Wir Sind the Champions... Almost (So Close)

The final game of the European Cup was yesterday, and Germany lost to Spain. We watched at a bar that was stuffed to the gills with Germans, and it was a silent, solemn crowd that walked home in the rain (literally) after the final seconds passed and hope was officially gone.

I think I've mentioned in the past that I don't enjoy watching sporting events (Olympics excepted of course. Arrgh! It's still killing me that I'm going to miss them!). Heading over to the bar then, I knew that the highlights for me would be the playing of the national anthems and the end of the game. With ugh, 90 minutes of sport in between.

As it happened, I had a better time than I expected. It was hard not to get caught up in the excitement of a crowd of füssball-crazed expatriates. It was also hard to miss the sexiness of the team. Rawr!

To begin, a couple players. Here's Michael Ballack, a national sex symbol in Germany.


Another: Christoph Metzelder. Do these pictures do them justice? I don't think so. To get the full effect, you need to see them running around the field like little warriors while a nation goes crazy behind them.


It wasn't just the players. Even the coach, Joachim Löw, had me a little flushed. Having grown up in the time and place of the two Mikes (Ditka and Holmgren), a stylish, physically fit coach kind of catches me off guard. Look at that hair! And that scarf. Where's the Starter jacket? The paunch? The mustache? Maybe I've got a warped view, but to me, Germans all seem so stylish! Curse you, sophisticated Europeans. You make me so aware of my yokel-ness.

Strangest of all, I was even a little captivated by the team doctor, Hans-Wilhelm Mueller-Wohlfahrt. The doctor! What is he, 60? Still...just look at him (center below). At one point an injured player had to leave the field for a minute and the doctor walked with him. Maybe it was the drama and excitement of the moment, but he looked like a jungle cat. He had this lithe step to him, and the bright lights caught the shadows in his craggy face as a faint breeze stirred his (beautiful) hair.


It all made me, for 90 minutes, want to move to Germany.

It also made me anxious for my upcoming 15th birthday.

Bryant Park and Beyond

Bryant Park is two blocks from my office. When I first walked past it two weeks ago, my first reaction was “whaa...?” Why do beautiful parks in Manhattan still shock me?

This park, lovely and bursting with orderly greenness, has become something of a symbol for me.

I ended up in New York/Jersey more or less by accident. This just happened to be the area where both Oliver and I could best pursue our career interests: a good library science school for one and plenty of big, soulless banks for the other. I like the fact that I had no fantasies of New York before I came here, because it makes me feel detached from the spectacle. I feel a bit like an explorer or an anthropologist, notebook full of questions in hand.

The first: what’s so great about New York?

Silly question, right? The answer is obvious after all: it’s big and there’s a lot going on. Still… big? A lot of stuff going on? These phrases have never captured my imagination.

So there are crowds and tons of options on a Saturday night. So?

Back to Bryant Park (which is much more lively than my photos make it look, by the way). I often walk through it on my way to/from work, and I’ve spent a few lunch breaks there too. Each visit, I’ve noticed that there are about a dozen different things going on. Authors do readings to nodding crowds in the park’s outdoor “reading room”. Perfectly coiffed young professionals chatter and network over glasses of wine on the terrace of the Bryant Park Grill. Colleagues grab seats in the shade for lunch and gripe about their bosses. A pianist plays on the upper terrace. Young women rush to the lawn, LuluLemon mats in hand, for the public yoga class. Workers scrub the giant screen at the west end of the lawn in preparation for the night’s outdoor movie. A bluegrass band plays to an end-of-the-workday crowd. Here, time isn’t passed but seized. When I look at Bryant Park I wonder if I don’t see a little something of the “it” that so many have written about.

New York, more so than any other city I’ve lived in, is hellbent on “being somebody”. It’s as though everyone here is working feverishly toward some dream or another. There’s the actor /model /business tycoon dream of course, but there’s also the organize- an- African- music- festival dream, the hold- indie- rock- concerts- in- an- abandoned- public- pool dream, the open- a- bar- full- of– vintage- arcade- games dream, and so on. There’s such drive, and so for many unique things; sometimes I imagine I can almost feel it. And it feels good! Just walking down the street, knowing that all around you the city is creating and building and working towards newer, bolder things … it’s exciting.

Away

We sold our car before leaving Toronto, a move I have regretted zero times in the two months we've been here. Gas is expensive, parking around here is miserable, and our next door neighbors had their car stolen awhile back, right off the street in front of our building. Really, are there any pluses to owning a car here?

Okay, there's at least one. Weekend trips. We loved our weekend trips in Canada. We went camping and hiking, visited Montreal and Ottawa, and just generally had the region at our fingertips. I knew it wouldn't be as easy to make quick East Coast getaways sans car, but I made my peace with it. Not owning a car makes me happy in many ways, so the small sacrifice is worth it.

As it turns out though, it may not be as much of a sacrifice as I thought. Exhibit A: Breakneck Ridge. This 5.5 mile hike on the Hudson River within Hudson Highlands State Park, is a short 76-minute ride from Grand Central Station in Manhattan. What's more, the train drops you off half a mile from the start of the trail. A day in the "wilds" of the Hudson River Valley brought to you by public transit? It took me awhile to believe it.

What a wonderful day! The hike took about four hours, with frequent breaks for water and shade, and about 1200 vertical feet of scrambling over rocks (imagine climbing steps three at a time. There was a lot of that). The view was magnificent, and I could almost picture a member of the Hudson River School crouching nearby with a canvas. What a nice change too, from the concrete and lights and Tory Burch bags of the city. After the hike was over, we went to Cold Spring, a little town 30 minutes (by foot) down the road. I bought some vintage Pyrex from one of the antique stores in town, had an heirloom tomato salad with shitake mushrooms and edible orchids for dinner, caught the train back to the city, and was sound asleep in my own bed that evening. All without a car.

P.S. Orchids: really tasty!

Gored by the Bull

I've been having a real problem with clothing lately. As I mentioned before, where I work you can't swing a stick without hitting an attractive, well-dressed woman. My own wardrobe, fair to middling even in the locales most likely to inflate my perception of my own stylishness (rural China, for example), now seems atrocious in comparison. My clothes are suddenly all out of date and unflattering. The lengths are wrong and the cuts are wrong. My shoes make my calves look chunky and my pants make my legs look stubby. Everything is just ick. Including me, really. Am I really the girl who stapled her pants together this morning because she was too lazy to get them hemmed? I don't want to be that girl.

Luckily enough, there are hundreds of solutions to my silly little problem scattered across the city. Department stores, boutiques, flea markets, vintage stores and everything in between. All I have to do is go out and shop.

I did just that, briefly, after work tonight. Taking this bull by the horns, I stopped by the J. Crew near my office and perused their wares. I tried on about 10 different items, felt eh about nine of them, and ended up buying one really cute shirt. It was on sale too, which made me feel even better. In my newshirtphoria I even busted out the iron tonight to get New Shirt ready for tomorrow. It was when I had started ironing that I noticed the hole.

There was a hole in my new shirt! How had I not seen that? And upon closer inspection, how had I not seen that other hole? And that third hole next to the other two? It was a sale shirt too, which means no refunds, no exchanges. I wonder if the clerk who rang me up knew. Maybe that's why he looked me dead in the eye and said "final sale". J. Crew. Huh, more like J. Screw.

8-8-08, and all that comes before it

We booked our tickets a couple weeks ago. Two weeks in Germany, divided between time with friends and relatives and time to travel and explore. Oliver is thrilled, and for those of you who have met him, you can get a measure the feverish joy in his heart by the fact that he is actually admitting, out loud, that he is looking forward to the trip. Yup, August 7 through 20. Beer, good bread, Alps, rigidly organized hiking trails, this raw-meat-on-bread stuff that Oliver swears up and down by… it’ll be great.

One teensy little glitch. I talked with my mom on the phone last night, and we somehow got onto the subject of tv. We sold our tv before we left Canada, and have no plans to buy a new one here. This really bothers my mom for some reason, maybe because she keeps thinking we don’t have a tv because we can’t afford one. This isn't true. “How will you watch the Olympics?”, she asked. “I know how much you’ve always loved the Olympics.” I made some flip remark about renting a tv or watching in a sports bar. “8-8-08”, she said. “You’re going to want to see it.”

Wait. 8-8? As in August 8? As in the day we land in Germany? You mean I’m going to spend the entire two weeks of the Olympics on vacation? My heart sank.

Okay, to flesh out this story a little bit, I’d like to give you a short overview of my Olympic history. It started when I was 12, with the Winter Olympics in Albertville, France. I started watching the CBS coverage and got hooked. It's like that character says in Steven King's Apt Pupil: everyone, at some point, finds their “thing”. You know, that one thing that you can’t stop thinking about, can’t let go of until you’ve found out everything there is to know about it. And even then it’s not enough. My “thing” was the Olympics. I memorized all the figure skating medal winners from every Olympic competition. At the age of 12 and at a height of around 5'7", I took up gymnastics. My parents, being the horrible, thoughtless people they were, planned a family trip to Hawaii that happened to coincide with the 1992 Barcelona games. I sulked for weeks, arranged with friends to have every night of coverage taped for me (all 70-ish hours), and wore a black “Barcelona ‘92” t-shirt regularly during the vacation. I bought books and devoured them, making people like Paavo Nurmi, Tommie Smith and Abebe Bikila a part of my own life, somehow. I developed crushes on Norwegian speed skaters . I applied to be in the opening ceremonies of the 1996 Atlanta games. I plotted my rise to the presidency of the IOC. I obsessed.

As I got older, I calmed down. I even got a little cynical about the commercialization and cheating. I still watched, though. All of it. Boxing, fencing, steeplechase, archery, rowing. No sport too dull, no human interest story too schmaltzy. During the 2004 Athens games, I parked my butt on the couch for 16 days, knitting a scarf the whole time. If I was going to lose two weeks of my life, I was at least going to have something to show for it. The scarf was blue and white, the colors of the Greek flag. I thought that was a nice touch. I also look good in blue.

More importantly though, the Athens games helped me realize something about this long love affair of mine. When the first night of NBC’s coverage came on, and the Olympic fanfare swelled as the camera swept dramatically over the Acropolis, my heart caught in my throat and I started to cry. I had been to Athens, just three years before! The memories flooded back and I was filled with longing, not just to go back and visit again, but to… something more. What?

The answer to the questions was a long time coming. It just came to me tonight, actually, while telling Oliver how mad I was that we were going to miss the Beijing games. I was trying to explain to him how much they should mean to us because of the role the city itself has played in our lives. It hit me.

It was never about the sports. I mean it was, but it wasn’t. I hate sports. I don’t like participating (too much competition – can’t we all just collaborate?), and I definitely don’t like watching. You want to go to an NBA game? Great, I’ll be right there. Just let me gouge out my eyes first. The Olympics weren’t about sports for me. The fat, hairy Ukrainian guy throwing a shot put was just a means to an end. And the end was the enormous world out there, that world I wasn’t old enough to go out and see yet. All those beautiful faraway places like Norway, Spain, Japan, Australia. It was about all those exotic people and that beautiful world they got to inhabit for two weeks while I went about my daily routine. Someday, a voice told 14-year-old me, you’ll get to go to places like those.

Fast forward to 2005. Beijing, my home for six months. And if the glamour of living in Asia wasn’t enough, I also fell in love there. With Oliver, of course. We wore the tires out on our bikes, we explored and stared in awe at everything around us while the locals gaped right back. If God ever offers me the chance to choose one six-month period of my life to live a second time… um, I don’t think I’ll have much trouble deciding. Not to dis any other periods of my life. In fact, these last years have been pretty fantastic in their own way. I’m no Mount Everest climber or round-the-globe traveler, but the life I live is exciting enough to me. And even better, we’ve got the promise of further adventure. Where do we want to live next? Where should we travel? Hey, anything's possible, right?

And that’s just it. In the deepest subconscious of my heart of hearts, isn’t this exactly what I dreamed of while I watched those hours and hours of coverage? Going off to a distant, glamorous city and falling in love with a foreigner? Once in love with sed foreigner, didn’t I want the two of us to dash off to strange new places and have unspecified adventures? I know, I just know, that the first notes of the Olympic fanfare, that first shot panning dramatically over Tiananmen Square, the first words out of Bob Costas’ mouth, would reduce me to a blubbering fool.

A Turning Point

Today was the first day of my new job. I've got a full-time summer gig doing database work that will turn into a part-time job when I start school in the fall. The office is located up near 42nd and 5th Avenue, and I had a great time this morning playing "New York City commuter". I was also reminded, for the millionth time, that I have to update my wardrobe. The women here are looking fierce! I feel like a lecherous old man, staring down every girl I pass. I can't help it though; they give me so many good ideas. I've even gone so far in my flight of inspired fancy to buy a pair of earrings and a belt. Accessories? Am I really so extravagant and up with fashion?

I got to the office a little too early this morning, and decided to wait it out in a deli down the block. Since it was only morning and already somewhere around 95 degrees, I took advantage of the time to hydrate. After hemming and hawing for awhile (lately I've become really frustrated with beverages. If you want to avoid both caffeine and sugar, what are your options? Tasteless water? Piping hot herbal tea on a flames-of-hell-powered summer day? Curse you juice... for years I thought you were my friend.), I settled on a freshly squeezed orange juice. You can't go wrong, right? I mean, take a piece of fruit and drink it. Perfect. Once I paid and sat down to drink though, I noticed that the juice had an unusual color to it. It looked too light... like grapefruit juice.

I will generally eat just about anything, but I do have a short list of restrictions: olives, coffee and grapefruit. I point to these foods as evidence that I am a supertaster, a claim my brother rolls his eyes at (That's 'cause you're jealous!). Today then, when faced with a large cup of freshly-squeezed grapefruit, I had to sigh. I couldn't bring it back, because it would just get thrown out and wasted. I decided to at least try it then, and I was pleasantly surprised. Wow, it's not as bitter as I remember it being! It actually quenches my thirst! All these years, all those demands to my mother to not include grapefruit in fruit salads... isn't grapefruit one of those super foods, too? A new day has dawned!Grapefruit for breakfast! A ruby red feast! And while we're at it, roll out the olive cart! Bring me a cup of coffee! Let us climb to the top of Mount Tastebudschangeasyougetolderhuhwhowouldhavethought! Friends, we have a new world to explore.

Done!

Our Oriental Heritage is the first book in the "Story of Civilization" series by Will and Ariel Durant. It provides an overview of eastern culture, from Sumeria to Judea to India to Japan, from prehistory to today - "today" being 1933. I got this book for Christmas 2006, started reading it shortly afterwards, and finally finished it this week. It's not often I spend a year and a half on a book, so I thought I'd mark the occasion.

It's a great book, as long as you can overlook 1930s-style comments like "the people of India are lazy and weak, as centuries of an unbearably hot climate have worn them down." Yikes. The occasional foray into racism aside, the densely-packed 940 pages of factfactfact were fascinating. Some points (of the many) I thought were interesting:

Civilization is not something inborn or imperishable; it has to be acquired anew by every generation, and any serious interruption may bring it to an end. Man differs from beast only by education, and education may be defined as transmitting of civilization (p4).

Our incredible work ethic: probably thanks to centuries of slavery. No one would do any hard, drawn-out work if he could avoid it without penalty, after all. All those ancient slaves instilled the discipline that prepared man for industry (p20).

The Indian caste system was started by the invading Aryans. Outnumbered by a subject people they believed inferior to themselves, the Aryans saw that without restrictions on marriage they would lose their racial identity. The first caste division therefore, was not by status but by color. The first Untouchables were war captives and slaves (p399).

To Buddha, the worst delusion of mankind was individuality. We are all simply parts of the whole. When we have learned to love not our separate life, but of all men and living things, then at last we will find peace (p436).

Good times, good times.