Waiting for the shippers to arrive
Jul. 7th, 2015 12:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
melodyssisterToday is our penultimate day in Takoma Park. The house is almost empty - everything we are shipping is in boxes, waiting to be containerized by the shippers, the unsuccessful yard sale items were picked up half an hour ago by Purple Heart (the Salvation Army could schedule pick-ups only from the 15th), and almost all our clothes etc. for the West Coast are already in suitcases, with the final packing to be done after the shippers come in a couple of hours. Tomorrow the house will be professionally cleaned, and we will set off for the last leg of our American adventure.
Yesterday we went to our last Smithsonian museum: the Museum of American History. It was a good choice for an afternoon's entertainment, but I think we were right to keep it low on our list of museums to go to. We went to three exhibitions, averaging an hour per exhibition: We started in the Food hall, where we saw Julia Child's kitchen, in which her TV shows were filmed. Ariel was very envious of all her copper pots. The description of how American food changed from 1950 to 2000 was very interesting, especially as it seems to me that many of the movements that took place in the US in the 1970s are now occurring in Israel. We continued to an exhibition on a house in Ipswich, MA, which was continuously occupied from its construction in the 1760s until 1963, which told the stories of four families that lived there - a Revolutionary merchant, an abolitionist and reformist family, an Irish washerwoman and her factory-worker daughter, and a grandmother and grandson during WWII. That last kitchen put the 1950s kitchens into a different perspective! We then moved to another wing of the museum, to exhibitions on transport. We started with maritime transport and the Atlantic world, and ended with the containerisation revolution of shipping in the 1960s and 70s, which moved the centre of West Coast shipping from San Francisco to Oakland.
Yesterday we went to our last Smithsonian museum: the Museum of American History. It was a good choice for an afternoon's entertainment, but I think we were right to keep it low on our list of museums to go to. We went to three exhibitions, averaging an hour per exhibition: We started in the Food hall, where we saw Julia Child's kitchen, in which her TV shows were filmed. Ariel was very envious of all her copper pots. The description of how American food changed from 1950 to 2000 was very interesting, especially as it seems to me that many of the movements that took place in the US in the 1970s are now occurring in Israel. We continued to an exhibition on a house in Ipswich, MA, which was continuously occupied from its construction in the 1760s until 1963, which told the stories of four families that lived there - a Revolutionary merchant, an abolitionist and reformist family, an Irish washerwoman and her factory-worker daughter, and a grandmother and grandson during WWII. That last kitchen put the 1950s kitchens into a different perspective! We then moved to another wing of the museum, to exhibitions on transport. We started with maritime transport and the Atlantic world, and ended with the containerisation revolution of shipping in the 1960s and 70s, which moved the centre of West Coast shipping from San Francisco to Oakland.
