The United Nations of Bader

The nominal hook for this leg of my trip is the 50th birthday party of my friend Bader. Bader lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. He and I used to work at companies that competed directly with each other, so we used to be rivals. Somehow, over the last few years, we’ve come to know each other, starting at medical conferences and trade shows, and gradually becoming colleagues, then friends.

Anyway, Bader is Algerian. Though he identifies with Italy and Rome a lot, and lived here for a time. He is so proud of his knowledge of Rome that when some Romans asked him for directions one night, and he told them in fluent Italian how to get where they were going, he looked like a cat that just caught a bird.

Being Algerian, he also speaks French (and Arabic and English) and has many friends and relatives in France. So, his birthday party was to be a world party. Loving Rome as he does, and having celebrated his 20th birthday there, he thought it would be a good gathering place. It’s also easy for his relatives and friends from Paris and Algiers to get there. Not so easy for the Americans, but as I think they say in Rome: whatev!

The first gathering I attended was the night before the party. Bader wanted everyone from his various nations to get to know each other before to party, and to experience a rooftop terrace bar view of Rome at night. Ever planful, Bader had already scoped out a place in one of the large international hotels right on Piazza Reppublica, and had used me and his friend Laurence to scout out alternative rooftop bars. That turned out to be wise, because as we gathered at the piazza Reppublica, Bader discovered that the rooftop bar he had selected had unexpectedly closed up that night. So, he decided that the group would move to one of the alternate sites – as it turned out, the one right around the corner from the Daphne at Piazza Barberini where I was stayed. He put me in charge of leading the mixed group of international folks through the streets of Rome to the terrace bar. I had just been there long enough to do it without getting lost, though I had to look at my map once. Turned out to be a nice couple of hours, with a view of San Pietro (St. Peter’s basilico). I enjoyed meeting some of Bader’s professional friends for Algiers. Lively, entertaining and articulate people with panache. There was a confusing moment when we filed out after midnight, each individual paying for her/his own drinks. When it came to me, I couldn’t understand why they didn’t have a total for me. Finally, someone from another party translated: the bar proprietors noticed that I was the person who led the 30-odd people into the bar, so they decided my drinks were on the house. Così bello!

The actual event the next evening was like a wedding. A lot of activity compressed into one evening. A champaign reception, a sit-down dinner with name assignments, DJ dancing, toasts/speeches, and some final dancing by the hard core dancers.

Fantastic food. Pasta that I don't even know what it was. Some kind of super-delicate thin potato au gratin. Gigantic (a meter tall) chunk of parmesano reggiano formaggi with fist-sized chunks spilling out of it.

The whole thing reminded me of my own wedding in Barcelona. Trying to glue the people from different countries together, translating toasts into multiple languages. Even the dancing reminded me of that, because the Americans at Bader’s party were a little reluctant to dance. The music was infectious though – a kind of North African pop/traditional blend that almost, but not quite, pulled me onto the dance floor. Some of the Americans were bolder than me, though since I am the person here least close to Bader and his tribe, it was probably more that they were better integrated than I was. It was cool to watch the Algerians dance. Sometimes they danced what looked like traditional dance moves, sometimes just modern club dancing.

Towards the end of the evening, I met a dermatologist from Paris who has all the latest lasers and lights treatment machines. What does she like? The Cutera "Titan" infrared dermal treatment device. She was well-pleased to meet the inventor of that Titan light source tonight...

The restaurant where all this took place – “L’Archeologica” - is south of the center, on the Via Appia Antica. (“the Appian Way”) is a the pre-Christian trade road out of Rome. This old road has many archeologic sites along it, and in fact the restaurant site itself is one. The restaurant is built on top of a 1st century A.D. early Christian crypt, and the crypt has been converted to a wine cellar. I guess a limbo for wine bottles now, rather than a crypt for human remains. I’m probably not the first to notice the relationship between wine, the blood of Christ, death and the history at this particular site, though when I remarked on this to a couple of Italians, they seemed surprised at the connection. Probably the symptom of something I noticed in life in Spain – that modern Mediterranean Catholics do not spend a lot of time thinking about their religion compared to many Americans.

The whole evening heightened for me that dislocated feeling one gets while traveling. I didn’t completely understand what was happening around me, though I often understood enough. A foreign traveler often feels like both participant and observer, insider and outsider. No pictures accompany this blog entry, because my camera battery ran out. And that’s fine, because I was struggling to be more of a participant and less of an observer. A camera (I have never really carried my own camera before this trip) would have distanced me more than I already was.