IBERIA2001-01

IDEAS Homes for Vacation & Long-Term Rentals

Made With

This is the first of letters home regarding our trip to Iberia. The two eyes in Iberia are Ken and Marcia Hoffer. I am from New York and Marcia is from Rockland, Maine. We have been married since 1970 after which we honeymooned on a trip to Yugoslavia and Hungary behind the Iron Curtain. We raised our three children, Kevin, Jeffrey and Kristin in Santa Monica, California while I built my cataract surgery practice specializing in intraocular lens implants. We took many summer trips with the kids but only to show them America, including Alaska. We refrained from trips to Europe until the children were all on their own. It was our plan to experience the empty nest syndrome with biannual 3 month minimum trips to one country at a time. I selected Italy as the country for our first trip in 1997 and Marcia chose the UK for our second trip in 1999. We spent a great deal of time equally deciding the destination for our third trip in 2001 and concluded it best to go south again to Spain and of course Portugal while we are there.

Before we left we had a wonderful time celebrating our only grandchild’s 1st birthday as a wonderful send off. We would have liked to visit Iberia earlier in the year but I had made a commitment that I wouldn’t take one of our 3 month trips to Europe during my presidency of the Los Angeles County Medical Association which ended on June 30th. We were then told by my son Jeff and his wife Rebecca that we couldn’t leave until Kaylin’s birthday, so we left the next day. Rebecca did a great job arranging the party as usual and we all had a wonderful time (left.) It was great having my brother Gary there to see his new niece for the first time. Our oldest son, Kevin, drove us to the LAX airport but we still got there in plenty of time. We got on the plane at 4 PM. It seemed to go much smoother this time, repeating the Alitalia Magnifica class to Milano that we took last year. I dislike flying very much (not afraid of dying just hate sitting cooped up) so I usually travel by car or Amtrak train. I hadn’t been on an airplane since November 1974 until we took our first 3 month trip to Italy in 1997. For that I decided I wanted my first flight in 25 years to be as short as possible so we took the Air France Concorde from New York to Paris. We repeated this using the British Air Concorde from New York to London in 1999 for the UK trip. Upon my return Amtrak trip from New York, Marcia picked me up at Union Station in Los Angeles and on the way to Santa Monica let me know she had just won the first prize in a charity raffle. The prize was two first class tickets on Alitalia to Milano or Roma with $2500 for hotel expenses. The catch was that the return trip home had to be before April 30th. It was then that I had to decide whether to take the almost 12 hour flight or let one of our kids go with her. They were all hoping I wouldn’t go. I had used Xanax and melatonin to sleep the full 3 and half hours for the Concorde transatlantic flights but that was not going to work for a flight this long. So I took the flight to Milano and Klonopin and melatonin allowed me to sleep 10 of the 12 hours with a bathroom break halfway through. I gratefully missed all the meals and movies, and the seat was very comfortable. Since the return trip worked as well and the Concorde crash in Paris grounded all the Concorde’s, I decided to just repeat what worked well the year before.

We arrived at Milano’s Malpensa airport at noon on a beautiful hot day - it's actually summer here (compared to Santa Monica's usual 72 degrees). I first met Dr. Dimitrii Dementiev in April of 1997 at a cataract society educational meeting in Boston just before heading to NYC to get on the Concorde heading to Italy. He was a pioneer in implanting intraocular lenses to correct nearsightedness (called PRLs), something he had learned while at the Moscow Eye Institute. This is a procedure I had been dying to perform since 1993 when I first heard the famous Russian surgeon Dr. Syvataslav Fyodorov present his results with PRLs in Los Angeles. Dimitrii was born in Moscow and was able to escape the USSR in 1989 just before the Berlin wall came down. He settled in Milano, established an eye surgery practice there and basically became an Italian. During our visit to Italy, he showed me the patients he had implanted and allowed me to implant my first PRL lens in Bari, Italy. We have become very close friends with Dimitrii and his wife Tania over these past five years.

Dimitrii had asked his driver, Mario, to pick us up and take us to the Hotel Buenos Aires [26 Corso Buenos Aires, +39-02-2940-0169] near Piazza San Babila where we have stayed before. It is the skinniest 6 story hotel you'll ever see being only the width of one room window. The rooms are very modern and clean and the rate is reasonable. I began running in September 1993, at the age of 50, in preparation for my first treadmill test at a cardiologist’s office. I knew I would probably collapse after two minutes after they turned it on, so to prevent this embarrassment in front of a colleague I tried to train for it. After several months I had worked up to a mile and I was a winner on the treadmill but not on the cholesterol test. I was told to keep up the running and start Lipitor as well as cut out fatty foods. I kept up on the first two but haven’t been very good on the meals. But this has led to a compulsive 45 minutes of running for one mile at 7 mph followed by fast walking at 4.5 mph. I do it every day because then I don’t have to spend time trying to figure which days will be best to do it. I have not missed one single day of running since September 1993. Once I find a reliable excuse to skip a day, that excuse will occur more and more often. I have run even when I have been as sick as a dog and in bed all day. I’m told by colleagues that this is not good, so don’t follow my example – I just refuse to miss a day. I don’t really enjoy running or look forward to it – actually I dread it each day. I get no high afterwards or “endorphin kick” but I feel generally better, happier and more optimistic than before I started running. I also no longer have those aches and pains in my hips and knees as I used to.

After taking the slowest elevator in Italy and unloading our bags, I went for my first Italian run down Corso Buenos Aires to Piazza San Babila and the Duomo (dwoh-moh) (major cathedral) area. I had a great slice of pizza at the Autogrill and a cappuccino, which I had been looking forward to for a long time. My usual routine back home is to have at least one cappuccino while doing my daily LA Times crossword puzzle. Regular brewed American coffee has more caffeine in it and the acids give me stomach upset while a cappuccino does not because it is made fresh right before you drink it and it doesn’t get to sit around. I walked back to the hotel and Marcia and I took a cab to Bice Ristorante [12 Via Borgospesso, +39-02-760-02572] where we have been before and had the wonderful vitello tonnato. Dimitrii introduced us to this dish at the Gatto Nero in Moltrasio near the outrageously expensive Villa d’Este on Lago di Como in 1999. I don’t like cold foods at dinner so I really wasn’t inclined to try it but he forced me to and am I glad he did. It is a cold thin slice of cooked tender veal (vitello) covered with a tawny-colored sauce of tuna (tonnato). Sounds ridiculous but it is wonderful. The only cold entree I have ever enjoyed. It’s only served in the summer in Italy and we have never found it on the menu in the States. We met a young couple from Connecticut; he's a venture capitalist looking to spend money. The dinner was excellent and we had a lovely walk back down the famous shopping street, Montenapoleone (ala Rodeo Drive) looking through all the shop windows. We both have felt a little dizzy jet lag and it felt right going to bed at this “normal” time of 3 AM (my usual bedtime at home.)

Woke this morning at 8:30 feeling pretty bright. View from our hotel, left, looking down on Corso . Dimitrii should be arriving from LAX today sometime and we shall join him for dinner. My previous camcorder died prior to leaving so I purchased a new SONY camcorder which has the capacity to take still photos and stores them on a little memory stick. A 128 megabyte stick can hold up to 1,350 photos. When it’s filled to capacity, the stick can be slipped out and slipped into a slot on my new SONY notepad C1VPK notepad computer. I dump the photos into the computer then edit them using Adobe PhotoDeluxe and save them in very low memory capacity (10-15 K), put them in a WinZip file and attach them to the email I send home. This will be better than sending postcards.