London, Dancing, Oscar Wilde and a Brilliant day.

So, for the weekend, I took a TGV to Paris and then caught the Eurostar to London.

This included another case of "Train station wayfinding: how not to do it"

The Eurostar boarding area is on that upper level, and the sign above the stairs is trying to tell you NOT to continue forward onto the (downward) stairs but to go around these stairs and take the escalator that cannot be seen.  Unhinged design choice.  I imagine tens of thousands of lost Brits trying to figure out how to go home get caught underground every year.

Once on the train I was thoroughly amused by this anthropomorphized toilet, (and by the idea that someone in possession of a rubber duck might be dissuaded from feeding it to the poor toilet by this sign).

And then hey presto, a couple of hours later I was in St. Pancras, which is delightfully pretty, these days, more on that when I write about the return.

 

As I was arriving to see my foundational partner, Rachel, who lives here in London, being greeted by a giant neon sign that simply declares "I want my time with you." and a statue of lovers embracing was an ideal way to start my weekend. ❤

It was a whirlwind of a time -- I got to listen to a great blues band, go dancing, get dressed up sharply, meet Benjamin, attend an Oscar Wilde play, revisit an excellent modern Levantine restaurant that Rachel and I had discovered back in December and get up to all sorts of lovely activity.

I took basically no pictures, which is a shame.  Here are almost the entirety of them:

A band!

Dressed up

(During intermission I was lusting after this lamp.  I really need to start updating some of my furniture)

Rachel!  Benjamin!  Myself!  First picture is from dancing on Friday and second is the Tube on Saturday after the play (featuring a new tie I found in London, very last minute).

Rachel and I maintain our tradition of ordering cocktails that have gender aesthetic signifiers that are inverse to our presented genders.

It was a truly wonderful time, and I'm so, so thankful that I made plans to come to London and spend the time here.  It was a delight to watch the city awaken as the spring progresses (I even got to catch a bit of the Hackney half marathon, which was neat) and to share such special moments with Rachel.

On Monday, after a weekend that felt both infinite and instantaneous, I would begin the trip back to France.

Mild pettiness & nonsense food.

So, while I was in Lyon, I intended to cook a few meals, and so I visited an Aldi and a Carrefour for both snacks and groceries.

I also bought one item basically for the pettiness of it.

My Airbnb provided laundry detergent and dishwasher detergent -- but only one pod of each in a twee little cup on the counter, and I was here for an entire week. 🙄

So I found a good laundry detergent that I knew I would want to take with me to London and give to Rachel afterwards (the British are savages and simply do not sell good fragrance-free detergent, and the French one I found--while not truly fragrance free--was a quite mild scent by comparison).

But Rachel doesn't have a dishwasher so I would be leaving that detergent behind.

Aldi sells a very nice pod that I find works very well and is convenient but it was more expensive and for the next guest it was equally likely that my host might choose to be stingy and withhold the remaining pods, so I decided to be cheap AND make that more of a hassle, and bought -- for a single Euro! -- this stupidly large 2 kilogram box of the cheapest dishwashing crystals I've ever seen.  

(You're welcome, everyone who does dishes in this Airbnb for the next million years.)

I also purchased food!

Some of those foods were nonsense.

For example: I was keeping dancer's hours over the weekend.  Though this event was much less nocturnal than Toulouse's fusion event, the dance here was still running until 1:00.  So I purchased this very stupid popcorn.

 "Golden Power" (what a name) is the name of the Aldi house brand of energy drink in France that competes with Monster, and so yes, that's caffeinated popcorn.

Which also tastes like knockoff Monster.

3/10, I don't recommend it, but as a sweet snack that helped keep me awake after classes and before the evening dance, it was useful.

Speaking of sweet snacks:

The French have learned that you can fry almost anything until crispy and it will be delicious.

As demonstrated by:

Yes, that product is a form of snack crisp/chip that's made of fried, lightly sweetened crêpe batter.

Honestly it wasn't bad.

The caramel flavoring tasted very vaguely of Maple syrup though, which is never a flavor I utilize on my crêpes so I found that very disconcerting.  5/10.

But speaking of crêpes. . . I was horrified / delighted [ed note: delightified?  Horrilighted? awful, both of these options] to see this insanity in the Aldi.

Because the Germans have an infinite interest in efficiency and cleverness but perhaps lack the decency that God gave a goat.

Allow me to explain what you are looking at:

This container is mostly empty.  Its primary ingredient, by volume, is air.

Aside from air, it contains flour and emulsifiers and some form of chemically deconstructed egg powder that probably involved sorcery and some salt and sugar and it's instant crêpe mix that you don't even need to dirty a separate container to make.

The container simply tells you to add 400ml of milk directly into the bottle, shake vigorously for a minute, wait a couple of minutes, shake once more, and then pour it straight into your cooking pan, like some sort of cultureless peasant.

Yes of course I had to buy it.

I had to know.

Because surely the mix would be bad? Right? It would clump, it would be poorly balanced, it wouldn't cook right when you used real butter and a properly heated pan and would bubble or get horribly lumpy or watery or both?

Damnit.

Dammit.

They were, honestly, pretty damn good crêpes.

(The variation in the shapes and edges are due to the fact that I couldn't find the detachable handle for the pan I had to use so manipulating the cooking surface was awkward.)

Were they as good as my grandmother's, or Monsieur Brown's? No, of course not (Thank heavens!).

But with both savory (cheese, peppers, ham) and sweet (Confiture des Mirabelles, butter) fillings, and with a little coffee, they made a good breakfast.

Heaven help me, but if this product were available in the states I'd probably keep 2 canisters and a liter of UHT milk in the back of a pantry shelf as a strategic reserve brunch option for treating weekend guests.

8/10.

Dammit.

Let's talk about how great Spaces is

Ok so this is going to sound like a paid endorsement but honestly I just like it when a service feels worth paying for (refreshing in a time when it feels like very corporate service offering in the world is in a constant race to the bottom).

So, let's talk about Spaces (HQ/Regus/etc).

I pay a monthly fee for a private membership with Spaces that gives me 5 days of dedicated coworking in Pittsburgh each month that I almost never use, along with a few other perks, like the power to book a meeting room or private office in coworking facilities across the Spaces office network and also their partner networks (Regus and HQ are two others, and there are a few more as well).

I never book private offices or meeting rooms either, but one of the other perks is the ability to check into the "Business Lounge" in any one of those partner offices.

The Business lounge is basically just the public coworking space / break room area of the small office spaces that the network offers to small businesses, and includes fast wifi, a chill working environment where a business video call is socially acceptable, and often free coffee and a break room kitchen.

I can use those lounges, as many days of the year as I like, anywhere in the world.

The offices are generally open from at least 9 to 5, and in France many of the offices actually run 8:30 to 18:30 hours, which is really excellent for my schedule.

As a third-space for a remote worker, this is basically the platonic ideal.

I've used offices in Pittsburgh, New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington DC, London and Paris, and on this trip alone I've also added Bordeaux, Marseille, Lyon, and Nantes. 

They're often very near city centers and so they're easy to reach by transit, or alongside major train stations.

Some of the touches are really fantastic (great free coffee machines in some places, thoughtfully appointed working areas in others).  In Marseille on this trip the office manager for one center called me after I sent her a request, and recommended I work at the sister location across the street because of the view, which was very sweet of her and was absolutely worth it.

That was this view, I was pleased she'd called to nudge me in that direction.

And in Lyon, a city defined and deeply in conversation with its rivers, the office complex that I used had a sort of moat along one edge of the property, which created this delightfully unnecessary visual effect:

As a result, the four wings of this office building looked like they were on the water, and in the afternoons you'd often see team members standing at the "bow" of the building having a drink.

Sometimes a design choice can really make the difference in how we think about a place, and this one really charmed me.

So yeah, if you're a remote worker and you travel like I do, I highly recommend it -- it's a tax deductible business expense for me, and for a few years my previous employer even compensated me for it as part of our wellness program meant to increase the quality of life for remote employees.

(One observation for anyone else using this sort of approach : HQ and Regus facilities are usually more ergonomic for actually getting work done. 

The Spaces facilities have been appointed mostly to act as comfortable "break room" locations in tandem with the dedicated office rooms, but "comfortable place to have a coffee before going back to work" is different from "I'd like to sit and crunch numbers in this spreadsheet for a few hours.") and so often the chairs recline too much and the table surfaces are the wrong height.)

Running on the Saône

Lyon isn't just a reflection of its rivers and its industry.

It's made up of them -- when you look down a street or across a valley, the fabric of each breath here is water and silk, the same way it's water and steel in Pittsburgh.

And so, since I was staying directly on the Eastern bank of the Saône this time, I made a point of running alongside the river on the quai that runs north, running upstream in the midmorning between periodic bouts of rain. 

 

I ran past a really clever bench/picnic construction that was elegant and simple and ideal for a riverside.

My intention originally was to run until I reached this tiny dock, referenced on google maps as "Ponton des cœurs ouverts", which I think is best translated as "bridgelette of open hearts."  Then I would turn and also run south of my apartment.

There I found a tiny eye looking out over the river, but just beyond there was an inviting bend in the path, and so instead of turning around I continued.

I ran through veritable tunnels of green.

And then I discovered the masks.

Just one or two, at first

But then more.

and more.

Hundreds, perhaps, eventually, scattered along the wall, serene and haunting and beautiful.

It turns out there is a public art project with over a dozen installations along the banks of the rivers of Lyon, scattered across the city, turning the river quai network into one gigantic linear art museum, of a sort.

These masks are the work of Pascal Marthine Tayou, an artist from Cameroon.  

They were beautiful.   It's been in place for many years and so a few were damaged, which created a striking effect.

Later I found other work by different artists on other parts of the river, including these brilliant and varied hopscotch boards which utilize the various flags and symbols of current and former French colonies and regions across the globe.

and of course, the buildings along the banks of the river were also art all by themselves. 

---

The first time I went running in Lyon, there was a point where the river was full of sculling teams, and one scull in particular was very near me on the eastern edge of the bank.  

The members of the crew were young -- boys of perhaps 12 or 13.   Their coaches were chasing them in a small orange skiff with an outboard engine, shouting guidance that carried over the water between bursts of droning from the motor.

There was an earnestness in young faces, there was a shaky confidence to the crew -- one could almost see that confidence weaving itself out of the water and the air and the morning mist.  A consistent yelp from one of the boys punctured the morning on each stroke -- to assist with coordination, I suppose.

As I ran I saw many other sculls, all full of young people, all engaging in something that is so clearly part of the fabric of life in Lyon.  Crew is a part of the culture here.

The last time I ran in Lyon, I ran past four men, alike in age, all pushing 65 or 70 perhaps, preparing a skull.

It felt as if I had slipped easily across 55 years and perhaps they were the same boys I'd seen two days before.  The confidence was fully woven now, draped across each of their movements like a cloak.   They were comfortable on the water, chatting as they tucked their shoes against the edge of the dock and prepared to push away, checking over oars and slipping into the scull with the practiced air of men who were once 12 themselves, on this same river, and were shouted at by a coach who is only a memory now.

It felt good.  Time is a flat circle.  It can become a series of repetitions, improvements, evolutions, and continuations.  We return to the beginning and find it different because we are different, and so we begin again.

The river is the river.  Always flowing and yet always here. 

And in some moments we are simple creatures.  We move to live, and live to move.

A repair.

So, this is a silly blog about the weird stuff I get up to while traveling...

(And this is out of order because it's from the Marseille part of my trip but I forgot to write it up then.)

My Airbnb in Marseille was excellent but one limitation for me personally was that the "lego-man-hand" device that holds the mobile shower-head in place was broken, and while I appreciate a mobile shower head for lots of reasons, I always have at least one moment in every shower where I wish I could just stand under it. 

Broken. 😥

I am thankful every day of my life that I have the parents I do, but I think the reasons that I'm so thankful are thrown into especially sharp relief when I utilize the resources they gave me via my upbringing to travel and to fix things. 

My father introduced me to the magic of slow-setting 2-part epoxy sometime in high school I suspect, 30-ish years ago. And periodically it is exactly the right way to solve a problem, if you can keep the parts in place for enough time for the epoxy to set properly.

On my walk to "the office" at the start of the week I had clocked a DIY / hardware store ("Mr. Bricolage", which is basically the Home Depot of France (right down to the Ryobi brand tools!) and so I picked up the epoxy on the way.

And in my bag I had a wax paper wrapper from a pastry and a rubber band from groceries in Toulouse.

And voilà! Held in place.

The second day I peeled off the rubber band and paper and then reinforced the seams with extra layers over the next day. 

 

Waiting for the reinforcement to set (it will be clear when finished).

I'd guess the plastic will break somewhere else before it will break at that seam, now. 

And hey presto, fixed!

Not the most beautiful repair I've ever made, but it's a damn site prettier than when it was broken.  😁

The ability to see a problem and know of an approach that can be used to repair i is invaluable to me. And the skills to apply that repair effectively cements that infinite value.

So it's a little in advance of Father's Day, but still: Thanks Dad. 🖤

A photo blog of Lyon

Lyon is a gorgeous city that I've visited in the past, and this visit I leaned a little bit into that foreknowledge and didn't plan to act very much like a tourist. 

During the weekend I was busy with the dance event (at which I took no pictures) and during the week I worked in the afternoon and a little in the evening, so my days where often quiet.

In the morning I would go for a run or a walk to go grocery shopping, in the afternoon I would go to the local co-working facility.

And I'm the evening I went out for a nice dinner or a quick snack depending on the day.

I revisited a few views I had appreciated on past visits.

And rediscovered a few at new times of day when they were especially charming.

And of course, the rivers.

The rivers are always beautiful here.
 

From Marseille to Lyon

May 8th is Victory day in France, so the evening of the 7th I went out on my terrace to find the Prefecture building across the square decorated in SO MANY French flags.  A beautiful, if somber, view for my final evening.

 

The next day, I went out for breakfast to a Tunisian treat shop near the library that Rachel used when she was a student here, and the young man who waited on me was delighted to talk about Boston, as he'd spent two years at school there.  When I asked him what he recommended, he told me the name of this thing, which I will not attempt to romanize and spell (Ftayer?  Ftayedg?  Thtaredg?  See? I said I wouldn't and I did and now I feel deranged), and which he gestured around to point out that basically everyone else was consuming.  

Admittedly that is small coffee cup, bit it's not that small, this thing was gigantic.

Thankfully it was also mostly air, and it was SO GOOD.  Piping hot, crispy and chewy and delicious.

10/10.  I'll be back for more, and since the place has been there since the 80s, I think I'm safe to plan on it.

Next I went to the train station and dropped off my bags at luggage storage so I could take a walk to a park near the train station that Rachel had recommended.  I'd made myself a sandwich with the remainders of my snack foods from the airbnb, and it was nice to get out and stretch my legs before the train ride to Lyon.

While at the station I snapped another couple of pictures of the view leaving the station -- It still doesn't do Marseille justice.  You really need to visit.

I went to a gorgeous park from the Napoleonic era that Rachel had recommended for lunch, and then boarded my TGV to Lyon.

A couple of hours later, I was in a city that -- now that I live in Pittsburgh -- feels especially homelike in some ways, because of the severe elevation changes and ways in which the rivers define the city center.

My new Airbnb where I'd be spending the week was directly across from an excellent bike/footbridge.

And the view from my balcony wasn't half bad, if I do say so myself.

I spent the weekend in Lyon dancing at a small Fusion event weekend that I'd learned about very last-minute from a friend, and it was a lovely time.