Judge not, lest ye end up having the best meal of your trip in McDonald's

Except for a brief interval where I took my toddlers to the ball pit at the McD's on Capitol Hill every day, I have spent a lifetime scorning and avoiding McDonald's.  I once barely spoke to a friend again who insisted on eating McDonald's on the Champs Elysees in Paris (that friend later went on to be the toast of the town in New York).

Then I spent a week in Italy trying to eat wheat free, dairy free, low carbohydrate, no red meat.  What else could drive me into the arms of a branch of this despised corporation in the Florentine train depot?  

O.M.G. their chicken "Caesar" salad (no caesar dressing or cheese or croutons which actually made it perfect for me) was the most satisfying culinary experience I've had in Italy--is that sad?!  Or am I just incredibly grateful?  I guess both.  They made it fresh (I don't think anyone had ever ordered it before and they had to kill and roast the chicken for me in the back--it took 20 minutes to come out).  The greens were varied, fresh tasting and flavorful.  The chicken was delicious.  The dressing was a lovely little individual glass bottle of olive oil and balsamic.

I was a very happysadgrateful tourist.

Visit to a Worldly Vatican

While our writhing, dripping scorched flesh trip through the Vatican Museum this week may have presaged Michelangelo’s vision of hell on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, it did nothing to prepare me for the almost complete lack of Biblical references in the rest of Museum’s collection. 

It’s fascinating.  Most of pre 20^th century western European museum collections are devoted to Christian art—I can’t count the wonderful paintings, tapestries, frescoes and triptychs I’ve seen representing the crucifixion, the beheading of John the Baptist, the expulsion of the merchants from the Temple and the Annunciation.

Yet, here you might think rather than the heart of Christendom, you were visiting the palace of an atheistic monarch—the collection displays vast troves of Egyptian statues, pagan Gods, detailed wall-sized maps including an incredible assemblage of contemporary art. 

Even in the few gorgeous Raphael-created walls of the Papal apartments just before you finally enter the Sistine Chapel, the floor to ceiling art depicts battles, political scenes, and particularly telling, important moments in papal history.  My favorite? The creation of the concept of “Immaculate Conception.”  I don’t know if anyone but me finds this fascinating:  in the privacy of their home, the popes appear less interested in the birth of the son of God than they are in the birth of their story about the birth of the mother of the son of God—tell-ing (did you know that, by the way?  Most people assume that the Immaculate Conception was the conception of Jesus but it's actually the conception of Mary so that Mary can be without sin).

So there it is.  

When in Rome...do what I usually do

I could have written the Control Freak's Guide to European Travel.  I was brought up to travel like the "anti Ugly American."  That is to say, to do everything to be respectful of the local culture, make a solid attempt to speak the language, try all the foods, speak in hushed voices, blend in as much as possible.  Needless to say, this opportunity alone was highly privileged.  It meant that I traveled a lot from a young age (I spent the first 2 1/2 years of my life in Greece and a half a year in Paris at the age of 14).

This basis, coupled with some control freak tendencies, caused to me to sharply condemn other approaches to travel along the way.  Some 35 years ago I can remember sending a friend packing back to London from Paris because he wanted to eat at McDonald's and wouldn't attempt to speak French.  About 20 years ago I ruined the better part of a day in Montreal because I was so upset that my travel companions ordered modest pasta dishes in a French restaurant (rather than what I judged to be French food).

Both times I knew that I was in the right and they were wrong.  It was as simple as that.  They ruined my time, not the other way around.  And it certainly wasn't me who ruined my own time.  I also always kept up a punishing schedule on travel.  Every day, get up go to a morning sight, then an afternoon sight, then an evening sight.  None of this lallygagging around.


Today, as I visit Europe at 53, I find that I am a different kind of traveler and need a different guide book than the one I brought myself up with--maybe The Spoiled Brat Guide to Europe?  Not sure what to call it.  These days, I am less concerned with what locals think of me.  I try to be respectful, but I also work harder at getting my needs met.  Italian food, much as I'd like to eat it, just does not work for me.  I really don't seem to be able to stay healthy and eat dairy, wheat, sugar or meat.  (Try getting a low carbohydrate vegan entree with any protein at one of these places and you could be waiting a long time for your meal)

Also, I need a lot more down time.  Because I've had the extreme luxury of traveling to Europe several times in my life, I am free from the "this is the only time I'll be here" stress.  If I need to skip seeing a world class museum to write a silly blogpost like this, I am free to do that.  I meditate and I check-in with myself and I see what rhythm is right for me.   Sometimes my happiest time traveling is to go to the exact same cafe every day with a notebook and sit and people watch, rather than running around the city chasing Michelangelo (who can be very hard to catch).

And, thank God, I don't care as much, or barely at all what the people I'm traveling with do.  If they want a frantic pace, let them have it.  If they want to eat in McDonald's--fine!  I can let them be the way they want to be, and skip swearing at the them in the streets.

4 Snouts up for Boyhood in theaters now

(:)(:)(:)(:) 4 enthusiastic snouts up for Boyhood in theaters now.  Directed, written and conceived by Richard Linklater (of Before Sunset fame), this extraordinary fictional piece chronicles the life of a young man, Mason, from age 5 to age 18--using the same actor  (Ellar Coltrane) as he himself grows up.

For this viewer long accustomed to different actors playing the same person as they grow (and to watch actors who are much older than the child they are playing), it was almost overly intimate to watch the same actor play his own age over a 12 year period.  It gave the film a quality of a documentary, even when it was clearly not one and was confusing to my senses.

As riveting as it was to watch Mason age, it was also interesting to watch the people who played his parents (Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke) age 12 years.

The story itself: absentee dad, single mom doing her best with alcoholic jerks for husbands, held my attention and made me care about the characters.  But the central conceit is what actually kept me hooked throughout.

Not to be missed.

Small is the new big--How Orange is the New Black tells the truth

After the first episode I watched of Orange is the New Black I dismissed it as soft core lesbian porn (if I had readers, several of them would have just made a note to watch it) and decided it was not for me.  Then I hit a hot day with no one home, no energy to do anything else (and my husband far ahead of me in the series) and I watched a couple of episodes and realized there was more to it (and really almost no porn) than I had initially thought.

I've read a lot of about this popular show and learned about the true story that spawned it, the transexual character, etc but the episode I watched last night--the chickening--awakened me to an important truth that the show illustrates in every moment:  the small is big for all of us.

When Piper (the incarcerated upper middle class Smith grad protagonist of the show) talks to her fiancee and her business partner on the outside, they are constantly trying to get her to pay attention to "the real world" instead of the petty dramas of the prison.  In the Chickening, Piper drops the hallway pay phone while on hold to talk a key buyer into stocking her artisanal soap to follow a chicken she glimpses outside in the prison yard.  For Piper it represents the ultimate in wandering away from the "real world" to the "fish bowl" of the prison.

Yet, the episode begs larger questions.  Who amongst us hasn't been more interested in a petty drama close at hand than our larger good?  And yet who is to say that the discovery of the chicken (and what it says about her "rep" inside) isn't on some level more or as important as whether a department store stocks soaps with jalapeño peppers in them?  Is the world outside really more "real" than the world inside?  And which outside is the most real:  The department store? the conflict in Ukraine or Gaza?  Climate change? the shrinking of the universe?  the idea of parallel universes?

And which inside is the real inside:  the chicken? or Piper's fears of being thought a lunatic for saying she saw one? or some part of Piper perhaps that knows she's okay whether she saw a chicken or sells artisanal soaps on a large scale?

The invitation is to pay attention to the small but look for what is most real and most true.  To stay grounded in spiritual practice to be connected to all things so that at some point the chicken is everything.