200 View of Rome: Grand Hotel de la Minerva Rooftop Bar

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5 Stars




While I will argue a near objectivity for my 5 stars for something like The Palazzo Barberini, I am fully aware my 5 stars here are extraordinarily personal, subjective, and idiosyncratic. So take that as you will...

On a night in early October, starting to grow just too cold to sit outside, just as all the dinner service seemed about wrapped up, my wife and I asked if we could come in and just sit and have a bottle of wine.

Of course. Prego.

We picked out one of the cheapest, happily a Shiraz, maybe 35 Euros. Heat lamps every once in awhile wafted some precious warmth at us where we sat on the edge of the roof. They gave us marcona almonds, the nicest bowl of nuts we received in Rome. I don't remember if there were olives. We drank wine, pondering the fascinating rooftops of the baroque city, the intriguingly bland facades of gothic Sopra Minerva, and the ancient, massive wonder of the flanks of The Pantheon.  

After not long we were alone, as patrons, in the large rooftop restaurant bar. We changed seats. A grand piano player regaled us with the cheesiest romantic pop hits of the seventies, making them deliciously charming through the alchemy of situation, time, and a heavy Italian accent.

Among thirty days of fabulous romance, this, this was romantic.

200 Views of Rome: Alice Pizza

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4 Stars





Oy, these stars will be the death of me! And I'm a person who likes quantifying things! I'm in the top 11 percent for quantifying and am a 4.48 star quantifier!


So here's the deal. There were several Alice Pizzas out there in Rome, possibly dozens. I went to one or two. Lovely sheets of pizza under glass on the counter. There are a range of varieties like one would never see in America, maybe prosciutto on one, shrimp and a vinegary sauce on another, ribbons of zucchini, blots of ricotta, eggplant, one with a thick scattering of thinly sliced mushrooms. You tell them where to cut. They weigh it up and throw it in their pizza oven. It's delicious stuff.


Now here's the rub. I only went to pizza places I read good things about in the reviews on the Internet. But looking at the pizza under the glass would have been scrutiny enough to tell. These venues were all really good and extremely similar in every way. Not a single one of them pierced my heart with ecstasy, and yet every one of them was terrific. If just one of these places, a branch, for instance, of the ubiquitous Alice Pizza, opened up in the twin cities where I live, I would fall to my knees weeping tears of gratitude. In Rome, it was just pizza, really good pizza.


There was one thing about this kind of pizza though that was hard for me to face, and I at times resisted it to my detriment. This pizza has the half life of french fries. You must eat it now! Hot. Go! Their takeaway box is useless except for eating out of it as you are walking away. Quick, find some place to eat that pizza and sit down and eat it. The clock is ticking.


Alice Pizza, four stars, five stars, I don't know. Let's just say I would fly for eight hours to have a piece right now. Of course, we'd pop over to the Palazzo Altemps since we're there, and then get a quick drink at Sant Eustachio, and Giolitti, I mean, since we're there. I mean, there's no point being silly about it. 

200 Views of Rome: Giolitti

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4 Stars





It's really hard for me to properly rate this as it was such a personal pleasure to my wife and I. It was close to where we lived and our fallback for our nightcap. We would sit at a table, deliciously reserved for table service people like us, and slightly grubby, old world style waiters with names like "Fwed", would formally, kindly, and not entirely attentively, wait on us. Negronis and wine, and they'd give us olives, peanuts, and potato chips while we watched the throngs get gelato, take pictures of their gelato, and not be allowed to sit down. Giolitti is almost divey, almost once glamorous in 1920, and yet entirely legendary. The gelato? I had a bit. It's okay. If you're on the hunt for great gelato this is not a place you need to go. But if you want to talk about gelaterias, well, yes, Giolitti will always come up.

200 Views of Rome: Largo Di Torre Argentina

 


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5 Stars



I am engaged in the major literary project called "200 Views of Rome" consisting of 200 reviews of Rome. You should read them all because the whole is far greater than sum of the parts, or, possibly, due to math, exactly equal to the sum of the parts, but reading them all gives one such a rosy sense of completion that it feels like more. And in all these 200 reviews of Rome there are plenty of things where assigning a rating, out of 5 stars, couldn't be simpler. Pantheon? Five stars! Palazzo Barberini? Five stars! But other things are very confusing to rate. How does one score the 20th best church in Rome? Same as the best which is far better? What if that same twentieth best church is prettier than every church in all of North America (and it is!)?

Which, finally, brings me to the Largo Di Torre Argentina. These are some ruins, not much in tact, in a pit, with a fence around them, that you can't go into, in a busy, too sunny area of central Rome. That description surely doesn't sound so good. So what is that for a score? Two stars? Three stars?

Yeah, but there's more to it than that. It sort of depends. Indeed, there are an awful lot of different reviews one could write for Largo Argentina, and maybe that's how it should be done...


If you like cats, even mildly: 5 Stars!

In a large, closed off area of ancient and picturesque ruins a wildly diverse population of cats, operating out of the cat sanctuary tucked in the corner of the ruins, sprawls out in the sun. Generally you can see about ten to twenty cats at any given time, though at first you might see none. Then, you excitedly spot one, and another, until you are delighted in finding them in all sorts of unlikely spots. Seeing cats with free run over Roman ruins is astonishingly satisfying, and vastly more entertaining, morally upright, and more beautiful than any zoo on the face of the earth.


If you like notable historical locations: 5 Stars!

We're not talking about "This is where the Roman Senate convened" or "The Vestal Virgins were in this Temple" or even "This is where Audrey Hepburn drank champagne with Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday" worthy as those might be. We're talking about "This is the precise spot where Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by Senators, including Brutus!"

You may have heard of this event.


If you like a cool spot to get out of the sun: 0 Stars!

This is one big open, exposed square. It is bounded by shops on one side, a modest street on another, and two gigantic, busy streets on the third and fourth. Stand there, leaning on the fence watching sleeping cats in shade that you cannot get to, until you are shriveling like Gollum in the sun and hallucinating that you are in a toga being stabbed to death by your friends!



Of course, as you see, I gave Largo Argentina 5 Stars. I like cats.

200 Views of Rome: Origini Gelateria

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4 Stars




Oh, I love this little corner. Across from the Ditta Poggi art store. The Prosciutteria is up that little alley. It is in sight of the side wall of Sopra Minerva and its Michelangelo. Partly I know Origini so well from hanging out on this corner a lot, loitering. I would loiter for awhile, then I'd wander into Origini, just to, you know, look. And they'd give me tastes of things, which was fair enough. And then I'd buy a small cup of something, which also was fair enough. Then I'd wander off and eat five or six bites and throw it away. Not because it was bad. It really was excellent gelato. I recommend it. It was just, I was only in Rome for 30 days and I had A LOT of gelato to taste. A lot. So it was more in the spirit of spitting wine out at a tasting. A horrible sin, but necessary.

I give out five stars frequently here, and why not with all those Roman Churches and Palazzi? But five stars for every good gelateria might not be so helpful to others seeking discernment when it comes to gelato. So I'll only give five stars to the four or five special gelaterias I found, the touchers of heaven, the gelaterias that snuck through excellence and daringly reached out their cold spoons and touched magic. Origini didn't quite manage this for me.  But they did succeed in making a very, very nice gelato, smooth, consistent, and well balanced. Much interested in unusual gelati this was one of the only places I ended up finding one. I had Parmesan gelato here. It was made with Parmesan cheese. It tasted like Parmesan cheese. It wasn't good, exactly, but I enjoyed the opportunity.

A flavor to recommend? Ah, you will try what appeals to you in the moment anyway, and may you have that little bit more luck than I, and see all the stars...

200 Views of Rome: Lost Food Factory

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3 Stars




Is this still there? It wasn't very busy. I had a panini here once. It was passable. Wait, let me get my snob hat, okay? If you eat corporate fake food, like Subway et al, yes, this may seem amazing, I guess. If you know how to make a good sandwich with real ingredients it won't, but it won't be bad. 

Okay?

200 Views of Rome: Santa Maria Sopra Minerva

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5 Stars



Oh!

A Church!

In Rome?

What's this doing here?

But though my head may spin in trying to relate past accounts of a positive avalanche of Roman churches, there is no problem with dear Sopra Minerva. It remains vivid and distinct in my mind and memory. For this Sopra Minerva has a host of advantages.

1. Located next door to the Pantheon, it was right in our neighborhood. We passed it countless times, and I was not averse to taking an occasional rakish shortcut right through the heart of the church itself.

2. All besotted of the Baroque does not mean that an anomalous Gothic interior doesn't offer a bit of very refreshing change.

3. There's a Michelangelo inside (front left corner of the Altar level), and while, sure, the Pieta is better, the Pieta requires two long lines, a security check at an airport level of scrutiny, and can only be viewed in a large crowd, from about 200 paces away, through a  foot thickness of acrylic glass that bounces the flashes of constant photo taking into one's eyes. Meanwhile this one is nearly as good (check out the leg!), and you can get within about 3 inches of it on the least whim.

4. There's just something about that Minerva ceiling, like the first stars at the very end of dusk, that makes me go all whoozy inside, like, and I hope you'll forgive me, the prelude swamp scene sky at the start of the Disneyland ride Pirates of the Carribbean. Two peas in a pod.


P.S. Never mind that the exterior is bland. Enjoy the elephant appetizer.

200 Views of Rome: Margherita Restaurant

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3 Stars



Also called "Friends". This is kind of a typical mediocre Roman restaurant with a casual, somewhat cafe-ish vibe and an American food influence. I can't exactly recommend it, but I don't not recommend it, and they were once playing a Barcelona soccer game here on their bar TV. Most of Rome's ridiculous English Soccer Pubs with 12 TVs couldn't manage to do this, and we could buy a good, fresh juice here and sit and watch it. So I'm grateful.

200 Views of Rome: Chiesa Del Gesu

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5 Stars


Here we have another in an amazingly long line of churches in Rome that I must recommend with the faint "Well, if you're passing by, it would be kind of terrible not to go in, but you don't really need to make any particular trip over to it."

But here it is with five stars. It is one of the most amazing interiors I have ever seen. It is in the top 100 ever! 

Unfortunately 78 of those are in Rome.

So, yes, Rome, fecund, bursting at the seams Rome is our first problem. Without any Caravaggio painting, Borromini architecture, Bernini Sculpture (though supposedly he prayed here regularly) or point of total differentiation from other Baroque interiors, I have to take a few moments of trying to sort out Del Gesu from the other churches we went into. What I remember is that there was some construction going on, altering the approach and access to the church. I remember how it is just off the unappealingly busy street Corso Emmanuale. And I remember we went in there three or four times, mostly because I forgot whether I'd been in there or not, or forgot what it looked like and thought I should take another look.

The inside of Del Gesu looks like this:

There is a clear and beautiful Autumn day. The sky is full of grand, puffy clouds that threaten no rain and look like fairy castles in the air. You have the sharpest knife in the world. So, idly, to test your knife, you cut into the belly of the clouds. 

Del Gesu is what spills out.

200 Views of Rome: Church of St. Louis of the French (San Luigi dei Francesi)

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5 Stars




Very nice French church near a good coffee shop. 

HA! I really enjoy that understatement.

So, actually, yes, it is a nice church well worth peering about at, up the street from the legendary coffee shop Sant Eustachio. But we're here for 3 drop dead miracles of the human experience, 3 paintings by Caravaggio, hung up on some side chapel like they're a footnote. These are not footnotes. This is as great a painter as who ever lived, working at full power. Holy crap.

Why are the paintings obscured by gloom? 

You have to put a coin in the box to turn on the light for a bit.

PUT A COIN IN THE BOX ALREADY!

Oh, thanks, I was just about to put one in myself.

This is absolutely worth flying thousands of miles just to see alone! And yet, if you miss it... no biggie. That's Rome for you.

200 Views of Rome: Palazzo Barberini Cafe

5 Stars


It may be hard to leave a review for The Palazzo Barberini Cafe on TripAdvisor or anywhere else on the Internet because, sadly, there is, as such, no Palazzo Barberini Cafe. Rather there is a sort of empty, large stone vestibule tucked up against Bernini's notable staircase in the Barberini Palazzo. And there, against a wall, is all we really have of a cafe: an espresso dispensing machine.

I love that espresso machine!

My god the hours of fun my wife and I had at that espresso machine. Well maybe not hours exactly. It was great though. It had all these drinks, I mean, espresso, sure, but every weird variation one could think of too, with mochas and cappuccinos and maybe even some fake milks. Dozens of buttons to push. Luckily I often had a pocket full of change and it would be empty by the time we would leave that fantastic machine. Put in the requisite coins, make your selection, and down plops the cup. Weird complicated sounds, frothings, steamings, gurglings, issue forth from deep in the machine, human, animal, espresso bar, mad sounds. Espresso, frothy espresso squeezes out of the machine into the cup. Then, if you went fancy, more things, more whirrings and gurglings, agitating and cajoling. A tiny spoon hilariously spits into the cup. Wild, magical things happen. It is the most entertaining machine in the world!

Once Italian men in suits came and got drinks and walked off with them. One man had a special card that held a credit for the machine. He even tried to get us a drink. He might have been running out of credit. It might have been half successful. It might have been our eleventh drink. What a nice man. He might have been touched by our love radiating so wildly towards the machine.

Were the drinks any good?

Oh no, god no. The espresso could be drunk only with a strong will. Everything else was truly repulsive and absolutely had to be thrown away after a mere sip.

Imagine if they had a real cafe there at the Barberini. Imagine if one could get a really good cappuccino sitting at a small table by Bernini's stairs. What a great cafe it would be in such a place. What a glowing review I could give it! I would give it five stars.

Which is exactly as many as I give to this machine.

Which makes one understand why sometimes Romans don't put in the effort. What, after all, is there to strive for?

200 Views of Rome: Biblioteca Angelica

3 Stars



An old Library Italians use that they will let you peep at. Interesting interior that's fun to see, like a mediocre (for Rome) Church, but happily, for a change, not a Church, and with the refreshing decoration of walls full of mysterious old tomes instead of pious Saints. Plus, what are all those people at the tables studying? At a glance this library does not carry any books published after 1850 or so. I wish my library had a bit of this. We've stopped carrying anything published before 2012. Very much not worth a trip of any kind (Biblioteca Angelica, that is, not my library, which is not in the purview of this review), and yet totally worth the five minutes if you just happen to be passing by (and Caravaggio fans might as it's next to Church of St. Augustine with its Madonna of the Pilgrims).

200 Reviews of Rome: Church of St. Augustine

4 Stars




Dime a dozen Roman Church (Mainly Renaissance, I believe). This means it would be hardly worth the 15 minutes trouble in Rome, but in any American city it would be worth planning half a day around. This church though is elevated up even from there by a middle of the pack Caravaggio (again the relativity thing: worth building a fifty million dollar museum around the painting in other cities, and yet in Rome merely worth popping in for if you find you're walking by it, but don't sweat it).

Nevertheless, for all my off-the-cuff casualness, it's kind of a gorgeous painting (check out those dirty feet, the shoulders...) and it's a three minutes walk from either Piazza Navona or, more to the point, The Church of St. Louis of the French (San Luigi dei Francesi) which holds three more Caravaggio masterpieces. And, if you can set aside that perhaps just recently you've been in nine churches, 4 prettier, 3 about the same, and 2 not quite so nice, and instead trick your mind into this being the only church you have ever seen, the beauties of San'Agostino are capable of burning ice out of your heart.

200 Views of Rome: The Pantheon

5 Stars



Well, what's the point, and it could hardly need another review, another person suggesting you see it, my favorite Classical Roman building, not a ruin, just a building, ever carrying on.

But okay.

This was our neighborhood wonder. Two hundred times in our trip we came upon it in the course of thirty days. Never once did it cease amazing.

Time one: Oh my god, that's The Pantheon!

Time 184: Oh my god, that's The Pantheon!

Sure, go inside. The doorway is good, looking up is fabulous, pretty floor. But once or twice of that and it's enough. No, circle it. Catch views of it. Bask in it. Watch a busker by it. Shop in its shadow. Pick out its hidden details out back, down below. Get a gelato at it. Notice it. Forget it so you can notice it again. It's still there. Is it still there? It's always still there. How is it perfect? No one knows. Is it still there?

It's still there.

The 200 Views of Rome reviews

In the course of four or five years of blogging the question has come up as to what is appropriate for me to write about here. So I answer the question, but the question just sits there, froglike, staring without discernible reaction to anything I answer. So I put the question up on a shelf above my screen where it eats flies and I rarely notice it anymore. Sometimes when I'm thinking of writing about soccer or radical politics I look nervously at it and it says ribit.

This weekend I started writing in my notebook. I started writing two hundred reviews of places in Rome, thinking I would post these on Trip Advisor. Two things happened. One is that all my reviews sounded like they might as well be blog posts. Two is that I realized I will never manage to do all the massive writing of 200 reviews if they can't double as blog posts.

So I came down to my computer to see if this would be okay. And the frog ate a fly and said ribit and peered into space. Good enough for me.

And so now, after 8 months of recovery from the journey, I am ready to review every last thing I can think of in dear Rome, and, by doing so, give a kind of account of it, a literary travelogue. Or at least I'll give it a shot to make it so.

Up these reviews will go here. And for a while the normal rules of the blog will cease. Yes, there will still be at least one post per day, but there may be many more. Rome reviews will go up as they can and, if you are a subscriber, you may find your inbox swamped. This could go on for awhile. There may be breaks. But hang in there; soon all 200 reviews will be written, and you will know everything there is to know about Rome.

Or at least everything I know, minus a couple private things to keep the mystery...

Bob Dylan's prize tips

 

Bob Dylan flew in to have cocktails with me just this last Thursday. Regardless of all his fame and money and such, it's very touching to have someone fly for two hours just to have a drink with me. I think he was coming from New Hampshire and returning to Vermont, maybe? It's a bit odd that he doesn't think of paying for our drinks, I mean after all the trouble and expense he's already going to. But we go dutch. I think it would offend his code to pay. Don't get me started on his code. 

We were at a cocktail house called Du Nord. We both had variations on a drink called "The Last Word". This is a drink built around the French Liqueur Green Chartreuse. Green Chartreuse is a brilliant and beautiful drink made by Monks, Monks who live up near the Mountains. Or maybe it just used to be made by them. They say it's made of 130 herbs and spices. It tastes like it.

"You know what's great about Green Chartreuse, I mean, besides the taste?" Bob asked rhetorically, so I didn't interrupt. "It's twice as expensive as any other good liqueur, and it's complicated. So you know if a bar uses it they probably have conviction."

"Also it's really strong." I added.

"A hundred and ten proof." He said, nodding his head.

"Hey, I got something for you." I said, remembering, and digging in my pocket. "There!" I cried, spreading a wrinkled newspaper article out before him.

"What's this?" He asked suspiciously, not making the slightest move in his chair.

"Songwriting tips!"

"No, I'm good." Bob said.

"There's some good stuff in there." I said encouragingly, pulling back the article. "Look at this one. Number two: Lyrics matter. Taylor Swift says her experience with song writing is usually so confessional."

"You don't say." Bob sipped his drink.

"Number eight is "Don't overthink it"."

"I know how to write a song." Bob said cooly.

"It's been awhile." I responded.

"I've been busy winning Nobel Prizes."

"Oh, yeah?" 

"For lit-er-a-ture." Bob enunciated grandly, swirling and admiring his third cocktail.

"I'd like to win a Nobel Prize." I said.

"Yeah, yeah." Bob tossed off.

"Do you have any tips?"

And Bob just laughed.

My part in global warming

You might think that as the Billionaire Chief Executive of clerkmanifesto I would be above the small maneuverings of politics. What is global warming to me? I who can afford all the air conditioning units I can want. Nevertheless, President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement caught my attention. While Mr. Trump's tax policy seems terribly levelheaded to a job generator like myself (the people I shout at all day to get me stuff don't do it for free!), I felt a twinge of concern for the planet. After all, I own so much of it!

So even though it appears the ship has sailed on the Paris Climate Agreement, I thought "Hey, that doesn't mean I can't do my part!" So I had my people draw me up a list of earth friendly lifestyle changes for me to choose from. Most of them I had to cross off as being too inconvenient. A couple were so demanding that they offended me and I had to fire the writers of them for impertinence, but a short, brave list of possible actions survived my winnowing, and I have already begun instituting them.

But I can't do it alone. It takes all of us to combat climate change, or so I've heard. This made me think "I am not so different than you all out there on the Internet". What if we all did these small acts of conservation together, our own little Paris Agreement. Yes, as easy as I have tried to make these lifestyle changes, you may find a few of them to be personally challenging. But I feel if we bear down and stick with it together we can save the world!

And so here are my five small actions that I believe if we all do together we can truly make a difference in saving the planet! Or at least, so my staff people seem to suggest:


1. Fly first class.

Yes, I know, horrible to give up a private plane. But some airports are starting to have some very exclusive and adequate VIP member lounges and boarding access. My tip is, when traveling alone, arrange to buy two first class seats next to each other so you have some room to spread out.


2. You don't have to heat all your swimming pools. 

You're never at the Tuscany House in the Autumn. Why have them keep the pool ready like you might drop in at any moment?


3. Grow your own food.

I'm not entirely sure what this does, and I think it might have something to do with my Estate Manager at the Napa Villa wanting to hire his daughter, an unemployed master gardener. But my Chef likes the idea of extensive kitchen gardens, and I like the Chef. So... benefit of the doubt.


4. Don't let the live-in staff control their own thermostats.

You're maybe onto this one already as a cost saver, but go ahead and crank that thermostat all the way until you hear complaints of discomfort. At that point you say "Don't you want to be able to leave a habitable planet to our children?"


5. Have your dogs put down.

Especially if you're not particularly close to them. The cats can stay, they make no notable difference as long as you feed them fish and mice.



Let's do it. For the planet!

Library fun!

 
Ohhh. Fun! 

It's not all work work work around here at the library. Sometimes there's fun!

A man came to the front desk of the library. "I'm looking to see if you have a movie." He said.

"Sure. What is it?"

"Embrace of the Serpent" He said.

So I noodled about on my keyboard and like magic came up with the essential information that indeed we did have such a movie checked in. "Yes." I said. "We have a copy checked in."

"I looked and I didn't see it."

I got up from my chair. "Well, I'll go take a look." I said.

"That's it." He cried. "You're just going to look where I already looked?"

"Yep."

"But it's not there. Couldn't it be in the back?" He asked.

"No." I explained, not breaking stride. "It would be on a different status if it were back there, one for recent returns."

"But I thought you'd be able to do something different than what I already did." He complained.

"Well, I have all kinds of secret tricks, so we'll see. Did you look down below here?" I asked as we arrived, gesturing at the two underneath shelves people sometimes miss that are below the flip through bins.

"Yes." He replied. "I already looked through all of those twice."

The words were hardly out of his mouth when I pulled the DVD off the shelf. "Here you go." I said cheerily, handing it to him.

"Oh." He said.

Fun!

Hilarious joke concerning minute library policy

As you will see this joke is meant for the oral tradition. So it would be best if you read it to yourself, listening to it and ignoring the spelling. Due to homophones it is less hilarious as written, and possibly slightly confusing. So you may thus not be amused by it in reading, but if you nevertheless bravely tell it aloud to everyone you know you will be gratified by their peals of laughter and their increased conviction, spoken or not, that you make everything in the world just a little bit better.

And so:

We freely give out day passes to people without library cards who want to use our Internet computers. But for reasons way too complicated and stupid and boring to explain a patron had to be 18 or older to get a pass on their own, unaccompanied. Some people abided by this policy. Others, like me, engaged in a dedicated "Don't ask, don't tell" approach. But finally, due to some quality staff advocacy, the word came down from our Management Team: Minors shall be allowed Internet passes anytime they want with no restriction. There was one proviso though. We should ask that they flick their headlamps on and off to prove that they are who they are pretending to be.

You see, it's a pun.

Yes, yes, much much better read aloud. Incomparable.

No, just trust me. Go tell it to a bunch of people. People love puns!

Bike etiquette in Yiddish!

Yesterday in this space I started out by telling you about how readers around here come and go. And then I was going to tell you about how sometimes I say something really important and fundamental, but after a long time a lot of the people here on this blog haven't heard it because they weren't there back when I said it. This is what I think of in the blog business as a "set up". It was going to lead into my ridiculous, obsessive, but very clear-headed and essential reflections on bicycle passing lane etiquette. This is a subject that has been discussed here before, but I felt it could use some freshening up. But as so often happens with my introductory comments, they take issue with being yoked to my preconceived fancies. So, as they often do, yesterday, they ran off in the direction of their own whim. Their own whim, it turned out, had something to do with my being Jewish, which I barely and completely am. And before I could do anything about it the whole blog post ended completely in Yiddish. Yiddish! 

Reflecting on this now I realize that this may have something to do with my blog's curious resistance to becoming wildly popular, and also probably has to do with the "and go" part of the phrase "readers around here come and go". The number of native secular Yiddish speakers has, over the past 80 years, dropped from 12 million to just 22. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally my blog readership is also 22!

So then here is how you pass on a two lane, two way bike path:

If there is no bike in the oncoming traffic lane you go into that lane and, passing on the left, you... pass.

That's all!

You do not say "On your left" unless what you really mean is:



"Haha! I am faster than you by a mile, loser!"

 or

"I don't trust any human being other than myself and I don't care how irritating or dangerous that may be to others." 

or

"Hi! Isn't biking virtuous and fun and just delightful! How I wish I could stop and chat with you even though you're a stranger. I would ask you loads of fun questions and not listen to your answers! But alas I must be moving on. Have a nice day!"

or

"I don't understand any of the subtleties about biking etiquette as I have only been biking for 28 years now and I don't speak Yiddish."

But if you are trying to say any or all of those things, "On your left" is a very succinct way to put it.