Travel

If you ford a river with the crowd, the crocodile cannot eat you.
         –Malagasy proverb

My husband, Bill Rollnick, and I were part of an American Red Cross team traveling to Madagascar to help implement the global Measles and Malaria Preventive Initiative. In October, our team was part of a joint partnership led by the American Red Cross, the United Nations Foundation, UNICEF, CDC, WHO and the Malagasy government in which millions of Malagasy children, ages 9 months to 5 years, received measles vaccine, Vitamin A, de-worming medicine and insecticide-treated mosquito nets.

In our effort to downsize but continue to have fun, we scrambled together all our frequent flyer miles and managed to put together two return flights to London and Italy. Then, by making a small investment on a home exchange site, we found a young woman in Prato (twenty minutes from Florence), willing to do a non-simultaneous exchange with our desert house in Joshua Tree.

Our first stop was London, where a kind friend loaned us her house. Although I grew up in London I have not lived there in over 30 years. The minute I walked off the plane, I was surprised by the intense 80-degree heat, a byproduct of global warming, and something I had never encountered in my childhood, where you were lucky if it reached the mid 70’s in the summer.  After struggling with the new monetary denominations and a new subway system, I began to feel like a stranger in my hometown,

Yet, one area that has vastly improved since I lived in London is the food. But like everything else, it is very expensive. Fortunately, another ex-Brit friend had recently visited London and her sage advice was that bargains could be had at posh restaurants if you went at lunch, rather than dinner.  Following her recommendation, backed up by “Time out”– still the best magazine to tell you what is going on in London – I made reservations at Gauthier, a French restaurant in Soho.  

We arrived this morning in Italy, which makes us very lucky people.

Everything is different here. It’s like Brigadoon. You would think that air is air, sky is sky, light is light – it’s the same wherever you go, the same world, right? Nah. Italy is enchanted. They even speak a different language over here. Crazy, no?

Today – to tide over my jet-lagged body until dinner – I had half a salami sandwich. That’s all we had in the house at that point. I sliced a thin piece of whole grain bread off the loaf, slapped three or four slices of salami on it, folded it in half and took a bite. It’s not the same, baby.

Nowhere else in the world does a salami sandwich taste like this.

I took my sandwich outside to look at our vegetable garden and I noticed that our cherry tree had ripe cherries on it. Crazy, no? The problem is that it’s a big tree, which means that most of the good fruit is ten, fifteen feet off the ground.

I was 'off to see the queen,' the stewardess lingo we use when working a London trip. I packed my tall boots, a few jackets and scarves. I was invited to join a friend from London for dinner with a small group at the famous old oyster bar "J Sheekey." I was, for once, concerned about what I would wear as my friend, Tim is a famous London tailor with a shop on Savile Row as well as shops all over the world. He dresses David Beckam and Tom Cruise and I certainly did not want to embarrass myself with some sort of 'get up' from my usual suitcase wardrobe.

As I was getting out of the shower that evening, I heard the fire alarms going off. Too many times I have called downstairs or left my room, only to discover that it was a false alarm. But I was having visions of Mumbai and quickly threw on the pajamas I had laying on the sink, grabbed my purse, put on my coat and ventured into the hallway. There was a little old Japanese man passing by my door and he sort of put it all in perspective in his heavy Japanese accent, "When in doubt, it is best to get out." I followed his lead and joined a group descending down the stairwell. When we got to the first floor, a security guard directed us down a long hallway that lead to the garage.