DisneyDubaiVegas

When you arrive in Dubai you immediately notice not only that it's a desert, but it's deserted.  Traffic is light and everything is so huge, that it never feels busy.

The beaches, like the streets are immaculate.

Our hotel has 600 rooms, a nice size hotel, but with 22 restaurants and 40 stores?

The Emirates Mall and the Dubai Mall are so massive that nothing could make it feel crowded.  There are 1250 stores in one mall.  My son wanted sunglasses, we passed five sunglasses stores on the way to the bathroom.

The perfect representation of Dubai is the Mall of Emirates.  It is there that my kids could ski and tube at the indoor ski resort, while it's 95 degrees outside.  As my children played in the snow my wife and I drank coffee at the St. Moritz restaurant, complete with a video of a fire in the fireplace and the smell of burning Aspen trees, which sprayed over our heads via a fragrance pump that hung above the restaurant.



Oh yes, and I finally found an open Borders Book store.

There is no recession here.  The malls are open until midnight, at 11:00 it was well-trafficked.


Dubai is a city of visitors.  With a population of 6 million, 4.5 million are foreigners, mostly Pakistanis, Indians and Filipinos, all looking for work.  The guests are 70% Russian. 


The Barj Kalipha, the tallest building in the world has a telescope where you can find hot spots around the city and then push a button and it shows you what it looked like 20 years ago when it was a wasteland.
Vegas-Style the Dubai Mall has an aquarium and a dancing water show.

When we were told to go to the Souk, I pictured the stone alleys of Jerusalem, but instead I found a dirty street filled with Indian expats selling knock-off Hermes bags.




This place is a combination of DisneyLand without the charm, Vegas without the gambling or alcohol.  It's a Twinkie town.  Tastes good, but feels a bit empty.

Swimming and Snooker in Sheffield

Swim meets, or Galas as they are called in the UK, are long days and sometimes long weekends.  My favorite shirt of all time was found at one of these events, worn by a tired parent.  The shirt read:  “If I only had one day to live, I’d like to spend it at a swim meet.  Because they last forever.”

But they are also rewarding watching your child stand on the blocks in front of hundreds of people and take off into the water as she stretches and challenges herself in a very public way.

Sheffield England is a town a few hours North of London and when I told members of my office I'd be going there they gave me blank stares.  Well known for its crucible steel process invented in the 1740's, it's a city on the rebound from years of decline.  Well known for its University, a soccer rivalry (the Blades and the Owls) and this weekend the World Snooker Championships.

But around the world it is best known as the maker of most of England's cutlery.

When the Holiday Inn Express dinner didn't invite we found a restaurant called Vito's which was well recommended by an online website.  We took a cab to this cozy Italian joint where the pasta is Al dente, the house wines are great and a shot of Limoncello and Grappa are gratis.

After dinner Vito came up from the kitchen in his chef top and black and white checkered pants.  We asked him how he made his way from Southern Italy to Sheffield.  He wanted to learn English and saw that all the knives he was using were made in Sheffield.  So he came there to learn English, and "Here I am 30 years later."

The swim meet was held at Pond's Forge.  Did you know how many cups of tea it takes to fill a pool?  This was a country-wide meet with build up that included singing and grand entrances.  

The final activity before the starting gun was the singing of "Land of Hope and Glory" a song written to the tune of Pomp and Circumstance, so it already reached for the parental heart.  And then the hundreds of parents and athletes stood and sang:

Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free
How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee?
Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set,
God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet,
God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.

And while the song was written in 1902 at the request of King Edward, and was no doubt written about the Empire, the song had special resonance for the parents as so many of them looked down from the stands and watched their children perform.  Big burly men and bright haired women with faces painted the color of their child’s swim club shouted the words in their loudest British voices so maybe their children, and God will hear:

God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet, 
God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.

From the Township to Jumeirah, Cape Town to Dubai

Once my wife convinced me that Dubai was "on the way back" to London I stopped showing her the Atlas. However, the distance between Cape Town and Dubai is so much more than even the 9 hour plane ride suggested.

In Cape Town we had a Seder with 200 Jews, using the same Haggadah, the same text, the same chicken soup as our ancestors back in the old country and our parents back in Florida.  Dayenu.

In Dubai people with Israeli passports are not allowed in the country and even having an Israeli stamp can cause immigration questions and delays.

We left a country that can't house its people or give them jobs, where 70% unemployment in the township is average and 25% HIV infection is progress.  To a place where the wealth is so vast that only 10% of the population needs to work. Where three quarters of its inhabitants are foreigners who they literally had to ship in to fill the jobs.

We left a place without running water, where living in a room with 16 relatives, but is on the "double story," is a high achievement, to a place where the tallest buildings in the world look futuristic, beautiful and empty.

Walking through the Township our gestures feel empty when all you can offer is a pack of chips, some change, and a hug.

The day before we arrive a train came through town and hit four cows that had wandered onto the tracks.  When word spread men ran from their homes with machettes, hacking off what was left of the dying animals.  They came back home and thanked God for the gift of their Easter feast.

In Dubai my children donned heavy jackets and snow skied in a mall in the middle of the desert in 95 degree heat.

The Big Five

My image of South Africa was molded in the Michigan diag shanty that stood in opposition to Apartheid.  It was formed in the words of "Dont Wanna Play Sun City."  It came from Bono, imploring the fans on Rattle and Hum: "Am I bugging ya?  I dont mean to bug ya."

My generation saw the end of white South Africa, the release and ascension of Mandela, the Vuvuzelas of the 2010 World Cup.

My children's first impression is formed by the baby warthogs they ask to bring home, the dazzle of Zebra that cross our path, the troop of monkeys that unlatch our door, penetrate our home and steal our apples.


The Safari excitement comes from that edge where interest and fear meet.  The crocodile that could take your arm if he wanted to, the elephant that could flip your car with a wrong move, the road that seemed to disintegrate under your tires.






The days are 6:00 AM wake up calls, a search for excitement, a peaceful afternoon, early evening rides before dinner and then zipping into our netted beds.

The first day you are struck by the scene, then the need to find the big 5 (Lion, Rhino, Elephant, Leopard, Hippo) and finally something more, which we got when we found a leopard in a tree with a dead nyala in its mouth and a hyena circling nearby looking for scraps.

The crushing of bones and skull in the leopard’s mouth had one child declaring her vegetarianism, like her mother 30 years earlier. This declaration only lasted until lunch, however.


The game drives were about nature, the history of South Africa would come later.  There was some discussion of the vanishing elephants, the ivory trade, the decline of the cheetahs, the need to live as a partner with nature.  But boarding our plane out of Hoedspruit to Johannesburg history walks by when FW de Klerk comes and sits next to us with his wife and body guard.  The transition to Cape Town begins.

The Case for More

There is an electronic sign in Trafalgar Square counting down the days until the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London.  Today, with the sun shining down, there are 137 more to go.  The countdown is a build up for the city, but for me it represents time running out, as it coincides with our planned departure from our year abroad.

In late summer 2011 our house was a boiling cauldron of overflowing angst about what London might bring.  The night before leaving I video-taped the children and uniformly they were scared about one thing:  The first day of school.  My wife wondered aloud what she would do once I left for work in the morning.  I was nervous for them since I felt the burden of dragging them along on this adventure.

And now six months later the kids can’t remember what the first day of school was like.  And my wife is out of the house before I am most mornings.  So I’m guessing her running/hiking/ art history/photography/museum tour/pub crawling groups fill out her days.

And so with everyone settled into a routine of friends, teams, birthday parties and sleep-overs the question arises, why leave?  We went through the trouble of immigration and Visas and schools and housing and then immersion, all for one year?  Like most things in life it’s about expectations.  If you expect to stay one year it’s hard to get your mind wrapped around two.  If you expect to go home in 12 months you plan a certain way:  Your expenses, your family, your career, your pets.

But if your life is subjectively better with less stress, less driving, fewer headaches, more freedom, more family time (cuts both ways), less criticism, more days of pure adventure and enjoyment, why end it?

The argument goes that if you are here for a year, it’s like a long vacation, but if you stay it becomes home, with stresses like anything else.  If you miss one year of school you can pop back in.  If you miss two years, you come back out of sync with the rest of your friends.  If you miss the first year of high school it’s an entry point making re-entry tougher.

We took a big risk coming here and it worked.  Are we taking as big a risk in year two?

All the negatives for staying relate to what might happen to the children should they be out of their lives for more than the allotted year.  For the parents the negatives are softer.  There are friends and family that are missed.  And we’ve seen the struggle when there is a crisis back home.  But the day to day is richer and in many ways more fulfilling.  And that’s hard to walk away from.

As Chekov wrote:  “Any idiot can face a crisis.  It’s the day to day living that wears you out.”

Abbey Road

You can't live where we do, in the Northwest Section of London, and not become fascinated with the cult that is the Beatles.  You can walk by Abbey Road Studios at any time, on any day, no matter the weather, and see people doing one of two things.  Either writing on the wall that surrounds it, which they repaint every three months, or waiting.  Waiting for traffic to clear so they can take their shot.  The money shot.  The same shot of the Beatles on the cover of the Abbey Road album, crossing the famous walk.


But that's as far as you can get, no piercing the black gates from the street to the inner sanctum that looks like a normal house on a normal street in a residential area.  But for the 80th anniversary of the studio they were letting in a lucky few, Willy Wonka-style.  But instead of chocolate I paid 75 quid for my golden ticket.


At 7:00 PM on a Friday the line stretched out past the gates but soon I was walking through the lobby filled with pictures of music history and into Studio 2 where I spent the next 90 minutes learning about the history of this place.  Even though they discuss the 30 years leading up to the Beatles, it is John/Paul/George and Ringo who made the space famous.  Lots of big time artists have worked there since EMI opened it in 1931.  But the surrounding area is suffused with Beatles.  It's not just the iconic street corner or the St John's Wood tube stop with the Beatles coffee shop, or the memorabilia store a mile up the road at Baker Street where you can buy Beatles cuff links.  The people who come to pay tribute to the band have a distinctly late 1960's feel.

The 50 or so people who joined me in Studio 2 are told that the Beatles were not welcomed inside at first either.  "The music was OK, but they won the hearts of the execs through their personalities."  They weren’t just fun, they were light, witty and smart.  Clever as the Brits say.  And you see it in the outtakes and studio shots of them enjoying the process. 

The studio itself is unremarkable.  There is very little to suggest the specialness of the place, it's just a big room and long beige draperies with stains of white paint from what looks like the work of a sloppy handyman.

We sit in red leather chairs, the same chairs you see in nearly every picture of the Beatles.  They were purchased in bulk because the previous chairs were wood and they squeaked, ruining many a take.  I sit in the corner, in the spot where Paul conceived and played Blackbird.  You see where Ringo sat, his cigarette stand brought in for the occasion.  And what you understand is that there is nothing in this room that gave inspiration, they brought it with them.  In this big old room they dragged their guitars into closets and storage rooms, hallways and backways, and even into the control room, testing every sound, every echo, every twist.

They were kids in their 20s and the sounds that are now iconic were just them trying to find something new.  You can sit and listen and hear them evolve into the performers they would become.  They were just friends trying to be creative together and it became magic.

The studio sits in the same spot where it was bought at the start of the century, in a place where neighbors still complain about the noise.  But EMI knew what they were doing, they wanted it far from the trains and noise of the city.

It was the last place Glenn Miller played before dying in a plane crash over the English Channel.  Amy Winehouse spent her last days here as well.  But it is Beatles' memories that bring people from all over the world.  It's why they stand outside and write and weep, fully iPod plugged in wondering how the magic was made, what went on inside.

And after spending an evening in that place I still wonder how they did it.  But I no longer wonder about the place.  Because I now know the magic came from inside those four boys, not these four walls. 
 






Off the Path

Tell your kids to “get off their path.”
That was the message from this 75 year old CEO I went to see.  A Brit who ran public companies on three continents said we are all born on a path, and all too often we stick to it.  “A banker’s son is born in Boston goes to Princeton, to Wall Street and to Florida where he plays golf and dies.”
He told me of a young man who came to see him asking for career advice.  The freshly minted graduate came to his office with a report card full of A’s and a specialty in Geography.  He asked the new graduate:  “Where is the Irrawaddy River?” And when the young man fumbled and guessed wrong, the old CEO admonished him: “Go do something!  You’ve spent all your time in a classroom.  The Irrawaddy is in Myanmar (Burma) and I know that because I swam across it.”
He questioned the rush to leave school and get a job, commenting that young people believe they are entitled to a job upon graduation.  “And now that the jobs aren’t there, they’re angry." 
“Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains,” is his favorite quote.
Sometimes your children go off their path, and then you wish they hadn’t.  That is the emotion every time our son hits the Rugby pitch.  The season is a demolition derby of broken bones, concussions, bloody noses and torn ears. 

When the final weekend arrives the theme of my pre-game pep talk is victory is walking off the field under your own weight.  Tennis tryouts are a week away, a sport where I see a brighter future.

But he is fifteen and like everyone his age, he is indestructible.  So when I lose his jersey under a pile of sweating boys, I gasp  When I see a large man/child run off, his first stride atop my son’s barren ankle, I want to jump the fence. 


When I hear a “pop” after his wind is shaken by a shoulder to the gut, all I can do isturn my head.

The tournament ends with a second place finish and an overall healthy corpus.  And we move on watching him take these detours.  Hoping these risks allow him to walk his own path, even with a small limp.

The Lion

I now know that Lyon is not French for Lion, even though the Lyon Tourism Council has adopted a giant red lion as its logo.  Is that just to confuse non-French speaking Americans?
Lyon is beautiful on a chilly, sunny Monday morning.  The city bills itself as an island between the Rhone and Saone rivers.  I really think it’s a peninsula, but I am reluctant to tell them.

To be there on the day The Artist won top honors at the Oscars is to be reminded of the tremendous pull of hometown loyalty and the regard in which the US is seen.  Their version of CNN showed a non-stop loop of the Academy Award speeches by the various French victors and everyone was talking about what a great day it was to be French.  “This has never happened before, five awards.”  On this day they were all French, but usually they are Lyonnaise.
The inhabitants are fiercely loyal.  When I mentioned that Lyon was the third largest city in France, showing off my Wikipedia knowledge, they snapped back that you can’t trust anyone from Marseille.  “Marseille is only bigger because they include the suburbs.”
They are quick to characterize everything as either very American or very French.  It’s an hour flight from London to Lyon.  I could have taken the Eurostar train to Lille and then on to Lyon, a four-hour journey, but instead I flew.  “America is a flying culture, not a train culture like us,” they told me.
Coffee in Lyon is espresso.  If you ask for an Americano they point to the Starbucks down the street.  If you ask for an Americano after telling them you are allergic to dairy, everything you say is discounted and you are met with a harrumph, in French.
The old part of town is filled with narrow streets with openings on two sides so you can move from street to street via the open doors.  These are relics from the days when Lyon was known for its silk trade and they carried the long pieces of silk through the streets and had speedy access to indoors when the rains came.
The French revolution destroyed the industry when many were sent to the guillotine and most of the skilled labor fled.


Lyon, like much of Europe, is another town filled with religious artifacts, and non-religious people.  Although the 8th of December is their festival of lights when everyone puts a candle in their window to thank the Virgin Mary for saving the city from a deadly plague in the Middle Ages, Churches have as much meaning as museums.
On a lunch tour between meetings they proudly show off the churches and religious landmarks.  When I ask about Church attendance, they ask, “Why go to Church?”

Country Living

I tried to rub the ache out of my shoulder wondering its source, messing with the kids, that one lap across the swimming pool?  Later in the morning my daughter emerged at breakfast asking if I had gun bruises as well.  It wasn’t the breast stroke, but the recoil from the previous day’s shoot that gave me an upper body Charlie horse.

I always admired the people who lived by the natural calendar.  Who understood it was Springtime by the way the birds acted or the trees bloomed.  Following a day of shooting it was a fly fishing guide who told me the song of the swallows overhead suggested Spring was here.  The way the toads jumped or the goose trying to mate with the swan, all suggested, much more than the mild temperatures, what was happening in the world around us.
Our cab driver called Hampshire the 45-minute community because it’s 45 minutes to London, 45 minutes to Heathrow, 45 minutes to Stansted.  It’s part commuter and part pure country.   One of the hotel workers told us he had only been to London 3 times in his 76 years.  Once was to see Phantom of the Opera.
While the ability to tell the time of year by the mating calls of the swallows was impressive, and the ability to shoot two clay pigeons as they zig zagged across the sky was skillful, it was the ability to tame the Falcons in a feat of patience and bravery that outpaced them both.
The world of Falconry seems pre-historic.  These birds of prey have no loyalty, no love or companionship.  The women are bigger than the men and mating occurs when the women accept the male’s advances, rejection is met with death.  There is a purity to the relationship.  You cannot cajole these animals, you cannot buy their affection and if you cross them they will never trust you or anybody else again. You cannot impose your will on them and these characteristics made them popular among the Kings in the Middle Ages.  Living in a world of sycophants they appreciated the obstinacies and rules of nature by which the falcons lived.  According to our Falconer, “God has not created a faster or more perfect creature for flight” as they are clocked at 210 miles per hour, making them the fastest creature alive.
(As an aside, at the Hampshire Estate I did feel like an extra on Downton Abbey)
The Falcons soared, the fish bit on everybody’s line, but daddy’s, and the pigeons tried to out-run our gunshots.  I hoped part of the impression on the children would be a realization of life and death in the country and how these activities were once survival, not sport.  If you couldn’t fish or shoot, you wouldn't eat.  But as with most things, education came from an unlikely source. It was the side pocket of the Falconer that drew in the children.
We were asked to hold a piece of yellow fluff to feed the Falcon after she approached on call.  But soon one of the children noticed how the Falconer would pull the yellow from his satchel before handing it to us.  When they realized his pockets were full of dead baby chicks that he picked apart, the kids were grossed out, the parents closed their eyes, and my wife was happy to be a vegetarian.
After shooting pigeons and catching trout, after lectures about the risks of life in the country, it was the cracking baby chicken legs that finally led to the lesson of the weekend: “Dad, I am NEVER eating chicken nuggets again.”

Charity Toast

Would a charity event in the UK be different than a charity event back home?
In the end the differences are just changes in protocol.  When they say black tie, they mean black tie.  So I am running down Oxford Street at 6:45, like Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man, to rent a tuxedo for the first time since my senior prom.  My tie options included a bow tie, a skinny black, a wide half Windsor, but beggars had to choose when I told her I needed the tuxedo, not tomorrow, not in June like everybody else in line, but in 20 minutes.
A thousand people packed into a ballroom at Grosvenor House and I am seated next to a Member of Parliament, OK, we’re not in DC any more.  Mr. Stephen McCabe runs for five year terms, represents Birmingham Hall Green and Birmingham Selly Oak, has 75,000 constituents and needs to raise 30,000 GBP for his re-election run.  As a member of the British Labour Party he is on the outs, but he still had plenty of stories.  Most interestingly his tales of meeting Bill Clinton and his strong Scottish Accent, which in a poll was voted the most trustworthy of accents.  He said in a field of Brits it helped him stand out.
Unlike charity events at home there is no fee for entrance, instead it is more like a High Holiday appeal where the table host passes out pledge cards and you can’t leave until you fill them out and give them back. 

There are a series of toasts and presentations.  The usual “thank yous” by board members, a prayer by a Rabbi and then a toast to the Queen, which I was quite excited about.  Everyone grabs their drink, stands and raises a glass and says, “To the Queen,” and sits down.  That’s it?
The Toast to the State of Israel was a bit longer and then the Chancellor to the Exchequer George Osborne spoke movingly about growing up in a Jewish area and always wishing he had a Bar Mitzvah.  And so the Ambassador to Israel stood and gave him a fountain pen with a letter that read:  Dear George, congratulations on your bar mitzvah, it was wonderful.  Please use this pen in good health and don’t seat us next to the Michkin’s again.”

45 in Oberlech

It’s an hour and 20 to Zurich, a two hour drive to Lech and then a gondola into Oberlech where cars are forbidden and only hotels and skiers reside.  It’s half term break.

Austria was not on my bucket list.  But during the first week of school a friend said that if we want a ski vacation, this is where everybody goes and you better reserve your room.  And so if you view this year as an adventure you jump in and rationalize that if you can spend Passover in Dubai, then Austria is part of the ride.

Oberlech is in the Arlberg region, the home of Alpine skiing and a grouping of small towns, many of which are abandoned in Summer, only open for a few snowy months a year.

It’s very Austrian, with big busted bar maids who look like St. Pauli Girl, plenty of Wiener schnitzel, Goulash and Almdudler.

Our 21 year old ski guide is Austrian, she lives in Zurich, she speaks German, Austrian-German, English and she’s very wise.  When the children order chicken nuggets and hot chocolate from the Fraulein I lament about American kids.  She shares that the Turkish and Russian kids are the worst.  “It’s new money.”

Her most astute comment is about the time she was refused a beer in a New York bar.  "I had been drinking beer and wine at my parents’ dinner table since I was 16.  We have no drinking and driving problems in Austria.  We learn to drink long before we learn to drive.  Once we start driving we already know how to handle alcohol.”

Another ski instructor, a well-spoken 33 year old kept making Schwarzenegger references as if he were the only Austrian I would know.  I’ve heard of the Von Tropps and Kurt Waldheim for G-d sakes.

The specter of the war is here, however.  Two ski instructors got into it because one of them had a German mother.  The Austrian was bragging that Hitler had to go to Germany to get people to follow him, the Austrians were too smart.  It may not be fair, but all the American tourists wonder aloud what the old people in the town were doing during the War.

An odd place to celebrate 45.  With half the family in London, bad internet connections and the rest of our life in the US, it has a distinctly distant Austrian feel.  Forty five has no great appeal.  It is not the beginning, middle or end of anything.  But for some reason when you see your birth date up there on a newspaper it still screams, YOUR DAY.  Even if that paper is the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten.

Snow Times Two

There is a big metal door that locks our office building at night.  So leaving late this huge slab swings open and when it closes all of Lime Street rattles.  Every evening is an adventure, is it warm, cold, rainy, clear?  But last night, for the second time in a week it was snowy.  London gets about one snowfall a year and here was a second treat. 

It was a scene from a holiday movie, big fat flakes, a quiet street, a full pub across the way, the windows streaking with sweat.

Our hometown of Washington can’t handle the snow, but at least we have the equipment.  In London they can’t handle the snow because their only defense is to ignore it and wait for it to melt.

In typical human fashion, last year’s snow fall, which created havoc at Heathrow, caused them to pull the trigger a bit early this year and close the airport before the full force of the 10 centimeters was felt.  The opposite occurred at our children’s school.  A couple years ago the headmaster closed the school for a second day after a snowfall and the parents rioted.  And so now she is wary to pull the trigger.

Last night as the snow fell, the city quieted, the trains stalled, the cabs swerved and the British went to the pub.  Tomorrow it is half term break and we are going to Austria to ski.  Who knew we could have skied in our own back yard.    

Super Sunday or Super Monday

Either stay up late or get up early.

Those are the two ways to deal with the five hour time lag.  I thought the mature way would be to tape the Super Bowl, get up early, avoid email, hope to G-d the DVR starts at the right point and watch the game in 90 minutes.

My son can't live in a world where everyone else knows the score but him.

I can't live in a world where I go to bed at 3 in the morning.

So he rests throughout the day, tries to pace himself, finishes his homework.  For me it's a normal Sunday, errands, preparing for the Monday ahead.

And at 11:00 PM I climb into bed, making sure the recording is set and he opens up the couch into a bed and settles in with a package of Kettle Corn for the long haul.  If it's a blow-out he'll go to bed, but anything close and he'll force himself against nature to see what everyone else is seeing, his own personal fight against time.

I'm up at 6:30 the following morning and ask my wife if the son waited up all night.  She said it was a close game.

I go downstairs where he is fast asleep in front of a quiet television.  I turn it on and begin.  Pushing past the inane commentary, we don't get the American commercials so there is no need to slow between timeouts.  Through the first half, slowly over the Madonna show, the slog of the third quarter and then the full tilt ride of the fourth quarter.

A 44 year old needs to be well rested for work, the practical side of starting the week off right, just getting over a cold.  A 15 year old must not miss anything, he needs to be updated, to follow his friends on Facebook as the game goes on.

His generation is used to taping a show and watching it any time they like.  My generation is used to being controlled by the clock, "It's 9:00, Love Boat is on..."  Today the old man needed the technology so he could get his sleep.  And the young man followed the clock that sits back home five hours away.

Steve Jobs…Book Notes

I have read more pages per day using a Kindle on the Tube than any time since I was in Ann Arbor 23 years ago.  A Kindle in my pocket has allowed me to complete door stops including the Steve Jobs biography.  Books that were once intimidating are now now accesible.  The only down side is the rip off I felt when the Jobs’ book ended at 78% of completion (the last 22% are the index, acknowledgement and sources).

It is the most inspiring business book and as one friend called it, the Atlas Shrugged of our generation.

Key takeaways:
They stole their interface and a lot of the Mac and Windows ideas from Xerox.  When Windows was released Jobs told Gates that he was ripping off Apple.  “Gates looked at him coolly and said, ‘Well Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it.  I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.’”

John Lasseter pitched Toy Story which sprang from the belief that products have an essence to them, a purpose for which they were made.  “If the object were to have feelings these would be based on its desire to fulfill its essence.  The purpose of a glass, for example, is to hold water; if is had feelings, it would be happy when full and sad when empty.  The essence of a computer screen is to interface with a human.  The essence of a unicycle is to be ridden in a circus.  As for toys, their purpose is to be played with by kids, and thus their existential fear is of being discarded or upstaged by newer toys.  So a buddy movie pairing an old favorite toy with a shiny new one would have an essential drama to it.”

He wanted the Apple stores because he said if Apple is going to succeed they do so with innovation and you can’t win on innovation unless you have a way to communicate with customers.
A good company must impute, it must convey its values and importance in everything it does from packaging to marketing.  He was reminded of his first visit to the Ralph Lauren story on Madison Avenue.

Jobs knew the isolating potential of technology, he was a strong believer in face to face meetings.  “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and i-chat.  That’s crazy.  Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings from random discussions.”

Unfortunately Jobs disapproved of Market Research, one of his flaws.  He used the Wayne Gretzky quote about going to where the puck is going to be.  Henry Ford said if he’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse.  People don’t know what they want until you show it to them."

“A lot of us want to give something back to our species, add something to the flow...we try to use our talents to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow.  That’s what has driven me.”

British Humor, Part I

Time Out, the magazine, which is in a dozen major cities and bills itself as the guide to Art, Culture and Going Out, has a distinctly British column called Lies to tell tourists. 

This week the column tells its followers to share this bit: 

"The pigeons of Trafalgar Square have their wings clipped:  legend says that if they ever fly away the monarchy will fall.  They are looked after by a yeoman called the Pigeon Master.  He's the bloke lying in the square with a can of Kestrel, wearing two pairs of trousers."

I will be Trafalgar Square later tonight for a Chinese New Year celebration and I hope to spread the word.

The World is Very Fast

Just the highlights
There is no way to say it without everyone sounding spoiled, but we hear it from every expat family.  The kids are tired of travelling.  They want to stay home and go to a movie, not another church.  So when my daughter whined, "I don't want to go to Greece this weekend," I said, "That's fine because Rome is in Italy."
My memory of Rome from 23 years ago was a dirty mess of broken down buildings.  The Rome we saw this month is a clean and well preserved place of beauty.  Every block is another chunk of history, it's an outdoor museum.
And so we do the quick trip:  Coliseum, Jewish Ghetto, Pasta, Spanish Steps, Pasta, The Vatican, St. Peters, Pasta, Trevi Fountain, Gelato, AS Roma Soccer, Pasta, Home.



It’s nice not to travel in the Summer with the crowd and to see the Coliseum on a mild day in January where you don’t need sharp elbows to get a picture of your family and where you can hear your guide who isn’t screaming above the English/French/German/Chinese guides around you.
The pasta is better, the Chianti sweeter, the roads more narrow, the people happier.
The Vatican and the 500 steps to the top of St. Peters, learning about this Pope and his Prada slippers and his love of Orange Fanta made you feel you could know this man with a billion followers.  This person who lives in Rome where 99% of the people call themselves Catholic, and only 10% go to Church.
This town doesn’t use butter when it makes pasta and cheese is delivered when you ask for it.  They have non-dairy Gelato and 15,000 of the country’s 35,000 remaining Jews.
And while they all sound just like you expect, with heavy emphasis on the final syllable, and you swear you spotted various characters from the Godfather or the Sopranos, one of my favorite encounters was with a Bangladeshi street vendor who sold junk to my children.
“Where are you from?"
“I am from Washington, DC"
 He looked up at me with his gold teeth and smooth face that suggested he couldn’t be more than 25 years old. 
 "I am from Bangladesh.  You are from America.  And here we are.  The world is very fast.”

Roma, Roma, Roma

Soccer explains the world.  And so to understand the Romans we make a trip to see AS Roma and the great Francesco Totti.

It was not a difficult match for Roma beating Cesena 5-1 with Totti setting a single-club scoring record.  So with the game in hand our observation turned to the scene where you learn that an 80,000 seat stadium is unnecessary when you have 30,000 fans.  You see an aging population, mostly men who drink as much espresso as they do beer in a stadium that housed the 1960 Olympics and was built by Mussolini (in front is an obelisk with his name, the only reminder of the fascist dictator).  And what you feel is the need to leave at 20 minute intervals because the thickness of the cigarette smoke, even in an outdoor arena, is eye and throat piercing.

To start the game everyone joins in a raucous rendition of Roma, Roma, Roma by popular singer Antonello Venditti.  This is not a national anthem, as this is not a national team, instead it is a recent song that is as joyful as any we’ve heard.  It doesn’t praise the city's beauty, but the team’s.  "Roma, Heart of this city, One and only love of many, many people who sigh for you...Roma, beautiful Roma, I have painted you Yellow like the sun and red just like my heart."  It is a love song. 

And then there is the Roma crest which consists of the She-wolf and the twins Romulus and Remus for whom the city is named. 



When a foreigner buys a ticket for a soccer game you need a passport to prove your identity.  So we spent part of Saturday night with our tickets hanging out of our passports.

So when we got to passport control to leave Italy on Sunday morning, with the five of us and our 10 carry-on bags the security guard barked out, “Who is Joshua?”  My son peered from behind us and into the box where the guard sat. The guard held up his cell phone, showing his screen saver, the She-wolf and the Roma flag.  Inside of his passport Josh had left his ticket stub.  We passed with no questions asked.

Vignettes

Oxford and Cambridge
Staying at the Beltsville Maryland Crowne Plaza for a weekend swim meet is a pain in the ass.  Staying at the Crowne Plaza in Cambridge for a 3 day swim gala is an adventure, at least for us. 
There were murmurings amongst the parents, even some of the expats, “I can’t believe I’m back in Cambridge…again.”  Some stayed home and took an early morning train, others skipped the Friday night or kept the kids home for that friends’ Bar Mitzvah.  It’s all perspective.
Both Oxford and Cambridge were a bit of a disappointment, I expected old bookstores, not Waterstones, coffee shops, not Pret a Manger, an Apothecary, not Boots.  And while some of the views are magnificent, it is still just a place of learning and a place of commerce.
Pub Trivia
The Lime Street Runners, the name of our Pub Trivia team, had a great showing at our latest event at the City Tavern.  Pub Trivia is another excuse to have drinks with office mates, but under the guise of, well having drinks with your mates.   Nineteen teams pack in a Pub, there are questions and videos on a monitor, you put your answers on a sheet of paper which is then corrected by another team.  Eight rounds later, after food and drink throughout, there is a winner.  The prizes are usually ghastly, but by then no one cares.
The American CEO came along for the ride but was little help for the team as the questions centered on far too many British celebrities, politicians and reality show winners.  Since I can barely tell a Pippa from a Kate.  I was lucky to have a question about the recent Republican to leave the race, John Huntsman (most guessed Ron Paul?)
As we moved our way up the charts, we were in 19th place (last) after round one, we hit the final round called “twist or stand.”  In this round the questions got progressively harder and at any point you can bow out and bank the points you’d achieved.  But if you stay in and get the answer wrong you lose all points accumulated that round.
After noting that Zagreb was the only capital starting with Z (Zurich is not) the questions presented particular difficulty even for my British teammates:  In what city is England currently playing Pakistan in cricket? What four letters on a British license plate are never used?  Since the inception of the Premier League 20 years ago, name the two clubs that have appeared in 15 or more seasons without being ever presents.
A strong last question (name the two biggest bones in the fore-arm, name the three movies in which Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise co-star) and a wise dropping off point gave us a proud second place finish.

In Paris

There is no one way of doing business in Europe.  You can’t characterize by region.  Every country and every city is different and our client visits in Paris prove they don’t want to do business like the Brits, unlike the US, bifurcated from the Belgians.
Calling on a client for a visit is often not worth their time, unless you have something new to say.  Checking in, how is the service, anything more we can do, does not suffice.  While Parisians love their cafes and their lunches, they do not spend a lot of time socializing after work, they work and they go home.  They do not head out to the Pub and “get to know each other.”  This is not an observation, this is the message from our French customers who are often exasperated at themselves.
While the French do not play to type, Paris does.  The romance of the city is borne of Robert Doisneau photographs of lovers on a bench, women in cafes.  And you can’t walk a corner without this scene playing out.  The city was going through a spot of Spring-like weather and you can’t not be taken in by the Eiffel Tower peering its head outside the window of a meeting or walking the Champs Elysee at night .
But once you get beyond that you realize that the French, of 35-hour work week fame, actually are putting in long hours to compete.  Maybe it’s because we were meeting with International companies, many with a US mindset, but either way, they went back to the office after our drinks ended well past 7 o’clock.
And while they are characterized as not being terribly US-friendly, the streets with names from every president since Wilson, are reminders of the war and the US presence.  Our meeting at the Publicis Group began with a tour of the lobby and the Eisenhower gallery, a tribute to the 34th US President who used the building as his headquarters during the war while in Paris.
Two un-pleasantries that I might address, were I President of France for a day, after spending some time with Mrs. President of France:  Everyone in France has a dog and everyone’s dog has a digestive tract and everyone’s dog takes a crap on the sidewalk and there is absolutely no inclination or requirement to clean it up.  Everyone in the country is bumping into one another because they are looking at their feet trying to avoid the minefield of doggy doo.  Even New Yorkers curb their dogs.
And second, a small reminder that smoking is bad for you?  A message that does not penetrate the beautiful minds of the students as they walk the grounds of the Sorbonne.  The women are stunning as they sit on the steps and stoops drinking their Cappuccino, reading their Jung and smoking their lungs away.
The French were a surprise, Paris was not.