A Post: About Thanksgiving (Nominally)

It will take me a while to land the plane that is this post, but I promise I will get there.

My solitude used to come in bite-sized pieces.

If Ed Norton’s character in Fight Club has single-serving friends on flights, then I certainly had single-serving moments of introspection. Six years of six a.m. flights. Of bad plane coffee. Of sprinting through CLT trying to make a hopeless connection. Of inconsistent WiFi and spotty access to charging. Of hour-long cab rides into the city, doing my makeup just as we hit the Midtown Tunnel, while turning the back seat into a mobile workstation. Of renting what was tantamount to an overpriced closet where I occasionally slept and more often did laundry. Of sustaining friendships with unexpected drop-ins.

Of measuring my life in miles.

2020 was – if it had continued as it began – going to be a banner year for business travel. I flew over 60,000 miles across 56 flights this year, 52 of which happened before March 15th. That old tale of the shark who dies if it stops swimming… that is the life of the business traveler. If you actually stopped to reflect on what you were doing, there would be just no way to make it work.

When all things came to a screeching halt with me “stranded” in California, I was forced to take that step back that I never wanted to take. I could have just as easily kept kicking the travel can down the road and telling myself sweet little lies like, “you’ll slow the pace of travel after this fiscal year” (said, of course, every fiscal year) or the even more insidious, “buck up, you’re tough enough to handle this.”

It’s not toughness, friends. It’s not fortitude. It’s stubbornness, pure and simple. And a healthy dash of fear of the unknown.

Could I be happy in one place? I can’t say I’ve ever really tried.

The truth is that I’ve lived a casually and ridiculously privileged bicoastal life, being neither here nor there, but just where I needed to be in the exact moment in time I needed to be there. The concept of a fixed “here” felt (and if I’m being honest, there are moments where it still feels) oppressive, and I would have surely cracked from Shelter-in-Place had I been cooped up alone in my Atlanta apartment.

I can’t say I believe in fate, but it was a stroke of pure luck that things stopped when I just happened to be in the Bay Area. They say you can’t go home again, but in many ways I think I have. The city is deeply different and yet my neighborhood feels exactly the same, with just a tiny bit of apocalyptic flair.

Having passed the 8 month mark from California SIP orders, my quarantimes look like this: 3.5 months each at my parents’ house and at my old/new building in the Mission, bisected by the most surreal month in Atlanta to pack my things. And though I was hardly isolated for 7 of those 8 months, it was impossible not to feel unmoored, adrift, listless, unenthused. Purposeless. Emotion I normally would ignore or kick down or push through. Or – when I was really in my feelings – go volunteer about. Those outlets I had nearly all are gone.

A quick digression: suffering is not an Olympic event. I’ve been incredibly incredibly lucky this pandemic and for that I’m so grateful, but it doesn’t mean that I haven’t had my frustrations. We all do, and we’re all allowed to feel them, and acknowledge them, and process them as we need to. Guilt is not a particularly utile emotion in times like these. Ours is a zeitgeist of ennui, to be sure. Universal as it comes.

Eventually, I turned to ritual in hopes of reclaiming some kind of anchor. And all of my rituals, my holidays, my family ties, all of it: they all seem to start or stop in the kitchen.

Cooking and baking tend not to be skills in which one acquires any true proficiency when one spends an average of ten nights (that is to say, twenty days) a month in hotels, on the road. In a way I’ve spent a lifetime of sponging up what I could, where I could: there was the after school cooking for kids program that my best friend’s mom ran from the teacher’s lounge at my elementary school—I still remember the lesson on folding batter. Or “baking” with my dad as a toddler, sometimes getting to stir but always getting to be the taste tester. Or at the elbows of my grandmothers, both excellent cooks with the mysterious kitchen idiosyncrasies that only old home cooks really can have. Or in that one soup kitchen in Manhattan that has access to a restaurant kitchen, but you have to be in Midtown by 5:30 on what is inevitably a frigid fall morning, worrying the whole way if the 5 will have issues, but the reward is getting to use an industrial mandolin and – hopefully – keep all your fingers. Or working in the phenomenal industrial kitchen in Atlanta where spaghetti is made in 40 gallon tilt skillets and stirred with what could only be described as an erstwhile rowboat oar.

Food justice and food equity are so important to me because it’s so primal, both in terms of human need and also in the satisfaction one gets from feeding others. I’m Italian: we cook to say we love you as much as we actually say the words.

I dabbled early in the year with what I ended up terming “Mik’s Quarantine Cucina,” basically Instagram stories of what I was cooking, how I was trying to make sense of our rapidly changing lifestyles, of the weird hoarding and ingredient shortages happening early on. It was nice to have something glib and fun and relatable and ended up being an easy way to stay connected to my East Coast friends and colleagues. You can get out of those awful “how are you?” conversations that everyone either lies about for politeness’s sake or gets too real and then you’re all in that rona pit together. We had something tangible to talk about that wasn’t more of the same, more of the quotidian exhaustion. It’s the same reason people got puppies and Pelotons, something to shake things up.

And so I threw myself into Thanksgiving cooking this year. That wasn’t particularly new; with no grandmas at the helm for the last 4 holiday seasons, I’ve certainly pitched in on dishes here and there. All the time, knowing I was missing the vital ingredient: old hands (as my zia says). I feel my grandmas’ absence most acutely at this time of year, as I think is common for most (whether with your family you’re born into or with the family you make).

This week was an orgiastic flurry of stirring and chopping and folding and sautéing and kneading and fraisage. A little bit French (pâtes, brisée & sucrée, one of each), a little bit Italian (ravioli in the style of my nonna’s mom, Nonnie B), a little bit American (3 recipes I took from the NYT foods section before I canceled my subscription in a fit over their publication of the Cotton op-ed), and even a little bit Somali (I would be remiss if I didn’t throw in a little plug for Hawa Hassan’s brilliant In Bibi’s Kitchen, which has energized my cooking over this month). There was even a little bit Chinese though it wasn’t done by me – maman made her mom’s (my popo’s) traditional day-after-Thanksgiving turkey jook (粥). I took pictures here and there, thinking to do some sort of post around technique that I always find frustratingly lacking in recipe blogs.

Dinner came together in fit of chaos, as it always does. Even with all the forethought in the world, we still run through the marathon of all the things having to get heated or cooked in the final hour. And though my parents’ kitchen is bigger and better equipped than either of my grandmas’ kitchens, the three of us were constantly on top of one another, vying for burners or ovens or even the microwave and trying to help each other stay moving. There were two last minute mishaps (exploding ravioli and these fussy potatoes where I just couldn’t get the butter to emulsify), and at one point I was caught muttering, “happy fucking Thanksgiving,” which thankfully sent us all into hysterics.

As I realized, sitting at the table by myself after the meal, I was cooking as much as anything to wrap myself in ritual and thumb my nose at the all loss all around me. It wasn’t a conscious decision to be incredibly extra about the holiday, but it was clearly all the angst of this oddest of years coming to the surface. I didn’t need to make two kinds of stuffing. I didn’t need to make two desserts with two different doughs. There were so many ways to simplify and streamline this process, and yet.

Most of us are not taught to grieve in any real way and there are some truths about grief that can’t be anticipated, only learned through experience. And when you take a year of such deep collective loss where there is no space given for commensurate public grief, it’s no wonder so many of us are struggling to cope in our own ways. Moving forward without going through the grieving process is not, in fact, moving forward – you’re just burying the problem, only to have it pop back up later, often times inconveniently and messily. We need time; we need patience with one another. We need patience with ourselves. And try though I might, you can’t just cheer it away, and relentless positivity is equally toxic to negativity.

I wish I had arrived at some sort of profound conclusion at the end of all this, but it, not unlike everything else, seems to be a work in progress. And that will do for now.

Belfort en zwart-wit

Generally speaking, I’m a color person.

What I mean by this is just that given a choice between monochrome and rich, vivid color, I’m going for the latter every time.

Furniture?

Clothing?

Photography?

Doesn’t really matter, that’s typically what I’m picking.

Most times, if I’m processing monochrome, it’s because I screwed something up. Couldn’t get the white balance right, or multiple light sources, or weird exposures. That kind of thing. It’s very rare that I’d head to B&W as an artistic choice first.

My one big explosion of monochrome was done my first winter in New York – a gnarly one, as first winters inevitably are. I was making instant prints on early experimental Impossible Project film and watching ungodly amounts of the first few seasons of Law & Order. I still think that series contains some of my best works. (God that feels like a thousand lifetimes ago!)

I wonder sometimes if it’s that I can’t see in monochrome that I can’t shoot in monochrome.

The beauty of a long-term hobby is that you’ve tried nearly everything once or twice over the years. My early scratching attempts at photography, though fraught with egregious dutching that makes my head spin, provided opportunities to give nearly any and all techniques a go.

In those early explorations I did go through an Alphaville (Godard, not the synth band) phase that I think sucked out all future inclinations towards moody contrasty abstracty discomforting B&Ws.

All that to say that I couldn’t for the life of me put a finger on why a monochrome treatment made so much sense to me as I was processing photos of the Ghent Bell Tower, but here we are!

In Bruges

And in Ghent. And in Bruxelles.

Traveling with friends is not my normal mode of operation – which seems odd when you think about the fact that a) I like people and b) that does happen to be the way that most of my friends and peers travel. I think the habit of solo travel was built up in part because that’s how I learned to travel (let me assure you, very few twenty-year-olds want to spend their year abroad exploring provincial capitals in Italy) and in part because I hate being the one holding the group back when I stop to take, oh, ninety million photos.

But when my dear friend Layne told me she was headed for Europe, had a few days solo, and would love it if I’d join her in Belgium, there was no way I was saying no. I arrived earlier (hence the stops in Paris and Luxembourg) and we planned to rendezvous in Brussels for a quick couple days in Belgium together.

This was not my first time in Belgium, but the prior visit was when I was the aforementioned twenty-year-old weirdo going to Italian provincial capitals. At the time, I didn’t drink beer. On that trip, I also for whatever stupid reason (probably affordability?) ate neither waffles nor chocolate. I wasn’t even supposed to be in Belgium, but rather in Maastricht, just over the border in the Netherlands… then a train strike happened and it felt prudent to be in Belgium so I’d be able to catch my flight out of Charleroi.

What I needed was a Belgium do-over.

It was a relatively quick ride up from Luxembourg for me. Belgian trains I found highly utilitarian and, if I’m being honest, a bit of a let down from the pristine, elegant SNCF trains I had gotten spoiled by in France. Brussels was our home base in a lovely apartment southeast of the city center.

There was of course one thing I knew I had to do in Brussels: Cantillon.

I wouldn’t consider myself a beer nerd, but I am certainly a Cantillon nerd. They are notable for being one of the few remaining traditional lambic brewers in Belgium (and depending on whom you ask, perhaps the only proper lambic brewer left in Belgium). We’re talking true lambics here – not some syrupy fruity is-it-a-beer-or-a-weird-cider concoction. Their menu is spartan, their production numbers laughable in comparison to other breweries of equal renown; all of this is intentional to maintain the integrity of the beer.

And my is it worth it.

I’d had their beers before, mostly at The Sovereign and Monk’s Kettle, but there’s nothing like unfettered access and great prices. It was a visit that I would recommend without hesitation, particularly if you like a little sour, a little funk. Glorious.

After a quick break back at the apartment (it was Layne’s arrival day, after all), we ventured up into town to see a bit of Brussels and indulge in that most Belgian of treats: la gaufre, the waffle!

We let our noses lead us to Maison Dandoy, a speculoos bakery that just happens to have phenomenal waffles. I went for bruxelleoise with toasted hazelnuts and it was perfection. Rich, crisp, sweet, nutty, excellent.

Just steps away from that sweet, carb-y heaven is the center square, known as la Grand-Place in French or De Grote Markt in Flemish. If stately, ornate buildings with lots of gilding are your thing, then this has to be one of the best squares in Europe.

We quite enjoyed playing tourist, which – being in Belgium and all – involved some fried foods and more beer.

For our second day, we knew we’d be headed off to Bruges, a quick hour’s jaunt west by train. Most of the trains leaving Bruxelles-Midi station have a stop at Ghent, so we decided to do the same. It was absolutely the right call.

Ghent was an absolutely joy and really typified the aesthetic I picture when I think of the Low Countries: canals, bikes, pretty Gothic churches and charming brick grachtenhuizen rising above the water.

We hopped on the tram to go into the city and have breakfast at Simon Says, a restaurant Layne found that’s housed in a wildly-colored gem of an Art Nouveau building.

It was the perfect spot for a casual breakfast, with delicious baked goods and any kind of coffee drink your could want. If you’re going, just know that it fills up fast!

The only thing I really knew about Ghent was in the context of its famed Altarpiece, so I knew I wanted to wind my way over to the cathedral eventually. It’s an excellent walking city, though I’d imagine it’s great for biking as well.

Ghent was a medieval powerhouse, its highly decorative buildings a testament to its success. Just before reaching the cathedral we came across the Belfry of Ghent, the tallest tower in the city. Naturally, we had to go up.

Unlike many of the bell towers I’ve visited over the years, this one has an elevator. No complaints about that. Above is a replica of the dragon that sits atop its spire, a symbol of the city.

We reached the top to find phenomenal views of the city and surrounding areas – no surprise there – and, well, a great deal of wind. Thank goodness for hoods and hats and puffy jackets!

This is the cathedral, just across a short square from the belfry and home of the second tallest tower in the city.

The great thing about the wind is that it kept the skies relatively blue and picturesque, though our faces were quite windswept by the time we caved and ran back inside to catch the lift down.

After a little more touristing downstairs, we made our way over to the cathedral. I’m always a bit iffy about taking photos in an active space of worship, and (truth be told) I doubt I’d be able to shoot the altarpiece as well as the professionals. On a more interesting note, the piece has a bit of a spotty history in that it’s been stolen multiple times.

We finished our Ghent visit with a stop at the nearby brasserie Sint-Jorishof. The beer and snacks were fine, but the real appeal was the ridiculous collection of antiques and bad taxidermy. Then we were back off to the station and, not too long after, on our way to Bruges!

First thing about Bruges: the city name is Bruges in French, but Brugge (broo-hee, more or less) in Flemish. We couldn’t get over how much more fun the local pronunciation is.

Like Ghent, there were lots of cute brick buildings, and it was very walkable; unlike Ghent, it had a distinctly touristy vibe (horse-drawn carriages on cobblestone and corny souvenir t-shirts, &c.) that wasn’t exactly my speed.

By the time we arrived, it was time for food. (Travel hanger is real.) We found a spot that did savory waffles: the food was much better than my photos of said food, so just imagine a waffle with a perfectly cooked fried egg atop it.

The central square, Markt, is very pedestrian friendly and provided a great view of the belfry. The buildings that ring it vary from old-old-old to just seemingly old (like the Gothic Revival Provinciaal Hof above) with lots of cafés and beer bars.

We eventually made our way to the patio of 2be, where I nursed a kriek (cherry lambic) in the cold, though I wonder if a Delirium Tremens may have been more appropriate.

One of the things I quite admire about most European country’s approach to cold weather is that they utterly embrace it. I remember a conversation with a bartender in Copenhagen one winter; his take was that if they couldn’t figure out how to lean into the cold, they’d all have left by now. As a weak-blooded Californian, I question my own sanity every winter on the East Coast.

With time left to kill before our late train back to Brussels, it only seemed prudent to stop for a snack of frieten—the inimitable Belgian fries! (France and Belgium apparently still disagree about which country invented “French” fries, but suffice it to say I’m grateful to whichever one made that discovery.)

We found fries in a little nameless stand in front of the belfry. Our fry cook – who, if I remember correctly, was from Albania… and I’m fairly certain we had a nice little chat about my visit… but who knows after a day of beer drinking – recommended mayonnaise and beef stew as our toppings. Both were absolutely delicious and made it worth sitting on a cold metal bench.

Finally, we made our way back to the train station and returned to Brussels. A trip well done.

Laisse les filles tomber.

For this autumn Polaroid Week, I’ve been using the new Polaroid Lab to make prints from the trip I took last February. I usually have a fairly good sense of what works within the confines of the medium: it’s not just aspect ratio and framing, but really the overall makeup of the image, whether contrast, levels, colors, or tones. Nothing isn’t taken into consideration.

I so badly wanted this image to print nicely. I’m obsessed with the interplay of dark and light – the woman in the middle could be cropped into a perfect chiaroscuro portrait. I’m also partial to the shadows on the green coat in the right foreground.

The resulting instant image? Off. Wonky. Wrong. It’s a good reminder that every now and then you’ll hit a dud, but when it comes to the artistic process that’s probably a feature and not a bug.

The Home in the Marsh

Which is allegedly the meaning of Brussels, or so says Wikipedia.

I’m definitely a hotel person and not an Airbnb/Vrbo/condo/etc. person… but every now and then I get persuaded.

This flat was truly my dream - the moulding, the light, the ceilings, the floors, the balcony, good god! I would style it completely differently and remodel both the bathroom and kitchenette and I would live there and love it forever.

Once upon a time...

… a princess ran out of the ball at midnight power-walked into the Gare de l'Est before sunrise to get on a train to go through the snow and up through the hills. She tried terribly hard not to smart when said train stopped at the Champagne-Ardenne TGV station where she was supposed to have been for a wine tasting the day before (but even princesses have their moments).

She wasn’t wearing a ball gown and had traded glass slippers for sturdy black leather booties, but from the second she stepped off the train, she felt like she was in a fairytale all the same.

Why? Not a magic spell nor a meddling fairy godmother, just Luxembourg.

I was in Europe to meet up with a dear friend and had one whole day between my arrival day and hers. With a family trip to Paris on the calendar later in the year, it made little sense to stay in France. Belgium was my eventually destination, but I had been there before, so it was time to find a new adventure.

For once, I did some planning a bit ahead of time – train tickets purchased nearly 3 weeks prior to departure seem excessive to me. Luxembourg was the perfect stop over: 2 hours from Paris, then 3 more onwards to Brussels.

Beyond the train tickets, however, I had very little plan. All I really knew about the country was that I’d still be able to speak French (indeed, much more reassuring than having to attempt German or – worse – Dutch).

Luxembourg, on first impression, was (as you may have guessed) something out of a fairytale. It started with one of the best single pieces of viennoisserie I’ve ever eaten: a hazelnut (not nutella, just hazelnut) croissant that I got at the train station upon arrival.

The walk into town was cold and brisk, through an unremarkable stretch of modern buildings, over a river and up to the adorable Ville Haute.

Churches and castles (or at least battlements). Pristine art galleries. Cozy restaurants. It was the perfect place for a day trip.

I explored for a bit before settling down for lunch at Am tiirmschen, which had the advantages of being tucked in away in a restored medieval building and hosting a full menu of Luxembourgish specialties.

After a bit of consideration, I settled on kniddelen, which are somewhere between gnocchi and dumplings (in the restaurant’s words: “un peu comme des gnocchis, mais avec farine de blé, œufs et lait – a little like gnocchi, but with wheat flour, eggs, and milk”). Roquefort sauce and walnuts, exactly the type of thing you should be eating to prepare for more frigid weather explorations.

After lunch, I made my way over to the Casemates du Bock - fortifications turned World War II bomb shelters turned modern tourist attraction.

After a long day of walking, I finally found some rays of sunshine over across in the river in the Grund neighborhood.

Was it ever worth the wait.

Achromatique

Winter travel in Europe is equal measures frustrating and magical. You could have an adorable town, the eaves of all its snug little houses lightly dusted with snow, looking like a perfect gingerbread village… or you could have sideways rain trying to frostbite your nose. It’s the luck of the draw.

There are two distinct advantages for American tourists, to wit:

• CHEAP flights. (SO CHEAP. You can get a JFK-CDG flight a week out for less than you’d pay if you booked a June flight a year in advance.)

• If you’re not a big traveler and you’re weird about being pickpocketed, it’s much harder to do when you stuff is shoved under a heavy coat.

For Northeasterners, the weather is really a wash—perhaps slightly warmer in fact—but if you’re a weak blooded California girl (like me), pack a scarf. Or five.

You also ought to resign yourself to lifeless gray skies and nearly monochromatic photos.

I ended up leaning into all of that, with a jaunty red wool hat, long black coat, gloves (the whole nine, really), and a look of grim determination. I hopped back on the Métro and made my way north to the Porte de Pantin, right on the Boulevard Périphérique, the ring road demarking the boundaries of the city.

My goal? The sublime form of the Philharmonie de Paris.

The building was an unexpectedly transcendent delight, strangely fluid and organic, basket-woven aluminum crumpled lightly like the folds of a discarded shirt. It was the sweeping vistas down to the minute abstract details, a play of light and a glossy reflection of the wintry skies.

It seemed so perfectly parisien, nestled in the Villette Park, a modern stunner alongside wonderful museums, large grassy expanses perfect for summertime picnics, and the 19th century Grande Halle – today a cultural center, but once a massive abattoir (leave it to the Parisians to make even their slaughterhouses beautiful).

I rarely find myself more than a quick walk from either the Seine or the Canal St. Martin (my typical haunts being decidedly slanted towards the third, tenth, and eleventh arrondissements), but visiting the Philharmonie meant seeing a wholly different side of the city.

Paris never fails to surprise.

And that – after all – is why I love it best.

That Time I Got Stuck in Paris

Okay hear me out: sometimes you actually don’t want to be in Paris.

I know, I know. It sounds crazy at first pass.

But imagine, if you will. The time: Lunar New Year, laaaate January, after an exhausting fiscal year end. The place: a gate at JFK Terminal 8, having left the comforts of the gorgeous and absurdly bougie Flagship Lounge to ensure you’re able to board on time. Your destination? Reims, the heart of Champagne Country… by way of Roissy of course.

There’s some weather (January in New York, after all), but not much. Not enough to be worried. The departure time changes. Then changes again. The gate agent gets on the loudspeaker, “we have the mechanics on the plane…” and a collective groan goes up from the passengers clustered around the boarding lanes. Your plane is now out of service, but! There’s hope! They’ve found another plane. If this can board and take off relatively quickly, you’ll miss the train where your reserved seat waits, but you’ll still probably be able to make it to Pommery in time for your tour and tasting.

Not too fast! Maintenance is on your new plane. It gets brought around to your gate eventually… without the maintenance logs. Another hour goes by. Kiss your champagne au revoir. Add another hour.

Look: there is no first world problem like your flight to Paris being delayed. It is the ultimate. That doesn’t make it any easier to stomach alas.

And so, 5-ish hours later as we finally took off, I resolved not to find some alternate activity (though jaunting off on a cathedral hunt in Amiens or Chartres crossed my mind), but instead to listen to what the universe was clearly trying to tell me: SPEND THE DAY IN PARIS, idiote!

The arrival into Roissy was absurdly smooth, and I plotted out my day from the RER train into town: take Métro from the train station to my hotel, attempt to check in, get a baguette, &c.

This trip marked my first stay at the Moxy Bastille. Moxy is honestly my favorite of the Marriott brands – modern, affordable, new, and often with an excellent bar/restaurant to boot. I was able to check in relatively quickly and into a room with a balcony no less. While the weather wasn’t exactly conducive to being on a rooftop, I made quick use of it. There is little as magical as a terrace in Paris, if you’ll pardon the rhyme.

After a quick nap and quicker shower, I was off!