Educating alice, p.1
Educating Alice, page 1
Praise for Educating Alice
“Settling down with a copy of Educating Alice: Adventures of a Curious Woman is a delicious experience. … [Steinbach] prefers going through back doors and tracking down true local experiences, which makes her writing more personal than a typical travelogue. [She has] a clean writing style, eye for details and awareness of nuance. Readers will feel the spark of excitement in her finding a lively Cuban dance club, or the shyness a foreigner feels while trying to make conversation on a French train in the Provençal countryside. …”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“If you could send your best friend on a journey for you, you could only hope she'd have Steinbach's generosity of reporting. … Educating Alice falters only in leaving the reader wanting more.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“[Steinbach] blithely abandons the demand that the journalist stay out of her story, offering herself as an engaging and insightful companion for the armchair traveler. … Through it all, Steinbach writes with warmth and humor.”
—St. Petersburg Times
“Go on this delightful journey with Alice. … As with the elegant travel writer and novelist Pico Iyer, Steinbach has done her work so well that the reader is likely to be caught up in the story and will, at the end, feel a special relationship with the author. … She demonstrates both agility and stamina in reporting on her strenuous and challenging activities in these various delightful places, along with writing about the people who became her new friends. There is nothing “general” about this book. It is developed carefully and tenderly, combined with intense descriptions and witty analysis.”
—The Deseret News
“I loved Educating Alice. … Alice Steinbach may visit some of the world's most popular tourist cities, but she does not follow the ordinary tourist route. Oh no! Down the back alleys Alice Steinbach goes, slipping through side doors and riding on employees-only elevators; dropping huge, slippery salmon on the floor of the Ritz Escoffier École de Gastronomie Française; and charming retired geishas into showing her their prized kimonos, wrapped in rice paper and stowed in boxes in the attic. Steinbach must be whom Henry James imagined when he advised novelists to try to become ‘one on whom nothing is lost.'”
—SARAH PRITCHARD, author of Crackpots: A Novel
“In these uncertain times, the smart thing to do is stay home and read Educating Alice. Alice Steinbach has more fun than anybody, whether chasing sheep in Scotland or taking cooking lessons at the Ritz in Paris or swinging to a salsa beat in a down-at-the-heel café in Havana or taking a writing course in Prague or studying landscape architecture in Provence, etc. etc. etc.—Alice's et ceteras are limitless, and what all of us, surely, have always wanted to do ourselves. What is more, no matter what she does or who she sees or how hilarious the encounter, she is a lady to her toes.”
—JANE FLETCHER GENIESSE, author of Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark
“The beauty of her narrative … lies in her luminous descriptions. She can brilliantly sketch a street scene or landscape or café, but it is her perceptive looks into the lives and minds and hearts of the people she meets through her studies that bring her settings to life and make this collection of essays truly engaging. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal
“[Steinbach] captures the uniqueness of each setting, aided by a sharply curious sensibility she claims stems as much from her childhood admiration for Nancy Drew as from her reportorial training. … Her stories are powerfully seductive to anyone who's ever been tempted to get up and go, following interests wherever they may lead. Even during the occasional setbacks, from language barriers to confusing geographies, Steinbach makes such a life look highly desirable.”
—Publishers Weekly
“After winning the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, Steinbach transformed herself into a travel writer and gained a readership with Without Reservations. She now presents another blithe chronicle of sophisticated adventures as she returns to the humbling role of student in order to sample different creative pursuits. … Attentive and receptive out in the world, on the page Steinbach is brisk, funny, confiding, and informative as she offers pithy observations, vivid profiles, and arcane facts. Experiencing her pleasurable sojourns vicariously, Steinbach's readers enjoy a virtual vacation from reality.”
—Booklist
“Engaging … Readers will admire her optimism (she carried a tube of 32 SPF sunscreen on a visit to Scotland) and enjoy her goofy humor. … A light, travel-going pleasure.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Educating Alice is a work of nonfiction; some names and
identifying details have been changed.
Copyright © 2004 by Alice Steinbach
Illustrations copyright © 2004 by Franca Nucci Haynes
Reader's guide copyright © 2005 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division
of Random House, Inc., New York.
eISBN: 978-0-307-48417-8
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
v3.0_r1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Introduction
Cookin' at the Ritz
Dancing in Kyoto
The Mystery at the Old Florentine Church
Sense and Sensible Shoes
Havana Dreams
The Secret Gardens
The Unreliable Narrator
Lassie, Come Home
Dedication
A Reader's Guide
Acknowledgments
About the Author
To learn of the pine, go to the pine.
—MATSUO BASHO (1644–1694)
Introduction
I've been trying to remember what started me on the path to this book. Perhaps it began on the hot summer afternoon when I played my first passable rendition of “Who-o Goes the Wind” in the front parlor of the Miss Pearl Evans School of Piano. I was five and my ability to read correctly the little black dots with the squiggly tails thrilled and excited me. Or perhaps it started at Carlins's ice rink when I learned to skate backward, sort of, for the first time. Or maybe the genesis of this book was when Grandmother taught me how to use the old Singer sewing machine, the one with the foot pedal. I must have made a half dozen very plain handkerchiefs that day, gifts for Mother, my third-grade teacher, and my best girlfriends.
As a child I was interested in learning about everything. Animals, tap dancing, tombstones, weaving potholders, hair braiding, the stars and planets, roller skating, rocks, ironing, and painting—the back fence kind of painting, not the kind called art. I am told by those who knew me in those formative years that I constantly pestered family, friends, and unwary strangers asking such things as: How do you get to Mars? How do birds fly? How do you do a time step? Why does gasoline make cars go? How do you iron a dress? Why doesn't a red skirt go with an orange blouse?
I now call this period of my life: A Portrait of the Reporter as a Young Girl. Back then, however, I had quite a different profession in mind. Given my insatiable curiosity and intense admiration for Nancy Drew, my future plans hinged on entering the detective profession. I saw myself as Nancy Drew aging into Miss Marple. It was the perfect life for me, I thought then, one that would require me to constantly ask questions, find out the answers, and along the way learn a lot of new things.
Although the detective thing didn't work out, I wound up almost in the same place. If you throw in travel and adventure with the items listed above in my Nancy Drew fantasy, what you end up with is a newspaper reporter.
In my twenty years of reporting I got to ask successful writers, dancers, artists, actors, scientists, and quite a few political figures such questions as: How did you learn to write-dance-paint-act-think-vote like that? I can honestly say I learned something new from every story I wrote, including the concept of string theory from one of the smartest physicists alive.
For two decades the job of reporter fit me perfectly. But some careers, like some marriages, are not meant to last forever. After taking time off from my newspaper job to write a book that allowed me to travel around the world, I found it difficult to return to my old routine. So after much deliberation I quit my job and set out to find a way that would allow me, personally and professionally, to combine three of my passions: learning, traveling, and writing.
This book is the result of my decision to travel around the world as an informal student, taking lessons in such things as French cooking in Paris, Border collie training in Scotland, traditional Japanese arts in Kyoto, and the architecture and art of Havana. The premise behind the trip described in these pages was simple. I wanted to study things that interested me in places I found interesting. Some of the lessons were taught in organized classes; others were learning experiences where the approach was more about teaching learnable rules in unstructured settings.
Those who embrace the philosophy that you study, say, cooking or Border collie training for the sole purpose of becoming a chef or a shepherd will be disappointed to hear that I am neither. Nor will the reader be equipped to apply for such positions after putting down this book. Instead, I offer a story about what I set out to learn and what I came back knowing.
Yes, I can tell you what an artist's life is l ike in Havana, but I also learned about the lives of two Cuban women, teachers, who live with great dignity on very little money in a crumbling apartment building. And, yes, you will meet a young apprentice geisha in Kyoto and find out why a modern Japanese girl enters such a profession, but you also will meet a Japanese woman who tries to help other women in her country find their “undiscovered” abilities in the workplace.
My hope is that by the end of our journey together, you will share with me what my role model, the late Richard Feynman, called “the pleasure of finding things out.” Feynman, a Nobel laureate who was a legendary physicist, accomplished bongo drummer, and expert safe-cracker, summed up his lifetime of learning this way: “I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there.”
I offer here stories of my efforts to add little bits of knowledge here and there to what I was born not knowing.
Cookin' at the Ritz
A LIGHT SNOW was falling as I left my hotel and hurried across the narrow rue Cambon to the employees' entrance of the Hotel Ritz. It surprised me that I had learned only two days earlier that such a door even existed. How, I wondered, in all my years of exploring the streets and passages of Paris had I missed it? After all, back doors were a major interest of mine. And so were side doors and courtyards hidden behind green gates and anything else that concealed the private Paris from me. Once, I spent two years writing letters and making phone calls before being allowed to visit the mysterious Maison de Verre, a house on the Left Bank designed in the late 1920s by the French architect Pierre Chareau. Compared to that heroic effort, gaining entrance to the back door of the Hotel Ritz was a snap: I had simply enrolled as a culinary student in the Ritz Escoffier École de Gastronomie Française.
Now here I was, on a snowy morning in February, about to enter the hotel not as an outsider but as an insider, a thrilling prospect. After all, I told myself, anyone willing and able to pay seven hundred dollars a pop to stay overnight could walk through the Ritz's imposing place Vendôme entrance. But only those carrying an employee's identification card were allowed through the back door on rue Cambon. Still, as eager as I was to begin what seemed an adventure, the truth is I was nervous about what to expect on the other side of the door. A French security officer who would turn me away? A snooty chef who would laugh at my limited French vocabulary? Classmates who would criticize my chopping and dicing techniques? A sudden, humiliating announcement from the school's Directeur that, for undisclosed reasons, he had revoked my student status?
It was in this Kafkaesque frame of mind that I pushed open the plain unmarked door and stepped into a small vestibule. A security guard sitting in a small room behind a counter stood up and carefully gave me the once-over. Immediately his stern appraising demeanor made me think of my root canal dentist.
“Bonjour,” I said with fake nonchalance, holding out my photo ID in such a way that my thumb covered any evidence of a very bad haircut. He nodded and reached for the card. I watched as he looked at it and frowned. Was it my bad haircut that offended? “Is something wrong?” I asked. His response was to look at my face and then at the photo, comparing the two. He repeated this twice. Face-then-photo. Face-then-photo. Just as I started to explain that I'd drastically altered my hairstyle—for the better—since the photo was taken, a buzzer went off. A clicking sound followed as the gate to the long basement corridor unlocked and, with a wave of his hand, the guard motioned me through.
So this was it, then, the moment when I became a part of the venerable Hotel Ritz. After descending a flight of stairs, I looked down a corridor so long I couldn't see the end of it. What I could see, however, was a small army of employees engaged in a whirlwind of activity. Fascinated, I watched as men in crisp white uniforms picked up crates containing hundreds of bottles of Evian water and florists pushed carts filled with lavish arrangements of lilies, tulips, and irises. As I moved deeper into the corridor I saw workmen carting off worn pieces of Persian rugs and cabinetmakers moving a hand-painted Chinese chest marked “For repair.” Service staff carrying covered silver breakfast trays entered and exited the service elevator. Some of the employees nodded to me in a collegial way as they passed by. I nodded back, trying to conceal my excitement at witnessing all the daily routines necessary to run a world-class hotel.
I continued on through the long corridor, past the sparkling white tile and stainless-steel kitchen classrooms of the cooking school, to the locker rooms where students changed into their uniforms. After a few minutes of struggling with the key, I unlocked the door on the right marked “Women.” When I opened it a blast of hot, steamy air hit me; it smelled like the warm dampness I breathed as a child when changing clothes in the locker room of the YWCA pool.
Inside the small, L-shaped room there were thirty-five bright blue lockers, a few narrow benches, and an adjoining space with a toilet, a shower stall, two sinks, and a mirror. On a small table in the corner someone had left a hair comb and a large roll of Tums—a bad omen, perhaps, to find in the locker room of a cooking school. After locating the locker assigned to me—Number 210—I opened it and saw hanging inside the uniform I'd been fitted for on the previous day. The room was empty so I began to undress quickly, hoping to finish suiting up before my classmates arrived. Call me insecure, but I preferred not to meet my colleagues for the first time wearing only my underwear.
The uniform was formidable. First, I removed the sturdy closed-toe shoes students were advised to wear and stepped out of my khaki pants. Then I pulled on a pair of heavy cotton houndstooth-check trousers. My sweater came off next. It was replaced by a starched white double-breasted chef's jacket with double rows of buttons and the name of the school embroidered in blue on the left. Then came the napkinlike neckerchief that had to be tied in a very specific way. Next, I wrapped a starched white apron around my waist, tied it in front, and then tucked a thick white side towel under the apron string on my left side. By this time I was perspiring heavily.
Finally it was time to don the flat, starched white hat worn by students. I approached the hat with some trepidation. I still had not gotten over the humiliation of being told by the sympathetic French laundress who fitted me that I would require a very large hat. “A size 21,” she said sadly. “There is no larger.” Also I had no idea of how to wear this hat. Pushed back on my head like a beanie with hair showing? Or pulled down over my forehead, just above the eyebrows? Either way, it was not a becoming look. I decided to wear it in the more severe position: very low on my forehead, almost to my eyebrows, with all my hair covered. Somehow, it seemed more professional that way.
I looked at my watch; it had taken twenty minutes to suit up. I made a brief detour to the mirror and stopped to stare at myself. The person staring back, the one who was supposed to resemble a culinary student, looked in fact like a Red Army nurse, circa World War II. Actually I sort of liked the look. I fancied myself as looking very much like the Hemingway heroine in A Farewell to Arms, despite the fact she wasn't Russian and the story had nothing to do with World War II.
To complete the uniform I pinned on the nametag, which, I had been warned at my fitting, “should in all cases be worn every day.”
With half an hour to kill I headed for the employees' cafeteria, where I was entitled to eat at a student discount. The pretty, softly lit room was almost empty, so I sat down with a cup of latte and studied the dishes we would prepare over the next four and a half hours: sole fillets with a mandarin sauce; boeuf Bourguignon, waffle potatoes, souffléed potatoes, chocolate and orange mousse. We would also learn to prepare meat glaze and demi-glace. I flipped the pages containing the recipes, trying to familiarize myself with the conversion of measurements and weights from the European metric system into its American equivalent, a daunting task. Added to that was the further hurdle presented by having the course conducted in French with simultaneous translation into English. Between the foreign metric conversion and the foreign language translation, I saw the potential for big mistakes.
