Context Switching - Books, Board Games, Travel and Food

We’ve just come home from our last big European family trip for the foreseeable future. We visited Rome, Florence, and Venice over the course of a week. It wasn’t enough time in any one place to do it justice, but it was enough to visit the belly of the Roman Empire, the heart of Renaissance Italy, and that canal city that the eldest child has been dying to visit ever since she saw an episode of Wonder Pets about Venice when she was four.

Rome 

My travels over the last five years have taken me to a number of the big European capitals. Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, Dublin, and of course London. Rome, I dare say, outshines them all. It is a city built by emperors to impress the barbarians. The emperors succeeded, and the Italians that followed them have added to the grandeur. You cannot turn a corner without running into a temple, a cathedral, or a statue-limned fountain. It is not hard for me to imagine the kings of England and France sitting in their squalid barbarian villages out there on the edge of what was once a mighty empire and gazing towards Rome with hearts full of envy. They have tried to build their own imperial monuments, but they were merely children wearing their father’s clothes. And I say that as someone who has loved my years in London. 

The Vatican tour was worth doing if you’re ever in the area. The guided tour was okay. The best part was probably seeing the Sistine Chapel, which I found to be more impressive than I expected. It’s a chapel, not a cathedral, but it’s still a pretty big chapel. The guided tour also had the benefit of giving us a shortcut from the Sistine Chapel to St. Peter’s Basilica. St. Pete’s was impressive in scale and grandeur, and seeing Michaelangelo’s Pieta in person was a highlight. 

Trevi Fountain, the Spanish steps, and Piazza Navona were fine. Complete tourist traps, and we strolled through them, took photos, and moved on. I don’t regret seeing them, but I’m in no hurry to see them again. The Foro Romano, on the other hand, I’d love to revisit and spend a few hours.

Food in Rome is like food in most European capitals. You can hit a homerun with one meal (that’s like hitting a six, cricket fans) and strike out the next. We had some wonderful meals at Da Enzo al 29 and Pasta E Vino in the Trastevere area. If I were to return to Rome, I’d look to stay in Trastevere for the sheer quantity of amazing food within a five minute walk. We also had some amazing gelato at Otaleg in Trastevere and at Fatamorgana in Centro. While I loved the gelato, I honestly think Midwestern frozen custard compares well. The dish that really impressed me was the tiramisu. The four of us split a tiramisu at pretty much every dinner. They were all good, though the presentation at Pasta E Vino won for having a birthday sparkler in it. 

Florence

We took the train from Rome to Florence. My fellow Americans, you don’t know what you’re missing out on when it comes to high speed rail. The train was running at 150 miles an hour, and it took us from city center to city center in about two hours. We walked to the hotel in Florence and immediately went exploring. We only had prebooked tickets for one museum, which in retrospect was a mistake. I wish we had been able to see the Uffizi Gallery in addition to the Firenze Museum. I booked the Firenze Museum mostly to see David. The statue of David was, like much of the rest of Italy, huge and impressive. Those Italians really understood how to impress barbarians.

We had dinner at Osteria Vecchio. It was superlative. The restaurant was a 15 minute walk from the middle of Florence, but I think that worked in its favor. My new hypothesis is that if your restaurant or food truck is within view of a queue at a major attraction, it’s probably an over-priced tourist trap. Going a few blocks away from the Colosseum or Trevi Fountain or–in the case of Florence–the Duomo can make a huge difference in quality and/or price. 

One night in Florence was not remotely enough. I’d love to spend a few days and go out to some of the surrounding countryside, too.

Venice

Venice itself is surreal. Being there felt like being in a city from a fantasy novel. They really don’t have cars. They really do get around with boats. There are so many little islands (and so many little bridges). 

Dinner was at La Colombina, which is seafood-oriented, but has some non-seafood dishes, too. It was another homerun. Every dish was excellent, but I’ll give a particular shoutout to the six piece appetizer selection for having a variety of vegetable and seafood-forward things whose names I don’t remember, but were all delicious. Carissa wants to give a special shoutout to the scallops, too. 

Months ago I asked the girls what they wanted to do on this trip. There was one clear and obvious winner: gondola ride. We did one. It was good. I’d do it again, especially if it wasn’t cold and rainy. 

Overall

It was a wonderful trip. My only regret is that I would have liked to do a few more things. When we moved to London, it was with trips like this in mind. We managed three big European adventures to Paris, Santorini, and Italy during our five years. We’ve also had some smaller adventures to Dublin, Inverness, and a few cities in the UK. This trip marked the turning of a page in the Baldwin family story. Tomorrow morning we fly back to the United States for good to start a new chapter in our lives. We’re sad to be leaving London, the United Kingdom, and Europe, but we’re excited about seeing more of our family back home and the opportunities in the States. 

We seldom call Fezzik by his name. (Aela is always “Aela” except when she’s “Doofenshmirtz.”) He’s usually Fezzio or Fezzi. When we brought him home, I had high hopes that he would, like his namesake, grow into a big bruiser who would outshine Piper at terrorizing the neighborhood cats. It didn’t turn out that way. He’s much more “smol boi” than “heckin’ chonker.” Most of Fezzi’s life has been dominated by the dog. Fezzi eats, he sleeps, and he harasses the dog. He clearly loves food more than anything else in life, but the dog isn’t too far behind. That might sound stereotypically cat, but I would hazard to say that he’s only marginally a cat. What kind of proper cat lets humans pick it up and cuddle it like a baby doll? What kind of proper cat sleeps in a toy baby carriage? What kind of proper at lets humans rub its belly? It’s something like 51% dog, 29% stuffed animal, 20% cat. 

Fezzi is strictly an indoor cat. In the US, this might sound normal, but over here we have no air conditioning and no screens on the windows or doors. It’s hard to keep a cat inside in England. He does occasionally wander into the garden to hide under the bushes or sun himself on the patio, but that is the exception rather than the norm. Fezzi has been with us for 17 months, and while he’s had those afternoons in the garden, he has little experience beyond the safety of home. Until last week, when, in a moment of feline hubris, he went adventuring.

He was last seen around 23:00, pouncing my feet. I sent him out of the bedroom and went to sleep. Sometime around 05:00, Carissa woke up and noticed that he wasn’t in his usual places at the top of the stairs or in her office. In a panic, she woke the rest of the house, who had absolutely no interest in searching for a cat at five o’clock in the morning. We did end up searching the house a bit later, but we didn’t find him. A search party was organized and sent out to roam the neighborhood before school. Still no sign of him. Signs were printed and hung from lamp posts. More searching was conducted, including along the roof and over the fences of the adjacent gardens. No sign of Fezzi.

A late afternoon rain shower dampened spirits and the neighborhood.

By early evening the tears were flowing faster than the rain. Another search party was organized. Doors were knocked. Flyers were shoved through mail slots. Still, no sign of Fezzi.

Shortly after dark (which is nearly 10:00 PM this time of year), I offered to go for one last search. Carissa and I gathered shoes and headed for the door. Before we could go out, inspiration struck. I ran back into the kitchen and found a metal cup. We added some cat food to it. Equipped with my newly-invented, state-of-the-art Cat Attractor ™, we ventured forth. And immediately saw our neighbors arriving home. They offered to let us look in their garden. Carissa went to look. I took the Cat Attractor ™ for its first operational testing on a stroll around the neighborhood.

Fezzi? Shake shake shake. Fezzi, where are you, you little knucklehead? Shake shake shake.

A cat emerged from the shadows. Too big to be Fezzi, but intrigued by the Cat Attractor.

I kept searching. Shake shake shake. Fezzi? Shake shake shake.

A second cat emerged. Still not Fezzi.

You might think I was losing heart, but indeed it was quite the opposite. The Cat Attractor was undeniably effective. I needed only to attract the right cat. After circling the houses immediately around us, my thought was to try the adjacent streets, but I wanted to let Carissa know the plan before I wandered off into the dark. The neighbors’ front door was still open, and Carissa was still there chatting with them, sans cat. We wished the neighbors well and exited into their front garden, where I demonstrated the cat attractor. Carissa looked over and gasped.

Fezzi was on the waist-high wall between our neighbors’ garden and their neighbors on the other side of them. “There he is.” She rushed for him.

He bolted.

But he was slow. Carissa ran around to the next house and cut him off. I corralled him toward her. Within moments he was in her grasp, only to wriggle out and force us to corral him again. The second time she made sure he couldn’t get away.

The joy was boundless.

He was damp from the rain, and he was clearly shaken by his experiences in the Great Outdoors of Suburban London, but he was alive and well. Carissa took him in for a bath because crimes deserve punishment (and he smelled like pee). I went to the computer and started adding things to my Amazon cart. And that, dear reader, is why Fezzi now has a collar with a bell and an AirTag attached to it. He can run, but he cannot hide.

Aela is alive and well. She has, blessedly, chilled out a bit for values of “chilled out” that include “border collie.” She will spend hours a day lounging in the kitchen while I work, followed by hours of dropping a tennis ball into our laps in the unwavering hope that someone will throw it for her. This is a huge improvement over where we were this time last year, which was basically “chew anything that doesn’t move and some things that do (like Fezzi).” There were long months where I clung to the hope that someday I could take her jogging to burn off some of her energy. That hope has at last started to turn into reality, aided by One Weird Trick.

The plan was to let her get to about 1 year old so we didn’t harm her joints with running. That would have been last November, but after the marathon in October, I was only prepared to do small amounts of running in the rain and gloom of another English winter. That should have eased up in early spring, but I was confounded by two things. The first was Aela herself. When I say “chilled out a bit” I mean relative to where she was before, which was basically 40 pounds of hydrazine in a fur coat. Back in the early spring, she was still all hydrazine, all the time. Taking her for a jog was a CHORE, mostly of her trying to drag me as fast as possible to the park so I could throw the tennis ball for her. We joked about getting roller skates so she could pull us along, but I couldn’t afford the sheer number of speeding tickets that would have caused. (Or the hospital bills, you might think, but we don’t have hospital bills in the UK.) The other issue was some health-related stuff that kept me from running for a while. I was able to work through the health things, and at the same time, we discovered the greatest collie-related invention on Dog’s Green Earth.

The Gentle Leader.

That’s a brand name. You can look it up. It’s a halter that looks sort of like a muzzle, and the key thing is that it loops around the dog’s snout and makes it uncomfortable for them to pull on the lead. Aela *hates* it. She tries to rip it off for the first half mile of every walk. Sometimes she succeeds. One time she succeeded in half-tearing off her dewclaw (again!) and bleeding all over the pavement. Mostly she tries to pull it off, I call her names (Doofenshmirtz), and she stops.

We recently went on the best dad/dog run we’ve ever had. Three miles of easy jogging with the dog at my side and a comfortable amount of slack on the lead. I’m not taking her on every run (I need to relax sometimes, too), but at least I can see a future where she’s actually a Good Dog and not just a meme.

As mentioned earlier, Fezzi has an AirTag. Aela doesn’t. Aela does not need an AirTag. We joke that if we took Aela to Wales and dropped her off where we first met her, she’d beat us back to the house and have a tennis ball waiting. She’s a good dog. Sometimes.

On the human front, things are fine. We’re doing some university tours this summer and thinking about the future. We may see you soon, but if we don’t, I’m sorry you missed me.

February in England is a month of gloom, of clouds, of a damp chill that settles into the marrow of your bones that no amount of tea will dispel. Add to that the commercialized celebration of the birth of a saint, who–admit it–you couldn’t even tell me the century he was born in, and it really rubs me the wrong way. This year I jokingly suggested that the children should make dinner for their parents for Valentine’s Day. It was not a serious suggestion. To my surprise, they agreed.

The cooking started around 3:00, and the adults were banished from the kitchen. Around 5:00 there was a last-minute trip to Waitrose. Around 7:00 I was getting hungry. Somewhere around 7:45, we were summoned to dinner. Rose petals covered the table. The plates were arranged with heart-shaped piles of spaghetti and heart-shaped meatballs. Chocolate-dipped strawberries waited for dessert. There was even a tray of freshly baked garlic bread. 

I tried the first bite. Two things were immediately apparent. 1) the pasta and meatballs were stone cold. 2) the sauce and meatballs were LADEN with garlic. I turned to the older child and said, “do you understand the difference between a clove of garlic and a bulb of garlic?’ Reader, she did not. The younger child piped up with, “I thought that was A LOT of garlic to chop.” Indeed, it was—something like three entire bulbs of it. The meatballs, I’m pretty sure, were 50% garlic by volume. 

I ate everything on my plate. I even went back for more meatballs and was pleasantly surprised that the ones on the stove were still warm. It was an eminently teachable moment, plus I can confirm that our house was entirely preserved from vampires for the day. 

Apart from cooking, we have been up to our usual activities. The elder child is trying to go to as many concerts as she can fit into her social calendar, prepping for the SAT, pondering which continent she wants to live on for college, and generally being a teenager. She had a birthday in February, and we took her and some of her friends out for Korean BBQ. Due to train issues, we couldn’t go to New Malden, so we ended up at a place in Clapham. It was fine. A touch disappointing, to be honest. The girls all had a nice time, though. 

The younger child is building the greatest farm Stardew Valley has ever seen, complaining about school, and generally being a teenager. I’ve been trying to convince her to pursue a career in data science. She’s skeptical. We’ll see how things go over the next few years of school. 

Carissa managed a quick trip back to the States to see family for a week. While she was there, the girls and I went into central London for a daddy/daughter day. We hit up a couple of bookstores, a lovely Chinese restaurant, and some convenience stores in Chinatown. The younger child likes to collect unusual beverage cans (aka rubbish), so she was excited about the opportunities in Chinatown. I let her get a half-dozen new drinks from two different shops, and we went on our way. After hiking all over central, we walked back to Waterloo and caught the train home. I looked across at the child and informed her that I was thirsty and she was going to have to pay the Dad tax and sacrifice one of her drinks. She didn’t love the idea, but she went along and pointed to a random can. I cracked it open, took a sip, and announced that something was wrong with the drink. The child tried it, scrunched her nose, and said, “does that contain alcohol?” Indeed, it did! Unbeknownst to me, I was drinking a can of makgeolli, a Korean rice wine. I was expecting a peach soda, but instead, I had what was basically a peach malt beer. The can even listed that it was 4% alcohol, but only in the fine print. I drank it because I was thirsty, and we all learned a valuable lesson: the dudes running the convenience stores in Chinatown will sell to anyone, apparently including a 13-year-old. 

I have been working, writing, traveling a bit, and occasionally running, though I have to admit that my motivation to run in the cold, the dark, and the rain is at an all-time low. Work travels have taken me to Madrid and to Leeds in the last few weeks. While I had Spanish food in both cities (there’s a very decent tapas place in Leeds, believe it or not), I enjoyed the sun in Madrid a touch more than the clouds in Leeds. It was nice to see the office in Madrid for the first time and spend a couple of days with my colleagues there. 

We have birthdays coming in March and April, so there will surely be more adventures as the weather turns warmer and the days get longer. I’ve been writing this post while cooking another batch of the Dishoom Chicken Ruby, and the food is nearly finished. Take care, friends. Be safe.