Cats and the Metro

06 Friday Feb 2009

Posted by in Arizona, Cats, Photographs, Travel, Uncategorized

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But cats don’t like to ride on the metro, I hear you say. True. But no sooner did I grouse about the lack of good public transportation in the US than lo and behold! The Phoenix Light Rail system opened.  This is more like it!  The Metro offers a very inexpensive and convenient way to travel around metropolitan Phoenix, including outlying Tempe (home of Arizona State University) and a bit of Mesa.

The grand opening was on December 27-28, 2009.  As luck would have it the Captain and I were attending a cat show (I know.  But we like cats.), and we stumbled serendipitously into the gigantic street fair celebrating the opening just outside the Phoenix Convention Center.  As it turned out, there were festivities of one sort or another at almost all the major stops along the 20-miles of Metro.

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It took twelve years to build the system, and it was gravely inconvenient for many businesses and residents during construction.  But now, everyone seems well pleased. The Metro web site gives all the information you could need to take advantage of this service.  The fares are ridiculously low – $2.50 will buy you an all-day pass, which includes some amount of bus transfer.  If you’re over 65 your day-pass costs only $1.25.  There are Park and Ride lots at many stations which offer free parking during the Metro’s hours of operation.

In addition, some fun blogs have sprung up around Light Rail: RailLife.com, Blogs about Phoenix Lightrail, and my favorite, found by the now-famous Mrs. Harris (bread, pumpkin ice cream), PHX Rail Food, which is a great guide for places to eat within easy walking distance of each Metro stop. You Are Here gives an urban stroller’s guide to metro Phoenix, with guides to culture, shopping, sports, events, dining and nightlife all along the Route.

Speaking of Mrs. Harris, she had the brilliant idea that we should take a day and ride the Metro from one end (Sycamore and Main in Mesa) to the other (Montebello and 19th Ave. in Phoenix).  So that is exactly what we did a while ago, and it was loads of fun.  We met a lot of people, all of whom were pleasant and chatty.  We stopped in Tempe for a walk-around and ended up giving our opinion on speed radar on the freeways for a PBS show (our 15 seconds of fame). Then we took a mid-day break and visited the Phoenix Art Museum where, in addition to walking through several exhibits, we ate a delightful lunch.

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We rode to the end of the line, then jogged to the other track and rode straight back to where we began.

If you’re interested in some photographs of both the cat show and the festivities outside the Convention Center at the Metro’s opening, click here, or over on the right under Photographs (Cat Show and Rail Opening)(You’ll see that I was fascinated by the break dancing.).

If you’re interested in some of the sights along the Metro, click here, or over on the right under Photographs (Riding the Light Rail).  These photographs are in three sections: sights along the rail ride, people we met, and some of the art at the Metro stops (each stop has at least one piece of art incorporated in its design).

And if you need to get your cat somewhere, you can probably take her on the Light Rail, but she’ll have to be in a cat-carrier.  She might even enjoy the journey! We did.

rail pics

cat show and rail opening pics

Desert Island Food

29 Thursday Jan 2009

Posted by in Food, Uncategorized

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Every now and then the Captain and I play the Desert Island Food game, and I’d like to invite you to play…

You’ve played before, right?  Imagine that you have been marooned on a dessert island (now that’s being an expatriate).  You might be there for a day, a week, or… forever.  You are allowed to take only FOUR foods with you.  What are they?


No fair saying something like ‘vegetables’ – that’s too broad; narrow it down to which vegetable. Your choices can be raw ingredients or some prepared dish (tuna casserole?) (maybe not). You’ll have unlimited water and a fire for cooking. A beverage counts as ‘food.’ Since you’re on an island it’s not inconceivable that you will be able to catch something from time to time, either in the water or on the ground (I’m hoping for a fish or a clam now and then), but you can’t assume that certain foods will always be available. It’s important to consider your health, physical, mental and emotional – you’re likely to be on that island for a long time.

Submit your desert island foods via comments, and in a month I’ll tally them all up and tell you what the most preferred foods are.

Here are mine (for today, anyway) – I bet some of you will be a lot more imaginative and creative, but here goes:

Brie cheese
oranges
spinach
wheat thins

Freeway Shock and Highway Art

27 Tuesday Jan 2009

Posted by in Arizona, Driving in the U.S., Uncategorized

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At the risk of stating the obvious, there is much, much, MUCH more open space here in Arizona than there is in our beloved Liguria, or in Italy as a whole, for that matter.  One of the luxuries all this space provides is the continued ability of the State to build huge new highways.  We are as great fans of the Italian Autostrada system as anyone else (and especially fans of the highway rest stops, the Autogrills particularly – yum!).  But if you find an autostrada with more than four lanes in one direction you have found a rarity.  Two lanes in each direction, sometimes with no emergency lane, are common in Italy (as they were on the dreadful old Pennsylvania Turnpike near Philly).

The Loop 202 was recently completed around Phoenix, making it a much shorter trip to get from our part of the Valley to Phoenix or to Sky Harbor Airport on the east side of the city.  For whatever reason extra care was taken to make the bridge abutments and the gravel banks on the sides of the highway beautiful.  The themes are, unsurprisingly, southwestern, and are all different.  It makes the drive much more interesting and fun, as do the lovely shrubs and trees that have been planted on some of the banks.

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But for all the space given to the new road, it is still choked with rush-hour traffic before 9 a.m. and between 3 and 7 p.m.  It’s hard to imagine where all the traffic went before this road was opened.  Driving around Phoenix at rush hour is about like trying to drive around Venice at any time.

And no matter what you may have heard about driving and drivers in Italy, both are a whole lot worse here.  The captain opines that the most dangerous instrument in the world is a woman in an SUV talking on her cell phone.  While I don’t necessarily agree with him (harumph!), I do think that drivers here exhibit an aggressiveness and a carelessness that is, well, not Italian.

Good or bad, the drivers here have a beautiful new highway. If you’d like to see some more photographs of the Loop’s bridge art, click on ‘bridge art’ under photographs over on the right, or click right here.  As usual, a slide show is recommended.

The Best Thing I Ate Last Week

22 Thursday Jan 2009

Posted by in American recipes, Food, Uncategorized

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lobster-aftermath

Not much comment required here… the best place in the world to eat the best lobsters in the world is New England, preferably within 100 miles of the coast.  We bought these beauties live, from a tank; each one weighed about 1.5 pounds.

Now the awkward part – how to kill the little dears?  While plunging them headfirst into a large pot of boiling water is the time-honored way, some say that there is a more humane way to do it with a knife, which you can see here, complete with gruesome photos of lobster-cide.  A friend skilled in biology once told me that lobsters have such a basic nervous system there is some doubt about whether they actually feel pain, as we think of it.  Who knows?  Ask a lobster!

The advantage of the quick knife through the brain is, supposedly, instant and relatively painless death.  The benefit of the boiling water method accrues completely to the murderess – one can look the other way and scream while thrusting the beast into the pot.  That way you won’t hear it if it screams.  Surely death by boiling water is also quick?  I have never heard a lobster scream, but then, being a practitioner of the second method, I have a pretty well-developed scream of my own.

However you choose to do in your lobster, serve it with drawn butter and lemon, and put out a big bowl for shells and extra liquid, as well as plenty of napkins. If you’ve never eaten lobster and don’t know how to tackle it, you can find some excellent instruction here.

A note on what you might find within:  if you find some orange stuff you’ve got a female and those are her eggs – considered delicious by many.  The green stuff is the lobster’s liver; while it is yummy, it might not be such a good idea to eat it; the liver is where all the poisons and contaminants of the lobster’s body gather.  The lobster is a bottom-dwelling garbage eater, so what his body considers poison is probably pretty gross.

Is it worth traveling to New England to eat lobster.  Oh yes!  The ‘shedders’ (lobsters who have outgrown their old, hard carapace and are wearing a new one that is still soft) have less meat in relation to the shell size, but the shell is much softer, and some consider the meat sweeter.  Typically a lobster sheds in the summer, so if you want a crusty old fella bursting with meat, eat lobster  in the winter or spring.  Having said that, my two companions had hard-shell lobsters and mine was soft-shelled; you really just never know.

Buon Appetito!

Expatriate in a Cold Climate

20 Tuesday Jan 2009

Posted by in Driving in the U.S., Travel, Uncategorized, Weather

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cold-winter-sun

No, this is not a black and white photo… see that brush of brown on the shed, bottom right?  a hint of red in the barn?  This is New England winter, just as I remember it:  life lived many days in black, white and shades of gray.  That little faint ball in the sky?  Yeah, that’s the sun.  Sort of.

We lived in New England for decades and loved it, but having been away for several years it is a shock to place oneself in Vermont in January.  -20 F (-29 C) is very, very cold.  So cold that when you go out to feed the shivering birds your hands become numb almost immediately.  The good thing about -20 F is that it is accompanied by cloudless blue skies – the sort of frigid blue that makes the phrase ‘blue is a cool color’ seem completely inadequate.

Here are some of the superficial differences between winter life in New England and winter life in Rapallo or Arizona:  1) It takes 5-10 minutes to bundle up to go outside, even for a few minutes work or fun; another 5-10 to unbundle when back indoors.  2)  One’s appetite increases geometrically as the temperature plunges – the colder it is, the hungrier we are and the more we eat.  3) Exercise – you can take a crunchy walk in the snow on the verge of the road, but you won’t stay out long.  Or you can ski, skate, or winter hike, each of which may well involve a drive somewhere.  4) And if you decide to take that drive… well, I’ll let the photos below from our trip back to the airport tell the tale:

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In all we saw a total of 10 cars off the road on a 30-mile stretch of  Interstate 89 in New Hampshire.  Fortunately we did not suffer this fate and I reached my plane, thanks to daring driving by M.,  with 15 minutes to spare.

Stepping into the 70 F night air at Sky Harbor Airport was a  shock of another sort, as was smelling the perfume of the blooming  tree off the deck and standing outside, uncoated, to admire the wash of stars in the dark, moonless sky.

Would I go back to New England in the winter?  In a heartbeat.

Wanderers

12 Monday Jan 2009

Posted by in American habits and customs, Customs, Travel, Uncategorized

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Courtesy of touregypt.net

Courtesy of touregypt.net

A December “Briefly Noted” in the New Yorker about Edmund White’s new biography of Rimbaud struck a synchronous note with an essay by Bruce Chatwin entitled “It’s a nomad nomad world,”  which I happened to read a few days later.  Why?  Rimbaud and Chatwin were both inveterate wanderers (and I hope the similarities end there because Rimbaud sounds horrid and I like the restless Chatwin).

Why do we wander? Why would someone with a lovely place to live in Italy want to spend time elsewhere?  Why does anyone want to pick up stakes and move?  It’s not all economics or thinking that ‘the grass is greener over there’.  Chatwin, in his essay, posits that our genetic heritage makes us move: “All our activities are linked to the idea of journeys.  And I like to think that our brains have an information system giving us our orders for the road, and that here lie the mainsprings of our restlessness.”

Man has existed in more or less his present state for perhaps 200,000 years; civilization dates from at least 4,000 BC., or earlier.  Before that people wandered of necessity to find food and/or shelter.  Now, maybe, we wander because of the restless gene that pricks our curiosity and makes us want to see the geography of other parts of the world, hear strange languages and meet people with different frames of reference (and maybe eat some new and interesting food as well).  Maybe, as well, that urge for movement makes 1-hour commutes acceptable to vast numbers of people who are otherwise sane.

There are those who cheerfully wander in their imaginations, and sometimes I think they have the best trips of all.  At the very least they’re home in time for supper.  But others are afflicted with such wanderlust that a month at ‘home’ is painful.   Most of us, I suppose, fall somewhere in between, being happy by our own hearths most of the time, while enjoying an occasional safe journey.

But isn’t it nice when planning the madness of, say, airplane travel or a long stay in a strange place, to know that we really can’t help it?  It’s a biological imperative!

Yesterday I put my visiting sister and her friend on a plane for home and I’m going to leave sunny, warm Arizona to go to grey, wintery Vermont for about a week.  It’s something I just have to do…

Where are you going?  Do you travel frequently or are you a homebody?

Crispy Tortillas with Pork and Beans

07 Wednesday Jan 2009

Posted by in American recipes, Food, Uncategorized

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While he was working on these tasty goodies I asked the Captain if he would call this Tex-Mex food.  He thought for a while and opined that no, these are Arizonican – so here you have it: the first entry in a whole new food category.

Its best to fry up the tortillas yourself, though you can buy them already crisped. After the frying you will put the toppings on and broil.  Garnish with salsa cruda and, if you like it, sour cream.  I’m of the school that believes there is little in the world that is not improved with the addition of sour cream, but there are those who don’t agree, strange as it may seem. The recipe for what you see above can be found here, or by clicking under recipes over on the right. The recipe for the salsa is here, and also on the right.

There are two great things about this dish: 1) It’s really fun to make and 2) It’s infinitely adaptable to what you have around and what you like to eat. It is only coincidental that these look like pizzas, it does not mean that we are pining for our adopted country.  Well, maybe a little…

You can’t get there from here…

03 Saturday Jan 2009

Posted by in American habits and customs, Travel

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Last year when we returned home to Italy after a stay in the U.S. we asked a friend to drive us to the Phoenix Airport (Sky Harbor, what a great name for an airport).  Our trip involved a couple of plane changes before we finally arrived in Pisa (Aeroporto Galileo Galilei – another evocative name).

After claiming our luggage we walked to the shuttle train which, after the briefest of waits, carried us to the main Pisa train station.  Another short wait ensued, and then we hopped on a train that carried us right to Rapallo.

photo by Maurizio Boi

photo by Maurizio Boi

Dragging our bags behind us we crossed the street to the bus station.  We did have to wait close to an hour, but then a bus carried us up the hill to San Maurizio and dropped us off within 20 meters of our house.

Photo from Max Chern Collection

Photo from Max Chern Collection

The Italian part of the journey combined all the bests parts of travel: thrifty independence, timeliness, the joy of riding on a train, and the entertainment of time spent at a bus station.  What more could you ask?

Why can’t we do that in the United States?  Once upon a time American cities were connected by an intricate web of rails and it was quite possible to get from one town to another by train.  Not only was it possible; it was often the most efficient way to travel.

The magic of watching a train chuff into a small-town station is long gone.  American kids don’t have a lot of opportunities to see passenger trains unless they live near large metropolitan areas. What a pity!

And how inconvenient.  All the post-World War II road building in the U.S. was a boon to those with the means to buy, store and feed an automobile; for everyone else it has been a huge disservice, as public transportation has dwindled and train tracks have been pulled up.  It’s an ugly circle: fewer passengers leads to less service which leads to even fewer passengers which leads to….

Some say it is a matter of size.  The U.S. is vast.  Well, so is Europe, and we can get to just about anywhere in Europe from our front door using only public transportation.  Is it as convenient as driving?  Of course not!  But it is less costly, much less tiring and likely to be pretty entertaining. And it’s probably better for Old Mother Earth.  From our front door in Arizona we can take a very nice walk… and end up back at our front door.

(In Elaborations over on the right there are fascinating accounts of ‘house-party girls’ arriving by train for a college weekend in Massachusetts, and of the last passenger train to run through the Hoosac Tunnel.)

2009 Doggerel

01 Thursday Jan 2009

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Put a lentil in your pot,

Make a wish for quite a lot,

Kick the old year out the door.

Let the New Year bring you more

of all you wish for and all you cravery

health and wisdom, joy and bravery.

To all who visit this blog o’ mine ~ I wish you the best possible in 2009. No doubt it will be quite a ride.

I am grateful that you read and comment.  Come back often.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

The Best Thing We Ate – Pumpkin Ice Cream

28 Sunday Dec 2008

Posted by in American recipes, Food, Uncategorized

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It was a few weeks ago that we ate Sherri’s incomparable Pumpkin Ice Cream.  She has been kind enough to share the recipe, which you can find here.

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Don’t skimp on the trimmings!  You can see them above the bowl of ice cream: caramel sauce, candied pecans, and rum-soaked raisin.  All of them add immeasurably to the ice cream experience.  I especially like the pecans, but the others are awfully good too.  And as Sherri has pointed out, if all the raisins aren’t eaten with the ice cream they make a delightful little mid-afternoon nibble in the following days.