Mr Creosote rides again

1 Commentfood, travel

For foodies, a quick run-down of eateries so far…

Crown Candy Kitchen is a candy store cum soda fountain cum diner which opened in 1913 and which hasn’t changed dramatically since. There are only a few booths, more like tiny wooden cubicles, and if there are more than four of you, you might as well head elsewhere. Likewise if you don’t like queuing for a table you might as well head elsewhere. The extraordinary thing about this is that Crown Candy is in a pretty desolate corner of town, north of Downtown. Millions of dollars have just been spent by the city in at attempt to rejuvenate the area and nearby there are lots of old stores that have been spiffily renovated but which currently stand empty, waiting to be occupied by boutiques and art galleries. Personally I wish they were becoming shops that actually serve the immediate neighbourhood, like bakeries and butchers, but that doesn’t seem likely. …

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Zing zing zing went my heartstrings

1 Commentopera, travel

This is my idea of a good trip. The biggest factor in that is that I’m not here to work; Lucy is. It isn’t that often that I’m free for the duration of one of her jobs, or vice versa, and more often than not we’ll spend weeks thousands of miles apart. I could have stayed in England, watering the garden, being a Saddo and pottering about at home, but it seemed infinitely more sensible to come to St Louis and have, you know, a married life.
Lucy is singing three cameo roles in John Adam’s “The Death of Klinghoffer” for the Opera Theatre so it’s not as if she should be rehearsing a great deal, nor does she have the pressure of a major role to worry about. Unlike most companies the Opera Theatre doesn’t work downtown but out on a university campus to the west of the city. They perform four operas, all in English, over about a month and that’s it for the season.…

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Packed

travel

I’m a good packer. I make no bones about bragging about that. I have sought ways over the years to whittle down my travel necessities to a tidy minimum. Advances in technology have helped enormously. Sixteen years ago, if I was going abroad for any length of time, I would pack in my suitcase a small Canon printer and a fax machine. It seems extraordinary now, but back then email was in its infancy. We had no home computer. Who did? Who had a mobile phone? Barely anyone I knew. Who had a laptop before 1995? Back then, they were the preserve of the very rich or high-flying businessmen. …

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The economy option

2 Commentssingers, travel

Two days ago I shared a photo of my hotel room in Berlin on Facebook. It’s a small room, about 8′ wide, with a single bed, a desk, an armchair, a sink and a cupboard.  And a small welcome pack of gumi bears on the pillow.
I posted the photo asking friends to hazard a guess as to who was paying for my hotel expenses; me or the promoter of the concert. Plenty of people cracked jokes about the size of the room (and the gumi bears) but no-one actually took the plunge and guessed. Or if they did, they didn’t say so.
It isn’t the easiest call to make. Some promoters are more generous than others and in these straitened times the five-star treatment on concert trips is less likely. But I’ll come clean. I booked the room. …

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