Rooms without a view

Every time I travel and stay in a hotel, I ask for a room with a pleasant view. This could be regarded as compensation for my early years in a Warsaw apartment that looked out on the ugliest church in the world (in a terrifying and gothic sort of way), adjacent to a highly trafficked tram stop; or for the years after, when our New York bedroom looked out on the back of the YMCA, where men routinely, unabashedly sat by their windows and stared right at our apartment. Creepy.

A good view should not be a hotel priority and I chalk up my request as belonging to the “dumb things I like in life.” After all, you come back late at night, it’s dark, you close the curtains, turn on CNN or check your email, and go to sleep. Still, unless there’s a price issue, I ask for the view.


So why do I eat with some frequency in places that offer at best a parking lot for your viewing pleasure? Or a gas station? Or a ridiculously busy intersection? Or –as in today’s lunch place—all of the above (did someone say Sunprint Café? Damn, you’re smart!). Yes, of course, a view can be sacrificed for the company, the food, or even (third on the list) the ambience of the interior. But I long for it anyway: a place to eat and talk and people-watch, with potted bay leaf trees or baskets of flowers at the entrance and maybe some winding little street or dirt road just outside, and let’s go for broke here: a boy pedalling an old bike, with a baguette sticking out of his basket, heading for an alley lined with tall cypress trees. Yes, totally idyllic—such stuff as dreams are made of.

Ah well, if something should be sacrificed, I suppose it has to be the view. Even a boy pedalling down a cypress lane isn’t going to overcome ratty food or tiresome company. Sitting through a meal where after ten minutes you wonder if it would be transparent to play the “sick dog at home” card (and after five more minutes you no longer care if it’s polite, you play it anyway), as you stare miserably at your plate of buffalo stew can ruin a day.

Life imitates cheap Russian perfume

I once purchased a gift for someone who had done us a tremendous service. I picked out a giant blossoming jasmine tree and left it on her doorstep with a gushy note attached. She called shortly after thanking politely but letting me know that she could not accept the gift. Even though she was a horticulturist, she said she could not tolerate perfumes of any sort indoors, and so she could not bring in the jasmine plant.

Only slightly hurt (the return of gifts is always a painful experience, moreover, I would have never known had she made a bonfire of the tree—I was not a frequent visitor to her place), I took back the tree, and plotted how I could rescind the gushy message as well.

The tree stands in my home ‘office’ and every few months it bursts into bloom, exuding the intense fragrance of jasmine throughout the entire lower portion of the house.

I should be pleased. However, I was conditioned to cringe at the sickly sweet smell of artificial so-called floral perfumes. For me, they are associated with the forceful Russian women who traveled to Poland frequently to stock up on our superior cosmetics. The odorous jasmine, I’m sorry to say, smells a bit like them.

I should pass on the well-intentioned tree to someone who will appreciate its willingness to sprout blooms with such regularity. But I’ve already had one tree chopped into firewood this year (see post somewhere below). I can’t live with the idea that I killed one off and orphaned another. It’s too much. I’ll just move my papers and work on the living room floor for all the weeks (the many weeks) of its blooming life.

Occasionally, one must write about politics

The IHTribune has an interesting comment (by Ian Buruma, who lives mostly in Asia and is the author of "The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan.") on the US presence in Iraq (here). Buruma compares the Western imposition of principled values (personal and religious freedom, democratic elections, etc) on a reluctant nation with the Napoleanic wars, when a true despot waged wars in the name of liberty, equality and brotherhood (and what French person doesn’t choke with pride over “Liberté Egalité Fraternité,” to this day?).

The author takes a sweeping look at the two hundred years that followed Napoleon’s crusade. He writes:

France's armed intervention was deeply resented. Some nativist reactions were relatively benign: romantic poetry celebrating the native soul, or a taste for folkloric roots.
.
But in other cases the native soul, especially in Germany, turned sour and became antiliberal and anti-Semitic. (…)

As soon as Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, the liberal laws he instituted in Prussia were annulled. And a century later, the resentments planted by Napoleon's armed liberation sprouted their most bitter fruits in Nazi Germany.
.
Arab and Muslim extremism may never become as lethal or powerful as the 20th-century German strain, but it has already taken a terrible toll. Once again a nation with a universalist mission to liberate the world is creating dangerous enemies.(...)
.
This is not necessarily because the Islamic world hates democracy, but because the use of armed force - combined with the hypocrisy of going after one dictator while coddling others, the arrogant zealotry of some American ideologues and the failures of a ham-handed occupation - are giving America's democratic mission a bad name.

(…) There seems to be little doubt that most Iraqis were more than happy to see Saddam go. Most would have remained grateful to the United States and Britain, if only the coalition forces could have somehow gone home quickly, leaving Iraq with a functioning administration, electricity, running water and safe streets.
.
This, of course, would not have been possible even if Britain and America had done everything right. The fact that the coalition got so much spectacularly wrong has made things far worse.

And herein lies the real issue: was it not predictable that the ‘mission’ would be impossible? That internal conflicts would bolster extremism, making it difficult for the moderate Muslims (in all corners of the world) to maintain their stance against fundamentalism without appearing like puppets of the West?

A friend from Poland wrote that the nation is becoming skittish about supporting the coalition forces in Iraq ever since the recent dismantling of terrorist plots to attack the airport and a railway station in Poland. That, of course, is a curious reason to pull out support (but then, the reasons for initial support were also curious). However, it may be that the time has come for Europe to coalesce around the idea of forcing another round of discussions about the future of Iraq. That discussion will not be initiated by anyone in this country in the next seven months, and waiting until November seems dangerously long.

It could be snowing bugs

To stave off my complaints about the weather (snow AGAIN this morning), a friend sent me this CNN image from Australia (she is especially insect-averse):

[story about Australia's plague of locusts can be found here]






Of course, I could retaliate and send her this ---->, as a pleasant reminder of what’s ahead, after the snow. Morning bantering of this kind can really jumpstart the day.