My wife, Lisa, has a cousin, Janet, who is an actor in Toronto. When she and her now husband Bob got married, their friends wrote them a play as a gift. They performed it locally in Toronto where it was discovered by some producer in LA (I believe). They tweaked it some and it eventually landed on Broadway, where it is now called The Drowsy Chaperone. It has been very successful, having been nominated for 13 Tony awards this year, winning something like 5. Lisa was very keen on seeing the show while it was still on Broadway, so we took a weekend in October to fly to New York to see the show.
I’ve never been to New York before, beyond just a brief layover in the airport. We stayed in Manhattan, which was pretty damn nice. Our hotel was on 52nd street and we were within walking distance of Madison. We wandered through the stores and shops during much of our free time. We visited Rockefeller Plaza, where they shoot the Today Show, I believe. We also visited the MOMA and the Met. We didn’t have nearly enough time to really see either and will have to go back. At the Met, especially, there were a number of exhibits that I wanted to see, but didn’t get a chance. I also wanted to see the Statue of Liberty, but we ran out of time.
The show itself was amazing. Bob, Lisa’s cousin by married, was the star of the show. He did a fantastic job as “man in chair”. The show itself is about a Broadway star, named Janet Van De Graaff after Lisa’s cousin, and her giving up the fame of Broadway to marry Bob Martin. There are the usually gaffs and confusions that threaten to derail the marriage. But, the real story is the nostalgia for a simpler time, when Broadway musicals were light hearted. It was a very funny show and well worth the effort of going.
After the show, we got to go backstage and meet Bob. He was very kind and gracious, especially considering he had never met Lisa before. But, we all hit it off well.
We had some amazing meals, especially on the night after the show. We ate at a French place near our hotel. It was very decadent. I had, if I remember right, beef medallions. They were excellent. The whole meal was great. It was especially nice to have dressed up and done the whole Broadway experience.
For anyone visiting NY, I highly recommend checking out The Drowsy Chaperone. It was one of the funniest shows I’ve seen in a long time.
In September, I had to go to Europe for work to attend the Multiscale Modeling of Materials conference in Freiburg, Germany. Freiburg is in the southwest corner of Germany, near the border with both France and Switzerland. The conference was held in the University. It was my first trip to Germany and it was very interesting. Freiburg, I don’t believe, is very representative of Germany. It wasn’t damage as much during the two wars and so still has some of the old Europe feel to it. Many of the streets are cobblestone, and there is a little ditch that runs along them, creating a little stream that runs through the city.
The Freiburg cathedral was amazing, one of the most ornate cathedrals I’ve visited. It was covered with gargoyles, which was both very interesting and, from the churches I’ve seen, fairly unique. The cathedral was also covered in various carvings. Some looked intentional, but others looked like graffiti, though they weren’t people’s names, but seemed to be diagrams of some sort. In the mornings, the locals set up a farmers’ market around the cathedral, which was very nice.
After finishing up in Germany, I took a couple of days to visit Euskadi to see my dad’s family. It was only a couple of days, but any chance I can get to visit Euskadi is always worth it. As I flew in, I had a wonderful view of the Basque coast. The picture is of the coast around Donostia, the city I lived in when I studied Basque and Spanish. My cousin Ander picked me up from the airport and took me to the town of my dad, Munitibar.
Almost immediately upon landing, I met up with a good friend, Jon, and he took me to the fiesta in Aulesti. Aulesti is a small town near Munitibar, but I understand that its fiesta is quite well known, especially for the region. My dad remembers walking to the fiesta from Munitibar. I must be a lazy American, since I couldn’t imagine walking through the mountains from Munitibar to Aulesti. One thing that has changed since the time of my dad is the music. The headlining act at the fiesta was Gatibu, who are a hard rock band. In the Basque Country, music comes in typically two flavors: folk or hard rock/heavy metal. Gatibu was very good, especially live. I need to try to find a CD of theirs to check them out more.
I spent Saturday relaxing before continuing on the fiesta at Aulesti on Sunday. The flavor was completely different on Sunday. We drove to Aulesti and then hiked up to a little valley at the foot of a hermitage. There, a couple of bars were set up and people mingled and drank. There was a little dancing and an irintzi contest. There was also a small demonstration. It seems that the main political point made these days in the demonstrations is to get Basque prisoners closer to home so that their families can more easily visit them. I think that was the point of the demonstration. It was a very calm event, with people just gathering and waving their ikurrinas.
The third leg of my trip to Europe took me to England, specifically Cambridge and London. My colleague had done a postdoc in Cambridge and wanted to see it again, so he arranged for us to give a talk at the school. We spent some time wandering around the city. Unfortunately, most of the colleges were closed as it was the week students were returning. So, we didn’t get to see, for example, the statue of Newton in Trinity College.
After Cambridge, we went to London to meet with some collaborators at Imperial College and Loughborough University. So, we spent most of the rest of the week working. But, our host, Robin, did take us to down town London in the evening. We spent a night of touring the sites as well as hitting a few pubs.