So we went to Barcelona. And then I went to Ontario. And then we went to Long Island to see an Islanders/Bruins game. And then Lisa went to Philadelphia for a conference. And then we both went to Philadelphia to watch baseball and see Van Gogh paintings. And then—last weekend—Mary and I walked 20 miles for charity.
It’s been a busy year.
Things I can’t hear:
Things I can hear very, very well:
If you’ve tried talking to me recently and only gotten a vacant look, don’t take it personally. If I’ve been talking even more quietly than normal or overcompensating by shouting, sorry. I’m not hearing things outside my own head very well these days. It’s the result of ear barotrauma.
It seems that it’s a bad idea to fly when congested. Evidently, it’s a very bad idea to take six flights in twelve days when massively congested. I didn’t suspect when I had sinus pain as we landed in Madrid and Barcelona that I would be walking around with invisible seashells on my ears for the next 24 hours. And I was starting to get a bit concerned when it lasted a couple days after we returned from Spain and then again the weekend that I flew to run Around the Bay. But I didn’t ever think it would still be with me ten days after flying home.
My doctor says that it might go away in another week or so. Or it might not. He’s probably going to send me to an ENT, who will probably prescribe me some steroids, which will probably wreak havoc on my blood glucose. My not-always-to-be-fully-trusted coworker says this happened to him after diving and his ears have never been quite the same since. Let’s hope medicine trumps anecdote.
So, suppose that you have barotrauma and need to go somewhere? My doctor’s advice: don’t fly. What if you had a cold, knew in advance that flying might mess up your hearing, and still needed to fly? My doctor’s advice: take a maximum-strength decongestant 30-60 minutes before flying, drink lots of water, use a saline nasal spray, and chew gum. Oh yeah, and try not to fly.
Lisa and I went through all of our pictures from Barcelona, and here are our favorites. (You can click on any picture to see a larger version. Once there, you can click through to the next one. Nice, eh?)
I’ll write more about the trip itself soon.
Iberia was running late. When we checked in, our flight from Barcelona to Madrid was already close enough that we had “Short Connection” stickers on our luggage. And now they were running late. We arrived in Madrid with less than a half-hour to make our flight to Boston. We didn’t know which part of the terminal we had to go to make the connection, but we knew that it was in another building and that we had to take a train to get there. The signs directing us said to expect to take 21-28 minutes.We would have run to and from the train, but Lisa was carrying the ceramic vase we bought, so we fast-marched through the airport.
When we arrived at E.U. exit control there were no other passengers there—thanks to the fast march—but I decided to use the “connections with less than 1/2 hour” lanes out of principle. The border guards looked at my passport, (maybe) looked at me, used his big stamp, and waved us through. Fortunately, we didn’t have to go through security again, and we just had one small stop before our gate where they double-checked people with American passports to make sure that we had them and were on the up-and-up.
Simple. And appropriate. If we had looked suspicious or acted oddly or not been running through the airport to catch our flight, I’m sure we might have gotten a little extra scrutiny. And that makes sense.
Furthermore, when we were going through security at Barcelona’s airport it was an easy and relaxed experience. Here’s what it was like. First, after waiting in almost no line, someone who looks an ordinary civil servant looks at your passport and boarding pass to make sure you’re going the right place and have the documentation to get there. Next, you take all of the metal out of your pockets, take off your jacket, watch and belt, and go through the magnetometer, to meet your items on the other side of the X-ray machine. The security guard sees your pump, points at it, gives you the thumbs up, and goes about his business. Your pants may hang low; they may wobble to and fro; but you can throw your bags over your shoulder and saunter over to a nice collection of tables to reassemble yourself. The trays aren’t deep, decaying, table-busing tubs; instead, they’re shallow, smooth, and easy to take things out of. Your Euros slide nicely back into your hand and into your pocket without you needing to scrape your fingers along the bottom of the tray to retrieve them.
Notice that at no time did you have to (a) take off your shoes, (b) get an aggressive pat-down, (c) let go of your wallet, (d) explain your medical device, or (e) feel rushed or under suspicion.
Let’s compare and contrast this with going through security at Boston’s Logan International Airport—with which I am quite familiar—the last three or four times.
You arrive at the airport, check in, and go to a long security queue where a uniformed representative of the U.S. government looks at your documents under a black light and then back at you skeptically, considers the situation, and then writes something inscrutable on your boarding pass which might translate into “Bonne Voyage!” or “Send this man directly to Gitmo.” You go through another queue where you jostle with other people who are taking everything out of their pockets—wallet, coins, keys, glucose tablets, Kleenex, scraps of paper, chapstick, the random Stop & Shop card, etc.—and putting it into a bin along with their belt, shoes, jacket, and watch. You walk (in your socks with a hole near the big toe) to another uniformed officer, point at your pump and say, “I’m not supposed to take this through the back-scatter X-ray imager.” To which he replies, “It’s okay. You weren’t supposed to take them through the magnetometers.” Uh-huh. Okay. You’re the boss, chief.
You stand, holding your pump facing a device that showers you with X-rays. They say it’s safe, but radiologists who have looked at the images suggest it actually does penetrate the skin and sinus cavities and have called it “the biggest low-dose radiation clinical trial without informed consent ever performed” (or something like that). Another TSA agent somewhere else can see that you don’t have any weapons, but then you will still get an extra-thorough pat-down.
After a few seconds, you step out of the machine so a guy (for me) can ask, “What side is your property on?” Do you mean my pump? “No. Your property.” Oh. My junk. The one thing I didn’t take out of my pants. Uh huh. And then comes the very thorough going over. Up one leg. Down the other. All the way around the inside of my waistband of my pants. Down both arms (since they were less visible because I was instructed to hold my pump in my hand.
Going to Buffalo last week, after the TSA agent who swabbed my pump and hands walked away to test for explosive residue, the woman behind me said quietly, “Makes you want to go through again, huh?” We New Englanders have dry cynicism down cold.
Eventually, once it’s clear to The Man that you’re not a terrorist, you get to go collect all of your stuff that’s been sitting unattended on the X-ray belt: wallet, fancy watch, coins, glucose tablets, Stop & Shop card, hand luggage, etc. Plus, oh yeah, your shoes and belt. Good luck finding a nice, out-of-the-way place to put everything back on. You’re going to be in the way and feel rushed.
And don’t get me started about coming back into the U.S. from another country. Getting into Canada is easy: “Are you transporting anything to sell or give away in Canada? Do you have any guns?” The UK and E.U. don’t care about anything as long as you’re not trying to stay for an extended period of time. Australians (and Californians) just want to make sure you aren’t bringing any microbes in that might destroy the local flora and fauna.
But coming back into the U.S. lately has involved a whole bunch of suspicious questions and needless queuing, especially to declare that I have nothing to declare. Just put an “OK” stamp on the duty card and let us walk out of the airport already. Jebus.
Is this really the right way to make us safe? Has this actually stopped anything? (I doubt it. And you know if it had, the TSA would be crowing about all of the Mega-Badness they prevented.) So why treat passengers like criminals? (BTW, I get less intense scrutiny when I visit my brother in the pokey.) Why subject us to extra-thorough screening because we have medical devices? (It’s not like they haven’t seen insulin pumps or CGM transmitters before.) Why, more than ten years after 9/11, do we still have a ridiculous system for getting through airport security and customs?
I have my suspicions, but I’ll just keep them to myself so that I don’t get branded as anti-American and put on a “no fly” list.
Hint, it’s part of the “fortress mentality.” (Which is also the reason why architecture from the 1960s and 1970s sucked so bad.)
Sunday, I ran Around the Bay, the 30K race in Hamilton and Burlington, Ontario, that I’ve been writing and worrying about here for many, many months. Let’s just cut to the chase.
I ran the 30K in 2:57:18. [1] That’s a PR for me, partly because I’ve never done a 30K (18.6 mile) race before. In fact, it’s the first time that I’ve run longer than 14 miles . . . ever. I’m happy with the time. I’m happy with how I managed my diabetes during the race. And I’m happiest that I finally met two of my diabetes best friends. (My “dia-besties,” if you will.)
I’ll write more about the fantastic weekend I had with Scully and Céline after this brief race report.
I’d been thinking about how to approach this unknown race during each of my training runs over the last couple months. My thinking involved this rough plan: Don’t run too hard for the first 20K, suffer through the 6K of hills, and then see what I had left for the final 4K to the finish. I was hoping for about 8:30-9:00/mile all while keeping my heart rate around 150 BPM. Several times on most of my recent training runs you could hear me saying (quietly) to myself, “Slow the fuck down!” (I seem to have a potty-mouth when I’m by myself or in similar company.)
On Sunday, the first 20K were actually pretty good. According to my Garmin, I was doing about 8:30/mile but at a slightly higher exertion than I was hoping: about 155-160 BPM. Unfortunately, my Garmin lies, and I did the first 20K at a very, very consistent 9:25/mile. Oh well, I still felt really good. Then the hills arrived, as I knew they would. The first couple weren’t so bad, but by the end of the second kilometer of hills I was hurting. I kept going, but the last four kilometers of hills were just plain brutal. In fact, they were bad enough that the 4K (allegedly) downhill run into the finish was an ongoing dialogue between my brain—which knew that the finish was drawing ever nearer—and my body, which just wanted to walk for a little bit. The last 10K took exactly an hour—which is only 20 seconds per mile slower than my earlier pace—and I made it to the finish with enough left for a good kick. See, always listen to your brain. “Shut up, legs!”
I survived. My joints didn’t fall apart. My conditioning wasn’t as bad as I had feared. And my diabetes regimen was on-track. (I was 200 mg/dL at the start, 180 at 12K, 140 at 24K, and 125 at the finish. That’s 11.1 mmol/L, 10.0, 7.8, and 6.9 for my Canadian friends. Yay!)
That was the race. Now for the good stuff!
Céline and Scully convinced me last year to do this race last October, and I had been super-excited about it since then. I love going to Canada. Heck, let’s just say that I love Canada. Period. It’s the people and point-of-view mostly. So I had hoped this trip was going to be a great mix of fantastic people, beautiful scenery, tasty food, a fun race, a whiff of international intrigue, and—what’s this?—curling.
After a very short flight to Buffalo and a short drive, I was viewing Niagara Falls, a beautiful and impressive force of nature. So much water. So much spray. So much noise. Unfortunately, the short flight messed with my already messed up sinuses, and my hearing was off all weekend. I guess I’ll just have to go back another time (with Lisa, of course) to hear the full rumble of all of the water going over.
I was a little late getting to the curling rink to meet with Scully and Céline because I had to sit in the rental car for a little while waiting for my blood sugar to come up after it went over the falls in a barrel. [2] I knew next to nothing about curling on Friday morning, except that Céline does it and that I would meet her and hang out with Scully while she did her slippy shuffleboard-thing with stones and brooms. Fortunately, one of their common friends came along to explain the whole thing.
Afterward Céline’s Doug posed an innocent question: “Would you like to throw a stone?” (He might not have said “throw.” I made up a lot of descriptions about what was going on, to everyone’s amusement.) When in Canada, do as the Canadians do, eh? Yes.
Let me tell you, it’s a lot more difficult than it looks. Coordination and balance are not my best attributes. Plus, curling ice is literally more slippery than a hockey rink because it’s all bumpy and stuff. And it’s all because of this guy:
Anyway. The rock stone weighs 20 kilos (44 pounds) and takes a bit of work to get moving. Well, not so much work if you know what you’re doing. Then you can make it look easy. Eventually, I actually got one all the way down into the box on the other end of the ice. Before going out on that high note, though, Doug had to chase one down before it went into a neighboring lane. And I looked like this a lot:
But look! I think I’m ready, Céline. Just don’t ask me to go out and scrub sweep.
The rest of the weekend I spent with my Dia-besties. After picking up our race numbers and swanky “Older Than Boston” shirts, we set out to do two very important things: buy chocolate and buy cheese. We drove all over the Niagara region, chatting the whole time as if we’d known each other for years.
Even though I’m home now—and it’s time to give my passport a bit of a rest for a while—I think it’s worth saying again: I had such a great time this weekend!
Stay cool, Canada.
1 — Fortunately I’m mostly fluent in converting between metric and ‘merican for all the important measurements: temperature, distance, weight, diabetes, etc. [Back . . .]
2 — Plus, I got a little confused getting back to the QEW. [Back . . .]
Hi, dear readers. The big post about our recent trip to Barcelona is going to need to wait a little bit longer. I’m still a bit jet-lagged, and I’ve just barely started going through the 1,700+ photos from our trip. But I have a lot to say, and I’m eager to get it down. Especially since I leave for Canada tomorrow to run Around the Bay and meet some wonderful people. I seem only to be able to think about one thing at a time, so it’s best to get it out of the way before embarking on a new adventure.
Speaking of tying up loose ends, here are a few follow-ups to recent posts.
I. What to listen to next? I wanted to listen to something new, but I wasn’t sure where to go next. Then yesterday on the way home, I heard an NPR segment on U.K. reggae. (It’s okay. You can admit that you listened to it to, and that you occasionally discover new music via public radio. Your sense of being special and nonconformist is safe here, friends.) One of my earliest memories of music that made me sit up and take notice was hearing a bit of calypso, so it feels a bit like diving back into the music of my early youth. Years later, when I first started listening to some early 80s British music, I was amazed at how much reggae and ska influence there was in it. (And then there’s this.) So why not dig into reggae for a while?
II. No hablo español. Turns out, you don’t need to know Spanish to have a good time in Barcelona; most of the shop clerks, hotel folks, and wait staff knew enough English for us to communicate. And the locals are at least as friendly as the French to people who try to speak a few words of the local language before asking if they know English. (I will grudgingly say the Spaniards are perhaps even a little friendlier.)
Often people could tell after my first few words of Spanish that I wasn’t very proficient, and they just switched to English. Evidently, Lisa and I don’t look Spanish either. One woman at the Madrid airport tried to say something to me in Spanish, which I didn’t understand, so then she asked, “Nicht verstehen?” (“You don’t understand?”) After I answered, “No,” she proceeded to try to speak to me in German. She could have also said one of the two or three things in Arabic I remember—”لا أفهم؟”—and my answer would have been the same. (I was telling Lisa how bizarre it is that I can say “I don’t understand” in Arabic and German but not Spanish.) So I countered with “¿Habla ingles?” and “Parlez-vous français?” with the same result. My helping her was not meant to be. Anyway, I guess that we look more German than Spanish.
Thanks to “Sesame Street” and my mom teaching me a few words as a preschooler, I can count to twenty and be on the look out for “entradas” and “salidas” and “peligro.” When we had to use Spanish, we were still able to buy things and order food, and I even gave directions to a woman looking for the street she was walking on. By the time we left I had the simplest of conversations with the check-in agent at the Iberia desk in Barcelona, which only broke down when she asked what kind of seats we wanted for the flight back to Boston. I laughed when she said that I speak Spanish very well, and she seemed amused when I said that I don’t speak Spanish at all.
And then there’s Catalan, which was everywhere in Barcelona. It’s a beautiful, funny thing that sounds not quite French and not quite Spanish. At any rate, I found the Catalan menus easier to read than the Spanish ones. Boy oh boy, did I want to speak French a lot on this trip. . . .
III. City Running. I have decided that big cities are not easy places to run in unless you’re willing to make a commitment to travel to a nice place to run: along the Seine or Thames, Central Park in New York, the Domain in Sydney, the waterfront in any city lucky enough to have one, etc. Suburbs are easy enough to manage, but if you’re staying in the city where all the action is, there’s just so much stopping and starting.
Except Boston. Somehow Boston has been blessed with plenty of long streets with minor side streets, meaning you usually don’t have to stop at every corner. And these streets take you quickly to the Charles River trails or to the Emerald Necklace and its parks. I’m trying not to sound parochial—especially since I don’t run in Boston often—but the number of people running all over Boston at any time of day just helps prove the point that Boston might be one of the best running cities in the world.
Nevertheless, I needed to run on our trip. This vacation was a perfect time to taper, but I still had to put a few miles in every other day just to keep my legs fresh and ready. (My orange New Balance shirt and I have now run in five countries on three continents.) So if you’re staying in the L’Eixample neighborhood of Barcelona and you need to run a few miles, what to do? First, use the Passeig de Gràcia or the Rambla Catalunya to head to La Rambla, the super-touristy pedestrian area. If you finish your run before 9:00AM, you don’t have to dodge many people. Also—and this seems true for most European cities—head to the old city where the streets are one-way, windy, narrow, and designed for pedestrians. You’ll often get lucky and an early-morning delivery vehicle will block traffic, letting you run in the street without too much worry.
Just have a good idea where you’re going and don’t get lost.
IV. Pool ladies. Honestly, it would be easier if the four of them weren’t trying to swim in my lane.
We’re back. It was a great trip, and I have so much to say about it and Barcelona. Right now, though, I’m so tired. It feels like 2:30 AM tomorrow morning, even though it’s not yet 10:00PM in Massachusetts. So you will have to wait a little bit longer for the travelogue and pictures.
In the meantime, here’s a little scene we stumbled upon on Sunday.
(Watch this video on YouTube.)
The amazing thing about this is that the church and the neighborhood are only a couple blocks away from La Rambla, the busiest, most touristy part of Barcelona, but it felt like another city entirely. It was the best kind of travel accident.
We’re going to Barcelona tomorrow, and I’m having a wee bit of anxiety. Somehow I feel unprepared. We haven’t even packed yet, I don’t 100% sure how we’re getting from the airport to the hotel. And I don’t know Spanish or Catalán.
But everyone says Barcelona is fantastic, and even Lisa says not to fret.
So I won’t.
Much.
And probably not at all after we arrive.
¡Ay!
From “Big Bang” at the Musée des Beaux Arts de Montréal.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about bilingualism. For political reasons, Montréal is outwardly very French, but English is right there everywhere you listen. Half the people walking down the street are speaking French, the other half English. When we walked into a shop, often we were met with “Bonjour/Hello.” And often we were just greeted in English. (I guess we look American or anglophone—or maybe they heard us talking. Who knows?)
Lisa doesn’t speak French, and it seems rude to carry on a three-way conversation with a bilingual person in a language she doesn’t understand. (It’s Canada, not France, after all.) So I was happy enough to use a little French here and there, to speak with people en français when it was easiest, and to read plenty of French throughout the day. (I even picked up some new words.)
But it got me wondering about how to navigate the English/French divide. What’s the most appropriate way to initiate a conversation or interaction?
In France, if you just start speaking to someone in English, it’s very rude. In fact, even a simple «bonjour» and «Parlez-vous anglais?» is usually enough to negotiate the “I don’t speak your language well, so please bear with me” barrier with sensitivity. And when I spoke the French that I knew, it got me through quite well.
Quebec being bilingual, though, is different. If you answer a «bonjour» in kind, you invite continued conversation in French, just like in France. That leads to that eventual moment when your partner in conversation realizes you don’t really speak French as well as they do. At one such moment, a friendly clerk at the HMV, where I was buying francophone music CDs, kindly said, “You can just speak English; we’re all bilingual.” But I’ve had a few conversations where it’s clear that not everyone speaks English . . . or that their English is only about as good as my French, and that French would be better for everyone.
So, my dear Canadians, Canadiennes, and fellow travelers to Quebec, what is the “right” way of getting by? Do you just start out in the language you want to speak? Do you ask whether they speak English? Do you start in French and go until it becomes painful? Something else entirely?
Lisa and I have never spent this much time in Montréal before. Usually, we arrive one day and have to leave the next. This four-day Thanksgiving weekend, though, has given us the opportunity to spend some extra time doing extra things. (That is to say, this weekend wasn’t just a food booty call.) We actually had to figure out some extra things to do.
So what have we done? We went to three churches yesterday (Chapelle Notre-Dame-des-Bonsecours, Saint Patrick’s, and Basilique Notre-Dame) and to the Oratoire Saint-Joseph today. We aren’t religious people, but we do really enjoy the artistry and architecture of churches. (And the really interesting stories—like the one about the theft of the heart of St.-André, the Brother responsible for building the Oratory. And I don’t mean “he gave his heart to Christ.” No! In the 70s, someone stole his actual heart from the reliquary at the oratory. It’s back now.)
It’s basically the same reason that we enjoy going to art museums. I’m a big fan of photography, 19th century French painting, and Aboriginal/Native American/Inuit arts, while Lisa likes to take it all in. But our brains have trouble—we are not ashamed to say—with contemporary art. Let’s face it, a lot of it is just shit. I know, I know; I’m being very judgmental. However, in a post-modern world where it doesn’t matter what the artists’ intentions were, it’s completely up to us as the viewers to ascribe value. And a lot of it is just boring, unapproachable, poorly executed, or (worst of all) irrelevant.
So why did we go to the Musée d’Art Contemporaine yesterday? Well, why not? You have to speculate to accumulate in the art world. You never know what you might like until you see it. Besides, it was hosting the Québec Art Trienale: “The Work Ahead.” If you want to see what’s coming up, an -ale is a pretty good, very avante garde way to do it.
Meh.
The sad thing is that the “Big Bang” exhibit of Canadian artists at the newly renovated Musée des Beaux Arts was head-and-shoulders better than the trienale exhibit. Is that an indictment of the MDAC or of Québec artists? I don’t know. Probably neither. I will say, though, that the smaller museum’s inclusion of video art was interesting (to me).
Between bouts of art-watching and church-hopping, we shopped a bit and ate delicious food and walked around and basically enjoyed ourselves. It was, incredibly, the nicest weather we’ve ever had on our five trips to Montréal. (And the weather never touched 50ºF!)
Until next time, Québec.
We’ve had a great day in Montréal. It started with crêpes, ended with a ridiculously delicious, two-hour meal, and was full of a leisurely stroll around the Ville-Marie and Vieux Port sections of the city. We visited three churches, shopped a bit, and took in the Musée d’Art Contemporaine. Tomorrow, we’re planning even more adventures (although with slightly subdued meals compared to today, I suspect).
Here are some pictures from our adventure.
It’s Thanksgiving Day in the United States, and I am very thankful for so many things: the day off, a good job, my cute kitty, chocolate croissants, relatively good health, great friends and family, etc. Most of all, I am thankful for Lisa, who loves me more than I ever thought possible. She truly is a wonderful person, and I feel very fortunate that she picked me.
She’s a great travel companion, and we’re off on a little adventure right now. Can you guess from these hints where we are?
We used our passports.
Overheard on the street — Yuppy man to guy handing out black-empowerment leaflets: Do I look black to you?
Leaflet Guy to Yuppy Man: No, you look like a jackass, you white-supremacist bitch.
Lisa and me, a few paces back, quietly: Tee hee! D-a-m-n.
We saw former NESN host Hazel Mae on television here while eating at a restaurant that serves poutine.
On the way back to our hotel, we passed the “Club Super Sexe”—situated incongruously between a jewelry shop and an Italian restaurant and across the street from a Marc Jacobs store and Old Navy—where we noticed a sign advertising “Buffet Gratuit.” I’m sure the free food is not the real draw. Also, Lisa and I wondered how you tip a stripper in a country that doesn’t use dollar bills.
Can you guess where we are? More hints tomorrow!
Take kitty to his kitty resort? Check.
Clean the kitchen? Check.
Map my 12-mile running route for tomorrow? Check.
Write blog post? Check.
Watch the Bruins beat Buffalo in an overtime shootout? CHECK!
Pack for the weekend trip? Um, not yet.
Figure out what we’re doing on the trip? Uh . . .
Dig out the passports? Okay, okay. I’ll get going.
Velociraptor #1: “I’m sorry, but Jeff can’t come to the blog right now. Umm . . . he’ll be right back. But he left these pictures for you. Won’t you stay for a while?”
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Top Secret America
