One of Jeff Hobbs’ roommates at Yale was a young black man from outside Newark, NJ. He was smart and personable, but kept to himself. He also dealt drugs the entire time he was a science major. Robert Peace lived a bifurcated life; he grew up on poor and mean streets without a live-in father and learned how to survive there and not call undue attention to himself. But he was also smart and talented so his stalwart mother worked several jobs and stinted for herself to make it possible for him to get a good education at St. Benedict’s. Later, he caught the attention of a wealthy donor who funded his 4 years at Yale.
Rob Peace’s life ended too soon and Hobbs takes it upon himself to dig deep into Peace’s childhood, his family, his friendships, his relationships with women and all the people who comprised his world from his youth through college and beyond. The book is The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace. It is a heartrending account of wasted talent and it lays bare how extremely difficult it is to overcome being poor, being black, and having no stable role models—and how one can physically leave one’s home neighborhood, but remain emotionally and mentally tied to it. I think Hobbs’ book is overly long and sometimes too detailed, but I don’t regret investing the time to read it.
This is my first visit to Amsterdam and we arrived by train from Brussels. Oh, the bicycles! Exiting the train station, I was immediately struck first by the 3-level parking garage for bikes and then the people on bicycles everywhere! You see more bikes than cars and they go whizzing along seeming as if they will never stop for anyone, but they do. People ride close together and zig and zag in and out of any wayward pedestrians. They will stop for a true red light, of which there are few, but if you are crossing an intersection, you better beware and either move quickly or wait. Bike lanes exist next to sidewalks or else they share the road with the few cars and motor scooters. Biks are locked in place along the bridge railings and there are usually one or two bikes parked outside every building. Most have baskets or paniers and people do their grocery shopping and other errands on their bikes and bike to work. It makes for a very quiet city.
After the bikes, there are the canals. They are lovely and quiet; moored alongside you will see houseboats and rowboats and cruising almost stealthily down the middle are the tour boats–long and sleek and slightly rounded on top, designed to slide comfortably under the arched bridges. The canals are arranged in rings out from the older section of the city and with all the many bridges linking the city from one canal to the other, it is easy to get turned around and perhaps even lost. Our hotel staff advised us to always count the bridges we crossed. But, even so, you can walk on the wrong or a different side of a particular canal and get confused that way.
Cheese Museum
Amsterdam is also a city of museums we discovered. There seems to be a museum for every subject or object. Examples include the Cheese Museum (really a cheese shop with some history about cheese making), a diamond museum, the Sex Museum, the Electric Lady (a museum of fluorescent art), and the Amsterdam Tulip Museum. The latter is a small museum in tight quarters, but they provide an informative look at the history of tulips in the New World and the tulip industry. The front of the museum is a shop, the first thing you come to, and they sell tulip and amaryllis bulbs as well as all sorts of tulip memorabilia.
Midst this surfeit of museums, we visited the Rijks Museum which is a grand and glorious art museum including an depth focus on Rembrandt. And just across the way from the Rijks, we also toured the Van Gogh Museum. In both cases, these were popular sites and, even though we arrived moments after opening, they both filled up quickly with lots of visitors. The galleries are smaller in the Van Gogh Museum and so the crowds sometimes made it difficult to get close enough to see the smaller works or to read the labels. Fortunately, both museums have English on their labels and signs as well as Dutch.
Rijks Museum atrium
On our last day, we walked from the center of town all the way out to the National Resistance Museum which is across the street from the zoo and near the botanical garden. It was well worth the trek. This museum provides a detailed picture of life in the Netherlands from 1940-45 under German occupation. It was a brutal, painful and uncertain time. While Jews were specifically targeted for mistreatment, deportation or death, all citizens suffered food and fuel shortages, constraints on their movements, and an overall lack of control over their lives. Our next stop is Berlin and this museum experience adds another facet to how we will approach it.
Hotel Sebastian’s where we stayed was wonderfully helpful with restaurant recommendations for dinner and we ran the gamut from fish (Lucius) to Indonesian (Kantjil & de Tijger) to tapas to elegant continental. At Belhamel, an old house overlooking the canal, we not only enjoyed our meal, but made friends with the couples on either side of us. The middle-aged couple to our right were from Manhattan and so we traded notes about New York and staying in Amsterdam. Later an older couple were neighbors on our left. They live in Shewood Forest in the UK and had come over on the ferry to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary. They were lovely and he regaled us with his Trip Advisor statistics and all the various cities and countries he had visited and spent time in in his corporate life (including New Jersey!). We shared how long we’ve been married and then when a new couple arrived on the right–younger and residents of Amsterdam, we learned they were celebrating 13 years. We didn’t find out how long couple #1 had been married, perhaps they weren’t.
One of the delights of a being in a big city is choosing from a wide range of restaurants and cuisines. London is one of the best places in the world in which to do this; there is everything from traditional British pub food to Indian and Chinese plus Lebanese, Thai, Mexican, Italian, French, and the list continues. While here, we indulged in some special places, but also returned to old favorites from seven years ago. Here’s my list of where we dined on good, and occasionally great, food.
Norfolk Arms (Russell Square)–This gastropub was just introducing Spanish tapas when we lived here and they were delicious! They still are and we made it a point of booking several lunches here. Highlights were the choice of sherries to start, the mounded blue cheese and walnut brushetta with a drizzle of honey, the blistered Padron peppers, and the delectable meat platters—ham, chorizo and the like. And if you simply must have your Sunday roast, that’s available too.
Benares (Mayfair)–This Michelin-starred Indian restaurant is superb! The space is elegant, the service attentive, and the food Indian with a contemporary twist.
Hutong (LondonBridge)–Located on the 33rd floor of The Shard, the view from the window tables is spectacular. This is London with the twisting Thames and the rippling rail yards splayed out before you and St. Paul’s looming on the horizon. The food is similar to what you would find in Beijing and good, but not exceptional.
De Amicis (Notting Hill)–Small, family-run Italian restaurant that is most welcoming with good food. We’ve enjoyed their veal preparations (one with fresh porcini) as well as the chicken cacciatore–so much so that we ate here several times this visit!
Mall Tavern (Notting Hill)–An upscale pub that gets very lively most every night (not for those desiring a quiet tete-a-tete), but which offers a sophisticated menu. Reserve ahead and you may be able to sit on the non-bar side which is somewhat quieter. We liked the hake with fennel and the smoked salmon in particular.
Kettner’s (Soho)–Many years ago my grandfather gave me a copy of Kettner’s Book of the Table, published around 1880 with recipes and tips supposedly from this renowned restaurant. We had walked by on a previous visit, but never eaten here. This time we closed the loop and enjoyed a pre-theatre dinner. Kettner’s is known for its selection of champagnes and has a pre-theatre menu. We chose neither preferring instead to order a la carte. It was good and very acceptable as a pre-theatre meal. Kettner was the chef here, back in the day, and had cooked for Napoleon. But he didn’t write the book–someone else did!
Produce at Borough Market
Borough Market (Southwark)–I don’t know how we missed out on discovering this marvelous maze of food stalls and produce and meat purveyors on past visits, but we did. This 100-year old market complex is worth the price of the Tube ride with lots of options of ingredients to cook at home, international dishes to takeaway and several sit-down restaurants. We opted for lunch at Fish! which offered a wide range of choices and an excellent fish soup with rouille. We first tasted this smooth, perfect for a nippy day, comfort food in Ajaccio, Corsica in the late 1970’s. It became a favorite then and still is.
Waitrose (everywhere, but especially The Brunswick in Bloomsbury)–I was amazed and impressed with the selection in this supermarket when I came here from Pennsylvania. After having lived in San Francisco for some years, I remain impressed. Waitrose, and even the other food chains (Marks & Spenser and Tesco) do ready-to-heat prepared foods far better than their American counterparts. These items occupy a significant amount of shelf space and the range of cuisines from which to choose is mouthwatering. We purchased several curries this time, which didn’t happen to be from Waitrose, and they were very good!
Just a sampling of prepared foods offered at Waitrose
We spent the better part of the day in the London Bridge area of the city and learned about Science Gallery London from Daniel Glaser (pictured above.) It is part of the Global Science Gallery Network begun in Dublin in 2008 to engage 15-25 year olds with science. More specifically to engage them “where art and science collide” through a variety of media—film, theater, immersive and online experiences, art of all types, and the like. London is the second location for Science Gallery and it will officially open in 2016. In the meantime, it is in pre-season mode, as it were, before its new home is created. Set in the shadow of the Shard and just steps from the London Bridge Tube and rail stations, Science Gallery is at a busy crossroads and the ideal spot for attracting an audience. It is affiliated with King’s College and all of the future Science Gallery locations (goal is to have a global presence of eight of them by 2020) will be based at universities. But part of their mission is to engage with the entire community and to be a bridge between academe and the city. Future sites include New York, Bangalore, and Melbourne. Why not San Francisco, I say?
King’s College Guy’s Campus
According to Dan, their enthusiastic and well-qualified director, the plan is to have 3-4 seasons each year around a common theme. This fall (September and October 2014) is a time of experimentation and a prototype of what is to come. The SG folks worked with youth in the community as well as with staff and researchers at King’s College to find out what topics and concepts interested them and then have commissioned professional artists and producers to create works. This is a facilitated approach to content development, but one that gets at what the young people want to know about, not what the adults or program staff think they should. Dan and his staff did six months of engagement work ahead of any programming. One novel aspect is that the media team is comprised entirely of youth and led by two sisters, aged 17 and 19, who have 16,000 You Tube subscribers.
Theme for the fall is FREQUENCIES: Tune into Lifeand it relates to the sounds of life, to the rhythms and cycles of our body. Involvement in FREQUENCIES includes: a juggler interacting with children, a cellist at the cancer center, a DJ with a market trader, looking at the physiology of sleep, and the participation of a hospital porter and a lung pollution expert. The emphasis in program development is on rapid prototyping with nine collaborators having just one week in which to create a new sound, and a sound that would be open source!
Science Gallery will have no permanent collections and will focus to some extent, but not exclusively, on issues of health and medicine, given its location on the Guy’s campus. This campus is home to the medical school and Guy’s Hospital. There will be several pre-seasons prior to the official opening of Science Gallery in 2016. Future themes are likely to be: “Spare Parts” (transplantation), “Teeth,” and in 2016, “Addictive.” For this last theme, they will do engagement work with addicts, pushers, specialists, and others in order to generate ideas for the works themselves.
Beginning in 2015, the building they are now in will be renovated to include a theater, a wide open gallery-like space, production facilities, and a cafe. Project cost is 12 million pounds which is a combination of funds from the university, from individual donors, and the Guy’s Hospital charity. Ongoing operating costs will come from the university budget.
Current home of Science Gallery to be renovated in 2015
Students involved in the project were recruited through the Youth Media Agency and are paid for their time. For those familiar with the California Academy of Sciences, Science Gallery has elements of NightLife, Brilliant!Science, Careers in Science, and Teen Advocates for Science Communication (TASC) with its flash mobs. One significant difference is that all events are free; some revenue will be realized from the cafe and a shop. The current staff is quite small, around a dozen individuals, plus three working on commission for this season, and the students. Attendance goal for the first year is 350,000.
We had the privilege of attending one of the FREQUENCIES events, a performance by Bishi, a Bengali British musician and singer based in London, which featured images from a lab recording of her sleep patterns juxtaposed with haunting music and singing. It was different and certainly combined science with art. It will be informative to watch how Science Gallery London evolves, how they define success and what outcomes they achieve. And it would be fun to return in 2016 when they are up and fully operational in their new space.
