Family Vacay VII: Day 6--Return to Hyde Park

We stayed in the "Green Room" of the beautiful Hamlin House, a Bread and Breakfast in Hyde Park that is a ten-minute walk from campus--closer to the University of Chicago than any other accommodations I could find. The house was built in 1905 for opera singer George Hamlin, and "The Green Room" was actually multiple rooms that occupied the entire 3rd floor of the house.

The description of the BnB online did not sound kid-friendly, so we tried to be super quiet.

I got up early before the kids were ready to go out, so I walked to campus by myself, made a visit to the Master's Program in the Humanities office--which had moved downstairs since it was my administrative home base. I also visited the Admissions Office and had a one-on-one meeting with someone on the admissions board. I learned that the U of C accepts 6% of its applicants, and you can apply without submitting an ACT score of any kind (a trend at many top universities). The guy I talked to also told me that you are not allowed to declare a major until your junior year because they want students to fully explore the liberal arts curriculum (but the student who gave me and Emilio a tour disputed that assertion).

When I got back to the house, we headed out. Our first destination: 5345 S. Harper, which was graduate school housing when I enrolled at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1998 (it looks like it is just rental apartments now). This was the first home Mari and I had together in the U.S. Though we didn't realize it at the time, we were living just a few blocks away from the Obamas.

Our first summer in Chicago was HOT. A Chicago friend told us we didn't need to buy an AC window unit. This was terrible advice. There was no cross-breeze in our apartment and the parking lot to the east of the apartment would just start baking in the morning and seemed to radiate heat throughout the night.

It was all worth it. Graduating from the University of Chicago is one of my proudest accomplishments. I wrote my master's thesis on Bertolt Brecht and pedagogical theory at 5345 S. Harper. And I did the work that got me admission into the doctoral program at the University of Chicago, and generous fellowship offers into doctoral programs at the University of Michigan, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Illinois at Chicago (the winner).

And Mari got her first teaching job in the U.S. while we were here.  She taught first grade at Blaine Elementary on the opposite side of Chicago, so she had a long, hard commute.

We lived here!

On our neighborhood walk, we learned that the Seminary Co-Op supermarket has closed.  So has our favorite neighborhood restaurant--Dixie Kitchen (best fried green tomatoes ever).
Our next destination: the University of Chicago campus. The room above is one of the university's many cafeterias.

The Quad was covered with students enjoying the sunshine and studying. It was idyllic--an advertisement for the life of the mind.

While Mari, Nina, and Pablo returned to the 57th Street Bookstore (we'd already spent some time there together), Emilio and I took a campus tour led by a University of Chicago undergrad from New Jersey (more on that at Emiliosdad.blogspot.com).


I took most of my classes in the building behind the kids, including two with some of my academic heroes: my independent studies class with Gerald Graff (I was the only student he taught that semester!) and the course on Modernism taught by Terry Eagleton (I took full advantage of his office hours!).


People change--kids especially--and labels can become self-fulfilling prophecies. I subscribe to the Growth Mindset school of development, which emphasizes curiosity and hard work. With that caveat, I would say that, at present, Emilio is best positioned to have the grades and standardized test scores to get him into a place like the U of C, Nina is the one who would have the easiest time transitioning to life away from home in the big city, and Pablo is the one who would most enjoy the U of C's culture of argument and independent study.
 
When I studied at the University of Chicago, I never visited the Oriental Institute Museum, which seems strange to me now. Even though I was 31-years-old when I graduated from the U of C, I think my interests now are broader than they were then. Writing A History of the World for the kids helped in that respect.

That's ancient Sumerian cuneiform writing behind Nina who is reading a National Book Award Finalist from 2016 in the photo above.

The Human-Headed Winged Bull  in the photo above was excavated by the Oriental Institute between 1928-1935. It formed part of the Palace of Sargon II (721–705 BC) at Khorsabad, which is 10 miles north of Mosul in Kurdistan Iraq.
  One of these looks like an ancient plant stand.

Before leaving the campus, we checked out the spot where Enrico Fermi and his colleagues engineered the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction on December 2, 1942. We saw an art exhibit by Liz Magor that featured rat skins (yuk!).

After we left the campus, we ate at Medici on 57th Street.

I still had some walk in me at the end of the day, so Pablo and I returned to the campus at night. It seemed like every block or so there was a security guard, standing under a blue light. We talked to some of them. We also checked out the Regenstein Library--which was packed with students, studying hard. We walked back and forth across the Midway and stopped to listen to a student pianist through the open window of the first-floor rehearsal room where she was practicing.  We applauded, and she turned around and smiled at us before we walked on.

Day Four: The Beach!

We planned our arrival in L.A. to avoid rush hour, but I wasn't prepared for the gusty winds on highway ten as we came through the mountains on the western edge of the desert. Fortunately, we made all the turns we needed to make to get to the Garden Grove house of my first friend: Jennifer Richardson, whom I met at age three, when our dads were in graduate school at the University of Texas. After our visit, Jennifer posted several photos of us taken over the years, which I have downloaded and will put in a separate post dedicated to them on this blog.

Jennifer lives close to Huntington Beach (Surf City!), so soon after we arrived, we picked up veggie hotdogs, marshmallows, and other cookout provisions and headed for the coast.

Nina was a little bit excited to get to the water.


So were the boys.

We had been assured that the water was too cold for swimming, and there was also a rip tide advisory. But after the kids got their feet wet and showed no signs of freezing, we knew from experience that even a wading restriction would soon produce a full body soaking, so we told them to change into their suits.

Pablo, sensibly, was the first to find creative beach play alternatives to the Blue Foot Challenge.

Nina and Emilio played the game depicted below for a long time. It basically involves standing still while enduring an attack from successive waves of cold. I call it the "Tiananmen Hero" game.

Sam and Morgan drove more than an hour across L.A. to meet us at Bolsa Chica State Park as soon as we contacted them.
Morgan was the first to volunteer to help bury Pablo in the sand.

Jennifer brought beach paddles that Emilio and I played with for a while before I retired and handed my paddle off to Nina.

Jennifer brought multiple fold-up chairs, and we were soon joined by a cast of friends from Jen's cohort group in a Master's in Fine Arts (Acting) program at California State University at Long Beach. After working together for two years, they were all graduating on Friday of that week.
It came as a surprise to exactly no one that these actors who know each other well and want to be a teachers were a fun bunch.
Pablo is serious about roasting marshmallows, though he isn't a particular fan of eating them.

One of the highlights of the trip for Pablo must have been the enthusiastically received fireside stand-up comic set he did comprised entirely of favorite bits from the collected works of Jim Gaffigan.

A chilly Morgan consented to wrap himself in the bedspread we brought with us.

While Pablo collected giggles, Emilio and Jen's partner Pam wrote their names in the paddle board record books.

Nina was the last one in the water.

Grand Tour, Day 1: Madrid Monday

Our 8 hour, 45 minute flight landed on time, at 8:35 a.m. We covered a lot of moving walkways and a couple of staircases after leaving the plane, but customs was a breeze. We were happy to see that all of our suitcases arrived and happier still to find Jaime and Maria Rosa waiting for us at the exit. They had decided it would be more convenient for the seven of us to ride to their house in a rented bus than to try to navigate the public transportation system with all of our luggage.

We felt like rock stars.

Emi rode by me and Jaime at the front of the bus, and he was all questions on the ride into town. Everything he saw seemed new and different. His reaction reminded me a lot of my first bus ride in Europe when the group I was traveling with left the Amsterdam airport. That was in 1982. One of our chaperones joked that I was going to use all of my film up before we even got to the hotel.

He was a buzzkill.

At Jaime and Maria Rosa's house, Pablo looks for Puerta de Toledo on the globe.  Stop #1: The neighborhood panaderia.

After breakfast, Jaime, Mari, Emi and I took the bus to the Atocha train station to see if we could make the train reservations we were unable to make online. We waited in line for a very long time. I asked at the information desk if we needed to have our passports in order to make reservations and was assured that we did not. But when we finally made it to the ticket window, we were told "no," we couldn't make the booking without our passports.

Ugh.

We headed home for lunch and then Team 131 took the bus again to the neighborhoods Mari and I lived in when we met in January 1991.

On the street where she lived (Doce de Octubre): la plaza de Mafalda.

Infamous site of my one and only street fight.

3A: I showed up here for our first date. We left from here to attend our wedding ceremony in Chinchón.
During my second year teaching in Madrid (1990-1991), I lived in an apartment in this building on Narvaez which I shared with two other American ESL teachers (two women), and during my third year I lived in the same apartment with a different teacher and one of my former students (two men). I believe my apartment was on the fifth floor. Living less than two blocks away from Mari's apartment was very convenient.

Portrait of Felipe IV (1632-33)
by Diego Velasquez

From 1990-1992, I walked home from work through El Retiro park, which was just two blocks away from the Fundacion Ponce de Leon, where I worked from 1989-1993. Some of my favorite walks home were those made with Gerardo at the end of the day that led to delicious suppers at Doce de Octubre.

El Retiro began its life in 1632 as a a royal retreat that included a palace built for Felipe IV (at left) outside the eastern city limits of Madrid. It soon became a center of 17th century court life.

The general public was given access to the park grounds by Carlos III in 1767.

The royal palace in el Retiro was destroyed during the Peninsular Wars (1807-1814), when Napoleon put his older brother onto the Spanish throne.

El Parque del Buen Retiro became the property of the city of Madrid when a revolution ousted Isabella the II from power in 1868.

I did not have this information to share with the kids on our walk through the Retiro, nor did I have an internet connection that would allow me to access it. But I resolved that throughout our trip I would pay attention to the world I could see with my eyes and leave internet information searches for stateside blogging sessions--like the one that is producing this post.

It was in El Retiro that Mari and I first discussed getting married.

Mari also told us that she was once mugged in El Retiro. As she tells the story, the experience produced more annoyance than fear.

I ordered horchata, a sweet, milk-like drink made from tiger nuts (earth almonds?) that is served cold.  My good friends at Wikipedia tell me that horchata originated in Valencia when the coastal city was populated by Muslims (between the 8th and 13th centuries) and by El Cid (between 1095 and 1099).

This sculpture--"Cubos de la Memoria" (1987) by Agustin Ibarrola--was installed in el Retiro in the same year that I first came to the Spanish capital as an undergraduate, but I don't remember noticing it until I decided to take photos of my kids climbing on it. Ibarrola was imprisoned in Burgos between 1962 and 1964, and again between 1967 and 1973 because of his militant communism, but I suspect that during Franco's regime any old communism would have sufficed.

The Palacio de Cristal (in the background) was built in 1882, during the reign of Isabella the 2nd's son, Alfonso XII (1874-1885). It is modeled on the Palace built for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London--the first in a series of World Fairs that became popular in the 19th century. Madrid's Palacio de Cristal showcased plants from the Philippines, which had not yet achieved its independence.  The year that it was built, 22-year-old Filipino Jose Rizal moved to Madrid from the Philippines (without his parents' knowledge or consent) in order to study opthamology at la universidad Complutense. I wonder if Rizal visited the recently built palace to check out the Filipino flowers and ferns on display there.

After Rizal began practicing medicine, he became a novelist and an outspoken advocate for Filipino independence. In 1896, the Spanish colonial government condemned him for rebellion, sedition, and conspiracy, and he was executed.
After Alfonso XII died in 1885, his widow Maria Cristina served as regent until 1902, when her son--the future Alfonso XIII--came of age. The same year that her son took the throne, Maria Cristina requested that a monument to her husband be built in el Retiro. Finished in 1922, the monument overlooks the park's Great Pond, which had been around since the royal park was first constructed for Felipe IV in 1632. That's Alfonso XII on his horse on the pedestal behind the RBs in the photo above.

In the fall of 1989, I started my first salaried job as a teacher of  English as a Second Language at the Fundacion Ponce de Leon at 18 Lagasca street in Madrid. The school is now closed, but the doorway is behind the tree on the right side of this picture.
I walked through these doors on the day I taught my first classes in September 1989 and walked out these doors after teaching my last class there in the summer of 1993.

I met Maria Jose here in January 1991. For me, it was love at first sight.

This is the Metro stop closest to the school. It also serves as a tunnel for pedestrians who want to go to el Retiro. I think Pablo believed there was something sinister about it.

After we returned to the Retiro, and the kids got popsicles and ice cream from a street vendor, we took the bus back to Jaime and Maria Rosa's house.

Jet lag hit Pabi first.

Then it got Mari.
We had supper at home, found out that Emilio left his Kindle on the airplane, and then went to bed.