning, as well as the roughed-in schedule for readings and activities that I had been cobbling together all day. After that, I elected to light out for a long late-evening run around Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, threading through the mass of humanity gathered for the outdoor concert (who the hell is “Blur,” anyway? Loud, that’s for sure. Bruce Springsteen had been there the week before, and Neil Young…). Strange to see the mini-shrine along the fence of K. palace, where Lady Di had lived “in happier times.”

Brussels to Oxford via London

[Written July 3, posted successfully July 5] Taking my leave from Brussels and the family was a bit wrenching, as I had forgotten how much I liked hanging out with my brother and sharing our stupid jokes and family-oriented humor / lore. But with an uneventful metro ride to the Gare du Midi and more than a little foomfitting to get through the UK passport control (odd to have the uniforms on this side of the Channel, in bowels of a Belgian railway station—same old embarkation cards to fill out), I could hustle up to the platform and board the sleek and quick Eurostar, which whisked me to Lille and then North and under the Channel at unbelievable speeds. Arriving in London’s refurbished St Pancras station only an hour and half later just blew me away—at that rate my commute from Berkeley to Davis would be about half an hour. Of course you’d never get an EIR for that kind of project.

Like a goon I sprang for a cab and inched through traffic, acutely aware of the meter but figuring in the muggy heat-wave heat I ahould just eat the charge. I ditched my rolling bag in the ridiculously crowded luggage room, crossing my fingers that it wouldn’t be pawed through (I did the pull-half-a-dozen-bags-out first so mine could be deepest), and started my mosey down memory lane. With my little Lonely Planet tear-out map not quite reaching to this hotel in Bayswater, I headed across Kensington Gardens in the general direction of Victoria via the Victoria & Albert Museum. Thousands of people on the grass, most of them sensibly avoiding the direct sun—not a typical London scene.

My sense of direction was generally OK, and eventually I sussed out the bus service to Oxford—much simpler than I had originally thought, a good omen for the trip to Oxford I have planned for next Friday: rather than spend the typical buttload of money for a coach and driver (as suggested by the “We love spending your money” folks at the London agency), I figure we can get the students up to Ox, AND through in an excursion from the Cherwell Boathouse renting punts (flat bottom boats propelled with a pole) for all thirty for three hours, with lunch at a streamside pub. Quintessentially Oxford.

I couldn’t believe how friendly everyone was, from the coach driver (whose Irish accent broadened when another colleague joined him at one of the earlier Oxford stops) to the porter at Oriel (who despite the lateness of the hour welcomed me to take photographs as I introduced myself as "another misty-eyed Old Boy") to the nice lady at the B & B up past Summertown in North Oxford, where I used to do my shopping my second year.

As I walked around the town after 25 years (28 years since I officially left—just a brief visit in 1984 I think), I kept noticing how much cleaner it seemed, and how many fewer cars there were—lots of streets are restricted access or no cars at all. The Covered Market was closed by the time I arrived, so I couldn’t confirm that the old smell was still there, but lots of things seemed just as they were. More foreign languages, fewer university students (it is prime time for Italian and French late-teens it seems to work on their English, smoke, and flirt with each other).

I couldn't resist having some nice tourists (from Albania of all places) take my picture in front of the place I spent so many gray days reading back in '78, and then from '79 to '81. Wow. Back then there wasn't a railing around the Radcliffe Camera, and tourists would come right up to the windows and snap photos of us as we sat at the long tables that ran spoke-like outward: it was like going to school in an aquarium. . .

Then it was bus up to my modern and fairly charmless B & B booked on the Internet, a decent run (out toward the canal near Godstow, the end of one of my more ambitious loops back in the day), a hasty meal (didn’t feel like anything special), and then too much time on the excellent wi-fi connection catching up on e-mails and talking with my coordinator back in Davis. Best part of it was sitting out in the perfect-temperature terrace (well, gravel extension of the car park) watching as the hot spell began to end: sure enough, this morning after a not very restful sleep I awoke to rain, which mercifully let up once I headed back into town.

I’ve exceeded my allotted time, so I will try to upload this onto the blog via a pathetic and expensive pay as you go wireless service here at the hotel in London (no time for a full description)—with my window propped open (thanks to my trusty Swiss Army knife that enabled to me to dismantle the doohickey that stopped it at 8” wide) and a fire door propped open and a window in the stairwell open, I actually have air to breathe. But lots of traffic noise and the wafting of the open-air concert a mile or so away in Hyde Park. Wish me luck. Tomorrow they arrive.

Brussels, Bach, Brotherhood

Sunday morning I attended my first Bach Cantata concert at the Chapelle des Minimes, a somewhat funky church in an odd part of Brussels; since 1982 a group has been performing cantatas there every month (July and August excepted), and my brother has been principal cellist and choir master and assistant director almost from the beginning. I had intended to catch the dress rehearsal on Saturday after taking the express train from Paris, but ended up schlepping myself and my bag for a good hour around the neighborhood near the Louisa metro stop, having gotten bad directions from several cheerful but completely misinformed passersby! No harm, no foul (except for my sweatiness)--I got there, enjoyed a beer with my brother at the cafe next door, and went to dinner with his wife and my niece later that evening. As my brother warned me, on the morning the attendees would run a gauntlet of panhandlers with faces straight out of a Brueghel painting--after all this was the 'hood where the Brueghels lived!


The Minimes concerts are a beautiful tradition: the chorus is mostly amateur, the orchestra a mix of amateur and professional players, and the level of performance is quite good. Back in the early days my father had dropped in and played viola with the group while visiting my brother, and in the mid-80s I had played recorder in a couple of concerts the group did as part of a festival in southern France. Like so much of Brussels the organization is extremely polyglot, and if you can't follow rehearsals in Flemish and French you are in trouble; there are three music directors who rotate through, and all are fluent in multiple languages; many of the members can effortlessly switch from German to French or Flemish to English, and hardly show they know they're switching. Amazing.


The run-through begins at 9 AM and there are always audience members who are there before the musicians, staking out their chairs and settling in to hear the cantata twice, in effect. The age range seems to be from babes in arms to nonagenarians, and I'm sure that there are some now attending as adults who were first brought as infants. By the 10:30 start time there are upwards of 300, with some standing, and by tradition the audience is coached in the Chorale and invited to sing along. I was very proud to see my brother working this way, clearly enjoying professional-musical and personal success; I was also glad to see a familiar face of Julius' old friend Jacques, who'd recently reconnected after several years.

The music (no. 30, Freue Dich, Erloeste Schor) was glorious, the small chorus sounding good, Julius' cello students holding down the continuo fort with some struggle but a good bit of success, and the professional soloists making some tough bits sound pretty easy (the soprano in particular seemed to have no problem with high B's at 10:45 in the morning, even, as my brother pointed out, with the organ's tuning getting slightly higher with the warm weather).

In the afternoon most of the group re-united for a potluck garden party barbecue at the home of one of the violinists, and I got to hear at least 30 people comment on how much my brother and I resembled each other in facial characteristics, voice, body language, you name it. Pretty funny, but moving in a way.


Later in the evening was the Annual General Meeting of the Brussels Madrigal Singers, which my brother directs, and which has some overlap with the Minimes group; I mostly hung out like a fly on the wall, but chipped in a couple of comments when I thought some of our experience with PME was relevant. I was also amused to see some of the same group dynamics operating here as in PME, as minor complaints about attendance or punctuality were voiced and (in this case) fairly quickly dismissed as the facts of non-professional music life that they are.

Throughout the day I was still writing and answering e-mails about the Tour. The big decision was whether to spring some extra dollars on a facility near the Luxembourg that would provide a classroom space for the 30 of us: there was no room big enough in our hotel, and what had been proposed was private dining room in a nearby restaurant, but in the end I realized the convenience of the new location and its other features would offset the added costs that had been imposed since earlier programs had used this particular facility in the past. Hey, this is why it's Grand, right? I continued to marvel at how tirelessly the Program Coordinator was working even on a weekend, knowing she also had half a dozen other programs to ride herd on. Go Kathy!

Today after a mixed sleep I spent most of the day trying to get organized with calendars and lists, semi successfully, and I also took a wonderful run in the Foret de Soigne, one entrance of which is a few hundred yards from our front door. Getting lost on confusing paths amongst the beech forest was actually quite pleasant, and I went probably 5 more miles after taking leave from Julius who not only had a cello lesson but also had to take it easy due to a bronchial problem and some potential back issues still lingering after his 2007 bout with staph abscesses near his lower spine.

All in all a great couple of days, both in the personal and professional sides of my life, and I really feel the Tour is going to actually happen and be a success. Now I have to plan some more, plus craft a pre-flight Welcome e-mail and nail down a few dozen more details before setting off for London on Wednesday.

As I post this I look out over the rooftops and it is only just getting competely dark--at 10:45 PM. Yet another thing to get used to while traveling....

My second morning in Paris started with immaculately crafted croissants bought a block away from 'Tcha's apartment, consumed on her tiny rooftop terrace under blue skies that defied the meteo's dire predictions. We then blasted off past the Pantheon and into the neighborhood she'd suggested we could find much nicer hotels for a future iteration of the Tour; from the number of yuppies pushing BMW-equivalent baby carriages I could certainly tell we were in a different world from the gritty environs we'd walked through yesterday.

Sure enough, entering the birdsong-filled courtyard of a little hotel off the Rue Mouffetard, and talking briefly with the quartet of American sorority sisters who were just checking out, I could tell we were in the equivalent of Polyface Farms paradise after the industrial-tourist CAFO hell of the neighborhood I'd be navigating a couple of weeks later with my thirty charges. Alas, despite this being the perfect little Paris hotel one would stay in if one didn't have the benefit of incredibly generous Friends with Terraces, the news was not uniformly good, in that their maximum group size is ten, and their brochure seemed to indicate that they would not accept reservations next July until March--too late for Summer Abroad coordinators who need to have accommodations locked in nine months in advance. But perhaps we could divide the group, use different close-by hotels and the like? It was worth looking into.


After coffee with 'Tcha's mom opposite the Luxembourg (punctuated by loud and confident suggestions of several more things I would've could've should've investigated), we ambled through the park to a possible classroom facility over toward the Montparnasse, again marveling at the difference in vibe as we stepped into a courtyard and saw what might have been / might still be: overcoming my usual reluctance to go up to fonctionnaires and risking disappointment, I found myself being shown around the various classroom spaces, several too small for our group but the last "just right"--and apparently things became less busy in July and we might be able to work things out.

For me these matters are fraught with all sorts of peril, as multiple contingencies and complications lead to analysis-paralysis: the nice woman was going on vacation for a week; she wasn't sure of the charges; I wasn't sure Summer Abroad would go for it (or whether they had already to committed to an alternative classroom site); perhaps there was some hidden barrier that would render this just a fanciful dream. In this way my pessimistic side too often leads me to not even ask, whereas my lovely and optimistic wife usually "goes for it" and wonders why I'm such an Eeyore. I'm sure there's deep psychologizing to be done on this.

Meanwhile we walked back, with me churning over the e-mails I would have to craft before heading to Brussels that afternoon. On the way we spotted improbably sights like this canary-colored bird with her appendages...










... and once in the park again we ran into a neighbor, whose cries and laughs waft through the skylight and inevitably brighten Tcha's life.

So before packing, I dashed off my e-mail to my soon-to-be-on-vacation administrator, then sorted gear (leaving my carry-on with hiking boots and miscellaneous items I figured I won't need til Paris in two weeks) and headed downstairs to give the key to my gracious hostess who was eating lunch with a friend, and rolled my enormous suitcase to the Odeon metro, thence to Gare du Nord, and via TGV to Brussels to catch my brother's last cantata concert on Sunday.

But that is for another post. (I wrote most of this one Sunday morning, having awoken on my pad on the floor of my brother's cello studio, bright and early at 6AM. If this be jet-lag, let us make the most of it.)

Start your engines

I should start by acknowledging my ambivalence about starting a blog, not merely because of its self-display but also because of the possibility that the wrong eyes might see something they don't want to read. But it seems as if this mode could be useful and semi-entertaining, if only for myself, in passing along some sense of how this strange trip is evolving.

A word about the URL choice and my title: a prof of mine (who inspired the voice of Pontius Pilate in the Monty Python movie) repeatedly dismissed Philip Sidney as "an aristocratic bauble," much to my consternation at the time, and I realize some of the Tourers both then and now might be dismissible as such (for that is how I will refer to the people in my class, since I don't know how well this'll be searchable and I want to be able to stay candid about events and places and, perhaps, people). About my title: Not sure whether I want to keep the lame-ass word-within-a-word nom de blog, but it's the best I could do under jet lagged conditions.

Voices of some loud Yanks are wafting up five floors from the street below, as mopeds blat past and the Parisian skies decide whether to dump rain again. I arrived on my friend's doorstep at 9 AM from San Francisco via Kennedy, the first leg punctuated by coach-class nightmare 2-year-old friskiness behind me (my reaction muted by my sheepish acknowledgment that my own son had inflicted such trauma on others with even greater force), the second leg featuring hauntingly beautiful cloudscapes over the North Atlantic in the bluish pre-dawn light, immediately took a two hour nap, and awoke refreshed enough to charge over to the Pompidou for the Kandinsky and Calder exhibits.

We then swung by the hotel that has been arranged for my kiddies and me for our week in Paris starting the 12th of July, and unfortunately the DJ on my personal soundtrack cued up the song, "Here comes that sinking feeling": the place is charmless, expensive, across from the St Lazare railway station, not a salubrious locale for sheltered 'mericans on their Summer Abroad adventure. I immediately began unproductive time-travel fantasies, wishing I had put my foot down back in October and told the woman she could do better. But as I warned the assembled students and parents at the orientation in May, any time things get tough I will trot out the examples of real Tourers who got caught in crummy rat-infested holes, besieged by bandits and subject to the whim of nasty customs officers! This made for a somber bus ride home to the friendlier confines of this neighborhood...

However, after a plodding couple of laps around the Luxembourg gardens, and a cramped shower, I felt better, made a couple of phone calls, and had what would have been a fine dinner on the terrace of a favorite restaurant with my host and her son, had it not been for the perfectly tag-teamed smoke from the tables right and left of us, as course by course these supposedly food-obsessed Parisians seared their own taste buds and spread the asthma love, course by course. I'm realizing that inside is probably where to find the better air now.

And for all that: With wi-fi password laboriously copied in correctly--thanks to the tech support provided during dinner--I am on line, receiving e-mail, skypeing a former student who requested help with GRE sample essays, and (hold your breath) a bloggviator for the first time. Bear with me as I continue!