Halfway down the Danube

Zerillo's

ZERILLO'S
La Trattoria Italiana
Piata Lohavari 2
Tel: 0722 383 507

Zerillo's was our first real find. We sort of stumbled over it one day in June, only days after we've arrived in Bucharest. It's situated on Piata Lohavari which is near the end of Calea Dorobantilor. A nice 15 minute walk from our house.

Back in June, it was still hot and sticky and the nicest feature of the restaurant was the open terrace on the second floor. The entire floor is enclosed by glass doors which can be opened in warm weather. Oh, boy - it's heaven on a hot, humid day in Bucharest! On the first floor there is a nice fireplace for those winter days -- an all-season restaurant indeed.

In Your Pocket claims that Zerillo's has the town's largest antipasti selection. While I'm not so sure about that, I can vouch that they are excellent. We had very good crostini there in summer with oh-so-good tomatoes and just a week ago, an antipasti platter with a selection of their best and finest, all finger-licking yummy.

But wait before you fill yourself up on the appetizers and leave room for a main course! The portions are *big*, the salads are salads (if you know what I mean -- it's hard to find good salads in the Balkans) and I've yet to order something that I didn't sigh over with delight. The pasta is always al dente, a very important point in an Italian restaurant.

Finish with a panna cotta... finally a panna cotta that doesn't have the consistency of a brick. I heard the other desserts are also good but I always end up taking the panna cotta anyhow. It's just so good.

What's left? Oh, good wines, good service. The prices are high-ish for Romanian standards but the food is worth it.

Very recommended.

Thanksigiving Dinner

Turkey, that's American. Cranberry sauce, that's very American -- I don't know anyone else who eats cranberry sauce. But Claudia made it as a sort of relish with currants, and our guests (Romanians and Germans) seemed to like it just fine.

The wine -- there was a lot of wine -- was mixed, Romanian reds and a sweet Serbian white and good old Montenegrin Vranac. When we lived in Belgrade we drank a lot of Vranac. It's not great wine, it's not even very good wine, but it's extremely okay wine, if you get what I mean. We drank all but our last bottle.

Then we had some Palinka. That's a Romanian plum brandy. Home-made, poured out of a soda bottle into little thick glasses. It doesn't go down easy, at least not for me. But once it hits your stomach it makes itself at home, if you know what I mean.

(Oh, and Miller Genuine Draft. This is a horrible American beer; one American guest brought a few bottles as a joke. But the Romanians drank it and claimed to like it. Afterwards Claudia said they were kidding. Maybe.)

Mashed potatoes, those aren't particularly American or anything else -- everyone eats mashed potatoes. But the next day, Claudia used the leftovers to make a sort of_kartoffelpuffen_, potato pancake thingies, very German. And very tasty.

And gravy, of course. Germans do gravy too, but the Romanians don't seem to much. ("It's like a sauce made from meat. And then you pour it over, um, more meat.") Same thing with stuffing; Germans do it, Romanians not. Which seems a little odd; if you have chickens, surely...? But it was good stuffing, bread-celery-apple-chestnut with sage. Everybody had seconds.

(Have we ever mentioned our spice rack here? No? Well, as a wedding present, our friend James gave us sixty jars of spices. Common ones like cinnamon and parsley, less common ones like sage and turmeric and mace, strange ones like asafoetida. The spice rack got a good workout yesterday.)

Corn. Sauteed mushrooms with onions. Salad. Rolls. Apple pie, chocolate cake.

Guests arrived at five, we started eating around 6:30, the last bit of wine was drunk around midnight.

I didn't marry her for her cooking, by the way. But I could have.

Elections in Croatia (more)

Just wanted to add -- for those who are still interested, our friend Dragan Antulov's Draxblog has some interesting analysis of the elections. Dragan lives in Split, Croatia, and he's a long-time observer of the political scene there.

Here's an excerpt:

"I'm not optimist. This all looks like wishful thinking. After September 11th 2001 USA and the rest of Western world forgot about Balkans. Their governments consider all of the regional problems solved – Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo elected "moderate, pro-Western and democratic" governments in 2000, refugees are returning, borders are being open, market reforms are improving living standards, media is free from hate-speech, war crimes suspects are being handed over to Hague tribunal or tried in domestic courts, former warriors are becoming champions of peaceful cooperation etc. Whenever something happens that doesn't fit this rosy picture, it is ignored and disregarded as something of little or no importance. When guerrilla war continues in Macedonia, it is regarded as "glorified border smuggling". When Serbian prime minister gets gunned down, it is the "desperate act of small band of die-hard ultra-nationalists". When nationalists win in Bosnia (parties that dominate Bosnian national assembly are same ones that led country into the war) they are "reformed".

"Why should victory of Ivo Sanader be treated any worse? Since his party replaced "pro-Western moderate democratic" forces on fair, free and democratic elections, it should too be regarded as "pro-Western and moderate", because everything else should indicate that West failed in Croatia between 2000 and 2003."

There's a lot more, and it's interesting stuff. Go see.

Sunday in the Park with Alan

Sunday morning I took Alan to Kisheleff Park. We got there early, and nobody else was around yet. Except for the women with rakes, the men with shovels, and the bulldozer.

By pure coincidence, that was the morning the Parks Department chose for picking up the leaves. Which is done by means of a lot of people with rakes (all female), a smaller group of people with shovels (all male), a big truck, and a bulldozer.

So there was this bulldozer with a scoop attachment, vrooooming around the playground, swerving to avoid the swings and the seesaws, grunting to a halt by the slide. While the men with shovels scooped up the piles of leaves that the women with rakes had raked together, and dumped them into the bulldozer's scoop, so that it could dump them into the truck.

Alan went into a sort of trance state.

I mean, a bulldozer and a big truck, right there on the playground. It just doesn't get better than that.

Elections in Croatia

This blog is mostly about our lives here in Romania, so I don't post much about political stuff. But the elections in Croatia affect some friends of ours, and they're at least indirectly relevant to what goes on here in Romania. So I think a brief comment is in order.

Croatia just held Parliamentary elections, and the big winner was the Croatian Democratic Union ("HDZ"). HDZ is the party that ran Croatia during the 1990s, and it was closely associated with a variety of bad things -- massive corruption, paranoid xenophobic nationalism, the ethnic cleansing of Croatia's Serbs. HDZ was kicked out of office in 2000, and nobody expected it to come back. But it has.

On the positive, or anyway less negative, side, HDZ has been acting like a good boy for the last couple of years. Most of the egregiously corrupt leaders of the 1990s left the party after 2000 (often because it could no longer protect and enrich them). And the new HDZ leader, a Mr. Sanader -- who will probably be Croatia's next Prime Minister -- has said that HDZ has dissociated itself from "any radicalism, extremism, or xenophobia". Mr. Sanader claims that HDZ is now modelled on German and Austrian moderate-conservative parties like the Christian Democrats.

Should we be worried? Well, my impression is that this was in large part a protest vote. Most Croatian voters were sick of the feeble coalition that was elected in 2000; its half-hearted attempts at reform seem to have alienated both conservatives and progressives, without actually accomplishing much on the ground. So I don't think this shows a sudden lurch back towards paranoid nationalism. And nationalist parties aren't bad per se; a bunch of them got elected in Bosnia last year, and it seems to have had surprisingly little effect on the ground.

On the other hand, it's hard to view it as good news for the region. Just the name "HDZ", for most Serbs (and a few Croatians) is as negative as "Nazi". And while the new HDZ has said that it will respect the rights of minorities, and welcomes the return of Serb refugees, it also says that it won't extradite any Croatians to the Hague. Since Croatian courts have not done a great job of convicting Croats accused of ethnic atrocities and war crimes, this is not language calculated to make minorities comfortable,

(If you're really interested in this topic, BTW, you can find a couple of good articles at Transitions Online, which is a consistent source of good information and analysis on the region. Read 'em now, because they'll be restricted to subscribers only after a week.)

The next elections in the region are in Serbia, by the way -- December 28. Nationalists are expected to win big there too. Watch this space.

Comparatives

Our preparations for Turkey Day are well under way. We'll have a minimum of eight guests, maybe as many as 11. That means a big turkey. I discussed that with my friend Natalie from DC on the phone yesterday. I told her that I wasn't able to find a turkey that was more than 4 kilos (about 9 pounds). She marveled that turkeys even came that small.

I have this silly little joke about the States that I use on Doug all the time. Since everything in the States is bigger, faster, louder than anywhere else, I call the US "The Land of Er".

It's a problem that turkeys are smaller here in Europe. So we are going to have two. That's the European solution, I guess.

If I ran the zoo...

... things would be different.

Well, yes. That's because I'm not a zoo person. Most of the times, I just feel very sorry for the animals and that's a gut feeling I can't control. Don't give me the arguments about the conservation of species -- if I see a tiger in a cage, I feel bad for him.

Let's begin at the beginning, though. It was Saturday morning, a glorious sunny day, we had two restless kids on our hands and decided it was the perfect occasion to visit the zoo.

We were prepared for the worst and were pleasantly surprised. The Bucharest Zoo is tucked away in a green, foresty area at the northern end of Bucharest (Baneasa). It's very pleasant out there and has a distinct country feel to it. That is, if you don't venture into the huge construction site that is the residential area of Baneasa and Pipera -- but that's besides the point here.

We arrived early, at about 10 o'clock. The zoo had opened its doors only an hour earlier and there weren't that many cars around. We couldn't spot a parking area, so we just parked our car alongside the road - which turned out to be the parking area because we were charged 30,000 Lei (about 80 European cents) for two hours parking by an authentic looking guy with authentic looking parking stubs.

Another 30,000 Lei brought us into the zoo. Compared to Belgrade, this zoo is, well, rather nice. Much less concrete than the Belgrade zoo, much more metal -- see picture.

(Again, these are thumbnails. Click on the picture to view a larger version.)

The arrangement of animals seemed to me rather eclectic. It started out with flamingos and pelicans, peasants and other birds, then one sort of ran into the tiger cage, to the left were more tigers, a lion, bears, the monkey house (complete with snakes and birds), the reptile house (nice and warm) which also served as a warming station for various homeless dogs.

Since we were early, we came in time for breakfast. This was interesting, gruesome and horrible all at the same time. In the reptile house, the black tegu had two little baby mice in his breakfast dish -- live ones, trying to cuddle together for warmth. I nearly threw up. (Those who know me know that I don't mind gore per se. But to see those helpless little mammals and this stony, expressionless reptile... maybe it's because I'm still nursing.)

The crocodile was cool. It heard the wardens come and scuttled to the door, expecting his breakfast. Imagine his surprise when he was repeatedly whacked on his head with a big hook-on-a-stick contraption and driven back into his pitiful little pond. Then the animal keeper came in and fished the remains of his last dinner, or lunch, or breakfast from the day earlier out of the water. It was eery to watch - like Animal Planet live. The croc stalked him. Doug kept mumbling "watch your back, better watch your back". In the end, nothing happened and the crocodile didn't get breakfast. I guess you have to clear your plate to get more, or something like that. Alan was enthralled. I don't think you can see something like that in a Western Zoo.

We walked down a beautiful alley with more iron fences on each side -- emus next to sheep and lamas and goats.

Interestingly enough, the wolves were kept in cages between the Vietnamese and wooly pigs. One cage wolf, one cage pigs, one cage wolf... I don't know for whom this arrangement was more stressful - the wolves who hear but can't hunt the pigs or the pigs which can smell the wolves but can't run.

In general, the zoo is a bit rundown - rusting metal and crumbling concrete, the cages are small and not exactly equipped with a lot of imaginative interior design, some of the animals don't seem so healthy (one of the parrots is ripping out his feathers, the largers mammals are striding back and forth in their cages in a decidedly odd fashion) but on the whole, we like the zoo fine. It's popular too, because there were a lot of people around. Also, it has quite a range of animals for a small zoo.

I don't think we saw quite the entire collection but Alan started to suffer from brain overstimulation. Most of the times, he sat on his Daddy's shoulders, his mouth hanging open with fascination. We decided it was time to get him to bed for his nap.

When we left, we almost stepped into an evil trap -- traders who sell anything from toy guns over Barbie dolls to balloons and dusters (dusters, you say? I don't know why myself) had set up their stands along the road in front of the zoo. Judging from the kids we'd seen inside the zoo, clutching all sorts of cheap toys, they generally make good business.

Some bare facts on the zoo:

It was first set up as two zoos, one in Bucharest proper and this one in Baneasa, in 1955. In 1962, all the animals had been moved to Baneasa and the zoo became the "Bucharest Zoological Garden". It's almost 6 ha big and houses over 800 animals - mammals, reptiles and birds. Almost half the animals are exotic, the rest are local animal like deer, sheep and various birds.

I'm sure we'll be back. Alan loved it, after all. (Although he was really scared of the elephant.)

Hmm...

If Romania is not getting ready for an imminent war, or preparing for Bush or the Pope to visit, then my next guess is that they are practising for a huge military display on December 1, Romania's national day.

For two days now, soldiers grace the streets everywhere, fighter planes and choppers thunder over our house frequently and I've never seen so much police since we arrived.

Our maid and nanny don't know what this is about. Does anyone else?

Brain Freeze

Romanians are really nice people -- the ones I met and talked to, anyhow -- and they have the saddest stories to tell. One of those stories I just heard this morning, from the nurse at our family doctor's office (yes, we have one now).

She's a charming woman, looks a bit like a pixie with blonde hair and a sparkle in her eyes. Her English is excellent and fluent. So I asked her how she came to speak so well.

Well. She had a scholarship for a nursing school in Dallas, TX, and got her degree there. She was full of high hopes and daring dreams when she came back to Romania with her newly minted degree as a scrub nurse.

The first setback came when she had to realize that the Romanian Medical Board doesn't recognize the professional title of a "scrub nurse". Her diploma was not accepted.

She bit her way through somehow (mind you, all the while she was telling me this story, she poked needles into me; skillfully but they were needles), and got to work at the Floreasca Emergency Hospital. She came to be responsible for all the surgery rooms and was to teach the other nurses how to scrub in. More walls: the nurses didn't want to do such a lowly job. She failed yet again.

Then, she and some of her friends from the nursing school in Dallas (I think it was Baylor) had the idea of founding a nursing school here in Romania. Well, that one went down the drain because this time the doctors didn't like the idea. Nurse practioners, eh. The doctors didn't want any competition.

She tried various other projects and ran smack against walls, yet she is still full of ideas. She works with orphanages -- donates her vacation time to work there -- and is still thinking of getting some form of advanced degree.

How is Romania ever to get out of the swamp if she constantly builds up walls for her brightest and most ambitious people to run against?

A Visit to the Senate

I visited the Romanian Senate last week. I was there to testify before the Senate Committee on the Budget, which was reviewing the new draft Fiscal Code. (Did anyone actually want to know that? I don't talk about my job much here, in part because I doubt too many of you are interested. Anyhow.)

The Senate is the upper chamber of the Romanian Parliament, and it's not supposed to be where it is. I mean, it's supposed to be in the House of Parliament -- that's the huge building that used to be Ceaucescu's Palace of the People. After Ceausescu fell, the Romanians couldn't think of a better use for it, so they decided to move their Parliament into it. And the Chamber of Deputies -- that's the lower chamber of Parliament, equivalent to our House of Representatives -- moved there in 1996.

But the Senate hasn't. They don't want to. They want to stay where they are.

Where they are is a different big building altogether. It's the former headquarters of Romania's Communist Party, downtown on Piatsa Universitii.

Now, it's easy to lump all large public buildings from the Communist period together (big, ugly, inefficient), but in fact they are not all alike. And while the former CP headquarters is not an attractive building, I can see why the Senators prefer it.

Most obviously, it's in a much nicer location. Step out of the Palace of Parliament, and you're on a hilltop in the middle of nowhere, with a ten minute walk to the nearest place you can buy cigarettes. Step out of the Senate building, and you're on a bustling plaza full of shops, kiosks, restaurants, and busy students from the nearby University.

But it's also just a better space for the work of a Parliamentary body. The Palace of the People was originally designed for... well, for Ceausescu. It was supposed to be a joint government/party headquarters, and maybe some sort of convention center as well. The Palace wasn't designed with the convenience of the Senate (or anyone else) in mind.

But the inside of the Senate building is... well, "nice" might be overstating. But it's not actively horrible, and it is sort of interesting. It was built in the 1950s, at a time when Communism was still trying to reconcile its Spartan revolutionary tradition with its grandiose ambitions. In the case of the Senate building, the interesting compromise was to eliminate all decoration, but make everything about 25% bigger than normal.

Really. Ceilings are three meters high. Corridors are wide, wide enough to drive a car down -- much wider than in the US Senate buildings. Doors tend to be double and immense. It's like a building designed for a race of seven-foot-tall ogres.

I don't imagine it's the most practical use of space, but you know, it was sort of charming.

Mind, it's possible to take this sort of thing too far. The elevator was also large. But it had a brass bar welded to its sides -- its walls? what do you call the inside of an elevator? -- parallel to the door, at waist height. That is, the elevator was cut in two; you could walk into the front part, but not into the back. The bar was well worn and looked like it had been there for a while.

Why is that, I asked our guide. She didn't seem to hear me. I cleared my throat and asked again, a little louder. She muttered something and looked away.

"It's because the elevator motor isn't strong enough to lift the elevator when it's full," said my deputy.

"What?"

"The motor's not strong enough, so they can't ever fill the elevator. So they welded the bar to prevent people from crowding inside."

I couldn't think of anything to say to that. I still can't. Moving right along.

Construction Site

There's a construction site right down the street from us. They just finished knocking down the buildings that used to stand there, and now they're digging a big hole in the ground. Bulldozers, backhoes, trucks filled with dirt.

It's very similar to a construction site in America, except for this: it's wide open. There's no fence, no gate, nothing. You can walk in off the street and wander around, and as long as you don't get in anybody's way, nobody seems to care.

Do I have to tell you how much Alan loves this construction site? I go in there with him on my shoulders, and we watch bulldozers pushing dirt around, and backhoes dumping gravel, and big trucks gunning their engines (Vroom! VROOOM!!) and he is absolutely transfixed. Clings to my hair with one hand, bounces up and down on my shoulders, points with the other: "Vroom vroom! Vroom vroom!!"

Yes, I'm very careful. And yes, I like it too.

Vroom vroom.

Chinese gooseberries

Since he was eating solids, Alan hated kiwis. We don't really know why -- and who knows anything when it comes to a toddler's food preferences, anyway? He hated them, didn't want anything to do with them, so we dropped them from his menu. Once in a while, I would buy some and try again, to no avail. Whatever he didn't like about them was hard-wired.

Or so it seemed.

We had another trial yesterday, and lo and behold!, he loved them. Absolutely loved them. Doug instantly evolved a new game which involves a lot of yelling "Chiiiiiineeeeeeessssssse Gooooooooooseberry!". Talk about encouraging a toddler to speak and giving him easy words to pronounce.

(If you don't know what the Chinese gooseberry has to do with kiwis, click here or here.)

If you have a toddler somewhere in your life, you'll understand how enthusiastic we are that he finally succumbed to these little vitamin bombs. His eating habits are erratic at best. His dinner tonight: 0 quesadilla (rejected, firmly), 5 spoons of pasta with veggies, 2 kiwis, 18 olives, 3 cherry tomatoes.

It's a diet of sorts, I guess.

Life's getting busy

So our lives are getting busier. Alan is having a playgroup date every week now, although his brother had to stand in for him on the first date because Alan still has this green stuff coming out of his nose and I didn't want to introduce myself with a highly contagious mite. Playgroup is on Wednesdays and/or Fridays at the American School in Piperi.

(And that is worth a post in its own right! It's a BIG school and truly a bit of the US brought to Romania. The art work, the design of the school, it all rings true of just another suburban school in, let's say, DC. Speaking of art work -- I really liked the one where the children had drawn monsters and described them with the help of an itemized list: "My name is ...", "I'm a ... monster", "I like to eat...", etc. One monsters description was "My name is Dad. I'm a scary monster. I like to eat pencils." Well.)

I found a gym of sorts nearby Piata Victoriei where I'm going to join Yoga classes and possibly, if I can physically endure it, Tae-Bo classes as well. It's been four months since David's birth and I better start getting (back) into shape again! :-)

We've made some friends and our social life is actually happening, sometimes. That all makes us feel more settled and at home and that is not a bad feeling at all. Oh, and we've started the Christmas decorations. I know, it's early. But Alan simply loves it and how could you resist that?

Modern Times

The worst thing the 20th century has done to parents and kids alike is jet lag. The worst thing you can do to your kids (and yourself) as parents in the 21st century is traveling over several time zones twice in eight days.

In VA, we had kids who woke up around 2:30, then 3:00, 4:00, 5:00, and finally a good 7:30. Needless to say, the 7:30 was on Saturday, a week and a day after our arrival and the day of our return.

Now we have kids who don't have any rhythm at all anymore.

David was up until midnight yesterday. He went to bed at his more usual 8 pm today but woke up twice, screeching. Alan is still awake, after a brief nap from 7:30 to 8:30 pm. It's now 11:00 pm. He's up since 8:30 am and had only a one-hour nap today. He should be tired. He is tired. But he's standing in his crib, and says "Mama, Mama, Mama" like a mantra. It's nerve-tearing. I am dead tired and want to go to bed. But we already had a meltdown toddler episode today so I'm not ready for a second one by just leaving him alone and shutting the door to his room.

Not quite ready. It may come to that, soon.

The next trip to the States -- maybe without the kids? Or in a decade or so? Or both? And what was I thinking that we could go to Bali for a vacation next year?

St. Martin's Day in Bucharest

In Germany, we don't celebrate Armistice or Veteran's Day. November 11 has two quite different meanings there: First, it's the beginning of the carnival season (at precisely 11:11 am) and second, it's St. Martin's Day. (For those who are not familiar with the entire palette of saints, here is a short description of the saint and the traditions surrounding the day.)

Well, it turned out that the German embassy here organizes a St. Martin's Day parade. Via a friend of a friend of the woman who did the organizing (Judith Urban from the Embassy and she did a great job!), I heard of it and volunteered. Hey, it was to be Alan's first St. Martin's parade! I was thrilled!

I ended up not doing much due to our untimely visit to the States a week before the event, but I did organise some electrical lampion sticks. Those are less romantic but much safer for kids than the traditional candles - imagine Alan with fire -- ugh!

So as the sun went down last night, about a hundred children (and their parents) gathered in our neighborhood before the "old" German embassy on Str. Rabat. The children all brought their lanterns, some store-bought, many self-made. The guards of the surrounding embassies were getting visibly uneasy about this mass of people on the street and only relaxed when two police cars showed up, complete with blinking lights and all, and made the whole thing officially sanctioned. Then the band arrived (three trumpeters wooed away from the Music School), started playing and off we were, walking down Str. Rabat.

It's a very German holiday, St. Martin's Day. Having it here should have felt strange. (Like, in Germany, we don't require police because everybody is prepared for children parading down the streets.) But it felt very familiar. One little girl dropped her lantern and it caught fire and she started to cry a little and, you know, there was always one kid who did that. I had some spare paper lanterns and electrical sticks ready and the tears stopped flowing. I'm a veteran, so to speak.

We paraded down the street, the singing was a bit thin, we stopped at one house (I forget who lives there but thanks anyhow) where the kids were supposed to sing (which they didn't do much) and collect sweets (which they did a lot) and finally ended up at the German embassy. The gates swung open and we entered the ultra-secure grounds, complete with high spiked walls and all. Doug was impressed by how easily he could have blown up the premises if he had been inclined to do so.

In the courtyard, there was a nice little bonfire and another round of singing. The band botched a little by cutting one song a verse short (so St. Martin never did give his cloak to the beggar that night) and extended another by a verse (so we repeated the first one, we're flexible). Hot spiced wine, hot spiced juice for the kids, and Weckmännle (human shaped dough things) warmed everyone up. After some socializing, the event ended at around 8 pm, lots of the kids being wired and hyper by that time. That also felt familiar.

It was very nice. A piece of home. And I must say that knowing we'll be doing this again next year, adds a certain something. It's been a while since we've known a year ahead where we would be living. It feels very... settled.

Anyhow. Thanks to Judith Urban, Petra Müller-Demary and my friend Hilke Gerdes. They all made this a very special day for the German kids in Bucharest, and for me.

PS: How did Alan like it, you wonder? He liked it fine. Rode on his Dad's shoulders most of the times, dropped his lantern (see! good thing it wasn't a real candle!), wolfed down his snickers bar and half of his Weckmännle, rejected the hot spiced juice, loved seeing all the kids. He especially loved the police cars with the blinking lights. "Vroom, vroom". Indeed.
David, btw, slept through the entire thing.

Air France Yes; Charles de Gaulle No

So we're back.

We flew Air France, and they were pretty good. Their baggage people tore a wheel off of our stroller, and we had to buy a new one, and then the new stroller got lost on the way back, but that's pretty much normal. The flight attendants were friendly and helpful, and that's what really counts. When you travel with a toddler and a baby, you need all the help you can get, and even little things like a smile can make you feel a lot better. We would fly Air France again...

...except, if we do that, we may end up in Charles De Gaulle airport again. And that would be bad. CDG is probably the nastiest large airport I've ever visited, and that is saying something.

It's incredibly user-hostile. To start with, there are five or six separate terminals, and going from one to another involves a long bus ride -- twenty minutes to half an hour in a bus, with luggage, baby and toddler.

Then when you get off the bus, you have to go up an escalator. But you can't use one of the baggage carts, because the escalator has been carefully designed to be half an inch narrower than the baggage cart. You can't take the elevator, because there isn't one. So you load luggage, baby and toddler onto the very narrow escalator...

...and the toddler needs a diaper change, badly. Very badly. Like, overflowing badly.

So you go to the ladies' room. Unfortunately, it has no facilities for changing diapers. (Note that this is not extremely advanced technology. We're talking about a flat surface, waist high; a trash can nearby is nice but optional.) There is literally no place in this airport, not one place, to change a diaper. (Presumably the architects were monks.) So the toddler goes flat on his back on the floor by the escalator.

Well, maybe things are better at the gate? No, they're not. You have to go through security to reach the gate area, and once you're there, you find... the gate, and some couches to sit on. There is no toilet at the gate -- if you need

to go, you must go back out through security -- nor any shops or news agents or, well, anything.

If you go back into the terminal, there are a lot of stores selling very expensive watches and perfume; but if you're hungry, or thirsty, or need coffee or a toilet or something to read, you're in for some difficulty. There's noplace to eat or drink in this large terminal except for one crowded coffee stand selling $5 coffees. There's noplace to buy snacks or a book or a magazine; you can get a $300 bottle of perfume, but not chewing gum or a copy of the Economist. And there's one toilet serving twenty gates, and it's not clean. At all.

Not really a nice place to spend three hours, from six to nine in the morning, between flights.

(Oh, and when your plane finally loads, there's another bus ride, from gate to plane. Nothing like another load-and-unload cycle to make you feel welcome.)

What makes this particularly annoying is that De Gaulle is an airport of flamboyant and intrusive architecture. Everything is either concrete or glass or metal, and there are lots of great swooping curves of the sort that architects in the '60s and '70s thought were soooo cool.

Just for fun, I googled a little to find out whether we were alone in our opinion of this horrible airport. See for yourself.

But anyhow, we're back. And happy to be here.