Monday, July 9, 2018

We'll Always Have Paris

Chocolate almond and plain croissants
from Gontran Cherrier

We are in Paris again, after a few pleasant days in Lyon. We have been to Paris several times now and feel quite comfortable here. As Judy wrote, sometimes we like to travel to revisit places we love. San Francisco and Paris are at the top of that list. 

Here are some of the things that make travel in France special. 

  • The food, of course. It is the best anywhere. Italy comes close but can’t match French breads and pastries. The croissants in the photo are unbelievable!
  • The trains. They are fast, clean and comfortable. You can travel easily almost anywhere in the country. Lyon is about 300 miles from Paris. The trip took us 2 hours on the high speed TGV train. 
  • Paris is beautiful, filled with great sites and museums, and it is easy to get around. The Metro is crowded, but it is fast and efficient. There’s even an app to plan your route on the Metro. The crumbling systems in New York and Washington can’t compare. 
  • The French people. You’ve probably heard all the stores about rude or haughty French who refuse to speak English. (Of course Americans learn the languages of tourists in our country. Right?). But that’s the old France and it hasn’t been that way in a long time. The people we meet are friendly, helpful, and switch to English when our limited French proves insufficient. Paris is certainly a friendlier city for visitors than New York, Philadelphia or Boston. Or London, for that matter. There are unhelpful and rude people everywhere and it’s possible to have a bad experience anywhere but you can have an enjoyable time here. 
So here's what we did on this trip:  We had lunch at La Cambodge, an authentic Cambodian restaurant with very tasty food.  It was one of places targeted by terrorists on November 13, 2015. From there we went to the Galleries Lafayette, which was packed on a Sunday afternoon.  We did happen to hit one of the two periods of the year when there are sales.  We replenished our travel wardrobes (in lieu of sending laundry out).  Since we had a substantial lunch, we decided to just have something light from Pret a Manger, a chain that is ubiquitous in London, fairly easily found in Paris and other large French cities, and now shows up in DC, Boston, and NY.  What we like about it is that everything is organic and fresh, guaranteed because at the end of the day anything left is donated.  Judy's pretty addicted to both the hoisin duck wrap and the mango with lime.  Steve's a fan of the chicken and avocado sandwich.  

Later in the week we ate at La Fontaine de Mars, an old-fashioned bistro near the Eiffel Tower, famous for being a go-to place for the Obamas when they're in Paris.  Their duck confit and sole meunière are just amazing.  On our list for this trip was also a take-out window, the "boutique" part of Yam'tcha, where we got an assortment of bao (buns) of the day (duck, stilton cheese, onion confit, meat, and vegetarian) and steamed shrimp dumplings.  Judy was excited to see the chef and her husband and children, who she recognized from the "Chef's Table" series on Netflix.  We took the food to the Tuileries Garden next to the Louvre for a picnic. We also discovered that our hotel was literally around the corner from a lively neighborhood, Abbesses, and we enjoyed shopping and eating with the locals.  Sadly, our favorite eclair from our last trip is gone, but we did have some from Eclair du Genie, the runner-up in our search for the best eclair in Paris.

On our last day in Paris, we strolled through the Cimitiere de Montmartre (cemetery of Montmartre), which was the view we enjoyed from our hotel.  It's a wonderful, almost whimsical place, with little memorial houses and many statues.  Many famous artists, musicians, and writers are buried there, along with generations of families.  It's huge, and they have laminated maps you can use to locate the graves of famous people.  

In all, this was a very relaxed trip, with a lot of strolling through neighborhoods, traveling around Paris to find amazing food, and enjoying the gift of time that we now have.


So we hope to continue coming here from time to time, and perhaps even bringing grandkids when they are old enough. After all, our 3 year old granddaughter, Lucy,  can already say, “I want another croissant.”

Dementia Studies


The Bronte parsonage in Yorkshire

The impetus for our journey was an invitation from our old friend, Murna Downs, to give a couple of talks and meet with faculty and students in the Centre for Applied Dementia Studies at Bradford University. Bradford has long been a center for innovative work in dementia, and for the past several years has offered a Ph.D. In Dementia Studies. The more we talked with Murna and her colleagues and students, and with two other friends, Linda Clare and Siobhan O’Dwyer who are researchers at Exeter University, the more it seemed that Dementia Studies was an idea that’s time had come. 

What became apparent in our discussions is how little progress there has been in care of persons with dementia and their families in both the UK and US and probably other places. Problems that were endemic and easy to fix, like making sure people with dementia aren’t overmedicated, have not been fixed. And it is still true that hospitals do on average a poor job of treating persons with dementia. Also still true is that when there are sudden changes in a dementia person’s functioning, doctors and nurses automatically assume it is due to the underlying dementia, but don’t look for possible treatable illnesses. And beyond that, despite notable exceptions, care facilities offer lackluster and sometimes cruel care.

These are problems that can be fixed but somehow it doesn’t happen. We don’t need to wait for an effective medication for dementia. We can make these problems better now. Over the years, Judy and I have visited wonderful programs and known health care providers who knew how to provide high quality care. They understood, for example how to talk to persons with dementia with respect, how to work around cognitive difficulties, and how to manage behavior problems. We have known excellent care facilities in The US and abroad. What is frustrating is how little progress there has been in implementing this practical knowledge widely. We have trained geriatricians, geropsychologists, geriatric social workers and nurses, but there simply are not enough people with training and not enough transfer of the knowledge from the truly good programs to the rest of the field.

So maybe we need Geriatric Studies to light a fire, to train bright and committed students who can advocate for better standards of care and to do the research that shows that good care is good for both patients and families and maybe even costs a little less. There has been a tremendous effort in the US and UK to increase research funding for basic biomedical work on dementia. Finding an effective treatment is a worthwhile goal, but in the meantime, we need to gather all the clinical wisdom that has accumulated in the stellar programs that have treated persons with dementia over the years. These are terrible diseases, yet we can reduce suffering with techniques that have been around for a long time and with new approaches. We can’t focus just on the biomedical aspects of dementia in research. Rather, There needs to be appropriate funding for people who have dementia now and their families, both in terms of implementation of what we know and expanding the knowledge base around care.

There is much work for Dementia Studies, and the bright and motivated students we met at Bradford University may be on the right track to begin making a difference.

Beyond the Bucket List

The Globe Theatre

Judy and I have begun travels in the UK and France. Our first stop is London. It’s a place we have been to many times and we are staying in Bloomsbury, which after several stays feels quite familiar and comfortable.  It is nice to be in a place like this. We know how to get around and don’t feel pressure to see the sites. We can move at a leisurely pace, going back to favorite spots and exploring new places and restaurants. A bucket list has it’s place, but so does returning to a city we enjoy. 

London has changed a lot since we first visited. I was first here in 1967 and Judy was here in the early 70s. England was fairly poor then, at least most ordinary people were. In B&B’s, you had to put a shilling into a heater to get some heat and hot water was at a premium. There was still rubble in places bombed during the war and many of the great buildings like Westminster Abbey were coated with a century of grime. The only relief from the drab food was an Italian restaurant, though they were usually not on the Europe on $5 a day list. 

Now London is a lively, exciting, international city, with, of course, a wonderful heritage. One major difference is how many people of different nationalities and races are here now. Just like closed minded people in the US, there are many people here who resent immigrants, but like the US, immigrants bring energy, intellect and innovation. We have eaten in two wonderful restaurants on this trip so far, one Asian Fusion, Wagamama, and the other Mediterranean, Moro. On all our recent visits, the hotel and restaurant staff have been international, mostly from other EU countries, but sometimes from further away. They have been cheerful and helpful.  And like in the US, immigrants have gone into many different professions and occupations. There’s bound to be a loss to the vitality and variety of London when the UK leaves the EU, just as there will be in the US as we close our doors to the world. 

Something we had not done on previous trips here was to attend a play at the Globe Theatre, the re-creation of the theatre where Shakespeare’s plays were first performed. Appropriately, we saw Hamlet. It was very special to see a play in that setting. This was a very contemporary Hamlet, with gender not taken into account in casting. Hamlet was played by a woman, as were some of the other male characters in the play. Ophelia was played by a man. Nonetheless, the play had the same power.  That’s what makes London fun for us, a mix of old and new. One piece of advice if you go to the Globe—the wooden seats are hard, even with the cushions you can rent when you buy tickets. 

On the rest of our journey, we will re-visit three places we have been before—Yorkshire to visit with friends Murna and Chris (and for me to give two talks), Exeter to visit our friend Linda, and Paris, where we plan to continue our search for the best croissants and eclairs. We will also travel to Lyon for the first time. It’s a mix of old and new.