Law, Partially

Living in a tourist city, you may well find yourself someday a tour guide to scattered friends and family showing up for a visit. Having passed our one year London residency milestone late this Spring, our organised tour is becoming increasingly standardized but with a few different loops. Dai Meng Guo, a white guy from Erie, Pennsylvania, with a Chinese name, stopped by London recently. He, along with his girlfriend, plus Christine and Bobby, went on my Westminster Tour. New friends, plus old friends from undergraduate Chinese class at University of Pittsburgh. Notice Big Ben all bandaged up while he gets a face lift -- same for Parliament. Westminster circuit For the Westminster Tour, we started at Trafalgar Square, saw that old one-armed admiral on a pole (Horatio Nelson), walked down Whitehall, past 10 Downing Street (of course barely visible behind the security establishment holding back Theresa May's thronging fans), to Westminster Bridge (from where one can ca...

If you were to exit our apartment building, the first business you would find would be Ley Ley's , a hamburger restaurant that serves beer from the local microbrewery, Hammerton . Bobby is a fan of their french fries and cheeseburgers. Were money and calories no concern, we would go to Ley Ley's every day. In addition to the delicious food, we've been having fun watching the World Cup there this summer. Bobby, cheering on England, in their 6-1 win against Panama. Bobby likes cheering when everyone else was cheering, but he was also cheering when no one else was cheering. I think he gets excited when he sees any team kick the ball far. He often points to the TV and exclaims, "Ball!" Soccer, as you may know, is very popular in Europe and the U.K., and England is competing in this summer's World Cup, Russia 2018. Bobby hasn't had much screen time since he was born. Now he's older, and we've been together watching sports on TV, especially so...

We hoped Rome would be the best; we feared it would be the worst. Rome is fascinating. I wanted to see the ruins from the empire we've learned so much about: from seventh grade social studies to Gladiator. I wanted to drink espresso in bustling cafes on the Via Veneto like Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita . I wanted wine, carbonara, cacio e pepe, and square pizza slices. I wanted to learn what happened to Rome between its sacking by the German gothic hordes in the 400 and 500s and its founding as the capital of united Italy in the 1870s (a silent period, apparently, in our textbooks). How can this ancient city function as a modern capital of one of the wealthiest countries in the world? I have travelled so many places but not yet ever to Rome, though Christine had visited before. Rome in 1960, as presented by Federico Fellini and starring Marcello Mastroianni and Anouk Aimée in La Dolce Vita . Watching the film as a young man in college, I was struck by how cool Rome l...

Bob's been travelling a lot, but just now he finally stepped behind the Iron Curtain. In Prague, we hoped to find a 19th century cityscape, peppered with gothic churches and imposing communist block buildings, difficult to pronounce heavily accented words, diverse pilsner beers for less than $2/pint, and restaurant bills under $30. We did find some good bargains, but at many places, the prices looked more like London prices. Some places straight up gouged us. For what we did find in Prague was a stream of tourists like we have never seen before. Look at how many people are on that bridge, below. Prague is not a large city, and the tourist sights are in a compact area and limited in number. I don't have the statistics to prove it, but I believe the number of tourists per tourist site would be much higher in Prague than in Paris and London, which although much bigger cities, they also have so many more sights to visit. Over the past dozen years, I think the secret about Pragu...

This big boy started daycare (or nursery, as it's known here) today. For now, he is going one day a week. As he gets used to it, we will ramp it up, so that by the fall, when Mum starts school, he will be going close to full-time. I stayed home from work for his first day; upon dropping him off, Mum and I had a relaxing child-free day visiting cafes on Holloway Road. Bob was sad when we said goodbye to him at daycare, crying, though the minders ensured us that once we left he was fine and had fun playing with the other kids. The toddler room is a strange place. It's a bit small and just full of kids moving in all different directions and bouncing off each other and redirecting like a game of pong played in a small room with twenty balls, each kid a ball. When an adult enters the room, the swarm of children flows toward the door to gather around. God bless these nice ladies who every day come and take care of these toddlers, all while seeming to enjoy it. Part of me wants to...

London is one of the greatest -- arguably the greatest -- museum city in the world. London also has some of the worst weather of a major city in the world. Chicago has the extremely cold winters; Singapore has the unreasonable heat and humidity; London has sunless winters where every day brings a slow drizzle of precipitation with a temperature just high enough to keep it all from turning to snow (but a few degrees colder and it's snowmageddon: all trains stop everywhere). Chris, Bob, and I filled many cold, weekend days with adventures to and in London's famous museums. It's not that Bob doesn't like museums, he just doesn't appreciate them. He seems to take the triumphs of human civilization as a given and hasn't shown a great interest in the lineage that brought us here, or its documentation in museums. He does like museums, though, because they present wide open rooms for him to unleash his best run-walking skills, regardless of who may be standing in his ...

Tourist numbers aren't as high in Lisbon as Barcelona, but it's only a matter of time. In the meantime, we loved our time in Lisbon. We went for two primary reasons: warmth and custard tarts. London has been so cold and rainy; we were desperate for some sun. We did find some Lisbon sun, though the temperature wasn't exactly hot. Bob received a happy welcome all over Lisbon and was kissed by many waitresses and had cheeks pinched by many grandmas. Back in Iowa, years ago, his namesake, Uncle Bob, confused lesbian women with "Lisbon women." The Lisbon women here were swooning for Bobby, as I imagine would the Lisbon women of northeastern Iowa. (My grandma said about her brother Bob, "Who the hell taught him how to speak?") We stayed in an apartment on the top floor of an old building in the ancient Alfama neighborhood. The apartment had a wide balcony, and from there we could see the River Tagus. With a nod to the famous patterned tiles found all over ...