Category Archives: Living abroad

TGI Thursdays

This is the story of how I accidentally wound up in a brothel in Dubai, part of a series that starts here.

—

The hostess at TGI Thursdays looked at me like I was an alien, then slowly led me to a table in the center of the restaurant and left me with a menu, which was all in English.

She had an African accent and I didn’t hear enough of it to ID which country, but I’m pretty sure her real name wasn’t the one on her nametag—“Hi! My name is Emily.”

She was about six feet tall, string-bean thin, and wore stiletto heels and a barely-there mini skirt. I vaguely wondered if she changed into more modest clothes to get to and from work, but I didn’t really give it much thought.

I was hungry by now, so I was happy when the waiter appeared almost immediately. He too looked at me strangely. Whatever! What was wrong with these people? I ordered a club sandwich and a beer, then settled back and looked around.

Have you ever walked into a situation and thought nothing of it until it was too late to get out of it?

All the other women in the bar were either African or Asian, and none appeared to be older than 20. They were all dressed like “Emily”—in high heels, mini skirts, and low-cut blouses. They were literally hanging on the arms of fat, middle aged white men, many of whom were talking loudly, so I could hear their Australian, English, and American accents. North American, that is—I’m sure most of them were Canadian, ha, ha. These were oil workers, no doubt, and I was in a brothel.

The girls (I’ll call them girls because many appeared to be 17 or 18 years old) tittered and cooed at everything the men said, as if the men were the most fascinating, funny, and appealing male specimens ever.

“Ooh, Keef, you so funny!” a girl laughed near my table. Keith was 50-something, ruddy faced, rotund, and very drunk. He sat tilted as though he was about to keel over.

As all this sunk in, one of the few Arab patrons approached my table. He was like a human cliche of an Arab man: wearing a kaffiyeh, sporting a Saddam Hussein-style black mustache, and smoking a cigarette in a short gold holder. He leered at me as he circled my table several times.

I had the urge to bleat like a lamb. Then he aggressively pulled out the chair opposite me and asked, “May I join you?”

“No!” I exclaimed, perhaps a bit too loudly.

A giant Sudanese bouncer sidled up to me and the Arab guy slinked away.

“Do you know where you are?” the bouncer asked in a low voice.

“Yeh-yes…” I replied, feeling sheepish (in the embarrassed sense, not in the about-to-be groped-or-worse sense).

“I will stand next to you while you enjoy your meal,” the bouncer said.

What could I say but, “Thank you?”

My club sandwich and beer arrived. They were like any club sandwich and beer you would get anywhere else in the world. I ate, drank, and did what I commonly do when I am dining alone; I wrote in my journal. In this case, I took detailed notes, which is how I can write this narrative years later.

—

It’s not a very remarkable story. I’m sorry if you’re disappointed that something more dramatic didn’t happen. It was an eye opener for me. I had seen adolescent girls in Jamaica with the proverbial obese middle-aged German men stuffed into Speedos. I had read about human trafficking and sex workers in my master’s program.

But this was how the business actually worked. Supply and demand. I figured the maze I had walked through to get to the entrance was a means of shielding passersby from what was going on inside, and also of signaling to people like me who just wanted a sandwich and a beer, “This is something you should think twice about!” Obviously I was too dense to get it.

To be continued …

Ugly Americans

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This is the story of how I accidentally wound up in a brothel in Dubai, part of a series that starts here.

—

The days ticked away in Dubai. Toni and I went an excursion a day; the most memorable was a “desert safari.” I have been on a real safari, and it involved living things. This did not, and I can recommend that you skip it if you’re in Dubai unless you love roller coasters. It involved careening up and down and sideways—sometimes at a 45 degree angle—in sand dunes. I was sick to my stomach and stayed that way until our driver blew a tire and we got to wander around in the desert while he repaired it.

A couple rushed up to me and introduced themselves as being from Iran. They asked if I was American and then exclaimed, “We love America! America people!” This was heartwarming, and it happened to me again when I was hiking in the Jordanian desert last year. Yes, many of our government’s policies are terrible, and it’s good to know that people get the difference between the US government and the American people.

—

After breathing in dust for hours, Toni and I decided to go see a movie. She asked the cashier about something—was there a good restaurant nearby or something like that.

“No English,” he smiled at her.

She repeated her question, speaking slower and louder. He shook his head to indicate he really didn’t speak English, and she went for a third try, louder and slower. Standing next to her, I murmured under my breath, “This is embarrassing. He doesn’t speak English.”

“Okay!” She laughed and said to him slowly and loudly, “I’m sorry—I’m American!” Then she did an about face and walked quickly into the darkened theater.

I was shocked and furious. “Since when are you American?” I demanded.

“Canada is in North America,” she said patronizingly.

“So you’re American when you’re making a fool of yourself, but Canadian the rest of the time?”

“I don’t need to explain myself to you,” she said. “They don’t understand things unless you make it very simple. They’ve probably never heard of Canada. But they have certainly heard of America,” she said pointedly.

We were the only patrons in the theater and it was a double header of Bollywood hits. It was in Hindi with Arabic subtitles, but you didn’t need an English translation to follow what was going on.

If you’ve never seen a Bollywood movie, here’s a summary of how they go, from my limited perspective: There’s a five-minute scene where they set up the boy-girl story involving forbidden love, mistaken identities, controlling elders, and a mischief-making best friend or auntie. Then dozens of people dressed in matching costumes leap into the frame and perform a riotous song and dance number, preferably in a field of wild flowers, on a beach, or in the middle of moving traffic. This is repeated over and over with different costumes and settings until everyone lives happily ever after.

I sat through half an hour of it but I was so fuming mad that I decided to leave. Toni gave me a withering glance as if to say, “You’re insulting their culture.” I knew I had been harsh and would have to apologize later, even if she didn’t acknowledge her part in our verbal scuffle.

I hailed a taxi. “Take me some place I can get a beer,” I requested.

And that’s how I ended up in a brothel. Because surely, a woman traveling alone and drinks alcohol must be a whore, right?

—

The driver dropped me off in front of a place called TGI Thursday’s. Thursday, in the Middle East, is their Friday. It had what looked like a maze of tall screens leading to the entrance. I hesitated, but the driver had wasted no time in disappearing, so in I went. I zigged and zagged and then emerged into what did indeed look—at first glance—like a TGI Friday’s in the US, except for the gigantic portrait of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum hanging over the entryway.

To be continued ….

Finally, Dubai

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This is the story of how I accidentally wound up in a brothel in Dubai, part of a series that starts here.

—

Toni was very serious. She was a teetotaler. She didn’t get my sense of humor. She was divorced and her kids were out on their own, so she was seeking. She had grown up somewhere in the boondocks of western Canada and was fascinated by eastern traditions like meditation. I was an on-again-off-again meditator but she was seriously devoted and would go on to live in an ashram in India and become a follower of some swami rami someone or other. Like most Canadians, she made a point of telling people she was Canadian so they wouldn’t mistake her for an American. Since I had fled the US, in part, to escape the George W. Bush era, I couldn’t really blame her.

—

When we arrived at our hotel I realized why the package had been so cheap. When most people think of Dubai, they probably picture phantasmagorical hotels like these:

Our hotel was in the old part of town and was a concrete bunker something like this except the windows were slits:

I suppose all that concrete kept out the heat, and in retrospect we were staying in a more authentic part of town, if anything about Dubai can be called authentic.

The first thing I did was go to the bar and order a beer. The two bartenders looked at each other sideways, clearly uncomfortable. One disappeared, maybe to consult with a manager. He came back and wordlessly opened a beer bottle, then wrapped it in a cloth napkin and slid it across the bar to me. Message received: I was a whore and an alcoholic, possibly both.

Toni disapproved too, and after pointing out the maple leaf on her back pack to the bartenders, left to go to the room. “I don’t drink alcohol,” she reminded me when I showed up with my beer wrapped in its shroud of shame. “But if I did, I wouldn’t drink it here out of respect for their culture.”

“They sell beer here,” I said. “So what you’re saying is that you respect their culture of treating women unequally.”

Toni harrumphed furiously and shot back, “I don’t know. I’m going to have some silent me time now.”

—

Our package included some free tours. I had bought a beautiful scarf in the airport to drape around my head. Not like a hijab, more like a glamorous, Audrey Hepburn-style nod to being in a Muslim country. I thought it advisable to leave my Star of David at home.

When I stepped outside, a wall of searing heat descended on me. I started sweating profusely and the glamor wilted.

Toni made up and were picked up at the curb by a guy in a giant gas guzzling vehicle—the only kind allowed in Dubai, apparently. He drove around and pointed out the sights. It was mind boggling, as you would expect if you’ve seen photos of Dubai. Then he took us to a “museum.” I was excited to learn about the history and culture of the Emiratis.

The museum was gleaming and glitzy, with crystal chandeliers, marble floors, and sleek escalators that might have been designed by Lamborghini. Strangely, the displays reminded me of shop windows in New York or London. Wait. They were shop windows. These weren’t historical artifacts or objects of art, they were items for sale. All of them were labeled as originating in Iran or Egypt or other places that actually had cultural traditions, and nothing was going for less than $1,000.

—

Back at the hotel, I went to check my email at the computer kiosks in the lobby but Yahoo wouldn’t load. What the hell? I Googled “weather in Dubai” and a local site came up that claimed it was 85F. That was weird. I had checked Dubai weather in Dublin and had expected 110F today.

It didn’t take me as long as it had in Cuba the previous year to realize that the Internet was controlled by the government. I was in for a six-day involuntary Internet sabbatical.

To be continued …

Having Some Good Craic Despite Being Cracked

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This is part of a series about living in Dublin and accidentally eating a club sandwich in a brothel in Dubai.

—

I had moved to Dublin from Oxford, and after a rough landing I was settling in. My flat felt safe. I reckoned that, since the addict had broken in shortly before I moved in, odds were that the flat wouldn’t burgled again until long after I had moved on. Magical thinking, I know.

Dublin did feel like a magical place, but not in a good way. The flat was close to some old castle that was a stop on the Haunted Dublin! tour. I don’t believe in ghosts or paranormal anything but there was something dark about Dublin.

And Dublin was ugly. I had moved from Oxford, city of dreaming spires:

To Dublin:

As usual I am exaggerating. Oxford is beautiful but it is swarming wall-to-wall with crowds, like some science fiction movie about overpopulation. Dublin has some lovely buildings, but unfortunately too many like the one above. It too was heaving with crowds, tourists but also EU newcomers from Slovenia and asylum seekers from Nigeria.

I thought about how the English had subjugated the Irish, taxing them, viewing them as sub human, and doing nothing while a million Irish died during a succession of famines. The architecture says everything about who was the conqueror and who was the conquered.

—

I didn’t have much in common with my new friend, Toni, except that we were in our 40s while everyone else in Dublin seemed younger, and we were both determined to take advantage of being “over the pond” to travel as much as possible.

The Sunday papers advertised great deals on travel packages. “See Sunny Spain! Only 400 € for 5 nights inclusive!” Inclusive meant airfare, hotel, some meals, and drinks in a resort populated by English speakers who would never be made uncomfortable by having to speak Spanish.

Sunday morning. I texted Toni. “Wanna go to Dubai?”

“Tell me more,” she responded immediately.

“Only 500 € for five nites inc airfare & hotel,” I read from the ad in the Irish Times.

“Wow thats cheap lets go!” She was in.

—

But first I went to St. James Hospital to have my collar bone x-rayed. I was no longer on the National Health System; in fact I was uninsured, so I would pay cash.

I walked down Vicar Street to Meath Street to Bellvue to Marrowbone Lane to Robert Street, on to Newport Street, to Pim Street, past the Guinness Storehouse, followed the curve of Grand Canal Place to Echlins Street and finally to James Street.

Total distance: 1.6 kilometers, or just under one mile. That’s Dublin. There may have been a direct route but now I knew I could stop at Guinness on the way back— and use my right arm to lift a pint.

The hospital reminded me of a Mexican bus station. The waiting room was furnished with a motley assortment of worn plastic chairs, the windows and linoleum floor were grimy.

I paid up front; I think it was 80 €. I was called in after the x-ray was developed, and the doctor said, “There’s been no progress. It’s still broken and you’ll have to keep it immobilized for another eight weeks, at least.”

I was shocked. “But it’s been six weeks!” I didn’t mention that I hadn’t exactly been resting and taking it easy, that I’d been climbing a ladder up to a top bunk at a hostel, then washing windows and scrubbing floors in my two-story flat.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“46?” I expected him to say, “Wow! You look so much younger—I never would have guessed you’re even 40!”

Instead he said, “Well at your age, things take longer to heal.”

My age?

“If it doesn’t heal after eight more weeks, you’ll need surgery to screw in a plate to hold the two ends together.”

Surgery? A plate? F— that!

There’s nothing like someone telling me I’m in a bad situation to make me come out swinging, to declare that things are great.

I was going to Dubai, and it was going to be a blast!

Incense and Sensibility

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This post is part of a series about living in Dublin and winding up in a brothel in Dubai.

Eddie’s house was so tiny I expected a hobbit to jump out of a closet. The floors were slanted, the stove looked like a toy, and the door hung crookedly off the bath so it wouldn’t be any trouble for him to keep an eye on me in there. I hadn’t been attracted to Eddie in a dark smoky pub, and seeing him in daylight didn’t change anything. He painted a picture of the house sharing arrangements. “I go out every night, and when I come home in the early morning I blast me music and drink a few more pints. It’s my house, so I’ll smoke in it. If you’d like to cook for us, that’d fine with me.”

I observed myself doing mental gymnastics to convince myself this would all be fine. I wanted out of the hostel. The serenity and confidence I had banked in England was gone. The fact that it was gone made me feel like a weakling. I had become a female Woody Allen, worrying, analyzing, fearful, neurotic. I was so afraid of being ripped off that I hid my watch—a Movado—in a zipped pants pocket, then promptly forgot about it and threw the pants in the wash. The watch had been given to me by a jerk boyfriend but was the one beautiful piece of jewelry I owned, and it came out in bits. Stress does funny things to the mind.

I listened to meditations on my MP3 player: “Sense a soft shower of shimmering light …” said the soothing voice, as the woman in the bunk below me hacked a tubercular-sounding cough. I attended meditations at the Sri Chinmoy Centre and went to Alanon. But I just couldn’t shake the anxiety.

Eddie kept saying things which indicated he knew sharing the house would be a disaster, such as “I’d probably end up hangin’ meself when yerself didn’t love me.” Like many men in the British Isles, asking a woman out on a date was not in his playbook, and he wasn’t yet drunk enough to just grab me and snog me. He must have sensed I would have reacted negatively to either approach. We sat at his wobbly kitchen table and he slowly drew me a map of Dublin and advised where else I could look for flats, stalling for time.

I admired his engineer’s pencil sharpener, which he gave me and which makes a great eyeliner sharpener.

—

After two weeks I landed a room in a spacious maisonette. It had a living area and kitchen on the first floor (in America, the second floor), and three bedrooms and a bath on the third. I shared it with a French guy who was building a website to help football fans find pubs in real time to watch specific games. He only emerged from his room when his girlfriend, a Canadian, came over. The other flat mate was an English guy who worked for Google. I only saw him once or twice, but several times a week I would come down to breakfast to find a young woman hanging about—someone he had slept with and was done with, but who wasn’t done with him. “So what time does Paul usually get up?” they would ask. Or, “How does Paul like his tea?” I would grumble, “I dunno,” until they took the hint and left.

It took a while with my arm in a sling, but the flat was very nice once I scrubbed it from top to bottom and painted my room, which overlooked some sort of friary.

There was a methadone clinic on the other side; the flat had been burgled recently by an addict who kicked in the door. There was a primary school on the other side of the flat, and Christchurch Cathedral was nearby, so I heard children playing and bells ringing throughout the day.

Things were looking up. I met a Canadian woman at a travel agency who was game to go anywhere. Because, once my anxiety ebbed away, it was time to travel.

To be continued …

Down and Out In Dublin

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In my last post I wrote about the river of “what ifs” going through my head about my upcoming trip. After writing it, I thought back on the worst things that have ever happened to me in my life. All of them have happened at home. The worst things that have happened to me while traveling? Well, they’ve didn’t turn out so bad in the end.

For instance, I accidentally wound up in a brothel in Dubai.

But the story starts in “the other DUB city,” Dublin, where I was working for Oxfam Great Britain on contract for the summer.

Everyone thinks Ireland would be a great place to live, and that’s what I had expected. But I hated it.

This was at the height of the inflationary period they called the Celtic Tiger—right before the Great Recession hit—and everything was colossally expensive.

I stayed in a 12-bed dorm in the Four Courts Hostel until I could find a flat. The other 11 beds were occupied by immigrants from Poland and the Czech Republic who were almost out of money and facing the prospect of going back home as failures. One woman was so depressed she stayed in bed all day with the blanket pulled over her head; I never actually saw her. The only good thing about The Four Courts was the talking elevator that announced, “Turd Floor” in an Irish accent when it reached our floor.

I could go to the Oxfam Ireland office to work, but they didn’t really have space for me, so I worked out of the hostel dining hall while everyone else was out hustling during the day—except for the woman under the covers.

The streets were full of drunks, Irish and otherwise. Lots of Brits and Dutch and Germans came to Dublin for their stag parties. One morning I literally stepped over a drunken man vomiting in the gutter. I don’t know how they afforded it, because a pint of unremarkable beer in a pub cost $8. And maybe because Ireland’s economy was roaring, it seemed like the Irish were over being friendly to travelers. The only friendly overture I had from an Irish person in my first few weeks was a shopkeeper telling me to “Have yourself some crack, now!” That freaked me out until I realized he meant craic—which means “a good time” in Gaelic.

I had pictured myself working away in a cozy pub and making all sorts of new Irish friends, but I was bored and lonely.

—

In the UK and Ireland, it is much more common for people to share a flat or a house than it is in the US. Having roommates is not just for young or poor people. I would go to look at a flat and there would be a dozen desperate potential renters crowded around the front door. When the landlord deigned to let us in, we would find a dingy, dirty, little hole with a bedroom featuring a sagging twin bed and a window looking out on a brick wall. The rent for that bedroom and sharing everything else with two or three strangers was $500 a month each, easy.

Every night I climbed up to my top bunk and hunched over with my head against the moldy ceiling to read, hoping this would be my last night at the Four Courts. Oh, did I mention I had broken my collar bone in a bike accident in Oxford a week before, and my arm was in a sling?

Everyone used a website called Gumtree to look for flats and jobs and probably to sell their bodies to pay rent. I arranged to meet a potential landlord in a pub rather than go to his house alone. It was love at first sight, for him. Eddie was a good 10 years younger than me and at least a foot taller. His teeth were brown from smoking and crooked from not being an American. I wasn’t attracted to him and I knew it would be a bad idea to move in to the room he had for rent, but I agreed to come and see the place the next day.

To be continued …

Notes from an Anglo-Irish-German-Czech-American Jewish Atheist

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This is the latest post in a series about a road trip to New Orleans that starts here.

—

Desra gave us a ride back to the Air B&B. Inside, Lynn said pensively, “If I went to dinner in London with someone who was Afro Caribbean, I don’t think the subject of race would even come up—but we spent the whole dinner tonight talking about race.”

Of course they don’t have African Americans in England. The race labels were confusing when I lived there, especially who was covered by “Asian.” In Minnesota, Asians are Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, and Thai. By far the largest group, the Hmong, are mountain tribes people from Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, and China—where they are called the Miao. That’s pronounced “meow.” Our newest arrivals are the Karen, an ethnic group from Burma/Myanmar.

In England, an Asian is most likely from India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh.

Lynn herself is Anglo Indian because her ancestry is English and Indian. Note that the Anglo comes first, whereas in the U.S., we say “African American” or “Muslim American.”

This labeling is all very fraught with the peril of offending one side or another.

“What if you were having dinner with a Pakistani or other Muslim?” I asked Lynn. “Would race or religion be a theme in every angle of the conversation?”

“Hmmm…maybe,” replied Lynn. “Yes, that might be it. It’s not that we don’t have prejudice in the UK. But I think it’s the Muslim population that’s getting the brunt of the suspicion and animosity, especially since September 11 and seven seven.”

July 7, 2007—the day on which 52 people were killed and 700 injured on the London transport system in an Islamist terrorist attack. I remember watching it on the news, in Spanish, from my bed in a hotel in Cusco, Peru, where I was vomiting my guts out into an ice bucket after eating some bad guinea pig. That’s a story for another post, but here’s a free tip for you: never use a hotel ice bucket for ice.

—

We reference so much with these simple dates: 9/11, 7/7. So much has changed. In the U.S., half the population—the conservative half—replaced its constant fear of a mass attack by communists with fear of a Muslim attack, which has made possible the rise of a demagogue like Donald Trump. The strange thing is, they don’t fear the white guy next door with 50 guns who just lost his job and his wife and is acting strangely—just “the Muslims.”

—

The third major terrorist attack in the west was 11-M, the train bombings in Madrid on March 11, 2004. Almost 200 people were killed and 2,000 were injured. I don’t remember where I was that day. But I do vividly recall being in Spain sometime after 9/11 but before 11-M studying Spanish. I was chatting with a British woman and somehow 9/11 came up.

“Now you lot know what we’ve been living with all these years from the IRA,” she said casually about the attack in which nearly 3,000 people died.

—

Back in St. Louis after a good night’s sleep, Lynn and I were preparing for our last day on the road.

“What do we do with the doughnuts?” she asked.

I carried the box out with us, thinking I would take them home to Vince. Then I spotted a kid on the porch of the house next door and approached him.

“Hey kid, want a box of doughnuts?” He was chubby and his eyes said Yes as he also backed away from me toward the door and called, “Daddy!” The father came rushing outside, looking panicked. I could just picture myself at the police station: “No officer, really! I just wanted to give him the doughnuts; I wasn’t trying to lure him into my car.”

I offered the box to the father, who looked inside to make sure they really were doughnuts (I wonder what else he suspected could be inside? Snakes?). He looked up at me with a grin, thanked me, and the two of them hurried inside, where I could hear the boy calling out excitedly, “Mom! We got doughnuts!”

Good Supplements, Bad Supplements

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I get 22 days of Paid Time Off (PTO) per year, which is good for the U.S. (In England I had 35 days.). I end up using some of those days to spontaneously enjoy a fresh spring day, or just catch up on chores.

As you read this I am sojourning in New Orleans as part of my 11-day road trip. This will leave me with about 10 days of PTO.

I wish I could live and travel internationally year round, forever, but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. I’m not going to sit around moping the other 355 days of the year that I’m not on some fantastic global journey. That’s why I write about the importance of being able to appreciate every day adventures in your own back yard, or in South Dakota.

—

Recently there was a development that stepped up the urgency I feel about seeing the world. I learned that I have osteoporosis. This is a condition in which the bones become porous and prone to breaking. This is on top of my lifelong condition of scoliosis, or curvature of the spine.

Since my mother has osteoporosis and I look just like her, I figured it was coming my way. So I’ve done mostly the right things to prevent osteoporosis, like consuming lots of calcium, doing weight-bearing exercise, and quitting smoking. But you can’t escape your genetics.

This is my mother on her 80^th birthday with my adorable nephew.

She looks good, but she often says, “The doctor tells me if I sneeze too hard I can break a bone.” That’s got to be awful to live with. She wears a brace, has had a lot of pain, and worst of all, she can’t travel anymore—it’s just too hard on her.

—

You build up your bone mass until around age 30, then slowly lose it. If you have osteoporosis in your family, or if you are even just a small person, you might want to check with your doc and start taking calcium supplements and jumping rope. It’s more common in women but men get osteoporosis too.

Mine isn’t bad yet. I’ll keep fighting it and hope there will be a pill to fix it before I get to my mother’s age.

This development has been a push for me to review my international travel long-term plan. My general idea is to go to the most far away places on my list, like New Zealand and Japan, first. I would save the easier places, like Santa Fe, for when I’m older.

I started checking out tours to Japan. My nephews are half Japanese, so Japan is at the top of my list. I don’t feel confident enough to go on my own. I’ve watched my brother’s home videos of their many trips there, and they’re like some science fiction movie about overpopulation—wall-to-wall bodies in the canyons of Tokyo. The tours looked great, but then I ran up against my nemesis—the Single Supplement.

The single supplement is a surcharge tours add to the price of a tour for solo travelers. They’re not trying to shame or discourage single people—it’s just economics. Tours can’t make it, financially, if they let a single person have the same rate as a couple. In this New York Times article about single supplements, they cite this example for a cruise: For two adults, it’s $1,539 each. For a single traveler, the cost is $2,843 — an additional $1,304.

This article advises on how to avoid the single supplement. But there’s also the “blah” factor of tours. I went on a tour to Portugal a few years ago through New Market Holidays. Yes, it was dirt cheap, I saw a lot of Portugal, and I never had to make any decisions about anything. But it was just me and 50 retired English couples. They were nice but aloof. Why wouldn’t they be? I was the odd woman out.

Life is about trade offs, right? The road trip to New Orleans may not be on my list of far-flung destinations, but it’s with good friends, so I jumped at the chance to do it. Laissez le bon temps rouler!

Minis, Everywhere

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This is the ninth post in a series about a UK road trip that starts here.

Day Two of the Mini United festival in Silverstone, England. Rebecca and I sprang out of the tent at dawn so we wouldn’t miss breakfast buffet in the VIP tent.

Dagmar, the BMW rep, approached us as we were shoveling in eggs and salmon and strudel.

“We have a special treat for you,” she announced. Then I ate a poopie. I like to eat poopie.

A special treat, I wondered? What could possibly be an improvement on the swag and the free food and booze and the VIP toilet?

“We know how much you must miss having your Mini with you,” she went on.

Not really. Did I mention the 8,000 Minis all over the festival grounds? I didn’t have some kind of unnatural connection to my car. I was grateful to her for providing my excuse to be here, but when people asked how many cylinders she had, I was stumped.

I was all ears.

“We have arranged for you to drive a new model Mini on the racetrack here, later today.”

“All of us at one time, or separately?” I asked. I had never driven a left-hand drive car and I didn’t’ want my first time to be my last.

“Vun at a time!” she said through closed lips, then whirled and walked away. We must have been very trying for her. I wondered if she would lose her job over the budget mishap.

—

But before the track, there were more exhibitions to see.

First stop, celebrity Minis. David Bowie’s was my favorite.

Madonna’s was my least favorite. Why, Madonna, why? What’s with the cammo? Aren’t we American’s already viewed as war mongers as it is?

George Harrison’s Mini was the most beautiful.

Then it was on to the novelty and classic Minis. Everything from cowhide to the Simpsons.

We visited the information booths and picked up all the free pens and pencils and key rings we could find. There was the Mini Club of Northern Ireland, the wheel makers, the specialty body works people, the custom floor mat booth, and on and on.

At the appointed time, we meandered over to the track. Silverstone is an international, professional race track, whatever that means, if I haven’t already mentioned it. All the North Americans were already there; apparently they’d been lined up for hours. Rebecca and I joined them and the doors opened. It was a pleasant sunny day, not at all a bad one to spend hanging around a race track—Minis, when viewed in multiples, remind me of hummingbirds.

It was our turn, and I urged Rebecca to go first since I was nervous. They pulled the car up and she glowed (Rebecca that is, not the car).

Rebecca is from Oxfordshire and I think she thought this was some sort of sign. I didn’t remind her until after, that Oxford is where BMW makes Minis in the UK.

A few minutes later it was my turn. I got in, grabbed the gear shift with my left hand, and thought, “Don’t think.” In certain life endeavors, like learning a language, falling in love, or driving the opposite of how you’ve done it all your life, thinking can be detrimental.

Suddenly, the car careening out of control, smashed head on into the side wall, then burst into flames!

Just kidding.

I drove around the track a couple times. I think I got ‘er up to 50mph. It was uneventful.

We all knew it was a promotional gimmick to get us to buy this new model, whatever it was, but we appreciated that BMW had thrown in even more fun, for free.

We retired to the tent, where one of my fellow Americans, and Indian guy from LA (India Indian, not Native American), was saying he had just ordered the new model to add to his collection. Nice for some people.

I was done with Minis for now. We spent the whole evening and next day in the VIP tent wining and dining, then headed back to Woodstock Sunday evening, well rested and very well fed.

Mr. Whooooo

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This is the eighth post in a series about a UK road trip that starts here.

Rebecca and I spent our first day wandering the Mini United festival grounds. As I wrote in the last post, Mini owners like to have fun. Cramming is some people’s idea of fun.

I did not participate in the cramming. The most people I have ever had in my car is five. Two of them were men well over six feet tall. I remember the elbows and knees everywhere, and only being able to get up to fourth gear because someone’s foot was blocking the gear stick.

I did happily subject myself to a fake pat down by a fake generic police officer. There are all sorts of things I could write about this, involving naughty British and German stereotypes, but I’ll just say, “Anything for a photo opp with a classic Mini,” and leave it at that.

There was a double-decker bus full of overpriced Mini T-shirts, hats, sunglasses, drink glasses, key chains, and lavishly illustrated souvenir books. I didn’t need to buy anything; I was more than content with my swag bag, which had turned out to contain a bunch of similar Mini trinkets in addition to the bottle opener.

There was lots of racing by professional drivers which I found boring. I’ve never understood the attraction of watching someone drive around and around and around a track.

But then, there were the trick drivers, a la the Italian Job, accompanied by a DJ.

We went back to the VIP tent for our evening feeding, then headed out for the headline concert by Paul Weller. I had never heard of him, or The Jam, his first band. I had never heard The Jam’s number one 1980 hit, Going Underground. There are probably Americans who would be shocked at that, but I was busy changing diapers and going to school full time back then, so I had other priorities.

But also, back in the day, it was probably more possible and quite common for music not to make it over the pond. Not every group was the new Beatles or Rolling Stones, but lots of groups, like The Jam, were huge in their home country.

So Rebecca and I jammed, and I never actually saw Paul Weller because, at 5’3”, I never see anything from the main floor but other people’s heads. There were clearly a lot of drugs in use. A guy near us was hopping on one foot the whole concert, yelling “Whooo!” over and over and over. He was as entertaining as the concert itself.

—

It had been a long day and we were barely started on all there was to see and do.

We trudged back to the tent, feeling like First Class passengers forced to return to Coach Economy. We should have slept soundly but we were so excited about going back the next day that we stayed up talking in the dark. Besides, Mr. Whooo was camping somewhere nearby, so there was a round of mostly good-natured “Shut up!” from us and our neighbors every 10 minutes until he finally ran out of steam around 3am.

Breaking Free

Living Well, Despite what Life Throws at You

Category Archives: Living abroad

TGI Thursdays

Ugly Americans

Having Some Good Craic Despite Being Cracked

Incense and Sensibility

Down and Out In Dublin

Notes from an Anglo-Irish-German-Czech-American Jewish Atheist

Good Supplements, Bad Supplements

Minis, Everywhere

Mr. Whooooo