Kathlyn Clore

My Facebook Friends, also known as the people I used to see every day before I/they moved, are doing big things.

Specifically, they’re moving to New York.

And I don’t get it.

Much like Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s legendary novel, I am curious about the lifestyle of people who live in New York… But unlike Carraway, I feel no pull toward the supposed glitz and glam of the five boroughs.

As a native Midwesterner, when I think of New York, I think of a teeming hub of “eastcoasters.” Eastcoasters, to this Midwesterner anyway, are known to be stuck up, unnecessarily snobby and think the world revolves around their time zone. When I call someone an “eastcoaster,” I don’t mean to compliment them.

What’s odd about this prejudice - and I know it is one - is that I can get excited about visiting just about anywhere. I’ve visited 17 countries in the past five years. I’m ready to travel just about any time, any where. I have a deep-seeded love of luggage, phrasebooks and airports.

“The city that never sleeps” entered my life as “the place young and hip adults go to try to make it” during college. Specifically, if you wanted to be a magazine journalist, our professors told us, you have to go to New York City. A few friends moved there after graduation, with nothing but their caps and gowns, and whined about the rent prices for a while until they found jobs and settled in. I didn’t really find this striking at the time; I also moved to a part of the country, to South Carolina. It came with its own set of intrigues.

Then, during my first year as a sports reporter there below the Bible Belt, a very cool-but-unassuming features writer in her mid-20s announced, after much lamenting over the math section of the GRE, that she planned to move there to attend graduate school at NYU. She planned to study publishing.

The editor-in-chief of our paper, a delightful editor who was everything a beginning journalist could want - he barked awkward orders, wore suspenders and spectacles, and typed with his head down, hunched over his keyboard as he hunted and pecked across the keyboard - told the features editor that if he were a journalist in his 20s, moving to New York is exactly what he would do, too.

I looked on at her going-away party with the envy of a wanderluster, my inner vagabond stirred. But not shaken.

I have no family connections to New York. In fact, two people in particular convinced me during my early 20s to shrug off the Big Apple. And shrug off I have.

“If you love London, then you’ll hate New York. And vice versa,” said a friend of mine who studied in London a year before I did. Her family had some East Coast leanings, but she lived her childhood and teen years.

I love London. So I’ll apparently find New York big and impersonal. This advice has hung around my mind to this day, even five years after my 6-month stay in London, a city about which I believe Samuel Johnson is quite right.

“It’s like three Chicagos melded into one. It’s a mess. Way too big,” my mom said after my family went without me - I was a committed intern at Chicagoland Golf magazine at the time - to New York City for a convention related to my father’s work.

I love Chicago. I grew up in the suburbs and still usually mean Chicago when uttering the words “the city.” I love its neighborhoods, gorgeous skyline, Polish heritage. I love its accent, its pizza, its hot dogs. Its River, its lake-effect breezes. Its sports teams, its history, its mayor… Everything. Love it.

But three Chicagos? That would be a bit much. My mother made New York sound like a city that doesn’t know when to stop - kind of like its inhabitants.

But my friend the features writer, the one who moved to start grad school, began posting on Facebook about the grittiness of New York and its abundance of coolness about five seconds after she moved there.

Fast forward a year later, and I’ve moved to Maastricht, the Netherlands, trading South Carolina for the south of Holland and an editing gig. (I told you I love to travel).

In my first year in Maastricht, two more friends from that first newsroom moved to New York. I don’t recall who went first, but one copy editor went with a job secured and another reporter moved to Brooklyn with no job secured.

More photos, inside jokes and pop culture references to the gritty coolness of New York started to scrawl across my Facebook wall. This was exacerbated by friends and acquaintances who had moved to New York City after graduation and had gotten their second jobs by now, posting their daily updates from more noteworthy publications now.

I admit, sometimes I wonder… But really, feel no pull. Chicago, London, San Francisco, Barcelona, Berlin, Istanbul, Riga, Prague, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Hong Kong, Beiruit… Say the word, and I’m ready to go. But New York? I feel nothing beyond tepid curiosity.

About two years ago now, my fabulously funny and warm best friend from high school began sending me e-mails about her upcoming medical residency - in New York. We e-mailed and giggled about how cool her life would be - just like Sex in the City, only with scrubs.

Fast forward a year into my friend’s residency (which she loves) and an other fabulous friend, a Canadienne who I met in Maastricht, is telling me about her acceptance to a New York graduate school programme (Ed note: here in this paragraphwe’ve switched to poshier spellings to reflect the European beginnings of this particular friendship and her exciting upcoming move.

I have to say: I’m excited for all my friends’ opportunities… But again, I don’t feel the emotional pull.

I really wonder, ‘What’s the Big Deal about the Big Apple?’ (And then I wonder if that doesn’t sound like a cheesy line Carrie Bradshaw would start a column with…).

Anyone?

I should be writing this from the Netherlands. But instead of flying back to Maastricht today to work from the offices of the EJC, I’m home in Monterey.

Until May.

That’s because a volcano in Iceland is emitting tonnes of ash and limiting air traffic into and around Northern Europe to nearly nothing.

Probably, you, like me, have been reading or hearing about these events via whatever media you normally consume. Copy editors and announcers alike have been tormented for nearly a week now trying to spell and/or pronounce “Eyjafjallajökull”, the name of the volcano that has been puffing ash clouds into the air above Europe and grounding airplanes around the world.

The only people who have not been following this gigantic news story?

The men and women who man the phone lines at call centers of airline companies.

The people at United Airlines - which I was supposed to fly with from Monterey to Denver, on to Newark and finally to Amsterdam - seemed particularly uninformed.

Sure, I received several e-mails urging me to change my flight plans prior to my scheduled departure from Monterey. That was nice; I have never received this kind of prior notification from an airline company (then again, they’ve never had to deal with a disruption like this).

But when I called to find out about my options, I found a very uninformed group of employees. That, or I found a very good group of actors playing the part of uninformed employees.

While I could see at its website that Schiphol airport, for example, was closed at the time of my flight from Monterey, the United people couldn’t. News media like the BBC were reporting that the situation with the ash cloud was worsening. The United people had no idea what was going on. It appeared highly likely that I wouldn’t be able to go, but United’s website still said my flight was a “go”.

At the same moment, Google News was brimming with stories about airport closures.

Scotland opened its airspace, then it closed again.

The front page of Schiphol airport’s website warned travelers that the airport was not sure when it would re-open. Check with your airlines, Schiphol’s website suggested.

Ha!

United employees apparently aren’t allowed to use the Internet at work. I inquired about my options and told the United employee I reached after a half hour delay (nothing compared to the 160-minute delay I faced just three hours prior to my scheduled departure from Monterey) I figured she knew more than I did (being on the inside of the situation) and hoped she could talk to me about my options. She chuckled.

“We’re usually told last,” she said.

Great. Helpful.

Meanwhile, I was searching for information about the situation by using a number of media tools. I think my instinct to reach for these tools is reflective of the evolution and sophistication of Web 2.0 tools for enabling people to connect with each other to find out “what’s happening on the ground.”

But it’s also indicative that the “best” legacy media brands - like BBC, for example, - are still important. Their reporters are the ones with more access to the kinds of “official sources” that are making decisions about things like keeping airspace open.

I probably refreshed BBC.co.uk more times yesterday than I have on any other day. They do a great job of time-stamping their stories, which was a major help.

Other key resources I used to track the news events that impacted my flight plans:

- EUfeeds.eu: The web development team at the EJC created this tool, which aggregates and nicely displays news headlines from the newspapers of each European companies. I was able to quickly find out what Dutch media were reporting about the situation at Schiphol (the airport I was trying to reach).

-Google Translate: I can usually get the gist of articles in Dutch, but I’m not experienced enough with the language to get the details. But when I used my basic skills to find an article that seemed useful, I could pop it into Google Translate and learn more.

- Skype: Being able to instantly reach my colleagues in Europe, in particularly the Belgian web projects manager I work with, was great.

- E-mail: I could use CC to quickly inform groups of colleagues about the changes in my plans. And it’s great that Gmail automatically groups e-mails as “conversations” so that I could respond to individuals on the e-mail thread who replied to me individually.

- Smart phones: I myself don’t use one, but my colleagues do. My Belgian web projects manager was able to advise me throughout his Saturday night with his iPhone (that, or he added the “Sent from my iPhone” tag to his e-mails to convince me that he was having a night on the town rather than geeking out in front of his computer ; ).

- Twitter: I used Twitter in several ways. The people I follow linked to useful news articles and blog posts from other travelers (including a link to the Flickr pool of ash cloud photos) I searched “ash” to find out general information about the situation. Later, as it emerged, I followed the #ashtag. I also searched “Newark airport” to see what was going on there. I found several Tweets about the dismal situation at the international departures area at Newark.

I also amusedly followed Jeff Jarvis, a New York journalism professor who is well-known for his active blog Buzz Machine and book “What Would Google Do,” as he attempted to leave the re:publica conference in Berlin and catch a flight back to New York. Jarvis used Twitter and his conversation skills to hitch a ride to Munich and get on a standby flight after his Berlin flight was canceled. He Tweeted throughout the saga. Reading about his struggle to get a flight convinced me that I’d be an idiot to go to the airport.

- Radio - It’s a vintage medium, but important. When I had to run some errands Friday, I kept the car radio tuned to BBC World News. I heard interviews with scientists and engineers who talked about why planes couldn’t fly through the ash cloud.

So, did the United Airlines staff use any of these resources? No.

In my opinion, that’s a huge problem for the United corporation.

I truly believe United could have better helped me figure out my travel options - and craft better policies to help their customers - if its employees were all able to have Hootsuite or Tweetdeck open in front of them.

As for United’s totally bogus “we-won’t-give-you-your-money-back-until-your-flight-from-Newark-to-Amsterdam-is-actually-canceled-nevermind-that-you’d-have-to-plan-on-being-stuck-in-Newark-for-a-solid-week-in-order-to-do-that-because-we-wait-until-the-last-moment-to-formally-cancel-a-flight-but-you-can-have-a-United-voucher-now” policy… That’s a different and entirely more annoyed post!

(This was originally published in my local newspaper, to which I contribute occasionally. It’s here.)

An autumn moon rises over the pink sunset on Monterey Bay as Kathleen Tarp calls out to the day’s final visitors at the Monterey Peninsula Art Foundation Gallery. Constantly smiling, she chats up a middle-aged couple visiting from Ohio. On a wooden easel, a trumpeter wearing a purple beret plays colorful jazz against a previous Pacific coast sunset Tarp captured in vivid strokes of oil paint.

Tarp is one of 31 local artists who display and sell their work in the waterfront gallery at 425 Cannery Row.

“Artists and Cannery Row go together like Coke and pizza. We have a history of artists being here on the Row,” said Dick Crispo, the notable local artist who helped start the Monterey Peninsula Art Foundation at a 1981 meeting in his living room.

Crispo looks on from a second-story window as Tarp locks up and descends into the night. His home, studio and personal gallery is next door to the collective’s gallery, which was his boyhood home.

“People come here looking for artists because they associate artists and writers with Cannery Row,” Crispo said.

Cannery Row was made famous in John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel of the same name. Even then, Steinbeck’s first-chapter descriptio of Monterey’s sardine-canning district reads like an elegy, as though he sensed the rowdy character of the place would disappear.

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light . . . a nostalgia, a dream,” he wrote.

Fish are no longer caught or canned here as they were then, when the smokestacks and corrugated metal of sardine canneries dominated the waterfront.

But the flavor of the Row as Steinbeck depicted it lives on in the vibrant characters making their living on this meandering street.

Among them are local businessmen braving the frigid business climate. There’s the local firefighter who opened a frozen yogurt shop in July. In the same month, a pair of brothers from Utah began selling gourmet sardines, bringing the oily fish back to the Row for the first time in 50 years. A family of Nepalese immigrants opened an import shop in September and a family of Thai-Americans began filling a tiny shop with startlingly uniform hand-knit hats in October.

The newcomers join the entrenched businesses that have thrived in the area for decades, including the Sardine Factory, the Whaling Station, the Monterey Plaza Hotel & Spa, and the kitsch shops in the Bear Flag Building. The Intercontinental recently opened a waterfront resort known as The Clement. Mix in the franchise presence - Bubba Gump’s, El Torito, the Chart House and the Holiday Inn - and Cannary Row is a premier tourist destination.

But if there is a keystone of Cannery Row, a central focus to ensure enough business to ensure sales of the “catch of the day” remain high enough to pay the dishwasher, its the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The Aquarium, which marked its 25th anniversary on October 25, 2009, is today the main draw for visitors to Cannery Row. Aquarium officials estimate that in 2009 about 1.9 million visitors will enter and be inspired by the magical worlds of live kep forests, sea-horses, sea otters and jellyfish.

AGE OF AQUARIUM

“It really anchors one end of Cannery Row,” said Mimi Hahn, the aquarium’s director of marketing. “And in our surveys we see that people find our exhibits actually inspiring. … When you come to the aquarium, you’re seeing what’s right under the water.”

Nearly all the sea life available to watch or touch in the aquarium connects to the ecosystem of Monterey Bay itself. Some staff like to say a visit to the aquarium is akin to strolling through the underwater neighborhoods of Monterey, Hahn said.

In addition to enchanting exhibits like The Secret Life of Seahorses, a local ecological focus is part of how the aquarium creates a unique sense of place for its millions of visitors.

In 2006, aquarium staff began partnering with local restaurants to cultivate awareness in Cannery Row kitchens about sustainable seafood eating habits. Twenty-four restaurants participate in the free partnership, in which they are asked not to serve seafood that is on the aquarium’s “red list.” The partnership seeks to helps tourists and locals quickly implement consumer knowledge they glean at the aquarium.

“People who go to the aquarium are generally environmentally aware and they choose restaurants that are similarly motivated,” said Sheila Bowman, senior manager of outreach and education for the Seafood Watch program.

Many are also interested in cutting back on paper. In January, the program unveiled a free iPhone application version of its Seafood Watch card. The application displays three categories of seafood supper options: Green for best choice, yellow for good alternatives and red for seafood to avoid at the table.

“We like the overall idea that people could carry around their iphone and have better and more current information than someone who has a piece of paper,” Bowman said. “That way you don’t just read the list on paper. You can click through the list and read why you should be eating wild alaskan salmon.”

The app has been downloaded about 200,000 times.

Appropriately, sardines - the bread and butter of businessmen on the Row during the early 1900s - are on its list of best choices for seafood purchases on the West Coast. This is good news for Daren

Warnick, who opened the Cannery Row Sardine Company in July.

THEY’RE BACK: DOWN TO BUSINESS

“This area is missing sardines,” Warnick said. “I was walking to my car one day and jut thought, ‘Hey, sardines would work.’ With the history and tourism here, it just seemed to fit.”

Tucked next to the Fish Hopper restaurant, Warnick’s shop in July began selling boneless, skinless sardines for about $7 a can, in addition to other canned seafood. With his kitschy label on T-shirts and the sardines receiving good reviews among foodies, business is good, Warnick said. Whole Foods will also soon begin stocking Warnick’s sardines, which are fished from as far north as Washington.

Cannery Row Sardine Company is one of a spate of new businesses on Monterey with plans to become mainstays for locals and tourists. Another good bet is Myo, a self-serve frozen yogurt shop at 685 Cannery Row.

Stuart Roth, an outgoing Monterey native and career firefighter with the Monterey Fire Department, opened Myo in July with longtime buddy Paige Meyer and two additional business partners. The Row previously had no frozen yogurt shops.

Myo, for Make It Yourself, is sparklingly clean and blindingly colorful. It offers constantly changing flavors and types of frozen yogurt as well as toppings ranging from fruity pebbles to fresh fruit from Del Monte Produce.

“Cannery Row is just a magnificent spot,” he said. “It’s got everything, so much to offer. It’s a neat area, and for locals I think it is underutilized.”

Over at the Little Hat Shop, at 645 Cannery Row, Nicole Chalardpru and her family of Thai-Americans are knitting up hats in just about every color, texture and style imaginable.

Many are sized and themed for children, including a series of fruit-themed hats. Each is made by hand.

“You can’t just go anywhere and find these,” Chlardpru said. “It’s a unique product. We have fun making them. Once you start doing it, you just can’t stop.”

ARTISTS ABOUND

“I came here in 1974 for the Monterey Jazz Festival, and I thought, ‘This is where I want to get old,’” said Kathleen Tarp, a singer who has been painting for about seven years. “So I travelled all around the country doing the music thing and then came back here in 1999.”

Tarp is one of 31 artists who volunteer at the gallery one day a month so the collective can save on commission fees. Small oil, water color and mixed media prints sell for as little as $35; larger works cost more.

Tarp welcomes customers heartily, freely punctuating her remarks with an emphatic, “Right on!” She’s quick to get on the phone to other artists when customers have questions or requests for companion paintings. There is no trace of the snooty atmosphere often associated with art galleries.

“We’re artists, we don’t have any money either,” Tarp exclaims. “They’re always checking you out see if you have any money. And you know those salespeople don’t have a dime either!”

Just as much as smelly sardines, artists have always been a part of Cannery Row. In the late 60s, Crispo and other artists worked in the former Hovden Cannery, which they could rent collectively for $150 a month as long as they agreed not to damage any of the knotty pine or copper inside the former cannery.

That space is now the main entryway to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, constructed in the late 1970s with a $55 million gift from David and Lucile Packard.

One of the most fun things about traveling is, in my opinion, seeing what’s for breakfast in different countries. I love most breakfast foods and can always find something to enjoy. That said, I have not been in northern Europe often enough to get used to raw fish for breakfast. Ick.

But I know enough about England to know a breakfast of sausage there will stay with me all day. Oh yeah - and British bacon? Not the crispy, microwaved Oscar Mayer goodness we’re used to in the (artery-clogged) US.

I’ve spent enough time below the Mason-Dixon line to know biscuits and gravy are also a good all-day bet. And I know that Germans and Dutch seem to like their eggs boiled, not scrambled or sunny-side up.

This wonderful Time Magazine photo essay documents how much “the small traditions” - like what we eat for breakfast or dinner - differ around the world.

This second photo essay depicts various ordinary bureaucrats at their places of work around the world. I first saw it in Rotterdam last year.

Both are reminders, too, that working in various mediums - like photography - is always more about the concept than the technical aspects of the medium. Yes, the lighting and resolution are important here, as is composition, as are a number of other technical aspects of photography. But the idea and overall concept or message the creator is communicating is what drives these projects to be so special.

I really like the word demonym.

It’s fun to say: “Dem-ah-nym.” The “-nym” part is the most delicious part of the word, leaving the lips pressed together with its yummy “mmm” sound at the end.

This weekend I learned the most charming demonym: Lisboeta. Meaning: a resident of Lisbon.

I’m pretty charmed by this grittier version of Barcelona, with its tiny wooden doorways shyly interrupting the candy-colored and tiled facades of the building that laze here along winding and narrow streets. And I love the herky-jerky old-fashioned streetcars whirring through these intimidate lanes. The black mosaic patterns decorating the white marble sidewalks littered with leaves from the outstretched trees above make me feel like I’m in some walking through some Gabriel García Márquez novel.

And I love the wild city gardens with the purple and white flowers springing up ad-hoc all over the place. The little wraught-iron fences can’t seem to contain the random, wild-growing flowers throughout the city. I love that there is this un-manicured quality to it all.

And the custard pastries everywhere only add to the mysterious quality of Lisbon: How can a pastry with no chocolate be so good?!? And how can it cost only 90 cents?!?

I have never felt called to be a fiction storyteller before, but I think someone with writing skills could be creative in that way here in Lisbon. There just seem to be a lot of novels unfolding here. Ambling on the walkways of the Castle St. George today, I couldn’t help but imagine the complicated and interesting kinds of people who could be living behind the penthouse French doors in the amazingly bright 17th-century city villas standing over the sea here. I even a saw a beautiful Lisboeta sitting in the windowsill of one villa, one leg dangling out the window against a marigold facade and the other folded against her chest. Dark wavy hair streaming past her shoulders, she perched in a fourth-floor windowsill absently people watching while some Spanish guitar music lilted out of the door. She could have been a novel cover.

Finally, I love that people cross the streets whenever they want here in Lisbon. It’s like they’re still explorers here. I feel so confined in places like the Netherlands where nobody crosses - cars or no cars - unless the light says it is OK.

Happy to be loose among the Lisboetas!

Knowing that my video journalism skills are not yet award-winning, I volunteered to make this video for the Monterey Bay Chapter of the United Nations Association. It was good practice, plus a good chance to watch Rick Steves’ travel documentary on Iran (embedded below).

(By the way, Rick Steves’ has had a pretty inspiring career. I had been downloading his podcasts for a while, but sort of lost interest. I plan to make a renewed effort to tune in, though, after learning more about Steves. Mad props to anyone who funds their travel dreams teaching piano lessons! Plus, this wasn’t his first trip to Iran - he visited there as a long-haired young adult about 30 years ago. Oh, and Steves is a spokesperson for NORML while at the same time being an active Lutheran. He seems like a pretty cool dude!)

I learned an important “VJ for Dummies” lesson making this: Don’t make interviews or take pictures in the dark. If you do, you will get home with less usable material than intended.

If my favorite Austrian videographer reads this he will probably laugh, because I should have learned that lesson by now. But anyway, this was my first “semipro” attempt at solo/DIY VJ-style reporting.

And, in more well-produced movie action…