And ... we're back.

After a holiday, it's time to get back on the horse. Or something like that.

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted here in a few weeks. This may have been a blessing for you, or you may have wondered if something was amiss. Nope, I was traveling with my family and wasn’t really great at proactively publishing scheduled posts so instead it’s been awhile.

Hey!

What’s up? 

How YOU doing?

We spent a week in London and a week in Paris, and it was truly delightful. For those of you who I’m friends with on Instagram, you’ve seen the photos. 

I am not going to create this post as a tricks and tips for traveling or anything like that, but here are some thoughts I jotted down over the two weeks abroad. Enjoy them as you will. A longer post on an unrelated subject will undoubtedly come soon enough.

At SFO, I bought a fantasy football magazine in the newsstand/gift shop. This generated several thoughts:

• Buying these magazines used to be one of the most exciting times of the year. It took several years before I really understood that they were out-of-date by the time I bought them, that the internet was making them (and, sadly, many magazines) obsolete, and that I should not trust them as much as I had. (Anyone else remember Tatum Bell on the cover as the RB1? Let’s just say … I do.)

  

• Is there a place on earth that has more frivolous, unnecessary purchases than an airport newsstand? Does anyone need a bag of Cheddar Chex Mix? A bottle opener or keychain? Or a magazine they will flip through and realize is 75% ads? How many magnets from cities you’ve visited do you truly need?

• These two things are related. I’d guess that fantasy football magazines only exist today due to airport sales. I have no way (or, more accurately, no desire) to confirm or deny this, but I’m pretty sure I’m right about this.

On the flight to London, I watched the second and third Hobbit movies. I’d watched the first years ago and enjoyed it … enough. (Note: I LOVE the Lord of the Rings movies, this isn’t an anti-Tolkien sentiment.) It just felt a bit dull and I couldn’t bring myself to ever dedicate hours to these films. But suddenly, I had over ten hours to do just that and watched them both. They were fine! Would I watch them again? Maybe. But I’d rewatch the entire LoTR trilogy again first. 

My other big takeaway? Man, elves probably would be GREAT at golf. Just such fluid movement, I can’t imagine how much swing speed they could generate.

You think Justin Thomas generates a lot of power compared to his body weight? My man Legolas would outdrive Bryson.

While we were in London and Paris, we used an app called Citymapper. I rarely praise random applications but this is truly fantastic if you are trying to use public transportation to get around a strange city (mostly, currently, in the United States and Europe). It also drives home how pathetic our infrastructure is in many US cities, but even looking past that, it absolutely scratched my planning/obsessive compulsion to figure out what metro/underground station and trains we would be taking the next day in advance. It even tells you what exit to leave a station from, if it’s better to be at the front or back of the train, etc. Super cool. 

While we were gone, Verizon (and, to some degree, other cell carriers) experienced over a day without cellular service for International customers. (Sticks hand up.) It’s yet another reminder how beholden we are to our phones, even for things like, say, using Citymapper. I only determined it was a bigger issue and not just us by searching for it and finding a Reddit thread that made it clear to me that I wasn’t NEARLY as angry or irrational about this as many, many other people.

Morning Brew is less fun to read when it’s describing something you had to deal with.

One thing that was actually pretty bad was the heat wave we arrived into – now, it wasn’t nearly as bad as what’s going on in so many spots in the world, but one thing that becomes acutely clear is that much of London RARELY needs air conditioning (and therefore doesn’t have it) … and even museums like the British museum (that don’t have paintings as much as stone relics and statues, etc.) just become humid, stale and hot rooms which isn’t nearly as fun as it sounds. The entire interior of the main courtyard was basically lined with tourists sitting down, fanning themselves and drinking water. Not…ideal. 

A major attraction at the British Museum is the Rosetta Stone, which of course helped folks decipher hieroglyphics into a recognizable language. I know this - and that there’s a ‘learn a language’ program named after this as well. But I sort I realized when looking at it that I kind of knew nothing else about the stone.

Who discovered it, and where? How long did it take to realize what it was - and then to figure it out? How did someone crack that code? Why hasn’t this been made into a great book or movie? (Or…has it? Let me know in the comments below.) 

Finally, one final note about the Louvre. It’s way, way too big. How do I know this? It’s physically preposterously large – like other museums such as the Smithsonian, it’s impossible to view everything in a single day. (I feel like this should be the metric of a museum, but then I don’t know shit about this stuff.) Also? The other major museums in Paris have a TON of things on loan from … The Louvre! That’s weird, right? (Answer: Yes.)

Not EVERY part of this building is the Louvre, admittedly. But it’s like 90%. That’s a lot.  

But despite this mammoth presence, this global recognition as one of the – perhaps THE singular – most important art museums in the world (“Hang it in the Louvre!” is a meme/expression for anything one finds gorgeous, not “Hang it in the Tate Modern!” or “Hang it in the DeYoung!”) the museum has absolutely no idea what to do with its most popular work.

You know the one. 

YES, you do. It’s the Mona Lisa. And virtually everyone who goes to the Louvre wants to see it. And as such, the room its housed in looks like this in mid-summer:

Easily the worst 5-8 minutes of our two week trip.

What are the paintings on the sides of the room? No clue. They look interesting! But you can’t get to them because the sides are for folks trying to get out of The Worlds Most Claustrophobic Space. I waited in this crush for maybe 5-8 minutes, finally bouncing after gettinghip checked by people just pushing their way past me, then turning and waving for their family members to do the same. Meanwhile I had barely moved a foot forward towards the painting. Meanwhile at the front, it’s just a sea of people taking selfies and then just … standing there? There’s some cachet to being up front that folks will not relinquish. It’s maddening. (Indeed, folks posing in front of art works – typically, young attractive women who likely define themselves as ‘influencers’ – was a constant throughout our Europe trip. One woman in Versailles had her much older boyfriend constantly taking photos as she sashayed through the Hall of Mirrors, flipping her hair back and practicing her botoxed, filler aided smile several times before she was satisfied that photos could begin to be taken. I hate people.) 

There’s no reason the Louvre can’t create a queue – our tickets for the building were for 11:30 AM. No reason at all we couldn’t be assigned a time like … 12:10 … to see the Mona Lisa. If you miss it? There’s a long line to wait in. Your fault, buddy. Life happens. (They are relocating the painting to a dedicated space and it turns out they HAVE had queueing in place before but this year they decided – for reasons unknown – that chaos is a ladder, and it’s time for us to climb. Hard pass.)