Travel

louboutin.jpgI walked right past Christian Louboutin last weekend.  He made an impression.

Louboutin is Paris’ most well-known ladies shoe designer, notable for his sky high heels and their trade-mark red patent sole.  Louboutin’s shoes eclipsed Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik at the peak of the swinging hey-day of ‘Sex and the City’, and I can see why: every pair I own are well-cut, sexy, and outrageously comfortable (and, to be fair, outrageously expensive).

Louboutin was easy to recognize: I remember seeing pictures of him in an article about how he spends his free time drifting down the Nile in an over-sized Egyptian dhou, and I also knew that his Parisian flagship was just around the corner in one of the covered ‘galeries’ in the 1er. Of course, it didn’t hurt that he was wearing a well-cut khaki suit, accented by an outrageous and sparky pair of silver studded black leather shoes that flashed in the light as he hopped up onto the pavement.

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rueseguier.jpg I learned to eat the year
I starved in Paris.

Like so many American kids, I lived the cliché of being a poor, broke, foreign exchange student there to lap up some culture and meet some romantic French men.

All the myths came crashing down the first month. The guys were scruffy, unwashed and uninterested. The universities went on strike. The dollar crashed against the franc, sending Paris food prices beyond the reach of U.S. students.

I was 19 and living in a 12th century building on the rue Seguier and I refused to go home. 

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maryland.jpg We’d walked past it a couple of times, a simple storefront set back from the street with a small porch, a glimpse of tables inside, unassuming.  The Key Lime Cafe.  Full at lunch-time, we assumed it was a Maryland version of a diner.  We never even ventured up on to the porch....

We walked across the road to Big Al’s Fish Store the first day for lunch and had a fried clam sandwich, we had fancy hotel food at the Perry Cabin and so much soft-shelled crab that Alan spent an afternoon in bed.

We’d moved my son into his dorms at George Washington University in D.C. three days before and driven to Chesapeake Bay to the small town of St. Michael’s, Maryland (birthplace of Frederick Douglass) for a few days of rest. It was hot and we were tired and the plantation style Inn at Perry Cabin was a lovely place to rest.

 

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plane.jpgLast week I endured the two most dreaded days of my life each year for the past 20 years. FAA mandated 'stewardess training,' formally known as "CQ." Stands for 'Continuing Qualification.' Ladies and Gentlemen, this has nothing to do with serving you drinks and meals, listening to all of your problems, helping you stow your 100 pound compact suitcases, with an everlasting smile on my face.

"Grab ankles, bend over, stay down. Release seat belts, leave everything, come this way, jump and slide two at a time" Repeat 1,000 times in two days but wait....if you're on a 747, upper deck, remember to say 'sit and slide'  as it is a long way down. If you're on a MD88, remember to grab the flashlight as it is dark in the tailcone. But wait, that's if we crash on land; it's all different if we land in the Hudson River. We bought another airline last year so now we have 20 different airplanes instead of 10 and it's different on each plane. 

We are paired into small groups and my group had our plane hijacked. It's no different than a screenplay in how it is meticulously choreographed. I can't divulge the information but I did come home knowing that I am prepared.
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miss-lee.jpgWe couldn’t have picked a better day to immerse ourselves in Korean tea shops than a day filled with brisk temperatures and a slight chilly rain. It made our check ins of tea houses much more cozy even though we were on a seriously ambitious mission to sip and sit in a combination of traditional and modern establishments.

We started at Miss Lee, a colorful and playful tea house washed in bright colors and natural woods. If I was looking for a quiet austere place for tea this sure wasn’t it! We arrived for an early lunch of bento boxes with a variety of teas. There’s something to know about the world of Korean tea:  it’s not necessarily always based on traditional tea plants and their leaves. It’s a world that encompasses fruits, seeds, twigs, roots and leaves, not to mention some grains and barley and rice.

The flavors of a rainbow are all here, from sour and astringent to candy-like and sweet. One of my favorites was Omijacha, made from the dried berries of the Schisandra chinensis and called the Five Flavors tea because it has sweet, salty, bitter, sour and pungent notes. Served either hot or cold, Korean teas are consumed for health and vitality but to me some are just plain fun: give me a cup of Yujacha (citron) any day for dessert and I’d be a happy man.

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