Little Green Bag, R. I. P.

Lamen Restauration Rapide - 1 star
Rue des Petits Champs and Rue Ste.-Anne, 75002 Paris

Best Saveurs - 2 stars
Passage de Choiseul, 75002 Paris

Exki - 1 star
Boulevard des Italiens, 75002 Paris

Little Georgette - 2 stars
Impasse Gomboust, 75002 Paris

Last week I left my suitcase in my hotel in Paris so I didn't have to carry it to the United States and back over the weekend - especially important because I insist on taking the train in and out of Paris rather than a taxi. When I unpacked it on Tuesday, I couldn't find my little green toiletries bag - the one with my razor, shaving cream, toothpaste, nail clippers, hair brush, and so on. I probably forgot to pack it last week, and the hotel didn't have any record of anyone finding it. So I had to buy a new set of supplies at Monoprix, perhaps my favorite supermarket in the world.

Losing my little green bag made me sad. It wasn't particularly nice - I suspect it cost me about $15 - but I had had it since at least 1996, and it had been all around the world with me. I bought it before I went backpacking all over southern Italy for The Berkeley Guides that summer, because it was big, expandable, and waterproof, and since then it made it to Rome, Florence, London, Paris, Berlin, Toronto, Singapore, Seoul, Bilbao, San Sebastian, Manchester, Wales, Dublin, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, and dozens of cities large and small in the United States. It was part of the travel routine, and I will miss it.

It was one of those weeks when you never catch up from spending a night on a trans-Atlantic red-eye, but the eating was not bad, thanks largely to the proliferation of varied casual options in Paris's second arrondissement, home of the Paris stock market and a large Asian population. The first night I wasn't feeling well so I had a large bowl of ramen at an authentic-seeming Japanese noodle house on the corner where half the staff didn't speak French or English, just Japanese. The service was fast, the broth was comfortingly salty, and the noodles were just right for a tired and hungry traveler.

The next day we want to Best Saveurs, one of dozens of casual places where you can get a fast, cheap (by Parisian standards) lunch to eat there or take back to the office (once a taboo in French companies, now becoming more and more common). If they have the hot couscous I usually have that, which is very good, but this time I had three salads - couscous with vegetables, carrots, and chick peas - and an apricot tart. For dinner I went to Exki, which is the closest thing to Pret a Manger I've found in Paris. Everything is laid out neatly for you to choose from and clearly labeled with ingredients and a convenient "vege" for vegetarian, and there's an emphasis on organic ingredients. The food itself - chervil and coriander soup, tortellini with artichoke hearts and tomato sauce, and real French whole-milk yogurt in a glass jar - was mediocre (except for the yogurt, of course), but the place gets a star for trying to provide a cheap, casual dinner for people who just want to eat and get to bed.

The last day after the client meeting we went to lunch at Little Georgette, a whimsical nouveau-French restaurant that specializes in small dishes. For example, I ordered the "Dolce Vita" and got a salad of mixed green vegetables, lasagna with diced vegetables and tomato sauce, a risotto with parmesan cheese, and a tomato-basil-mozzarella salad, all arranged on a large tray. The food was good, and the "Very good au chocolat" (that's really what it was called) was an excellent warm, meltingly soft chocolate cake. It was a fun way to relax with the team after a hectic few days.

But the high point of my trip was the day before the demo, when we walked out of the client's office after the final run-through at 6 pm, with no more work to do. I sat in the sun at a cafe with my friends Alex and Sigrid, who are leaving in a few days for Tokyo, and thought back to the day in October when they had just arrived in Paris and we sat in the sun on a grassy hill in the Buttes Chaumont and watched the dogs playing. Yes, we talked about work, but it still felt like time had stopped and we could sit there forever, and it was the most natural thing in the world.

The Romance of Air Travel

Panini Express - 1 star
Terminal 1, JFK

Growing up in a suburb of New York, Manhattan was the ultimate symbol of the urban adult world. And John F. Kennedy Airport, or JFK, as the most important airport of the world's most important city, was the symbol of air travel and all the romance it promised.

Today, New York area air travel is pretty evenly split between JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark, and when I actually lived in New York as an adult I flew much more often out of LaGuardia, like most business people. But JFK is still the main international airport, its terminals surrounded by rows of 747s painted in the colors of every major airline in the world.

I rarely fly through JFK, because it's too far to drive (about 3-1/2 hours if traffic is OK) and it's too close to my home airport for a connection. My only other flight from JFK in the last seven years came in the summer of 2006, when I drove to Hartford, found out my flight to London was canceled, re-booked on Aer Lingus, and drove to JFK to catch my plane. But this time circumstances conspired to force me there. First, I decided to come home from Paris for the weekend - flight home on Friday, flight back on Monday night. Ordinarily I wouldn't voluntarily take two long flights in coach, one overnight, that I didn't need to, but I didn't want to spend two whole weeks away from my daughter. And second, this Thursday I have a meeting from 10 to 1 in Nanterre (outside Paris), but I need to be home on Friday, and the only flight back I could still catch on Thursday returns to JFK.

So I was driving through the tangle of highways that protect New York from outsiders, over the Whitestone Bridge with its far-off view of the Manhattan skyline. In my memory, when I cross this bridge I'm sitting in the passenger seat with my father driving, on one of my trips to Europe in the 1990s, on whatever airline had the cheapest fare at the time - Tower Air, Pakistan Air, whatever, all through JFK. Those trips always seemed like such an adventure. This time, since I left my suitcase with my clothes in my hotel in Paris, I was left wondering ... what exactly do I need to pack? The answer, since I had left my passport and my euros in my briefcase over the weekend, was ... nothing. Flying to Paris has never been so anticlimactic.

Air France is in the old Terminal 1, which is largely empty, with only a smattering of stores, a paucity of eating options, and almost no working power outlets - overall, a letdown compared to some of the gleaming commercial centers like the Munich or Amsterdam airports, or even compared to domestic hubs like the Northwest concourse in Detroit or the Delta concourse in Cincinnati. I ended up eating the vegetarian standard, a tomato-mozzarella-basil "panini" - a kind of sandwich I first ate in Paris at a place around the corner from the BN way back when. It was surprisingly good - decent fresh mozzarella, a bit of balsamic vinegar to give it flavor, and most importantly bread that was grilled to the point of being slightly blackened and crunchy on the outside. And with that I boarded the plane, settled in for a night of 3 hours of sleep, caught the RER from the airport to Paris, and showed up at the office at noon the next day.

My coffee place

Café San Jose - 2 stars
Rue des Petits Champs, Paris 75002

I've already pointed out that my company's Paris office is just a block from the old Bibliothèque Nationale (National Library, known to the regulars as the BN) where I spent most of my days when I lived in Paris back in 1994. I just spent a week in the office, and although everything else has changed, my favorite coffee place hasn’t.

Café San Jose is not your typical Parisian café with little tables on the sidewalk, a bar with an assortment of drinks, and the black-and-white-clad waiters immortalized in Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, which I remember reading, largely at Au Bon Pain (in Cambridge), the summer before my senior year of college. It's a tiny place with a counter, a couple of stools, an espresso machine, and, around 1 pm, a crowd of people drinking coffee with tiny little squares of chocolate. When I arrived at the BN, my friends who already lived in Paris introduced me to the Café San Jose as the place to go - if you wanted something other than the coffee that came out of the machines in the library, which was so bad it appealed to that feeling that you were supposed to suffer during graduate school - and I introduced it to my friends who came later.

I was there to help teach a training program for our European employees, based in London, Paris, and Munich. From a quality-of-life standpoint, it was one of my worst trips ever - late nights at the office, missing the Liverpool-Arsenal game, eating the same box lunch from Casse Croute every day (it's the best lunch in a box I've ever had, but it got a little old), and not a single side trip to Berthillon, Mulot, Poilâne, or any of the other culinary landmarks of my Paris. But from another standpoint, it was a great experience to work closely with a small team of highly capable and intelligent people who all get along and have fun together. It also allowed me to do perhaps the two things I enjoy most of all in the business world: explain things and give advice. And when I needed a break, I would go to the Café San Jose with Eileen to gossip and complain.

There are few things more rewarding in the business world (or any world) than the feeling of being part of a community that you actually want to be part of, and I would rather have that than a good croissant au beurre. Of course, the croissants au beurre from the place on the corner were better than anything you can find in the United States.

Passport Number 2,906

If this blog is about anything, it's about travel and nostalgia. So this week, as I sit at home, I'm going to go much, much further back.

This is my father's Korean passport, issued in 1953. It's passport number 2906, which, I believe, means that it is the two thousand, nine hundred and sixth passport issued by the Republic of Korea, which only came into being in 1948 or so. You can see the stamp by U.S. immigration dated November 3,1953. My father came to the U.S. on a freighter that shipped food to American GI's from the U.S. and came back mainly empty, passing through the Golden Gate Bridge on its way into San Francisco Bay, where I would spend so much time decades later. About that boat trip, he said he had never eaten so much meat before in his life: this was a time when Americans ate meat three times a day, and Koreans perhaps once a month.

It's a truly remarkable story, much more so than anything I will ever be able to tell. Two years ago I recorded his recollections as we were driving across the country, and I've transcribed the recordings, but I haven't gotten around to writing them down in narrative format. But it includes dodging the conscription efforts of the North Korean Army, going months if not years during the war without word of his family, applying to a handful of American colleges picked more or less randomly out of Peterson's Guide, finding an American guarantor by pure chance through a family friend living in the Netherlands, getting into a one-year program at Wesleyan, and leaving on the aforementioned boat with neither the money nor any intention to return after that one year. When he finally arrived at Wesleyan it was mid-November; when he hadn't shown up for the beginning of the year the college had sent him a letter saying not to come, but he had never received it. It was many years before he would go back to Korea.

I think of my father sometimes as I jet around the world, occasionally even in business class, complaining about airport food. He still insists on flying coach, even though I always offer to upgrade him.

The Routine

The Last Resort - 0 stars
Hartford airport (BDL)

Waffle House - 2 stars
All over the South

Panera - 1 star
Your friendly local strip mall

Musashi - 0 stars
Detroit airport (DTW)

One week the JW Marriott in Copacabana, the next week (after a short break) ... the Comfort Inn in Birmingham, Alabama, after eating a disgusting piece of pizza (barely any tomato sauce, slightly sour-tasting cheese that had none of the properties of mozzarella) in the Hartford airport for dinner.

This blog is mainly about travel, and business travel in particular. In airports, you see happy couples, tired families with too much equipment, lost-looking kids on their first trips alone ... and then you see neatly dressed, single people with computer bags and expensive-looking carry-on suitcases, walking directly to wherever they are going, usually checking their Blackberries or looking for power outlets - that's us (or "that's we," which I believe is actually correct).

And the typical business trip is not to Rio, or Paris, or any of those fun places - it's to Birmingham, Alabama, and it goes something like this:

• 5 pm (Eastern): Arrive at airport. Go up and down escalator with 1-year-old daughter who just came home on a flight from visiting her cousins for a week. (OK, that's not typical.)
• 6.30: Aforementioned disgusting piece of pizza.
• 11 pm (Central): Arrive at Birmingham, by way of Charlotte. Take bus to rental car, which turns out to be a hulking Jeep Patriot. Drive 3 miles to Comfort Inn, where the bed is mushy and the heating/cooling system is too loud - but it could be a lot worse.
• 12 midnight: Check email.
• 12.30 am: Go to sleep.
• 8.30 am: Wake up and get ready for meeting. (Note the eight hours of sleep!)
• 9.30: Breakfast at Waffle House!!! (Grilled cheese instead of egg and cheese - because of something I read in Michael Pollan's book - and a double order of hash browns. Yummy.)
• 11.00: Pick up colleague at airport. Drive to prospective client's neighborhood, which is a sprawling mass of strip malls just like thousands of others all over the country. Eat lunch at Panera (tomato soup and Greek salad) because of the free wireless Internet access.
• 12.30: Arrive at prospect. Do meeting. Talk about company and product for 19,378th time.
• 4.30: Arrive back at Birmingham airport for a 5.05 flight.
• 8.30 pm (Eastern): Dinner at Musashi in the Detroit airport (cold, rock-solid vegetable sushi and a limp, greasy, characterless vegetarian egg roll - and a banana).
• 11.00: Arrive at Hartford airport and drive home. Check email. Play with dog.

Breaking News

Euromad discovers why croissants au beurre are so much better than croissants ordinaires (which are now, apparently, in a perversion of the French language, called croissants a la nature)! Click here for the shocking answer!

Copacabana in the Rain

Fasano al Mare - 2 stars
Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro

Fagulha - 1 stars
Rua Santa Clara 18, Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro

In many ways, I am a very fortunate person. You know those articles about jet-setting executives who get to go to exotic places and stay in nice hotels? Well, that's me ... if only a tiny bit. At home I drive a 1999 Chevy Prizm, I wear the same suits I bought 11 years ago when I started my first job, and most of my trips are to places like Louisville, Birmingham (Alabama, not England), and Gainesville. But this week I got to come to Rio de Janeiro, the kind of city that many people dream about but few Americans ever get to visit.

I got to live a little bit of "the life:" I stayed in the J. W. Marriott hotel on Copacabana Beach, which is one of the most expensive hotels I've ever stayed in in my entire life (including McKinsey), the others being in London and Moscow. The first night, our host took us out to dinner in his BMW 540 - which would be unremarkable, except that it was the first time in my life that I rode in an armored vehicle with bulletproof glass. We went to Fasano al Mare, one of the best restaurants in Rio, and the most expensive restaurant I've eaten at since I went to Bouley back in 2004 (the lobster, for example, was about $100 US). Unfortunately, it was a restaurant that specializes in seafood, and I considered using the excuse that I didn't want to insult our host by not eating seafood, but in the end I had gnocchi with tomato sauce and tiny cubes of breaded and fried eggplant, which was pretty good (the eggplant was much better than it sounds) and was only $35 or so. I also had a decent tomato-basil-mozzarella salad, and an unexceptional lemon pie ($14). The prices, of course, are partly due to the collapse of the dollar, which now buys about 1.7 reais, or less than half what it used to.

Besides that, though, it was basically all work: 9 to 6 at the client's offices in Centro (downtown), a quick and mediocre dinner (pizza one night, a strange rectangular tomato-mozzarella crepe the next, and a grilled cheese sandwich in the airport the last), work in the hotel room until midnight, and then up at six the next day to work some more while looking out the window at the gorgeous, enormous, nearly-empty beach and the waves rolling in from the Atlantic. I even started drinking coffee again, not only because I needed it, but also because waiters kept bringing little cups of espresso into our conference room. Apparently it is impossible to have a meeting in Rio without coffee, and there was a camera in the room that they used to see when anyone might need one. (The whole executive floor is continuously surveyed by cameras, less for security than so the executives can be tracked down by their assistants easily.)

I had a list of exactly three things I wanted to do: (1) walk on the beach, (2) go to Corcovado or Sugarloaf (two famous hills around the city with great views), and (3) go to a soccer game at the Maracana - and I did exactly none of them, except a quick walk down to the water one night with my colleagues. There were not one but two soccer games at the Maracana on Wednesday night, one with Fluminese and one with Flamengo, and our hosts even found a set of VIP seats that we could have used, but I decided to work instead - one of those decisions that is easy to criticize, but meant the difference between 6 hours of sleep and 2 hours of sleep. I planned an extra day in Rio after our meetings, but it rained all day, and besides I had a conference call all afternoon.

The food overall was OK at best, due to a combination of not speaking the language and not eating animals. There are a bunch of kiosks right on the edge of the beach in Copacabana where you can get beer, snacks, or meals, but despite (or because of) the fantastic location the food seemed unremarkable. The highlight for vegetarians is probably the restaurants that sell food by weight, like Fagulha in Copacabana, where I had lunch the last day. There's a big buffet, and everything is the same price per kilogram, so you can pick whatever looks good. Unfortunately, most of what looks good has meat in it, and you have to do some guessing as well, but you can still make a decent meal out of black beans, rice, various potato dishes, and salads.

But I shouldn't complain, and I am glad I came, even though I'm about to get on a 9.5-hour flight in coach back to the U.S. All the people we met were incredibly friendly and welcoming, and did everything they could to make our stay enjoyable. I walked around downtown Rio and look out over the bay. I watched people playing beach soccer at night and making moves you rarely see in the U.S. I learned a tiny bit of Portuguese. And I drank a caipirinha (sugar cane liqueur, lime juice, and sugar - too sweet) at one of the shacks on the edge of the beach, even if it was in the rain.

"Living Life Navigator Style"

(The title is a reference to a story by my friend Euromad.)

I'm in Rio de Janeiro this week, in a hotel overlooking the Copacabana beach. But I almost didn't make it here.

We planned this trip a few weeks ago, at the invitation of a possible client here in Rio. To get a visa you need a plane ticket and an invitation from a business in Brazil. On Friday, February 22 we got the faxed invitations and booked our plane tickets for Monday, March 10. We knew this would be tight for the visas, but we use an expediter - you send your application to them overnight, then they go to the consulate and hand it in, they pick up the application, and they send it back to you overnight. We collected our applications and passports and mailed them on Monday, February 25. We also asked them to use the San Francisco office, since we have had better luck there in the past.

The first problem was that the expediter claimed that we had to use the Chicago and Boston consulates, based on where we lived. On top of that, they don't have a Boston office, so they forwarded my application to another expediter. So we lost a few days there.

The next problem was the turnaround time of the consulate. The new expediter told us that it typically took 1-2 weeks to get a visa, which meant we had almost no chance of getting them in time to fly. The reason for this is that Brazil has a reciprocity law, according to which they treat applicants from any country the same way that country treats Brazilians. Since the United States is one of the worst countries at the world at processing visas (waits for Brazilians now are in the 3-4 month range), they take their time with our applications. (It could be worse; we could be from Spain.)

On Tuesday, March 4, we got a senior executive from our Brazilian hosts to call the Chicago and Brazilian consulates, and they said that we would get the visas in time. But by Friday, only the Chicago visas were done - not mine. We called the Boston consulate, the expediter called, and our hosts called, but no one could get a response.

So I woke up Monday morning not sure if I was going to Rio. My flight left the Hartford airport at 4.10 pm, which meant I had to leave home by 2.30. At 12.30 we found out that the visa had been processed and someone needed to pick it up. We told the expediter to pick it up and then got a courier to deliver it to my house. But because of traffic in Boston, there wasn't time to make it to my house by 2.30, so we then arranged to meet at the Hartford airport, outside the Delta ticketing area. Finally the courier pulled up at 3.40, half an hour before takeoff, and he handed me my passport with my shiny, new, 5-year, multiple-entry Brazilian visa.

The only problem was that when I arrived at the airport I found out that my flight to Atlanta was canceled, and Delta claimed there was no other way to get to Rio that night. (All the flights are overnight, so I would have had to wait 24 hours.) So I called our travel agent, who said there were seats on a United flight through Dulles, and then I convinced the Delta person to put me on that flight instead. (Because it was a last-minute, one-way booking, the cash value of the ticket was over $4,000, although I don't know how money changes hands between airlines.) I walked over to United, checked in, went to security, and got pulled aside for additional screening. (That's what happens when you have a last-minute, one-way ticket.) Then I strolled onto my plane with a few minutes to spare, flew to Dulles, flew to Rio (after upgrading my seat), got a shoeshine in the airport, and took a taxi to the aforementioned hotel on Copacabana beach.

After all the flights I've done, I can say honestly that, like the Navigator but unlike Euromad, I was completely calm throughout the whole experience, even while waiting to see if I would get my passport in time. You do the best you can, and if things don't work out, they don't work out. Which, of course, applies to most of life.

Home Away from Home

Zachary's - 1 star
Solano Ave., Berkeley, California
College Avenue, Oakland, California

I've lived in Berkeley (or the Oakland hills, which are basically the same thing) for nine out of the last eighteen years - 1990-97 (except for a year in Paris), in grad school, 1999-2001 while working at McKinsey and Ariba, and 2005-06 while my wife was on sabbatical at UC Berkeley - and I've visited many times over the last several years while visiting my company's headquarters in the Bay Area. As I and many other people have noted, Berkeley has perhaps the best food of any place in the world, from the produce selection at Berkeley Bowl and Monterey Market, through the cheese selection at the Cheese Board and the coffee at Peet's, to the landmark of California cuisine, Chez Panisse (which, unfortunately, was not so good the last two times I went).

But the pizza, I've finally decided, is only pretty good. The most popular place is undoubtedly Zachary's, a pseudo-Chicago-style place with stuffed pizzas. Zachary's was my favorite in the early 1990s, and the way I remember it it was always packed and the pizza was always great, from the crust to the spicy tomato sauce. In the mid-nineties, though, I shifted allegiance to Cheese Board Pizza, perhaps the epitome of California-style ("fru-fru," in the words of one of my co-workers) pizza. Cheese Board only makes one type of pizza per day - say, red onions, corn, mozzarella, feta, cilantro, and lemon juice - and people line up down the block for it. Finally, when I moved back in 2005 I decided that the Cheese Board was decidedly hit-or-miss, and my favorite became Gioia, a New York-style place (although not as good as some of the New York pizzerias) with a very thin, slightly blackened crust and a comparatively traditional set of toppings.

As both of my loyal readers know, though, I make my restaurants selections based on sentimental value, so this week I went to Zachary's and got a large, stuffed spinach and mushroom to take to dinner at my friends Jenni and Robert's house. The restaurants was only about two-thirds full, the crust seemed pedestrian, and the tomato sauce seemed to have lost its bite. It was still good, but the sad part was I couldn't remember what all the fuss was about.

But it was still nice to be in Berkeley, where it was almost warm outside in the evening, and you could smell the jasmine flowers (at least, that's what they smell like) that I will always associate with California. And it was nice to go the office, skip a meeting to shoot baskets with friends, catch up with people I haven't seen in months, meet new people at the office happy hour, and generally feel like I had a normal job in a normal office. It's hard to be away from home - where, my wife's text message said, my daughter has started jumping - but California is my home away from home.

South Beach

Pizza Rustica - 2 stars
3 locations
Miami Beach, FL

La Provence - 1 star
1627 Collins Ave
Miami Beach, FL

Front Porch Cafe - 1 star
1418 Ocean Dr
Miami Beach, FL


I was lying on my beach chair, not ten feet from a woman talking loudly on her cell phone. She was talking about an article in the New York Post about a "device" that you could plug into a cell phone to retrieve its deleted text messages (no big surprise, since in any reusable memory information is not actually overwritten when you mark it for deletion). But she emphasized that "I never text you, and you never text me," so they were safe. Then they talked about this and that and getting together before saying "I love you" (in the way you say it to your lover, not your mother). Pause. Then her kids and her husband walked up from the water and sat down with her.

It wasn't just that she announced to me, the unknown stranger, that she was having an affair. It was that she did it while worrying about someone reading her undeleted text messages and finding out she was having an affair. But we're here to talk about food, not other people's affairs.

Pizza Rustica has made a reputation for itself as the go-to place for late-night casual eating while pausing between trendy clubs in South Beach. What was I doing clubbing in South Beach, you may ask? Actually, I was getting three take-out pizzas to eat with my family and my sister's family in our hotel suites, which is much easier than taking three girls ages 1, 2, and 4 out to a restaurant. But whatever the setting, the pizza was delicious. In the storefront they sell those rectangular slices with a too-thick, spongy crust - described locally as "Tuscan style" or "Roman style" and called "Sicilian" in New England where I live, although I saw nothing of the sort in Tuscany or in Rome - but the take-out pizzas are round with a nice thin crust. We got a margherita, a rustica, and an arugula, all of which were good both for dinner and the next morning for breakfast and lunch. They might have trouble in New York or Berkeley, but for Miami they do just fine.

Although South Beach has some very good restaurants, in my mind it's like Las Vegas - the good restaurants are more expensive than they should be, and there are plenty of expensive but mediocre ones as well. But all in all we had a reasonable eating time. Besides Pizza Rustica, we had breakfast at the Front Porch Cafe on the same block as our hotel, where you can look out at the park and the sand dune that shields the beach beyond, and where I had a perfectly good breakfast burrito with home fries. The last day we had lunch at La Provence, on an unpromising stretch of Collins Ave. My tomato-mozzarella-basil sandwich was under-heated and devoid of character, but the apricot and raspberry tarts were a decent facsimile of the French variety, and their "rustique baguette" was surprisingly good, with a hearty crust yet soft and fluffy inside.

My trips to South Beach itself nicely illustrate the three ages of my working life. I first came in September 2000 for Ariba's user group conference, right at the peak of our bubble (when my unvested options were worth over $3 million on paper), and spent the entire time working - on what, I can barely remember, although I know there was PowerPoint involved. I don't have any memory of being outside, although I must have been, because I stayed in the Loews Hotel and the conference was in the convention center. I think I may have looked out and seen the beach from a distance, but I'm not sure.

My second visit was in December 2004 with my wife, my sister, her husband, and their one-year-old daughter. We went to the beach, ate at nice restaurants, visited Little Havana, looked for manatees, and generally had a nice time.

This time, of course, we had our own daughter, which meant that our days were a combination of the beach, the playground, the pool, the other playground, and the other other playground, we spent the entire time within half a mile of our hotel, and take-out pizza was as good as the food got. (At the playgrounds, by the way, we English-speaking Americans were a distinct minority, trailing the Russians, who were everywhere, the Spanish-speaking Americans, and probably the French as well. That's what happens when your currency is worthless but you have nice beaches.) But this time was by far my favorite trip. Holding my daughter in my arms as we bobbed in the ocean, or seeing her bounce up and down with excitement as we approached the playground, I wished I could just stay there forever.

Now Is the Time

Those one or two people who use an RSS aggregator to read my blog may have noticed a post I made in favor of John Edwards a few days before Iowa. I pulled that post from the site a few minutes later, having decided not to put a political endorsement on a blog that has a link from a couple internal web pages at my company. Which is, of course, another example of Democrats obeying scruples that Republicans simply don't have: for example, Stanley O'Neal, when he was CEO of Merrill (before being exposed as an unimaginably incompetent fool who had no idea how his company was losing tens of billions of dollars in businesses that he boasted about building), pressured more than a hundred Merrill executives into donating $2,000 each to the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign in 2004.

But anyway, screw that.

If you are a Republican, now is the time to stop reading. If you are a Democrat, now is the time to give money to Barack Obama.

I won't go into all the reasons I think Obama would be a better President than Hillary Clinton. The fact is that a vast majority of Democrats think either one would be a fine president. But ...

Barack Obama has the best chance of beating John McCain. Besides all the usual arguments - lower negatives and higher positives than Clinton, better ability to connect with people, Clinton's unique ability to unify the Republican party and get the Republican base to the polls - the surveys are clear and consistent: Obama always beats McCain, Clinton always loses.

We need a candidate now, or Obama and Clinton will tear each other apart all the way until the convention, while McCain raises money and appeases the conservative base. Obama is clearly the choice of the people, with 11 consecutive primary wins, including this week's 17-point win in Wisconsin - the type of heavily-white, old-manufacturing state where Clinton should do well. Our best hope is for Obama to deliver a knockout blow by sweeping all of the March 4 states. Anything less and Clinton will probably fight it out to the end. And to do that, he needs your money now when he's deciding how many television ads to buy in Ohio and Texas.

Barack Obama is our best chance at a presidential win in November, a landslide in the Congressional elections, and a better future for our country. I just made my second $500 contribution to his campaign. If you are planning to contribute anything at all in this election cycle, now is the time.

History

Yes, I have a Ph.D. in history. Not only in history, but in French intellectual history. And not only French intellectual history, but avant-garde cultural movements in France in the 1950s and 1960s. Existentialism? people sometimes ask. No - some people after the existentialists, who were much less interesting and even less important.

For a while I was actually embarrassed by this. My biography on my company's web site, for example, used to say just that I had a Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley - on the assumption that readers would assume I got the degree in CS, or EE, or something more relevant to what I do for a living. (This was a calculated ruse, since of the three doctorates on the founding team, one was in history, one in philosophy, and one, I think, in psychology.) I think I was embarrassed by having studied something so esoteric that it turned out not only to be useless in the usual sense of the term, but useless to me, in that it was not a topic of even enough academic interest (and the phrase "academic interest" already means that something has little relevance) to land me a decent academic job.

But I'm not embarrassed any more, whether due to age, or maturity, or having more or less succeeded in career #3. Looking back, not only did I have a lot of good "life experiences" (lived in Berkeley, went on strike, learned how to throw a dinner party, lived in Paris, ate at lots of great places, lived in Berlin when it was still rough around the edges, traveled throughout southern Italy), but I had the academic experience as well, the one where you immerse yourself deeply in a specific topic until thinking and writing about it becomes second nature. And I know it must have been second nature at the time, because now that I have been out of that world for more than ten years it seems like a distant planet to me.

I'm on this topic because this is the first full week this year that I'm not flying anywhere, so I'm at home, and I'm reading The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism, by the path-breaking Russian historian John Randolph - a work of history so specialized that if you type "The House in the Garden" into Amazon it will show up on the 3rd page of the results, and its current ranking in books is 974,644. Why am I reading this book? Because John was a friend of mine in graduate school, and he actually should have introduced me to my wife (because his mother worked with her before she came to Berkeley), but we met independently. I have an occasional habit of buying books and CDs by friends of mine (a number of whom are professional classical musicians, but that's another story), although I haven't invested in the medieval historians yetbecause their books cost over $80 a pop. (Sorry Jay and Jason, I'm waiting for you to sell out and write your popular books.)

Anyway, The House in the Garden is a beautiful example of the historian's art: it takes a miniature as its subject (in this case, the actual house that the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin grew up in - there, now John will be mad at me for having reduced Mikhail Bakunin to "the anarchist"), examines it and the people who lived there in loving detail, and shows how it either exemplifies or is influenced by the larger historical trends of its time. And that is only a crude description of the portrait painted and the arguments made by the book.

Unlike the vast majority of what I read, it is also a book I have to read slowly, because I'm re not reading it just to get information and move on (what information could the non-specialist possibly need about some the philosophical inclinations of early-nineteenth-century Russian noblemen); I'm reading it to re-immerse myself in that world of ideas that I left when I entered the business world. And like with my friend Peter's book about Franz Rosenzweig, it takes effort to re-enter that world and suspend not disbelief, but the feeling that I could be doing something more productive with my time. If I spend enough time with the book, I can get back to the feeling that ideas, and their history, are crucially important and valuable in and of themselves, which is a feeling I had for most of the 1990s. And clearly they are at least as important as most of what most people spend most of their time doing.

There may not be many people who will buy John's book, but part of me envies him all the same for his ability to immerse himself in his field to the point where it is as natural as breathing. Academic research is hard work, and depressing at times, and knowing that few people will read your work doesn't make it easier. But in this case, I believe this book got him tenure the University of Illinois. And we should all be so fortunate.

Why?

I recently flew home from Florida - Miami Beach in particular - where it was 85 degrees and sunny today, the air so perfectly warm and slightly heavy in the air it feels like you are suspended in it. At the company we visited, there was a Lamborghini parked in one of the reserved spaces just in front of the door, and after lunch we had to navigate around a Rolls in the restaurant parking lot. But that's not what I'm going to write about.

On the plane, I finished The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, the latest bestselling book about (to simplify vastly) food and where it comes from - think of it as a more philosophical version of Fast Food Nation, the book that inoculated me against eating at McDonald's. In the last section of this book - just before describing how he went hunting and shot a pig - Pollan discusses vegetarianism, and comes to a decidedly murky conclusion. After reviewing in detail the arguments for animal rights, and the evils of the meat-production industry, he seems to say that there are two possible responses: to look away (and ignore where meat comes from) or to be a vegetarian. But after several more pages he ends up arguing, or more accurately implying, that the most moral stance is to eat meat, but in full consciousness of what you are doing. As I said, it's pretty murky.

But enough about him; let's talk about me. I just ate at two restaurants where the practical drawbacks of being a vegetarian are hard to ignore: Chili's (which was my choice, but it was late and I was hungry and it was there), where the black bean burger with steamed vegetables is the only vegetarian entrée on the entire menu, and Hunter's, a very nice restaurant in North Miami Beach overlooking the water, where I had an undistinguished house salad (iceberg lettuce, crunchy julienned carrots, corn, big tomato wedges, creamy vinaigrette (?!)) and a dish of brown rice and black beans. And remember, last week I ate an omelet at a nice French restaurant on the Ile St. Louis in Paris because it was the only vegetarian main course.

People ask me occasionally why I am a vegetarian, especially since I just became one. (Although I haven't eaten mammals in several years, or birds in two years, I only stopped eating seafood a couple months ago - and my close friends know that there is one enormous loophole in my vegetarianism.) If you're not interested in this whole question and find vegetarians humorless and self-righteous, stop reading here.

There are many reasons to be a vegetarian, but none are all that compelling. I don't do it for my health; although it is good to eat fruits and vegetables, in my case being a vegetarian means that I eat a lot of carbohydrates and probably don't get enough protein. (If you could condense Pollan's advice on the subject of health into a sentence, I think it would be "eat as un-processed food as possible.")

On average, not eating meat is better for the environment than eating meat: first, modern factory meat production is far more polluting than growing vegetables (think enormous swamps of pig shit washing into rivers and lakes); and second, it takes something like ten calories of grains to produce one calorie of meat, so by eating meat you are indirectly consuming an enormous amount of grain, whose production is also extremely polluting (think lakes of nitrogen-rich fertilizer washing into the Gulf of Mexico and suffocating sea life for thousands of square miles). And because farming today consumes enormous amounts of fossil fuels (as Pollan says, where once we ate solar energy transformed into food by plants, now most of the energy we eat comes from fossil fuels), one of the surest and easiest ways to reduce your carbon footprint is to reduce your meat consumption. But this is not a conclusive argument; from an environmental perspective, it is probably better to eat a cow that grazed on grass on a sustainable farm than to eat, like I did in National Airport, a burrito with rice, beans, squash, and guacamole wrapped in a flour tortilla, every ingredient of which came from a factory farm.

Then there are the moral arguments, of which I think there are basically two. The first is that the production of meat causes intense suffering to millions if not billions of animals at every moment of every day. This is basically an inarguable fact, and I'll spare the details for those who eat meat. This is essentially a utilitarian argument that says that by eating meat you are causing suffering to animals, many of which are every bit as conscious, intelligent, and loving as my dog. But this is not an invincible argument. First, it leaves open the option of eating cows that graze happily on a diet of mixed grasses. (There are far fewer of these cows than you might think, though; most of the politically correct meat you see at Whole Foods comes from a factory farm, just not quite as brutal a farm as the meat at Safeway.) Second, it leaves open the option of eating animals that are not as conscious, intelligent, and loving as my dog - some kinds of shellfish come to mind. Third, one could quibble about consistency - what about leather shoes? what about eating soybeans from farms that were cleared out of the Amazon rainforest, destroying habitats for thousands of endangered species? Fourth, you could go down the interminable rathole of what would happen to these domesticated species if humans stopped eating them; most of them would vanish from the face of the earth. To which I would say, better that than to spend your lifetime... wait, I said I would spare the details. On balance, though, I think these are weak counter-arguments; even if you aren't a vegetarian, it remains a fact that by eating less factory-produced meat you are reducing suffering among intelligent animals.

The second moral argument is that it's just wrong to eat animals, no matter how happily they were raised. I can't say why, because arguments from principle invariably depend on your principles, but the easiest way to argue this is to compare it to cannibalism. Most people believe on principle that it's wrong to eat other people. I believe that at some point in the future we will believe the same thing about animals, because we will no longer be able to justify the distinction we draw between ourselves and all other species. The more we learn about dolphins, whales, chimpanzees, bonobos, dogs, and pigs, the more they seem like us.

But ultimately I'm not sure I could defend that position, either, against a determined and sufficiently sophist opponent. In the end, I don't eat meat because it's something that I can do. To be honest, it's simpler and easier than wondering how happy the cow was each time I order a hamburger; it's easier than wondering if a flounder has feelings (not sure), or if a scallop has feelings (I doubt it); it's easier than having to come up with flimsy reasons why my dog is different from my food. And finally, it makes me happy to be doing something.

The Last Time ...

I'm in Paris again.

Like the last couple times I've come here, I can't t help but wonder: "Is this the last time I will come to Paris?" Part of it is being 38 years old and right about the middle of my life expectancy; for no rational reason, having less time to live than I've already had reminds me that I will not do everything I would like to do, nor will I do anything unlimited number of times.

I am actually quite fine with this. From my perspective, I've already had three fulfilling careers (music, academics, business), even if they weren't all as successful as I might have liked. (I recently read The Last Tycoons, a breezy book about the investment bank Lazard, which mentioned some banker who made tens of millions of dollars and is now getting a Ph.D. in history; "done that," I thought.) And I don't have what is these days called a "bucket list;" if I were to learn I had six months to live, I would spend most of it at home with my wife, my daughter, and my dog, with maybe a few trips to see a few close friends.

But it is a fact that there will be a last time that I visit Paris, and for all I know this could be it. Our European teams are getting bigger and more experienced, to the point where they will need fewer visits from founders like me; with a child, our vacations now are more likely to be at beaches in Florida or Delaware than in Europe; and it gets harder and harder to spend time away from my daughter. When I'm home, one game she likes is when I pick her up so she can look at the family photos in the hallway. If I say "Where's Daddy?" she points at my picture and then points to me (actually, she sticks her finger in my neck) with a big smile. My wife emailed me to say that now when she points at my picture she puts up her hands in her sign for "Where?"

If this was my last trip, it was, unfortunately, probably the worst few days of eating I've ever had in Paris. Part of this is due to being a vegetarian - when you subtract fish, there are virtually no main courses you can eat in a French restaurant - and part of it was staying in an area with many tourist hotels (we were next to the Hard Rock Cafe, of all places) and hence many mediocre restaurants, but mostly it was due to having just too much work to do. We had two days of meetings with a potential and very large French customer, and I had to present and demonstrate to them for most of those two days - in French. And on top of that I spent two hours late Tuesday night - before preparing for Wednesday's presentation - explaining our business to our finance team. So speed, not quality, was the key culinary requirement.

Somehow I managed to avoid eating a single good croissant au beurre in five days (I had one decent one and two mediocre ones), a single piece of pain Poilane, or a single spectacular fruit tart (one good, two mediocre). On Sunday I took a walk with Alex and Sigrid, and we stopped by Cacao et Chocolat for hot chocolate and Pierre Herme for macarons, which were not as sublime as I remembered them, and on my last night Jay and I went to Le Tastevin, a nice restaurant on the main street of the Ile St. Louis where I had two scoops of Berthillon sorbet - green apple and cassis (black currant) - which, despite being freezer-burned, did have the intense concentration of fruit found nowhere else in the world. (I also split a bottle of wine with Jay and had two whiskeys in his apartment afterward, which, after the last time we got together, I guess makes us drinking buddies.)

But I did get to stroll one more time through the Luxembourg Gardens, which I remember from my first trip back in 1991, and from when I used to live on the Left Bank, and watch the kids playing with their boats in the central fountain - only now the boats are all remote-controlled, not the miniature sailboats you used to see. So if it was my last trip - which I doubt - I can live with that.

A Real Diner

Paul's Diner - 2 stars
6 Carlisle Rd.
Westford, MA

On Wednesday I was in Northeastern Massachusetts, driving to New Hampshire to visit a client, when I pulled off of 495 to get gas. After getting gas, I was hungry, and I had some extra time, so I started looking for one of the usual standbys to grab breakfast: maybe Panera, or Starbucks, or some Mexican chain that served breakfast burritos. Instead, I ended up at Paul's Diner.

Paul's is the kind of diner you can't find in California, or in any gentrified neighborhood, or in the strip malls that litter the country - no 50's nostalgia memorabilia, no jukeboxes, no guacamole, no inflated prices, and only open for breakfast and lunch. (It is not the other type of classic diner - the Greek-owned, 24-hour kind with a twenty-page menu.) I had an egg-and-cheese sandwich on an English muffin and home fries for less than $4, and it was as good as they come. The home fries were chunks of red new potatoes, crispy on the outside and tender on the inside like I can never manage to make them at home. And they even had free wireless Internet access. I'm already looking forward to having breakfast there next week when I have to go back to New Hampshire.

In between, though, I have to go to Paris for five days, and I'll have little time for anything except work. On the way to the airport I picked up a hitchhiker, trying to follow through on my advice to help other people when you are traveling. He was in his 30s, friendly, fit, clean-cut ... and homeless. He used to have a family and a job (as a graphic designer) in Maine, but then he split up with his wife, and she moved to Massachusetts with the kids. So he gave up everything and moved to Massachusetts, without a job or a place to live, so he could see his kids. He lived in his car for a while, but then it got too cold and his car broke down anyway, so now he's living in a shelter and trying to find a job, but no one is hiring graphic designers. But he does get to see his kids often. "It's humbling," he said about leaving his professional life to become a homeless person. But for him, he didn't have a choice; it was that important to be close to his children.

I couldn't avoid asking myself if I would make the same choice. And to tell the truth, I don't think I can say I would. I like to think I would do anything to be close to my daughter, but the fact is that I already spend about 30-40% of my time away from home. In theory I could get a job that doesn't require travel, but the truth is that I haven't. And this year I'm even traveling more than I have since 2004. I hope Willow will forgive me.

One Small Country

Waffle House - 2 stars
All over the South

None of my friends understand my affection for Waffle House. After all, I am a California foodie at heart who learned how to cook as a graduate student (in the humanities, no less) in Berkeley - and a vegetarian.

If I wanted, I could explain my relationship to Waffle House with a sentimental story. The first time I ever ate at Waffle House was on Thursday, September 13, 2001. I had been trapped in New Orleans with maybe a hundred people from my company, because we were having a user group meeting there. On Wednesday night, a few of us went to the New Orleans airport to see if we could get a flight to San Francisco, because some airports were opening, but New Orleans didn't. So three of us - Sundar, Marcus, and I - rented a big old American car and drove through the night to Dallas, which we expected was more likely to have flights in the morning. We ate breakfast at Waffle House somewhere near the airport around 6 am the next morning. And we got on a United flight home that morning, which made us among the first people to start flying again. (I was also in the air at midnight on New Year's Eve, 2000, but that's another story.)

But the real reason is I just like the food. The summer when I was coming to Louisville every week I would eat there at least once each trip. This morning I had the usual - a double order of hash browns with onions and jalapeno peppers, and two eggs over hard (sometimes I have an egg and cheese sandwich instead of just the eggs). The hash browns are nice and crispy, with the sweetness of the onions and the spice of the peppers, and the eggs are better than you'll find at far more expensive places like Denny's or the Courtyard Marriott lobby (my other choice). The portions are reasonable (not gargantuan), and the prices are so cheap you can order everything you want.

I even woke up half an hour earlier than necessary just so I could go to Waffle House. Those who know me will realize there are few greater recommendations I can give than that.

Now, the people who work at Waffle House are invariably friendly and helpful, but to tell the truth I never thought I had a lot in common with them. Call me provincial, call me a snob, whatever. But I am a liberal Korean-American who studied French intellectual history, of all things, and has lived his whole life on the coasts (and in France, of all places) - and an atheist to boot. I could go on.

But this morning the Waffle House staff were talking about Seinfeld and how much they loved it, and they were true aficionados. They not only knew about Soup Nazi (everyone does), but they were talking about Elaine dancing, and the "on the wagon/off the wagon" episode, and the episode when Kramer and the car salesman see how far they can drive without running out of gas. Seinfeld was my favorite TV show of the 1990s (until I discovered Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the undoubted greatest TV show of all time), and they loved it every bit as much as I did.

We really are one country, like it or not.

Down Memory Lane

Senor Jalapeno - 1 star
SJC, Terminal C

French Meadow Organic Bakery - 2 stars
MSP

I used to fly to San Jose a lot when visiting my office, for cost reasons, but sometime around 2005-2006 it became cheaper to fly in and out of San Francisco, which is closer to the office anyway. This week, though, I bought a ticket at the last minute and it was cheaper to return from San Jose, so this morning I made the drive down 101 through Silicon Valley for the first time in what seemed like years.

The drive was a bit like looking at the striated walls of the Grand Canyon or anyplace else that you can see the layers of geological history, because for me it is a reverse-chronological tour through my career in the technology industry. I pulled out of our gleaming, glass complex in San Mateo just north of Highway 92, which used to belong to Siebel. Heading south on 101, I first passed the dirty-white Bay View building in the low(er)-rent part of San Mateo, where my company spent the last five years, growing from less than half of one floor (developers spread across the open space in the middle, sales and marketing sharing offices along the wall, Marcus's print of a New Yorker cartoon entitled "Making the big sale," showing a salesman in a suit sitting down with the customer, a dog, for a meal of dog food) to filling three floors and bursting at the seams. 10 minutes later there was the Redwood City apartment building where John R. and I shared a dingy two-bedroom apartment with his poker-playing college friend for three years during our frequent trips to California. Then unincorporated Menlo Park, on the Bay side of 101, where we founded the company in 2001 in the extra space of Ken's friend's (now-folded) startup, going out to eat in the taquerias where the jukebox only played Mexican pop music; real tacos, just beef on corn tortillas with nothing more than onions, hot sauce, and lime juice remain one of the few things I miss from my meat-eating days.

Continuing south, there is the Shoreline Boulevard exit in Mountain View for Ariba's old headquarters, across the street from Silicon Graphics, where we used to sneak into the cafeteria for lunch. That was where I got my first intoxicating taste of the startup life, although by that time Ariba already had 500 employees and more money than it knew what to do with. Then at the south end of Moffett Field the freeway passes right by the new glass towers we moved to in 2001, right when our stock had fallen by 98% and we had to lay off half the company. I filled up the gas tank on Mathilda Avenue in Sunnyvale, just past the Hobee's where I think Marcus and I first tried to convince Ken to start a company with us - arguably one of the most important days in my company's history.

Then just a few miles further south, in Santa Clara, you pass the nondescript, blue-and-beige headquarters of Intel, my first client after I moved from McKinsey's New York office to the San Francisco office back in 1999. The first times that I made that drive down to Intel, arguably the most important company in the history of Silicon Valley (although some might argue for HP or Cisco, or perhaps someday Google), I felt like I was at the center of the world, and the business world was full of possibility. Now when I make that drive, it's the memories that I think about, not the future.

My usual lunch at SJC used to be a tuna sandwich from Noah's, but since I've given up seafood I got a veggie burrito from Senor Jalapeno instead, which was perfectly serviceable and undistinguished, except for the salsa, which was nicely garlicky. On my layover I went to French Meadow, which I have previously rated as my favorite airport restaurant anywhere in the world (although the Wolfgang Puck Cafe in Cincinnati is a close competitor - nothing at all like the Wolfgang Puck in Concourse B of O'Hare, which is absolutely disgusting). This time I had a bowl of Thai Vegetable Curry soup, which didn't seem particularly Thai (or curry, for that matter), but was full of vegetables and was reassuringly spicy in a hot-and-sour sort of way.

Paris to the Moon

I haven't done any traveling since my last adventure returning from California, so I don't have any new restaurant reviews, but I didn't want to let the year slip away without some final thoughts. And since so much of this blog has been about Paris, I thought I would finish 2007 with the book I'm reading, Paris to the Moon, a collection of New Yorker articles and other essays by Adam Gopnik, an American who moved to Paris with his family from 1995 to 2000. (The copy I have in front of me belongs to John S., one of the founders of my company, who lent it to John R., another founder who moved to Paris for six months this year, before coming back to become CEO again in a story that will have to be told someplace else. It was John R. I went to the Bistrot du Dôme with in May.)

To be brief, Gopnik captures, at least in part, the magic of being in Paris for an American. The fact that I was depressed there thirteen years ago doesn't mean that I don't love the city. To be melodramatic, Paris is a bit like the girl you had a crush on but only went out with once; the crush never complete goes away.

Some Americans look for the romantic Paris of the late nineteenth century, or of photographs by Robert Doisneau. Not I. I always liked the things about Paris that seemed more modern than, or just different from, the U.S., like the subdued electronic music that Europeans use to set off the advertisements or the weather from the rest of the newscast. It's a difference I had never read about before this book. For example:

There is a separate language of appliance design in France ... Things are smaller, but they are also much quieter and more streamlined. ... They are all slim, white, molded, with the buttons and lights neatly small, rectangular, and inset into the white plastic. The hulking, growling American appliances we had at home ... all were solid, vast and seemed to imply survivalism. You could go cruising in them. The French appliances, with their blinking lights and set-back press buttons on the front, imply sociability and connection.

Throughout the book there are moments like that, which capture not just what it is like to live in Paris, but what it is like to be an American knowing that you are only in Paris for a short time and will never, ever be a true Parisian. There are the obligatory articles about French food and cooking, but they include a portrait of Alice Waters and California Cuisine as good as any I have ever read. ("Over time, an obsession with sex and drugs slid imperceptibly into an obsession with children and food.") The author even cooked seven-hour lamb for Alice - if I recall correctly, the same dish that my friend Jay ordered in Wajda during my trip in October. And then there are the hilarious analyses of the differences between American and French attitudes, like the substitution of the American fact-checker with the French "theory-checker" ("Just someone to make sure that your premises agree with your conclusions, that there aren't any obvious errors of logic in your argument, that all your allusions flow together in a coherent stream.")

I'm sure there are other books on the topic, and better ones no doubt. But this is the book that I happened to read, and I give it 2 stars.

The Year in Review

La Farine - 3 stars
Solano Ave., Berkeley, California

I woke up this morning in Berkeley, California, my favorite town in the whole world (I stayed with my friends Robert and Jenni and saw their 2-month-old son Evan, and also so my friends Ori and Lori, and their daughters Hannah and Ruby). For breakfast I stopped at La Farine on Solano Avenue in North Berkeley for a morning bun, perhaps the best breakfast pastry in the world (the other competitor would be a good croissant au beurre in France) - the top is light and fluffy, the bottom is dense and sweet, and I can never figure out which one I like more. Then I drove to the airport for my last flight of the year, back home to Amherst, Massachusetts.

Every year I keep track of every trip I take. Yes, I know it's a bit obsessive. This year I flew 48 times (if there's a layover, I count both legs together as one; but round-trips count as two) on nine airlines through 21 airports in three countries (the US, the UK, and France). I spent 38% of my work days away from home. (If I leave one morning at a reasonable hour and come home the next day at a reasonable hour, that counts as only one day away, but if I leave at 6 am and come home at midnight the next day, that counts as two - really I'm measuring time spent away from my family.) I flew to California 10 times for work (11 if you count the time I went while on vacation, but took my daughter into the office to explain our financials to a potential investor for two hours, while she played on the floor), including four weeks in a row in July when I was filling in as our financial forecaster.

This is considerably down from some earlier years. 2003 was the toughest, when I flew 107 times (more than twice a week), spent 62% of my work days away from home, spent 17 hours per week in transit, and ate 16% of my meals in airports or on airplanes. (I used to keep more statistics.) That was the year I was launching our first customer project in southwest Michigan. And then there was 2002, when I spent essentially every other week in California.

There are many people at my company who travel much, much more than I do. There are the implementation consultants who spend four days every week at a client site, every week of the year (except for vacations). Some of them even go on long-term assignments to places like Russia and New Zealand. There are the Australians, who travel regularly to Singapore, Indonesia, Korea, and Japan. There is the head of international operations, who alternates between home in Australia and our European offices in London, Paris, and Munich. And there is our CEO, who lives in Boston and runs a company based in California with customers and prospects on every inhabited continent.

On the whole, I don't like traveling. It's physically tiring, especially in the business world where you do so much flying in the early morning or the evening to maximize meeting time. It's bad for your sleep, especially staying in hotels with soft mattresses or erratic heating and cooling systems. It's terrible for the environment - my share of my airplanes' carbon emissions this year will be 10 to 20 times the emissions generated by my little Chevy Prizm. As readers of this blog know, you eat enough mediocre food for a lifetime, especially if you don't eat land animals. And most importantly, it keeps you away from your family.

But there are a few modestly redeeming characteristics. I get to visit friends I would never see otherwise. Occasionally I get to eat at Berthillon. I get to escape the New England winter for an occasional few days in California. And sometimes an airplane flight, or even a long car drive, can offer a brief moment of peace and relaxation.

With that in mind, here are my unsolicited, random, and unprioritized travel tips:

• Take advantage of being disconnected. Don't use a BlackBerry. Don't check email on your layover; let it wait until you get home. If you get home in the evening, let it wait until the morning.
• iPod.
• Stock up on episodes of This American Life (thislife.org) for car trips or plane flights. You can get the podcast for free, or you can buy any episode for about a dollar (both in iTunes). We spend so much of our lives in our own narrow little worlds, most of which revolve around our jobs. This American Life reminds you that you are part of a much larger world of lots and lots of different and interesting people.
• Read books, not newspapers or magazines. Periodicals make you feel like you're just barely keeping up; every day or week there's a new one to read. Books are more interesting and fulfilling.
• If you go someplace interesting, give yourself an extra day or a few extra hours to look around. Do it after your work is done, or the time will just get sucked up preparing for your meeting.
• If you're in a place with good restaurants, go eat someplace nice. (Search for "[city name] best restaurants" in Google, and you're likely to find a magazine with a list.)
• Skip breakfast and sleep fifteen minutes more.
• Carry your own tea bags.
• Look up old friends in the places you visit. Seeing someone you haven't seen in years can make for any amount of travel hassles. (They can also tell you where to eat.)
• Help out other travelers, like single mothers with infants and tons of stuff. Swap your aisle seat for a middle seat so a family can sit together. It will make you feel happier.
• Sleep when you can.

Postscript

I composed the above while on my first leg, from San Francisco to Chicago. On landing at O'Hare, I learned that my flight to Hartford was canceled, the next flight to Hartford was canceled, and I had been rebooked at 6.30 am tomorrow. There were no flights home via Washington, Charlotte, Pittsburgh, or Philadelphia, and while I was talking to the rep the 6.30 was canceled, so I rebooked at 1.20 pm tomorrow. Then I called back and switched to a flight this evening to White Plains and booked a one-way rental car to Hartford. But when I got up from booking the rental car the White Plains flight had been canceled, so now I'm on the 1.20 again.

So make that 39% of work days away from home.

Post-postscript

The 1.20 actually left on schedule, but when I landed in Hartford my car was buried in snow, with the wheels trapped in 18-inch snowdrifts and about ten feet of unplowed snow to cover (in reverse) before reaching the plowed aisle in the parking lot. It took over half an hour of digging, with an ice scraper, no less, and would probably have taken another half hour were it not for two nice people who helped push the car over the unplowed snow. Alex would say it was karma, because on the flight from San Francisco to Chicago I helped a woman with her bags because she was traveling with a baby.

Then it started snowing, and halfway home I pulled over because the freeway was too dangerous. Luckily it stopped within an hour or so and I was able to make it home around 8.15 pm. And that really is it for traveling this year.

New York, New York

Aquavit - 3 stars
65 E 55th St.

Aquavit is, according to New York Magazine, the 9th-best restaurant in New York City. (New York Magazine isn't a particularly trustworthy source, but Aquavit also got 3 stars (out of 4 - almost no one gets 4) from the New York Times. As such, Aquavit is also precisely the kind of restaurant I couldn't afford to eat at when I lived in New York from 1997 to 1999. Although I wasn't as poor as I had been when I lived in Paris, a first-year McKinsey associate's salary ($90,000 back then; probably at least $160,000 now) didn't go as far as you might think, especially not in Manhattan. Of New York's 101 best restaurants (again according to New York Magazine), I believe I only ate at two (maybe three) while I lived there. (Of course, many of the 101 didn't exist eight years ago.)

So on Tuesday, after a midtown sales call in the morning, the team and I went to Aquavit for lunch and had a great time. An aquavit is basically a flavored Swedish vodka. Susan and I each had the raspberry lime ginger, which was long on raspberry but generally pleasant; John had the pear, which was delicious; and Corbett had the mango lime chili, which had far too much chili pepper to be enjoyable. The food was mainly nouveau Swedish and American with an emphasis on mouth-popping flavors. I had a long, thin lobster roll wrapped in what looked like a moo shu pancake, topped with tiny baby cilantro leaves that were more pungent than any cilantro I had ever had, and tiny flecks of bacon (I didn't realize it came with bacon, and yes I ate it). Each piece of bacon was about one millimeter square, and there were only about six of them, but you could taste them distinctly next to the lobster and cilantro. I also had hot smoked trout, which was as tender as sushi, and a mainstream but delicious pear tart with apple ice cream.

And the sales call went well, so we were all in a good mood. We had very little time to prepare, so we came up with a plan, avoided a last-minute crunch, and stuck to the plan during the meeting. One of the keys to happiness is doing things that you like doing, and people like doing things they are good at. I'm good at my job (most of it, at least). It's not the world's most interesting job, but that's something.