One of the joys of traveling abroad these days is being able to convince yourself that you are more or less beyond the reach of Trumpism. Or at least that’s what I had been thinking over the past couple of months as Bonnie and I settled in Spain, France and now Italy. Of course, I wear my Trump button with his name crossed out and daily get high-fives from Europeans as a consequence. Also, some times we get a table in a restaurant that is “full up.” And I see bits and pieces of the news. Still, I feel quite removed from the U.S. and Trump and what he represents. But yesterday day Trump’s ignorant and evil little hands reached across thousands of miles and touched me at a surprising moment. I was riding down in the funicular from the mountain top where the Italian town of Montecatini is located. One of my friends and house guests, Sadie Jones, the English novelist, was standing beside me as we both road open-air at the front of the funicular. Standing next to us were two elderly Continue Reading
QUASI-DISASTER UPDATE
Following the mop up we went full on Masterpiece Theatre. Exhausted and sopping wet, Nicky, in her lovely BBC lilt, said " shall I put a kettle on? And there we sat, 15 minutes later having tea. We all felt better and THEN we carried on. Why did we ever throw out the British?! Continue Reading
DALLYING WITH DALI
Even in Europe, I'm haunted by ATT. If I weren’t so lazy, busy, distracted, overwhelmed, confused, etc. I’d pull the thousand ways I’m connected to them. I got an unlocked iPhone with a EU number, don’t even use my U.S. phone and they still find a way to tact on extra charges. FUCKERS!! Is anyone old enough to remember when we actually wanted to break up ATT? Well, we did it and now look. Of course the 12 mosquitos that are in Spain have found me and I want to claw my knee off where the latest bite occurred. It’s the middle of the night here. I woke up to go the bathroom and then just stayed awake. It happens to me when I’m churned up about this or that - usually good things, like thinking about where we’re going next. Or bad things like why did I have to submit my grades to USC a thousand times before it finally worked? Re: news. I know far more than I want to know about US, but far less than I thought would leak through. Once you’re here, you realize, “oh, America isn’t the Continue Reading
A MELTDOWN AT FRENCH BORDER
Trying to get my head around going back to LA on Tuesday. We’re in Paris for a few days because we fly back from here. Getting here was another adventure. Things had been fairly quiet in Calais over the last few weeks. But as soon as we got on the road on Friday, our driver received a call that there was a delay of a “few hours”. By the time we reached Folkestone, England to get the train ferry, a few hours had evolved into three. And by the time we actually got in the tunnel it was four hours. Once again it was laid the feet of migrant problems. It was sweltering hot, which was a surprise because the last few weeks it’s been very cool. Our driver picked us up from the train station in Folkestone and drove us to the tunnel to take us across. But since nobody was going anywhere, we had to stay together until we got through the tunnel. Then he was to drop us at the train station in Calais where we’d get a train to Paris. This guy, like the one who brought us from Calais to London Continue Reading