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This has been an incredibly productive week - ADC even finished the first draft of his article, and only has the figures and drawings to do, so coming to Friday Harbor has been very worthwhile for him, and I have gone through half of the articles for the special issue on medicine that I am co-editing. While the two of us have been at work, the boys have done a lot of exploring and holiday homework: A has made a lot of progress catching up on geometry, while S has listened to an audiobook of White Fang (an abridged version, by OxfordOwl) and written a new ending of over 600 words. This was his summer homework from his school in Israel, so I'm pleased that's done.

What else have we been up to? Last Sunday we walked back into town and explored what was there apart form the market and supermarket. We went down to the harbour itself and watched people setting off on a whale watch ($70-100 a person, I think we'll begin by seeing what we can see from land. Tomorrow we are going to a park semi-officially known as Whale Watch Park), before locating the San Juan Transit station, from which we would take the bus that goes to that park (the blue route) or to the alpaca farm (the green route), where I had been planning to buy yarn for myself and [livejournal.com profile] eumelia, until we walked out of an ice cream shop and I saw a sign out of the corner of my eye: Island Wools. As you can imagine, as soon as I finished my ice-cream I went inside, and immediately became overwhelmed. The young woman behind the counter was very welcoming, and showed me the alpaca yarn she had: not from the farm on San Juan Island, but from the next one. The yarn was a bit disappointing to me, as it was much thicker than I really wanted - alpaca is really warm, so not that useful in Israel, and I was planning to use it together with another yarn, a ribbon yarn in a wine colour. As soon as she said that there was a range of yarns that were hand-dyed in the shop, I knew that that was what I wanted. I must say that everyone else was very understanding of me - not to say enabling; S found a pattern for a Robin Hoodie, and tried to convince me to knit his next Purim costume. However, the lack of space in our suitcases (to say nothing of the prices; that alpaca yarn was $34 for 100 gm) forced me to decide that I could only buy one skein. The colours available were all so gorgeous that it was clear that I would have to come back with a ball of the ribbon yarn in order to match the colours.

Monday was a quiet day, as we were a bit exhausted from walking back and forth twice in two days, but on Tuesday the boys and I had a lot of fun: first of all, after a safety review on the docks, we were allowed to look at plankton that ADC had helped collect with the invertebrate embryology course. It was really fascinating, seeing all the tiny shiny balls that are actually real animals. After lunch, we walked into town, and while I went back to the yarn shop with the ball I wanted to match, the boys went geocaching. I will let A tell you all about that, and just say that buying yarn was even more fun than just looking. [livejournal.com profile] eumelia also decided that she preferred colourful fingering-weight yarn to thicker alpaca, and I bought six mini-balls for her, and one large hank for myself, in a colour called Black Cherry. With excellent timing, the boys arrived just as I had decided what I wanted, and they were able to watch the hank being wound into a centre-pull ball. Not only did they enjoy watching that, they were relieved to hear that now they would not have to help me do the winding by hand :-) On the way home, we went past a second-hand bookshop that claimed to have 50,000 books and a computerised catalogue. Interestingly, the boys were not that keen - they preferred the new book shop we had gone to on Sunday. I think they lack the formative experience of second-hand bookshops being the only way to get books in English at a reasonable price. We are planning to visit what is supposed to be the biggest second-hand bookshop in North America, Powell's in Portland, on our road trip, so maybe that will help change their minds.

On Wednesday, the highlight of the day was the ice cream social at the dining hall, where you could have all the ice-cream you wanted, with all kinds of toppings, while on Thursday, the highlight was the farewell party for the invertebrate embryology course where ADC had given two talks. A helped grill (on a gas grill), and a good time was had by all. On Friday, we finally got on the water, and when for a brief practise row in the immediate vicinity of the labs, which are across the bay from the town of Friday Harbor. It was a bit nerve-racking at first, and S in the bow and me at the stern was the wrong way around for balance (and I got very wet from the rowers), but all in all, ADC and A gained enough confidence to row all the way across this morning. It is indeed quicker than walking, just under half an hour rather than slightly over 45 minutes.

We started a bit later than we had intended, so instead of beginning at the Whale Museum and continuing to the farmers' market, we started at the farmers' market, went to the San Juan Cheese Shop and ended up at the San Juan Island Museum of Art - the Whale Museum will have to wait for another day. I had wanted to go to the SJIMA from the moment I saw an advertisement for one of the exhibitions there: a photographer at the Whiteley Centre (where ADC has his fellowship now) had taken pictures of the invertebrates studied at FHL and printed them on blank backgrounds - they looked absolutely gorgeous. My favourite was the stalk jelly, which looked like something from a kaleidoscope. A liked the curly-headed spaghetti worm, which he believes proves the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. S's favourite was two starfishes touching each other, which he thought reminiscent of the Creation of Man from the Sistine Chapel. ADC refused to say which picture he liked best, claiming to be used to the animals.

After getting home, we went out again in the late afternoon, very kindly being lent a car by one of our neighbours, who is teaching at the marine invertebrates course, and drove off to explore some of the south coast of the island, via geocaching. We also took the time to watch the tide coming in, as high tide was at 5:45. I will now quote A on geocaching:
Geocaches are small caches hidden on trails in various places. The person hiding the cache opens a cache page on a geocaching website with the coordinates for the cache and a brief description of the cache and hints how to find it. If you want to go geocaching somewhere you search the websites for caches in that place and choose caches that look interesting and send their coordinates to your GPS. When you make sure the coordinates are on your GPS you can go to the place you are going geocaching and start looking for the cache. The caches are usually small boxes hidden somewhere not obvious but findable after a search. Once you find the cache you open it and see what’s inside. Common things found in caches are marbles, stickers and travel bugs*. In every cache there are a few pieces of paper for writing your name and the date you found the cache. Once you sign the cache you leave something in the cache and take one of the things in side of the cache. When you get back home you log your visit and write you found the cache (or didn’t).
*Travel bugs are small discs with a code you move from place to place and write on the website where it was moved and then you can track its trip.

My personal experience of geocaching is very fun and extremely fulfilling. it’s a very enjoyable extra to add to every hike. It was very exciting to find my first geocache with Shaul. While Mummy was in her knitting shop S and I went to look for an interesting geocache called “Quick Trail!”. We followed the directions in the description and what the GPS said was the right direction (it’s not a GPS like waze but a GPS for geocaching and tracking where you went and it has a compass and stuff) until we reached the middle of a short trail between two streets. After about 20 minutes of searching and S trying to persuade me the cache wasn’t there we found it between the bushes next to a broken cinder block (like the description said). When we opened the cache we signed our names, took a marble and put in a travel bug from a previous cache we didn’t actually find but just asked the people at the reception counter after looking for it outside and they pulled it out from under the table, so that’s not a real find after looking. S and I were very happy after finding “Quick Trail!” and kept talking about it until the end of the day.
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I last posted while we were waiting for the shippers to arrive. They arrived within the time slot they had promised and were done - inventorying, sealing and some re-packing - in under an hour. A few days later, we were told that the shipment had been containerised and came within 5 cubic feet of the estimate, so no need to adjust the payment. All that was left for us to do in Takoma Park was to have the house cleaned, on the 8th, and to sample restaurants we had not got around to previously, since the house was completely empty - anything M and D had left, was taken by our next-door neighbours. All of that was highly successful: both Middle Eastern Cuisine, where we had supper, and Mark's Kitchen, where we had brunch, were excellent, and the cleaners left the house spotless. I think that the kitchen sinks were cleaner than they had been when we arrived!

The first leg of our journey was uneventful, apart from two suitcases being overweight. In the end, we underestimated what we had left to pack, and everything was a very tight squeeze indeed. We bought another small suitcase in Seattle - which added the excitement of taking the Monorail to our day there - but we really should have bought it already in DC. Not only would that have saved us $50 in overweight fees, Washington State has a 9.5% sales tax!! The only place we could easily find suitcases was at Nordstrom Rack, where the prices were higher than ADC had paid for a large suitcase in DC. Nothing to d about that now, and another suitcase had made things more comfortable.

Our day in Seattle was lovely. We woke up early, of course, and after breakfast made our way to the Chihuly Glass and Gardens Museum. After walking into Takoma Park mid-morning in the humidity and heat the day before, what Seattle considered to be a heatwave felt like perfect weather to us. ADC and I had been very unimpressed by the Chihuly in the Light of Jerusalem installation at the Tower of David in 1998 (it was hugely successful, with over a million visitors, but I don't think I've met anyone who actually thought it looked good), so we were eager to see what the glass sculptures looked like on their home ground. And they were magnificent. Some pieces were better than others, but they all "worked" much more than they had in Jerusalem. I have come to the conclusion that the Tower of David was not green enough. All the other installations outside of museums have been much further north than Jerusalem (Finland, Venice, Kew Gardens), in places with much more water - much more like Seattle, in fact. I think that the lack of green, the different light and the dust in Jerusalem, were what subverted the installation. Anyway, we all enjoyed the museum very much. A took a lot of pictures, and S is convinced that Chihuly is a genius. We spent about an hour and a half in a rather small museum before going on to the EMP, possibly the strangest-looking building I've ever been in.

We spent most of the rest of the day at the EMP, which stands for Experience Music Project. The museum began as a collection of rock memorabilia, but has now expanded to all kinds of popular culture. We spent the morning at three exhibitions: First, we went to the special exhibition of costumes from the Star Wars trilogies. It was amazing to see the costume designer and her team of 60-100 people at work making all the varied costumes. So many different materials and skills were involved! It was rather funny to see a video of Natalie Portman enthusing about her exotic dresses while wearing a plaid shirt, too. And of course there were the costumes themselves, with swatches of the materials to feel, which was great. We then continued to an exhibition on science fiction and another on fantasy, where again we saw many props and costumes from movies. The children were particularly excited to see costumes from The Princess Bride. I feel that there was a typo in the note about David Bowie's costume from Labyrinth, which says "the legendary David Bowie in Jareth the Goblin King's costume" rather than "David Bowie in the legendary Jareth the Goblin King costume."

After lunch (hot dogs in the park - with a vegetarian option! The West Coast is clearly much better at catering to vegetarians), we went to the music side of the EMP, where we saw exhibitions on Jimi Hendrix, the development of the electric guitar and ended the day with learning to play drums and a jam session. After a brief detour to buy a suitcase, we met ADC's second cousin once removed, JG, for supper. He took us to a Cajun restaurant, although none of us ended up ordering things that were specifically Cajun. JG struck me as being something of a combination of my father-in-law and his older brother, although not as tall. He was very enthusiastic about Friday Harbor, and very unenthusiastic about Chihuly.

On Friday we got up at the crack of dawn, missing breakfast, in order to be at the pier by 6:45 in order to catch the 7:45 Victoria Clipper to Friday Harbor (a catamaran that goes between Seattle and Friday Harbor once a day, and to Victoria in British Columbia several times a day). The idea had been to have the best view of seabirds and possibly whales, and to get to Friday Harbor fairly early from a conveniently central location. However, it was not to be. The clipper was cancelled due to mechanical problems (they had sent out an e-mail to that effect at 6:15, but considering that the shuttle had been canceled on Thursday as well, I think that they could have made the announcement earlier). We received a full refund, of course, and coupons for coffee, and they paid for a taxi to the Seattle convention centre, where we could get the 11:30 shuttle to Anacortes, where we could take the 2:00 p.m. ferry to Friday Harbor, arriving at 3:00 rather than at 11:00, as planned. We waited until the luggage storage opened, and then improved our mood by going to Pike Place market, where we bought excellent build-your-own sandwiches to eat on the way to the ferry. We arrived at the convention centre about half an hour before the shuttle was due to arrive, assuming that it would arrive early so as to allow luggage to be loaded. Wrong! It arrived 40 minutes late, with not a word of explanation or apology. When we discovered that we had to move to another minibus to actually get to the Anacortes ferry terminal, it was clear that we were not going to make the 2 o'clock boat - and the next one was at 4:45, arriving at Friday Harbor after six - seven hours and much irritation later. At that point, however, our luck began to change. As the ferry had been having its own problems, the 2:50 ferry to Sidney, BC, was making an unscheduled stop at Friday Harbor, and we were able to embark almost immediately. The voyage was very pleasant, we had a good enough view, and we got a taxi immediately as we walked off the dock. We were at Friday Harbor Labs before the office closed.

Once we arrived at FHL, we were able to book supper at the dining hall before we went to unpack at our cabin. The cabin is great. We were surprised at first to realise that there was no air conditioning, but since then we have realised that heatings and fans are all you need. The kitchen is about triple the size of the one we had in Takoma Park, with a table that seats 4-6 which is where we will be eating most of the time. The crockery, cutlery, pots and pans are a bit random, but sufficient. The children each have a single bed, and the pressure in the shower is good. In short, we have all we need.

Once we had settled in, we went to the social hour and ate popcorn and met people. I am proud to say that I was able to ask people about their work and carry on an intelligent conversation, understanding almost everything (or at least, the words were familiar and I have a vague idea of what they mean). We had supper at the dining hall and then breakfast yesterday. We were advised that the best meal of the week is Sunday brunch, and we duly registered for that (which is why I am writing this in the morning rather than the evening, as we are still waiting for brunch).

Yesterday (Saturday) was largely spent shopping. We walked into the town of Friday Harbor - which is significantly further away than we had understood, 45 minutes rather than 20 minutes - and shopped both at the grocery store and at the farmers' market. The market is all local, and there was far less fruit available than we are used to, only berries - but they were some of the best raspberries and strawberries we've ever eaten. We planned well in having brought along a cooler bag and two shopping baskets, as we needed all of that as well as our backpacks to carry everything home. Of course, once we got back we realised we had forgotten some vital items, like serviettes, but the plan today is to go back into town after brunch today, to explore the town itself and visit an art fair.

After lunch and a rest, the boys went back to the dining hall to play ping-pong, and ADC and I walked around FHL, identifying the trees (there weren't many birds around). We found ten different species in the short distance from our cabin to the Whiteley Centre where ADC has office space to the actual labs themselves. As we approached the labs, we met one of the people teaching there, who invited us to come and see the sea creatures. The boys turned up just then, and we had a very interesting half hour looking at the weird and wonderful invertebrates being studied. On one of the benches I saw a copy of Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, a particularly appropriate choice given the amount of time he spent investigating marine invertebrates with Theo.

ADC then went to play pool with the boys, while I continued knitting. I may want to complete this cardigan as soon as possible and actually wear it - it is currently 15C outside, at 9:30 a.m. I am very glad that I insisted that we all bring two sets of long clothes, rather than shipping all the winter clothes.
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It's difficult to believe that two weeks ago I was sitting in J's kitchen translating SR's bar mitzvah sermon, and her and LR's speeches. As we have a very cultural weekend planned (AwesomeCon followed by Fauré's Requiem on Saturday, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead on Sunday), I have to finish writing this letter today!
So, as everyone knows, A, S and I had a very action-packed week in Israel between May 10-16, while ADC spent part of that time visiting colleagues in Arizona with whom he has a BSF grant. We managed to see a lot of people, but not everyone we would have liked to, and most people we did not get to see enough of, for my part particularly not enough of my siblings J and R (I think I saw more of my brother-and sister-in-law than I did of them). It was lovely seeing my uncle and aunt from South Africa and my cosin from London, their son, too, and I'm sorry we only overlapped for 36 hours or so.

A and Sl's favourite day was Tuesday, which we spent in Jerusalem, each one of us seeing friends separately. I think that this week has actually made them  more eager to come home: seeing all their old friends really emphasised the extent to which they have made acquaintances rather than friends in Takoma Park. I think the day I enjoyed most was Thursday, when I spent the morning at Tel Aviv University meeting friends and the early afternoon seeing [livejournal.com profile] eumelia s flat and having lunch with her at a very pleasant café down the road, before she took the three boys to see Avengers: Age of Ultron, which they all enjoyed thoroughly. ADC and I are very grateful to her for doing so, otherwise we would have had to take the boys to see it, and we would rather do other things on our weekends.... The bar mitzvah itself, of course, was in a class of itself. I was highly impressed with SR's reading from the Torah, and J and LR's speeches thoroughly embarrassed him, as is the custom.
The trip home was much less traumatic than the cancellation of the Amtrak line between New York and Philadelphia following the derailment would have suggested; after spending close to an hour on the phone to America, we were able to be rerouted to Baltimore, and ADC came to pick us up. By the time he went to Princeton to give a talk last Thursday, the train was running as normal again.

Last weekend was Memorial Day weekend, and we went on what is probably our last out of town trip before we leave Takoma Park in July. We spent Saturday at Gettysburg, and Sunday and Monday in Philadelphia. It took quite a long time to get to Gettysburg, and even longer to get from there to Philadelphia; about half the day was spent driving. The national battlefield site is very interesting and informative, with a film (narrated, of course, by Morgan Freeman), a nineteenth-century cyclorama and an excellent museum at the visitor centre, and the most authentic living history we've seen yet in the US (ADC questions whether we've seen any other living history; the RenFest in October certainly doesn't count). As we are so close to the solstice and so far north, despite arriving in Philadelphia close to 8 p.m., it was still light, which was very nice as we wandered around looking for a restaurant bear our hotel. We ended up at an Indonesian place, adding to the list of cuisines we are sampling here. Each of us thought that he had chosen the best choice of the dishes.
Saturday was our only full day in Philadelphia, and we were extremely thorough in our explorations, returning to the hotel nearly 13 hours after setting out in the morning. We didn't get to see the Liberty Bell, as the queue was incredible, but we did go to the National Museum of American Jewish History, Independence Hall, Reading Terminal Market, and the Delaware River Waterfront. At the NMAJH, we started with a temporary exhibition of Richard Avedon portraits, many of which came from the Israel Museum's collection. I found the permanent collection more interesting, though, especially the sections on the development of Reform Judaism and the post-WWII move to suburbia. Like the Tenement Museum in New York, a lot of the museum was a walk through ADC's family history. The Tenement Museum was a more intense experience, focussing as it did on only one of the times and places covered by the NMAJH. A particularly interesting aspect for me was the historiography: the presence of Yiddish, for example, alongside Hebrew in many cases, and the total absence of the non-Ashkenazi experience in the historical introduction, apart from the mass aliyah to Israel. At the same time, there was both a great emphasis on Jewish involvement in civil rights and feminism (neither of which would have happened, it looked like, without the Jews) and an acknowledgement that Jews today are both Republicans and Democrats.

After we finished at the museum, we had just enough time for a cheesesteak before going to Independence Hall. Everyone approved of the cheesesteak (even the vegan one I ate), as one should always try local foods, and it was the right thing at the right time. Independence Hall was a guided tour of a small building, with a very enthusiastic guide with great voice projection. I must say that I remain resolutely Old World-centric in what really interests me in history ... We continued from Independence Hall to Reading Street Market. We had begun our day there, as it was right across the road from our hotel, and the boys were enchanted by Mueller's chocolate, which featured various body parts made from chocolate. They desperately wanted to buy a heart or a kidney as an afternoon snack, but these were quite large and correspondingly expensive, so we forced them to make do with a nose each - which seemed lie quite a lot of chocolate, in any case!
We then decided to take advantage of Philadelphia's street art, and explored the city centre further by way of walking the abridged version of the Mural Mile. S took pictures of the murals, which were almost invariably on the walls of building that abutted parking lots - I don't think I've seen so many parking lots in such a small space! The murals themselves wee fascinating, and we spent much longer than the suggested 30 minutes looking at them and discussing what we were seeing. By the time we finished, it was past 6 p.m. and we were all starting to droop. We had supper at an excellent Italian restaurant, Giorgio on Pine, where our waitress was Italian and supper was still going strong when we left, just before eight - unusual for American restaurants, which often close for the night by eight. We finished the day by walking to the Delaware River Waterfront, mainly so as not to retire to the hotel too early. When we got to Penn's Landing, we were startled to see a Cold War submarine next to a floating fish restaurant.
On Monday, we spent the entire day at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We walked there from our hotel, down Benjamin Franklin Parkway and looked at all the flags, in vague alphabetical order (except for the flags of Poland, next to a statue in memory of Copernicus, and of Israel, next to a Holocaust memorial from 1964). At the museum, ADC declined to take pictures of the boys by the statue of Rocky, as he doesn't like taking that kind of picture - and in his defence, there was quite a long line of people waiting to take that same picture ... We were too early for what looks like a very good exhibition of the Impressionists, but enjoyed looking at the Museum's own collection of that school. We stuck to nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, this time. A was very keen to see the Surrealists and Marcel Duchamp's urinal, while S was happy to see a Roy Lichtenstein. Both of them spent the last hour or so at the arms and armour hall by themselves, while Ariel and I looked at decorative art and rooms from English stately homes that had been transferred piecemeal in the 1920s and 1930s. I have to admit to being slightly underwhelmed by the PMA. Admittedly, the National Gallery and the Met are in a class by themselves, but I think that there was more art that spoke to me, personally, at the MFA in Boston. But maybe I was just tired after Saturday ...
Last Friday, the 22nd, A's entire year, the 8th grade class of 2015, went to Six Flags. He had a lot of fun, going on a roller coaster and dodgem cars, playing games at an arcade and eating pizza. Very sweetly, he bought fudge and brought it home for all of us. The same day, S had Authors' Tea at school: parents were invited to class to hear the children read poems or short prose pieces they had written. About half way through, juice and cookies were served. S read an alliterative alphabetical poem about superheroes. Apart from him, the best pieces, I thought, were an extract from a description of a baseball game from the ball's point of view, and a poem entitled "Divorce" in which one of the girls reflected on how life was in face better after her parents' divorce - everyone was much happier, and shhe had double the family. Almost all the children read something and some of them read two pieces. As usual with this age, the difference between boys and girls is immense. I can't quite put my finger on it, but the boys are still children, and the girls - at least some of them - are becoming introspective, mature.

As a result of the Authors' Tea, I have decided to sign up for a poem of the day by e-mail. I was surprised to see how much choice there is. Should I go for a classic daily poem, or a contemporary one? When does contemporary start? Does anyone have a recommendation?
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I can't believe that the spring break has been over for nearly two weeks already ... when we set out for West Virginia on the 6th, it was still wintry: very few trees had any kind of buds on them, and it was definitely cold. Since then, spring has sprung: I'm sitting outside to write this on our deck in a t-shirt and barefoot.

Our plan for the spring break was to return to Breath of Heaven B&B, which we had fled in a snowstorm, as you may remember, and to explore West Virginia in better weather. On the way there, we stopped at Antietam National Battlefield, the site of the bloodiest one day battle in US history. The battle took place in fields surrounding farmhouses, many of which are still the homes of the same families today. There is a self-guided drive around the battlefield, and we spent most of the day there, driving from site to site, going up an observation tower, and viewing the sycamore that also witnessed the Burnside's Bridge stage of the battle. For the first time, we also made use of A's GPS and looked for geocaches - finding one right next to the visitor centre. That turned out to be the only geocache we actually removed and replaced - all the other ones we found were on hiking trails and inaccessible.

Our hosts at the B&B greeted us very happily, and asked if French toast casserole would be a good breakfast next morning. As we were not planning on proper lunches, and we were not sure what we would find in the vicinity for supper, breakfast was a vital part of the day, and French toast casserole sounded excellent (I would have liked to have observed Pesach a bit more, but recognise that it is almost impossible to do so away from home). We started Tuesday with a visit to Blackwater Falls, which we had thought was a tributary of the north fork of the south branch of the Potomac (had gadya, had gadya...), but it actually on the other side of the watershed and drains into the Ohio, which joins the Mississippi and eventually reaches the Gulf of Mexico. The water is dark-coloured from the sediment it picks up along the way, and the falls were beautiful. A particularly impressive sight just by the waterfall was a sheet of ice along the canyon wall, slowly melting and dripping away. Had we come a week earlier, no doubt all the way would have been covered in ice. We had a very pleasant hike along a cross-country skiing path, where the ground was squishy beneath our feet, but it was not really muddy. At this point, everything was still hibernating, so we saw very few birds and no flowers that day.

We then continued to Canaan Valley Wildlife Refuge, where we hoped to see beaver lodges (this excited A very much. He has an unexplained obsession with beavers). Unfortunately, it had rained heavily in the previous few days, and the paths assumed that everyone was driving a 4x4 or pickup - that is, at the point where we decided that we could no longer go forward, there were other cars coming towards us. We tried our luck at another entrance and eventually were third time lucky: the rain which had begun, stopped, and we found a boardwalk with an interpretive trail, whose leaflet S was very happy to read with much drama and pathos. The leaflet was actually extremely informative (although meant more for later in the year), and I was particularly pleased to have the different kinds of moss pointed out. We don't have a guide to mosses and lichens (because birds, butterflies and flowers is our limit), so it always frustrates me to see them and not know what I am seeing.

Next day was our major hiking day, starting at Seneca Rocks. As we drove there, we were very surprised to see a long line of wind turbines, which had been completely invisible in the whiteout of our previous trip, although obviously the were there all along. We were still slightly off-season, so the visitor centre was closed, but as we were not planning mountaineering, there was in fact only one path to the top, which had us all taking off outer layers. I need hiking shorts! Once I finish sewing the skirt I am making at the moment (4 hours work so far, and no sewing, as I had to print and glue the PDF pattern from 30-odd A4 pages, and then cut out the pattern pieces and the fabric), I will try my hand at a longer version of the pyjama shorts. But I digress ... Seneca Rocks was really lovely, although it was amusing to read the signs about tree stumps that had long since rotted away. There was a geocache there, too, but it seemed that you needed to rappel to it, so we left it alone.

Seneca Rocks' outdated signs were better than those at Spruce Knob, where we drove to the top of the highest mountain in West Virginia, to an observation tower, and walked along another interpretative trail - but this time there was no leaflet, and actually no signs! We reached the peak and looked across rolling hills in every direction, and had no real idea of what we were seeing, beyond Pennsylvania on one side and the Shenandoah on the other. We also saw rainclouds coming closer, and decided not to continue to Spruce Knob Lake, but to take a scenic route back to Petersburg and eat at an Italian restaurant for a change. On the way down one mountainside and up another, between Ross Road and Judy Road, I saw a sign indicating "Road Not Taken". Spruce Knob is so called for the large number of balsam spruces, which are endemic to West Virginia, that grow there. We saw balsam spruces at Canaan Valley, too, where there is a program to preserve and re-introduce them.

Thursday morning continued rainy, so our plans to hike at Dolly Sods had to be cancelled. Instead, we went to Lost River State Park, which turned out to be an out-of-season holiday camp with a fitness trail - rather like a Keren Kayemet forest in Israel, up to and including the pine trees. It felt a bit post-apocalyptic in the light drizzle, being the only people around. I would have liked to have seen the Lee House, a summerhouse built by Lighthorse Harry, father of Robert E. Lee, but of course that was closed, too. I should back track a bit here to report one of the highlights of the trip: as we were leaving Breath of Heaven, A saw a bird's nest with eggs in it just at the edge of the driveway and warned ADC to be careful. As the car began to roll slowly forward, the mother bird (a killdeer) burst into the driveway and tried to distract the predator, going so far as to lie down and play dead in the missile of the road. Unfortunately, this is a tactic more likely to get her killed than anything else ...

On our hosts' recommendation, we continued to Winchester, where we started at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley. The Museum has three components: a museum proper, with exhibitions about the social and cultural history of the Shenandoah Valley; an early-twentieth century millionaire's mansion, Glen Burnie, and the gardens of the house. The museum also holds a collection of miniature houses and rooms collected by Julian Wood Glass, who bequeathed Glen Burnie and its garden to the museum. We had not been expecting anything as interesting as what we found there. The miniature houses were amazingly detailed and lovely, and included a scale model of Tara, with portraits of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara. The house had a very beautiful exhibition of contemporary botanical drawings, which I personally found fascinating, and a good segue into the gardens. They were not at the best, of course, but the Chinese garden and the war garden were already charming. We still had some time before we needed to get to Joe's Steakhouse in Front Royal, so we went into Winchester historic centre, where we wandered around for a bit, and found an olive oil and balsamic vinegar emporium. We spent quite a bit of time tasting the different oils and vinegars, eventually buying three to take home. That kept us going until we reached the steakhouse where, as A said, "I had the best steak of my life last time I was here, and this time it was even better!"

As we drove east from West Virginia and came down from the mountains, we saw that spring had begun in Maryland, and on Saturday we went to see the cherry blossoms in the Tidal Basin, together with several thousands of other people. It felt like the Old City during Passover week (and this was without going to see the parade). The cherry blossoms are truly glorious. I hadn't realised that there were a number of varieties - with more added as the older trees die - and the different colours, shapes and scents came together in a very beautiful display. I got pollen on my nose smelling the blossoms; despite the similarity, they are far less scented than almond and apple blossoms. As we were already at the Mall, we also went to see the Vietnam War memorial, which we had missed on our previous visit, in the autumn. I remember reading a National Geographic article about it, so knew that the names were in chronological order, but I hadn't realised that the list began an ended in the middle of the monument, forming a loop. ADC took a picture of one of the names for a little old lady, as neither she nor her friends were tall enough to hold their phone in the right place.

The rest of the weekend was very musical: On Saturday we heard Bach's St John Passion at Strathmore Music Centre (where we saw the Chieftains), performed by the National Philharmonic and Chorale. Rather ridiculously, it reminded me of Jesus Christ Superstar (while of course the inspiration is the other way around). The program notes very earnestly discussed the anti-Semitism of the text. My feeling is that if your libretto is the Gospel according to John - which was written after the destruction of the Temple and Roman conquest of Judea - there is no way you can accuse the Romans of anything and of course the Jews will be blamed. I must say that following along (we were provided with the full German text with English translation), I was, on the one hand, very impressed that the Evangelist (narrator) knew his part well enough to not have any music at all in front of him, and on the other hand, even more confused about the timeline of the Passion. I had always thought that the Last Supper was a Seder, but from the wording, it appears that it was the day before the Seder? Anyway, clearly I am more interested in words than in music and I'm sure C would be horrified that this is how I am responding.

Sunday was of course the Battle of the Bands, in which ADC got to play bass live on stage in an Irish pub. ADC has been playing bass for about a year and a half now, partly self-taught, and when we arrived in DC he looked for a group to play with (bass players are always in demand). He plays every couple of weeks with DC Rockers, which is a fairly loose group of people who meet occasionally in varying combinations to play pre-agreed songs together. The group includes over 50 people, and there are anything between 5 and 10 people who show up for each session. A couple of months ago, the organizers of DC Rockers announced that we were going to have a live “Battle of the Bands” event at a local pub. Members of the group were invited to form ad-hoc bands, rehearse a set-list and then play live in front of their fellow rockers (and friends and families). Here is the link to his set. If you want to hear what the other bands sounded like (and have two hours to spare), you can click on the DC Rockers channel link there. I'll just say that I had a lot of fun, and my ears were ringing when we came out! A funny thing happened: when I was checking the bill, I saw that the waitressed had not charged me for the hot chocolate with Bailey's I had drunk. When I pointed this out to her, she was so impressed that she charged me only for a regular hot chocolate. I think this is a case of honesty being its own reward.

On Monday life went back to normal. The children received their third-quarter report cards on Tuesday, and happily these were as boringly good as usual. I started work on the material I had begun receiving during the break and ignored: I have two book manuscripts, an article and a grant proposal to edit before coming to Israel (this is why this letter has been delayed), with another article and a PhD dissertation in the pipeline. Today was a relatively quiet day: I stayed home and sewed (now I feel like a character in a nursery rhyme) while ADC went with the children to celebrate Record Store Day (they went to the comics shop, and also S had an eye test). In the afternoon we watched Some Like It Hot, which was enjoyed very much by all. The line about losing ponies playing water polo has been repeated ad nauseum by now, and the closing scene has lost nothing in the 56 years since it was first screened.
melodyssister: (Default)
Chag sameach! I hope you all had a lovely Seder. We were at the Ps, where the usual chaos was "enhanced" by an extra dog: another retriever, visiting from Boston with GP's family. The was at least one dog under the table at any time. It was strange to have a Seder which was read almost entirely in English, after so many years of everyone being able to follow the original text. And we skipped a lot more than we do at home, except for singing Echad Mi Yode'a twice, once in English with a weird tune.
The past couple of weeks have involved a lot of travel for me, some of which was on domestic flights where there is not enough elbow room to knit, so I have finished two books which I read purely for enjoyment: Evolutionary History by Edmund Russell, and A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. Evolutionary History was one of a bunch of books that ADC received from Cambridge University Press as payment for reviewing a proposal for them, and he read it first. In a way, the point of the book is to take the ideas of books like Guns, Germs, and Steel and show how evolutionary biology can help understand historical processes. One of the major case studies is a new interpretation of the Industrial Revolution, where the emphasis moves from English exceptionalism and ingenuity, to the importance of the evolution of cotton - both before and after domestication - in the New World. It turns out that New World cotton has a different genotype from Old World varieties, enabling extra-long staples, or threads, that can be woven by machine without breaking. In other worlds, New World cotton had to arrive in Lancashire in order for it to be worth anyones while to invent the machines that kicked off the Industrial Revolution. A Discovery of Witches was quite different. It is paranormal fantasy, set in a world that is identical to ours except that in addition to humans, there are three races of "creatures" - witches, daemons and vampires. The author, like her heroine, is a historian of science, specialising in the early modern period (that, in retrospect, is why her name was familiar), and the first scene takes place in the Bodleian Library, consulting a 17th-century alchemical manuscript.
On March 20th it snowed, for the last time this winter. Despite that, next day we went to the National Arboretum. Very little was actually in bloom yet, apart from crocuses and snowdrops, but we still managed to spend a long time there, enjoying the first warm sunny day in a very long time. We were all very impressed by the extensive bonsai collection, some of which - presents from the Japanese government - are hundreds of years old. My favourite, though, was a pear tree, which was blossoming. You could smell the pear blossoms as soon as you entered that part of the display, and it took a while to realise where the scent was coming from. As well as the usual Japanese trees, as you can imagine there were also native American trees that had been trained into bonsai. The bald cypress (complete with knees) that we had seen full size in the South Carolina swamps in December was very cute!
I have also had my second sewing lesson, in which I learned to make pyjama shorts (which most of you saw me wearing to clean the house). It was a very simple pattern, and I was surprised at how easy it was to sew a more-or-less straight line even over longer distances. I imagine that this feeling was very much influenced by the fact that the previous night, I had cannibalised one pair of S's tracksuit bottoms to make knee patches for another - which involved sewing two pieces of knit fabric (much stretchier and less stable than the woven material I'd used in my previous lesson) AND having to scrunch each pant leg beyond the needle, so as to actually be able to access the knees! The result is not something that I would wear out of the house, but S seems very pleased.
The next day I set off to Conway, South Carolina, where I participated in a colloquium on Coastal Carolina University on disease and society throughout the ages. I spoke for 20 minutes on the image of the pharmacist in medieval Egypt according to non-medical sources (this was basically a section of my dissertation, so I really did not have to prepare very much, apart for looking for images for my PowerPoint). Another speaker discussed the day of thanksgiving in February 1872 celebrating the Prince of Wales' recovery from typhoid, and what that can teach us about the construction of disease and the construction of empire at that time, while the last one spoke on her experiences as a medical anthropologist working in Sierra Leone during the outbreak of Ebola last summer and after she returned to the USA. I learned a lot from both talks and my own one seemed to fascinate the audience (I think my accent did too - most people once again assumed I was British). Coastal Carolina was formerly a two-year college and is now reinventing itself as a four-year university, including graduate programs, with the help of which they hope to increase enrolment by 50% over the next five years. A very different world from the research universities I've been to up to now. The conversation at dinner was fascinating: I was the only non-South Carolinan, as the other speakers were from the College of Charleston  and CCU, respectively. A lot of time was spent on the local sailing options, and whether it was was better to own a boat or to belong to a club and have use of one when you wanted. invited by Eliza Glaze, a thoroughly nice person whom I met last July at the Leeds conference. I hope I will be able to host Eliza in Jerusalem some day. Not only did she fully fund the trip, she also sent S a box of comics abandoned by her teenage son when he left for college, and is planning to send us a box of South Carolina delicacies to make up, as she put it, for missing a trip to Charleston. As I had an almost absurd amount of free time, I took advantage of the spa packages offered by my hotel, and had a facial and head/arms/foot massage in the morning before I gave my talk. It was a nice surprise to be told that I clearly take care of my skin, seeing as I haven't had a facial in ten years or so, and especially after all the teenage years of being scolded for having oily skin and blackheads.
I got back from South Carolina to a terrifying cold snap, and to ADC's cousin from San Francisco and his family - none of whom had really sufficiently warm clothes. Fortunately I could lend LC a scarf, but the others had to shiver (well, mainly JC - the little boys seemed quite happy). The main thing we did with them was go out to St Michaels, an almost self-consciously quaint village on the far side of the Chesapeake Bay, which involved crossing the local Bay Bridge. A and S had fun riding in the rented van, while LC enjoyed riding with us, without any children. St Michaels was rather reminiscent of Zichron, with the same kind of boutique-y shops and restaurants. We had crepes and hot chocolate for lunch, after a freezing walk (it was about 10 degrees, and windy) through the town to the old harbour. After lunch the weather warmed up considerably - mainly because the wind had dropped - and we walked in another direction, admiring the nineteenth-century houses. Owning a house like that is a full-time hobby, I should think. Many of them looked as I would imagine the houses in Anne of Green Gables would have looked, except with electricity instead of gaslight.
I didn't really get to spend much time with JC and LC this time, as I was away for so much of the time there were here, but it was clear that the four boys picked up from where they left off at Thanksgiving, and no doubt will do the same in August, when we get to San Francisco, the same way they picked up where they left off with GG and AG just before we left Israel. I should add that we now have firmer plans for the summer: ADC got approval for two weeks at Friday Harbor Labs, from July 10-24, and we are flying back to Israel on August 7 - so we have two weeks to get down to San Francisco and spend time there.
The busy week continued with a fascinating seminar at Johns Hopkins on the matatu minibuses of Nairobi on Monday, and finally, my talk on Galen at Rutgers on Tuesday (it was postponed from January due to snow). My talk, which I had been a bot worried about, as I had no idea what to expect from the audience, was very well received. The Q&A afterwards was very different from The Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton: most of the audience were Europeanists, and I was forced to admit that not only was everything after 1500 rather fuzzy, so was everything west and north of Istanbul (except for Spain). I had decided not to stay over in New Brunswick, and got home at 11:00 at night, having made by that time significant progress on my cardigan.
All that academia was great fun, but rather exhausting, which is why I did not write this letter on Wednesday and send it out before Pesach. Since then, I've been dividing my time between cleaning the house and completing the editing of a dissertation that had to be submitted immediately after Pesach. Since I will be away most of next week, and in any case my client needed time to reread everything, ask questions, and print it out, that took up most of my time the last few days. The dissertation was very interesting, on the sacred stones of Jerusalem in the Crusader period from an art-historical point of view. It is nice having a non-university client from time to time, as I finished that on Thursday and have already been paid!
melodyssister: (Default)
Part of the reason I haven't written in so long, I think, has been snow-induced depression. The second half of February was appalling, with the schools closed or starting late almost every other day, either due to active blizzards or due to extreme cold and ice. It was only when daylight saving began, and we had a thaw, that I realised how much better I felt with the sun shining. That being said, we did do a number of things ...

We continued our exploration of the Smithsonian Museums with a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian. This had been highly recommended by DE, ADC's host, who also warned that this was a museum that aimed to celebrate the community,and thus was more activist and less strictly academic than the Natural History Museum, for example. All museums are political, I thought to myself, and thesis simply explicit about it. I must say that while I enjoyed the visit, and learned a great deal, I came away feeling rather depressed. In the end, museums dedicated to recording and preserving ways of life that are dying - if not dead and attempts at resurrection being made - are, in a way, an argument for white supremacy; or at least, for the supremacy of the Mediterranean basin, a region where teleological worldviews joined the Hellenistic scientific heritage (all shared by Judaism, Christianity and Islam) over the rest of the world, in which cyclical worldviews (shared by most "pagan" native religions) did not advance technologically (cause and effect here is hard to judge). The museum rather reminded me of the Khoi-San museum/cultural centre we visited in the Western Cape, and a Bedouin village we once visited: traditions that once were vital for survival are dying, because they are no longer necessary. And since they are based on oral traditions, once they are gone, they are gone. And even if they survive, they are partly a game: there was a video of the whale-killing ritual of an Eskimo group: not only was everyone wearing parkas made of technical material rather than sealskin, it is no longer the case that they will not survive the winter if they don't have a store of blubber - you could see the tins of Heinz baked beans on the shelves. I definitely felt sorry for the North American Indians - most of them really didn't have a chance: their surrounding were so harsh that their material culture (or what remains of it) is really pitiful compared even to pre-Columbian Central/South America, not to mention the Old World. The attempts to restore traditions were interesting, though: one group, from the Hupa Valley in California, were so Californian when they talked about being one with nature etc (wearing plaid shirts, that well-known item of Amerindian dress, as they spoke to the camera). In Chile there are indigenous professors of the languages, who are academics as well as activists, and a case of a Catholic priest who in old age left the Church and returned to his ancestral traditions, becoming a shaman. We bought a book on the world in 1491 at the museum giftshop, which is now in my TBR pile.

Due to the snow days, the testing regimen at Montgomery county schools has been severely disrupted, and it feels like the PARCC assessments have been going on forever (S has maths today, still). These are tests meant to assess the schools, rather than the pupils, as I understand it, and both boys reported that the English/literacy tests were quite easy. A said, though, that the maths segment included material that he had not covered at school ... I really hope he will not have too much of a shock when we get home. He is making quite good progress in Arabic, now that we have set up a definite time and day of the week. Once or twice he has "cancelled" due to the science project measuring the relative rates of freezing of water, apple juice and Gatorade, but then I have insisted on a make-up class on the weekend; the only advantage of having been housebound by snow has been Arabic lesson for A, ukulele lessons for S (he can play several songs now, but is not keen on performing on Skype), and watching movies. We had a Kurosawa weekend a few weeks ago, when ADC and I watched Rashomon on Friday night, and then we all watched Yojimbo together on Saturday. The boys enjoyed Yojimbo very much, and we are considering adding A Fistful of Dollars to the Netflix queue (my memory is that is a rather more graphic. I'm glad we didn't show Rashomon to the children, even though it is deservedly considered one of the greatest movies ever made - I think they are too young for it, still, despite A' belief that now that he is 13, he can see anything that is defined as PG-13 and above).

We have finally begun to take advantage of the cultural opportunities available in Washington (apart form ADC's Meetup group), and have booked three classical concerts and a play. Moreover, at the beginning of March we went to a performance of The Chieftains, a Dublin-based group who have been performing together for sixty years. We have one disc of theirs, The Long Black Veil (with Sting, Van Morrison, Mark Knopfler, Sinead O'Connor, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful (separately) on vocals), which is one of my and S's favourite albums. We had no idea what to expect, really, at the concert, but it was like being invited to a party where all the other guests could play an instrument and/or sing and/or dance. The other guests included an astronaut, who played the pipes - and had played the pipes at the space station - and the Leahy family, who all played the fiddle and danced. They came on one by one: a 15-year old girl, a 12-year old boy, a 10-year old boy, a 7-year old girl and a 4-year old girl. Every time we thought now, that was the youngest, and then another child came on - playing the fiddle. Then they danced while playing the fiddle (except for the youngest girl, who conducted!). There were also a couple of local children's groups: a choir and one of the Irish dancing schools (whose upper bodies were much stiffer and more motionless than the dancers who were part of the Chieftains backing group), and a local bagpipe band, who wore eyesearingly mismatched tartan kilts. It was great fun, and good preparation for the St Patrick's Day Parade last Sunday (the 15th). The parade was amazingly well-behaved on the part of the crowd (almost nobody stood in the road), much quieter than expected (there was music only when the actually marching bands and/or Irish dancing schools went by), and including a bewilderingly large number of vintage fire engines. We speculated that this was a trial run for the Fourth of July parades for the fire engines, since I'm not aware there's anything particularly Irish about the fire brigade in the US (on the other hand, the large number of marchers affiliated with the police seemed to be obvious. Even Richard Scarry's police man is Sergeant Murphy, with his daughter Bridget).

The weekend before last continued our cultural activities: in reparation for seeing Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead at the Folger Theater in May, we watched Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet. We offered the boys the choice of Kenneth Branagh or Mel Gibson, and they immediately chose Kenneth Branagh, because they know him, both as Professor Lockhart and as Henry V. I suppose a completely uncut version is not the worst way of being introduced to Hamlet - we did split the viewing over two sessions - but I'm not sure this is my preferred interpretation of the play. Kenneth Branagh doesn't have enough self-doubt for Hamlet, in my opinion; he's too pleased with himself to consider suicide seriously. I think we will see the Zeffirelli version closer to the time, so that's what we have in mind when we see Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead. Derek Jacobi as Claudius (yes, we got the joke) was very good, as was Richard Briers as Polonius. I'm not sure about Kate Winslet as Ophelia; again, I didn't like the interpretation particularly, so that's affecting my view of the acting. I'll have to see how Helena Bonham-Carter measures up ...

We have finally given in to homesickness and gone to see Jerusalem 3D at the IMAX theatre at the Natural History Museum (we also went to see the insect and non-dinosaur fossil galleries). It was so wonderful to see all the bird's eye views of so many places we miss, not just Jerusalem. I thought that it was very well done, not just Benedict Cumberbatch's narration and the chance to see the interior of the Dome of the Rock, but also the fact that they found three girls - Jewish, Christian and Muslim - who looked similar enough that at first glance you couldn't tell which was which. The Jewish girl had grandparents from Poland and Algeria, and the Christian girl had ancestors who came to the Holy Land from Greece. And everybody seemed to be eating the same food around big tables with large, noisy families. It was a good thing to see just before the elections, to remember why we want to go home.

We have new neighbours: T&S  moved to a condo in Bethesda, and have been replaced by AN &LN, and their children R (5) and T (3). We invited them over for tea the week before last, and had a lovely time (and this has already paid dividends in that we were able to find a connection from whom to borrow a travel cot for when JC and his family visit). AN is a lawyer, working for the appellate division of the Department of Justice, and L works for the Government Audit, where he writes guidelines (he has a graduate degree in philosophy). R had a wonderful time playing with A and S, although T was a little overwhelmed by all the newness, I think.

Of course, a high point of the past month for me was my birthday. A and S very sweetly bought a heart-shaped paperweight. My sewing machine arrived the day before, and ADC (who bought me sewing books) hid it so I would open it on the day, which I did. It took me an hour and a half to set it up for the first time, including winding thread from the spool to the bobbin (I love technical terms) and several attempts before I managed to get the thread through the eye of the needle. My machine is a Janome Magnolia 7318, which is highly recommended on the internet for beginning sewers. It has 25 different stitches, including a button hole, and I am very excited about using it. I've had one sewing lesson, so far, in which I learned a trick for threading the needle more efficiently, and made a drawstring bag. Sewing is definitely much more instant gratification than knitting - although I suspect that as soon as I try making something larger and more complex this will not be the case. I have bought fabric for the next lesson tomorrow, in which I will learn to make pyjama shorts, which I have washed but not yet ironed. I've also bought fabric for t-shirts and skirts, and I'm assuming that the first things I make will not really be wearable outside the house. But I'm having fun, and A and S have asked me to make them summer pyjamas already.
melodyssister: (Default)
It has been blizzarding for the past five hours as I begin to write this letter, and ADC and the boys are baking a cake together, after a morning spent playing board games and Skypeing family. It seems that here, too, winter only begins after Christmas, and February is the coldest and wettest (well, snowiest) month).
So, what have we been doing? It seems like a very long time ago that we went to the National Gallery of Art, but really it was only two weeks ago. We had a great time there, beginning with a special exhibition of eighteenth-century American furniture. There were some really lovely pieces there. I particularly liked the the ladies'  worktables, which had a soft-sided basket below where unfinished knitting/sewing/embroidery could be left when it wasn't being worked on. I could really use something like that, as I have been knitting a lot - I've made a hat, neck warmer and hand warmers for myself, finally completed GB's vest and sent it off, and almost finished my mother's legwarmers-for-next-winter in the past six weeks, almost entirely on the weekends. We then went to the sculpture galleries, which were most impressive and then had lunch. To our surprise, lunch was excellent and very good value for money: $14 for ravioli or roast chicken or a trio of salads AND the receipt gave a 10% discount at the museum gift shop. ADC and I bought mugs - his in the shape of a camera, mine with a Qing dynasty pattern, based on a vase that I had stood in front of and admired for several minutes in the exhibition of French pre-revolutionary rooms - and S bought coloured pencils. We finished the day by going to a special exhibition on Piero di Cosimo, and a quick look at nineteenth-century American landscapes and portraits. We will have to go back to look at the American material properly.

The following week, ADC went to Connecticut for three days, to give talks at Trinity College and UConn-Storrs, where he saw snow six feet high, and everyone used snow tyres. This was good mental preparation for the last week or so: After a day for ADC to recuperate, we set on last Sunday midday for West Virginia. We decided to celebrate President's Day and the long weekend by going to stay at a B&B - the first English-style B&B we have found here. The plan was not to do anything too energetic, because the forecast was for extremely cold weather, and to stop at a steakhouse in Front Royal where we had bought excellent wine on the way back from our previous stay in a cabin in the woods. We set off later than we had originally intended last Saturday (only a week ago!), as we waiting for the wind to die down so we could clear the driveway and put down salt before setting off. It took us nearly three hours to reach the Breath of Heaven B&B outside Peterburg, WV, and as we got higher and higher the temperatures dropped - but there seemed to have been less snow there than there had been in Maryland. The geology of WV seems to be quite different from Maryland the rocks were a different colour) and we saw several frozen springs, that at other times of the year would have trickled down the mountainside.
The B&B itself was lovely. We had the upper floor - two bedrooms and a bathroom - to ourselves. Everything was beautifully set out, and the decorations included a guitar and a banjo, which ADC and S jammed on for a good half an hour, before we went back downstairs to the main room, where we were plied with tea and homemade chocolate chip cookies by Geri and Ed, our hosts. This was very lucky, because when we set out for supper, the only places we found open were fast-food joints, and we took Dairy Queen over Macdonald. We retreated to the B&B and played a card game, Duco, that we bought from its developer at I-Con last year. That was very enjoyable, although I think that A should have a time limit on his turns ... Once we finished that, we finally took out the art puzzle that we bought at the MFA in Boston. We decided to recreate Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the isle of La Grande Jatte from 130 cubes, as it looked like the easiest of the six choices. It took all four of us just over an hour, but our hosts were also fascinated, and took down the name of the puzzle, since they have grandchildren who are keen on art.

Next morning we began the day with crepes, scrambled eggs and toast (and bacon and sausage), and met the other guests, who included an American journalist working for an English-language Russian newswire in DC (kind of a mirror image of ADC's cousin who used to work for Dow Jones in Moscow), who had previously covered the Middle East, including spending a couple of years in Iraq. We stayed away from directly discussing politics, apart from agreeing that anywhere else in the world was probably less crazy. After breakfast, we decided to book another few days during spring break, when it would be warmer and we would actually be able to go on some of the very interesting-looking hikes in the area. The forecast at the time was for snow to begin "in the evening" and move south, so we decided to stick with our original plan and visit the Smokehole Caverns - a stalactite cave which remains a balmy 13 degrees Celsius year round (I remind you that it was at most 13 degrees Fahrenheit outside at the time - the oranges that we left in our car overnight had frozen). The drive to the caverns was very scenic, and full of riverside cabins advertising trout fishing and honeymoon suites. We got to the site as the giftshop opened (we stocked up on jams, but decided to pass on the moonshine), and had a semi-private tour of the cave: just us, and a young couple from Calhoun, WV. The guide was quite excited to hear that we were from Israel; we are probably the most far-flung tourists they've had in a while. The stalagtites were very impressive, and much more active than any other such cave I've been in: I was dripped on several times during the 40 minutes or so that we were inside. As we came out of the cave,just after 11:00,  it began snowing, and it was clear that the storm had arrived ahead of schedule. We got into the car and began our journey home, that ended at about 6 p.m. First of all, we debated how best to get back to the main highway to Virginia and Maryland, and ended up driving on a section of the WV-55 that was still partially under construction and thus little travelled. The road was covered with ice, and ADC went down to second gear; the "Runaway truck ramp" signs did nothing to improve my peace of mind and I may have actually prayed for a few minutes. At one point the car told us that it was 5 degrees Fahrenheit (= -15 in real money) outside. It seemed like forever before we saw signs for Moorefield and Petersburg again ... we stopped at a petrol station to refuel ourselves and the car: there was no way we were going to go to Front Royal. We got back to DC in time for the evening rush hour to begin, although presumably the fact that it was a federal holiday made things easier, and were lucky to reach the supermarket while there was a brief respite, so that we didn't have to dig the car out of the parking lot. Next morning, Tuesday, was a snow day, of course, and on Friday (yesterday) the boys started school late due to the dangerous cold: -15 before wind chill. ADC didn't go to work, either, as he had really suffered walking to and from the Metro on Thursday. It's now after supper, and the snow has begun to give way to icy rain. Hopefully this will wash away the snow covering the car, so we can possibly go to the farmer's market tomorrow.

On Thursday night ADC and I began to take advantage of the cultural opportunities afforded by a big city, and went to see a fringe production of The Tempest, with an all-female cast. The actors were excellent, especially Miranda/Tirinculo (apart from Prospero and Alonso, each person played two characters). I thought that having the same person play Ariel and Caliban was inspired (although I had thought that there were scenes in which the two interact, but I suppose that these were cut). The play was performed in an arts centre in a DC residential neighbourhood, and we sat in what called a "theater in a box", and what I would call theatre in the semi-round. The two island sprites were constantly in movement both on the stage and on the steps alongside the audience's seats, where some of the action also took place. It is quite amazing the difference that changing a costume and a hairstyle can make - and I had forgotten how idiotic Shakespeare makes teenage girls seem. We drove home in driving snow. I had to scramble through snow to get into the car (the driver side is next to the cleared street, while the passenger side is next to the pavement, of course, and my boots - while remaining dry inside - did not hold up to the cold. I think that my mother made the right decision not to come visit at the beginning of March - the forecast is for another arctic blast late next week and more snow and ice next weekend. I am looking forward to winter being over, and cannot say how glad I am that we did not go to Boston, say, for sabbatical.

Being somewhat housebound, we have been watching quite a lot of movies. We saw Singing in the Rain on the snow day after returning from West Virginia, and agreed that The Sound of Music was a better film - because it had a bit more plot, and the songs advanced it, rather than being showstoppers, as in SitR. It was still very enjoyable, though, and an important part of the children's ongoing education in classic films (we have booked tickets for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the Folger Theater in May, so will have to see Hamlet before that. Any thoughts on whether the Zeffirelli/Mel Gibson or Kenneth Branagh version is preferable? I think that the Laurence Olivier one will be too stagey for the boys). Today we watched Last Action Hero, which I don't think I had seen before. It had surprising similarities to the film Ariel and I watched last night, Adaptation - both deal with the relationship between films and reality, sometime literally breaking the fourth wall.  I don't want to say anything more about it, as it should be seen when you have no idea what is going to happen. We also saw a few episodes of classic Star Trek last week on Netflix; so far, our favourite is The Trouble with Tribbles. A and S are finding the 60s imagining of the future quite fascinating.

Stay warm, everybody!
melodyssister: (Default)
This post is bracketed by snow: The first serious snowfall of the season occurred almost immediately after we returned from the south. While ADC was enjoying Florida, the boys had a snow day after one day back at school. The day before yesterday (January 27), as I set off for Princeton, they had another one. My talk at Rutgers has been postponed to March, due to the storm - which in the event didn't affect places south of New York as much as was forecast. Still, it would have been difficult to get to Rutgers (even leaving in the afternoon, it took longer than usual to get to Princeton, as the commuter rail was far less frequent. I ended up taking a bus from Trenton, where I was the only passenger most of the time, and the only non-person of color all of the time.
Going back, on January 9 I spent the morning with my cousins SG and her sister JG, who was visiting from London. We visited Kreeger House, formerly the home of David and Carmen Kreeger, that was specifically designed to set off their collection of art, which ranges from the Impressionists onwards. There were some very lovely pieces there, and I was sorry that it was too cold too see the sculpture garden properly: the grounds were covered with snow, making many of the sculptures inaccessible. It was nice spending time with JG, who I hadn't seen since we lived in Cambridge, and she brought Smarties for the children, which they are taste-testing in comparison with M&Ms.
Last weekend was Martin Luther King Day, and the boys had a day off school for teacher training. With a four-day weekend, we decided to set off for New York. We stayed in a mid-town hotel, the Grand Union, that suited our needs perfectly. Unfortunately for us, it is about to be renovated and will probably be priced above our means when it reopens (We were told this by a lady we met in the lift, who has been staying their for decades whenever she visits New York. She also identified the neck warmers that were all wearing as having been home knitted, and complimented me on my work!). But in the meantime, it was very pleasant, and had really excellent croissants at breakfast.
We arrived in New York on Saturday afternoon, and almost immediately went off to the High Line park, before it got dark. We were expecting a place where you could see views of New York from above, and were severely underwhelmed by what we found. Ignoring the fact that it was freezing there, the view was completely blocked by a variety of high rise buildings going up. I think that even if we had gone at a warmer time of year, this is a place that New Yorkers appreciate, rather than visitors. After recovering with large bowls of hot chocolate, we took the subway to the Guggenheim, which has semi-free entry on Saturday evenings. We stood in a fast-moving line for a while, and had a restorative experience once we got inside. Only part of the museum was open, because they were between exhibitions, but there was just the right amount of art for us to look at. We saw an exhibition of early Kandinsky, another of the Justin Tannhauser collection (some really lovely Impressionists), and of a modern Indian painter, Gaitonde. Interestingly, even before looking at the labels, it was clear that this was Indian-influenced art. We then returned to the hotel and ate at a neighbourhood Korean restaurant, which specialized in dumplings. We had fried and boiled vegetarian dumplings as starters, and I liked them better than most Chinese dim sum I've had. In fact, after this trip, I have come to the conclusion that Chinese is my least-favourite Asian cuisine. It's simply the worst option for vegetarians, it seems to me.
On Sunday we experienced possibly the worst weather so far: freezing, driving rain. We went to Queens, to see the street in Rego Park where my parents-in-law grew up, and were thoroughly soaked. Even the best coat has a limit - and we also walked through slippery slush, which was quite scary since I felt that my boots were not really up to the job ... Had the weather been better, we might have considered knocking on the door and seeing if we could see the inside of the houses, but we felt that we could not drip over the furniture of complete strangers. We then continued to the Museum of the Moving Image, where we tried to meet up with another cousin, OC, and her family. Unfortunately, museums are not really a good place to meet up unless your children are exactly the same age. We did manage to talk a bit, when the children were all involved in activities, but most of the time we were going though the exhibitions at different speeds. S was in heaven, and we all enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. We spent over 5 hours in the museum, first at a special exhibition on Chuck Jones, who directed most of the Looney Tunes cartoons, and then at the permanent exhibition, which described the development of all aspects of movies and television, from actors, scripts and costumes, through special effects, make-up and merchandise, to different kinds of cameras and screens. The children experimented with stop-motion animation and played Pacman on an arcade machine. ADC and I particularly enjoyed two collages of famous scenes and famous words from the movies, trying to identify as many as possible. Just watching all the movies in those collages would be an education in classic film. We tentatively agreed to meet OC after supper (they left the museum much earlier than we did), and we even ate at an Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side - not the one they recommended, though - but by the time we finished, we were too exhausted to be sociable, and went home without seeing them again. I hope we will be able to find another occasion, but if not, we are all going back to Israel in the summer, and apparently they are considering moving to somewhere in the Jerusalem hills.
On Monday the weather was much better, and we spent the day on the Lower East Side. We began by taking the Staten Island Ferry back and forth to see the Statue of Liberty. ADC and I had been to the Ellis Island Museum when ww visited New York in 1996, and we decided that the Tenement Museum would be more enjoyable for the children. We booked two tours - a walking tour, at 2 p.m., and a house tour, at 4:45. Before the tours, we met ADC's cousin (we have so much family here it's unbelievable) LS, who took us to a Chinese place for lunch (which was where I came to the conclusion above. It was't that the food was bad, it was just boring. There were about 3 vegetarian options in a list of lunch specials that ran to close to 30, one of which was plain steamed vegetables.) Anyway, it was very nice to see LS again, she seemed to be enjoying her life. The Tenement Museum tours were for me the highlight of our trip (thank you, Daddy, for suggesting it). The walking tour was led by a woman originally from the Netherlands, who had come to New York to study American history, and the group was multi-ethnic. We saw many different styles of buildings, three synagogues (one still working - the Romaniote Kehillat Kodesh Janina, one that is now Seventh-Day Adventist church, and one - the Erster Varsha - that is now a sculptor's studio. I wonder which alternative the founders of the congregations would have considered worse), a Chinese temple to the god of wealth and business, and walked through a few different parks, of which the largest was the Sarah D. Roosevelt park, named after FDR's mother, parts of which have been taken over by the community, in one case for a community garden like we have in Beit Hakerem, and in another case by Chinese men who bring their birds to socialise in a specific spot. The tour ended up at the Essex Street Market, but unfortunately for us, many of the food places were already closed. We had some time between the two tours,so we backtracked to a cupcake bakery I had spotted, and had amazingly good cupcakes and hot chocolate, before going to learn about life in garment production in the Lower East Side.  The Tenement Museum offers a number of building tours, we took the Sweatshop Workers ("Pay a visit to the Levine family's garment workshop and the Rogarshevskys' Sabbath table at the turn of the 20th century, when the Lower East Side was the most densely populated place in the world. Explore how immigrants balanced work, family and religion at a time of great change.") This time, the guide and all the participants were clearly Jewish, and had ancestors who had lived in similar tenements. We saw a census from 1900, and all the names there were from ADC's family album. There was even a brother and sister called Fanny and Abraham, just like his grandmother and her brother. The census was fascinating in and of itself: the difference between children who had been born in the old country and had gone to work on arrival contrasted with the American-born siblings, who were in school or college; the men all spoke English and could read and write, while this was not true of all the women. We were there in the late afternoon, and the Levines' back room which served as a sweat shop was already quite gloomy. I was very impressed by the weight of the coal press - no wonder a man was employed to press the garments! I would have liked more time to wander around the other rooms, especially the Rogarshevsky family's other rooms, which we got to see only quite briefly. We did see, however, a special additional prayer that women would say while lighting candles, in which they hoped that their family would be able to earn a living while being able to observe Shabbat - as people moved from backroom sweatshops where the owner knew you and was most likely Jewish himself, to factories that had to abide by New York state blue laws forbidding work on sundays, it became more difficult to keep Shabbat, and for many people this was a serious problem. The last thing we did there was hear an oral history, taken from an elderly lady who had lived in the building, Josephine Baldizzi (her family's story is the subject of a different tour). She described how she would be called to light lamps on Saturdays, and how proud she was that she was able to help by doing that. All in all, it was very moving, and I'm glad the boys are old enough to have enjoyed it, too.
Our last day in New York was spent at the American Museum of Natural History. One of the perks of ADC's job is having friends at all the major natural history museums, and not only were we able to get in for free, we saw an IMAX show and a special exhibition for free, too, thanks to the curator of invertebrate zoology. We didn't have enough time at the Museum. We saw the dinosaur exhibition, which is very up to date, and which was a must because the Smithsonian's dinosaur hall is being refurbished, then hurried to the IMAX. I felt that we could have done without this, in retrospect, but S really wanted to see it: "Tiny Giants" was a heavily anthropomorphised story of the challenges facing chipmunks and grasshopper mice, which I found a bit too cutesy. After that we went to the special exhibition on natural disasters, Nature's Fury, which was really quite scary. I am very glad I don't live in the tornado corridor of the central USA. By the time we were done there, we had to start counting down to catching the train home and we went to see the dioramas of American nature. I think I saw a (stuffed) real road runner for the first time, and I was surprised at how different they were from the Beep-Beeps we had seen on Sunday. We nearly missed the train home, since for the first time we approached Penn Station from street level, rather from within the subway system, and we had difficulty finding the right entrance. Luckily, with a burst of speed we made it, and we even managed to sit together.
ADC stayed on in New York to give talks at the AMNH and at NYU, and by the weekend, we were all exhausted - besides, it was supposed to snow then, too. We spent a peaceful weekend, without leaving the house. On Saturday KM and his family came to visit from Baltimore. The plan was to eat cholent and then go to a museum, but by the time we finished lunch (this involved a 45 minute break while vanilla soufflé was prepared and baked), the four boys were resistant to going anywhere and they spent the afternoon playing board games in the basement, joined at one point by their fathers, while AM and I talked and played with baby CM.
On Sunday, the main thing we did was watch The Sound of Music, which was surprisingly long, and very enjoyable. S has been singing bits and pieces of "The hills are alive" and the Do-Re-Mi Song ever since. Both boys had fun pointing out the tropes while we were watching. I completed the back of GB's vest over this weekend, and I will finish it - seaming and neck/armhole bands - after I get back from Princeton. [In the meantime, the vest has been completed and sent to Tel Aviv.]
Princeton was really fun. Sabine Schmidtke picked me up from the bus stop and I slept over in her enormous house - where she lives alone most of the time, as her partner works for the World Bank and spends Monday to Friday in Washington. I had lunch with Patricia Crone!! I still can't get over it, it was so thrilling to actually meet someone whose books have blown my mind. When I was practically learning some of them by heart for my MA exam, I never thought that someday I would actually meet the author. She was delighted to hear that ADC and his father had read and enjoyed her book Pre-industrial societies. the talk itself went well, I thought. Heinrich von Staden, a classicist who specialises in Galen, came too, and I nearly had a panic attack. But he was very kind about my lack of Greek, and thought that I was doing interesting work, so that was great. He had to leave before the end of the session, and after he left, the others asked questions more focused on the Arabic texts I was using, and I came away withholds of ideas for going forward.
It took a long time to get home. The train from Trenton to Washington was half an hour late, and I think went more slowly than usual so that I arrived home a good hour later than I had expected. I got a lot of knitting done, though. Luckily I brought it along, as I finished my book while still at Trenton. No more travelling for me for the next month or so - I'll be glad for some weekends at home.
melodyssister: (Default)
So we set off on the morning of Christmas eve, heading south. Since our previous trip to Durham, NC, had been a very traumatic traffic jam, we decided to avoid the I-95 as much as possible and instead start properly with a visit to an 18th century plantation, Thomas Jefferson's Monticello (on the previous weekend, we prepared mentally by watching Gone With The Wind. A and S had no idea what to expect, and enjoyed it - although one of their comments about The South was that nobody had accents like in GWTW. Understandable, considering the actors ). Monticello is at the top of a hill, and was shrouded in mist, so we basically ignored the grounds. We took a guided tour of the first storey, which was very interesting. Jefferson designed the house himself, and there were all kinds of gadgets and great ideas there - like a revolving book stand that could hold five books. I wish every research library had that as standard issue on the desk, it would be really useful! The octagonal rooms with beds and closets in recessed niches were also very space saving. In addition to the exhibits of furniture in the main part of the house, there was an exhibition with interpretation of the slave quarters. Apparently skilled slaves were able to earn money by selling the labour of their free time - whether this was made objects, tailoring or produce from their gardens - to the Jefferson family or from getting tips from guests. I had no idea that this practice existed. We walked back from the house down to the visitor centre, stopping at the family burial plot, still in use, on the way. There was lots of the same names repeating themselves, and a headstone that has been waiting for over thirty years for a widow to be buried beside her husband.
We arrived in Durham only half an hour later than our expected time, rather than the three hours of our previous trip. However, this time our traumatic experience was totally losing internet connection after leaving Monticello, getting lost in a place called Chase City because the GPS on my phone is not sufficiently accurate, and only resuming connection with the outside world just before reaching Durham. We had noticed that whenever we were in rural Virginia we landed to lose connection on returning to the car after a hike, and SG explained to us why this was: our provider, T-Mobile, simply didn't cover Virginia, the Carolinas and Tennessee outside the interstates and large cities! Well, at least we know what's happening now, and can prepare for it. On Christmas day we went for a toddler-friendly hike, and then to see a movie and eat Far Eastern food. The movie was Big Hero Six, which was very enjoyable but apparently has very little connection to the comics, and the Far Eastern food was not Chinese, as is more traditional, but a Japanese hibachi grill, where the (Indonesian) chef puts on a performance of grilling the (mediocre) food.
Next day we truly set off for the unknown, driving almost due west towards the Smoky Mountains and Tennessee. ADC prepared a "Southern playlist" of over three hours for us to listen to, without any actual country music, apart from a few Robbie Robinson songs (although The Band is probably more rock than country). We noticed the differences between the original and Joan Baez renderings of "The Night The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," and suddenly the lyrics made much more sense - of course it would be Sherman's cavalry, and not Stonewall Jackson's, that tore up the train tracks around Richmond (see more on that below). We headed for Asheville, a place that we had not previously been aware of, but highly recommended by ADC's cousin. This turned out to be a lovely little town that had not undergone development due to a the city's lack of money in the 60s and 70s, thus preserving a lot of Gilded Age and Art Deco building (a similar process occurred in Savannah), from the period when the town was an artistic centre with lots of sanatoria. We took a self-guided walking tour, which was included a pamphlet with details, and also additional signage, explaining, for example, that this was the house in which O. Henry had stayed during his rest cure there, and that the building opposite had previously been owned by a Jewish tailor who became famous for sponsoring scholarships to the local college for boys from poor families, not sending bills during the Depression and so on. We also bought fudge there.
We reached Chattanooga on Friday night, and stayed in a hotel off the I-75, which was convenient for getting supper when exhausted, since it was in the middle of a strip mall. Next day we had breakfast at a Waffle Shack, where the boys were very happy to eat a large waffle and bacon. It was due to rain, so we went as quickly as possible to the Tennessee Valley Railway Museum, to catch the first tourist train. I had been expecting a steam train, but even a vintage diesel train is good. While we were waiting for the train to set off, we saw a freight train coming down the currently used tracks, with some ZIM containers. At the time, ADC thought that the train freight must be coming from the Gulf of Mexico, but in Savannah, when we realised that that is the biggest port on the East Coast, it seemed more likely that the train was on its way to or from Savannah. The train trip was about 20 minutes in either direction, and seeing the engine being turned around was definitely a highlight. After the train, we went to the Chattanooga Aquarium, one of the biggest in the South, which has two sections - River World and Ocean World. We decided to start at River World, and go to Ocean World if we had time/energy to do so, since we had not been to a fresh water aquarium before. The River World was extremely well done, showing the journey of the Tennessee River from the Smoky Mountains, where there are cold fast flowing streams, and ending in the sluggish warm waters of the Mississipi Delta, and all the animal, plant and economic life along its banks. As well as some very big fish indeed, there was a section with birds and otters, several species of snakes and on the entrance floor, a really beautiful special exhibition on sea horses (not fresh water aquaria, in this case!). We all enjoyed it very much, and we have clearly infected the children with the idea that you go through a museum slowly, reading everything there is to read and looking at everything there is to look at, as by the time we finished River World, there was neither time nor energy to visit Ocean World. We did spend another half an hour or so walking along the river banks, where we saw a touristy paddle boat, and read signs about Chattanooga's role in the Civil War. At one place, we saw the excavated remains of an iron furnace, the biggest and most technologically advanced in the antebellum South, which broke down in the winter of 1861/2, and was never used again.
That evening we ate the meal that was, for ADC and the boys, the culinary highlight of our trip: barbecued ribs at Famous Dave's, across the I-75 from our hotel. This being a Saturday night, we had to wait for a while before getting a table, but it was worth the wait. There were six different barbecue sauces on the table, a long menu of different kinds of meat and some interesting sides, including pineapple steaks, which I enjoyed very much. A was particularly happy, as both broccoli and asparagus featured as side dishes; Shas expanded his in-depth study of cheeseburgers to an equally in-depth study of mashed potatoes, which can usually be substituted for fries.
Sunday was our longest day of driving, following in Sherman's footsteps from Chattanooga to Savannah. On the way, we took a short break at Warner Robins Museum of Aviation in central Georgia. As we got out of the car there, we  realised we were in a different climate zone: it was much warmer and more humid than it had been in the mountains. Georgia seems to be like Tel Aviv in the winter, and now I understand why "the snow was deep in Virginia" was so significant to Scarlett's beaux - they were used to something very different. Warner Robins Airforce Base is one of the biggest bases in the US, but the aviation museum there is not the main one: the Air Force has another, larger one in Patterson, Ohio. I talked briefly to the volunteer who was explaining about the museum's layout and handing out maps and a list of the aircraft on view, and he was thrilled to know that a family from Israel was visiting his museum. He had previously worked in DC himself, and said that the Patterson museum was not too far away, just about eight hours driving, something you could do on a weekend. The museum itself was quite different from both the IAF museum at Hatzerim and Duxford. Even though many of the same wars appear both there and at Duxford, the American point of view is quite different, with much more emphasis on the Pacific theatre in WWII, naturally, and of course the post-WWII wars were different. More than that, unlike Hatzerim and Duxford, which both seem to have the attitude "if you're here already, you're interested, here's the plane," at Warner Robins all the major planes had little diorama-like additions of either pilots or parachutists or mechanics, presumably to bring the exhibit to life for laypeople. We didn't have time to do the museum justice, skipping entire sections so that we could spend more time looking at actual planes. I will say that I would have preferred the opposite, but it is true that the exhibitions can be seen elsewhere in one way or another, while there is nothing like the impact of standing close to a jet fighter.
We reached Savannah before sundown, but the weather was so grey that it made very little difference. After checking in at our hotel - no longer in a strip mall, but on the edge of historic Savannah - we went down to the river and wandered around, soaking up atmosphere before having supper. This was the fanciest restaurant of our trip, and in the end, the most disappointing. We left feeling that we had eaten well (I was very happy to have the opportunity to try collard greens, normally prepared with bacon, as they had a vegetarian option), but paid too much for what we had actually got. A major conclusion of this trip is that chains are not necessarily the devil's own work in America, so long as you are careful not to go to the absolutely plasticky places like Chik-Fil-A.
The highlight of the trip for me was our full day in Savannah. It was quite warm, but grey and drizzly: reasonable weather for walking around in, if  you have a good raincoat, which we all did. ADC had found an app for self-guided walking tours of Savannah, and laid out a route by combining sites from a number of tours, which according to the app should have taken us past something like 11 sites in 3 hours. Of course, it took us much longer than that, especially since as soon as we walked out of the hotel, I saw a sign for the market place and suggested going there first thing. It took us nearly two hours to get out. We stopped and sampled a sweet shop, a cookie shop, a salt shop and an art gallery specialising in local talent. We bought something at every place (actually, we left sweets and cookies for the evening, coming back before we went out for supper). We then meandered through the squares for which Savannah is famous, all of which have extensive plaques explaining the significance of the site, its name, famous people, etc. We also went into a bookshop and a peanut shop. Sadly, the peanuts were from Virginia, not from Georgia, so we refrained from buying even more food-related souvenirs. We saw the synagogue of the oldest Reform community in the South, which we thought was a church until we noticed the magen David, and Google Maps insisted that this was the right location, the fountain where the opening scene of Forrest Gump takes place, and visited a smelling garden, which was not doing so well, as it is winter, after all. And every single lamp post or bit of fence in the squares was decorated with red Christmas ribbon, and every tree was festooned (that really is the only word for it) with Spanish moss. We had a lovely, relaxing day, and if we ever have another sabbatical in the US, I think we could do worse than spending it in Savannah. I should go and read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, as it is supposed to be THE book about Savannah (I had always confused it with The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, thinking that that was the name of the movie based on the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, but these are clearly two very different books and films).
From Savannah we started heading home. We spent the Tuesday basically driving through South Carolina and most of North Carolina, stopping at a nondescript town called Dunn, of which we saw only our hotel and a steakhouse (both on the I-85, not in the town proper), simply because driving all the way to Virginia was too far. We broke up the day by stopping at a nature reserve, Congaree National Park, which contains the largest tract of old growth hardwoods in the eastern US. This was another very different landscape: a swamp, where part of the boardwalk we had planned to use was washed out, requiring us to walk partly on very muddy paths. I did not have the right shoes, but both my boots and I survived. It was very quiet and beautiful there, with a few centimetres making a great difference in the ground coverage: bald cypresses poking up from muck were replaced by reeds as soon as the drainage improved. Going to and from Congaree was a glimpse into the backyard of America: trailer parks and little towns that time seemed to have forgotten, set among cotton fields. It was quite cold and there was nobody outside, so it was hard to know whether the people living in these rather depressing-looking places were black or white; some of them had a taste for Christmas kitsch the like of which we last saw when we were living in Cambridge.

On our last full day before heading home, we had planned to visit Petersburg Battle Site, which is actually a complex of sites, seeing as there was a thirty-mile front involved here; truly a dress rehearsal for WWI, this was the last line of defences before Richmond itself fell and the Confederacy dissolved. Like Chattanooga, this was a major railway junction, and Grant basically cut Richmond's supply lines by besieging Petersburg. We arrived to discover that we only had a couple of hours before the site closed early for New Year's Eve, at three rather than five, so we only got to see the Western Front site, which is where a company of Pennsylvania miners serving as engineers were able to dig a tunnel into the Southern trenches, undetected, and blew a hole into Petersburg's defences. Unfortunately, the Union soldiers were not properly informed of the plan, and rushed into the subsequent crater rather than around it, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory (a very common occurrence on the Union side, we learned from Ken Burns' documentary, but less so for Grant). Among other things, we saw a reconstructed hut that four ordinary soldiers would have shared, about the size of the bathroom in Kfar Saba without the service balcony where the washing machine is. This impressed the boys very much, especially when Ariel pointed out how much better this was than being in a tent.

Our final stop was in Richmond, where we spent New Year's Eve and the morning of New Year's Day. It was very cold and a bit of a disappointment, really. There was no public First Night celebration the way there is in New York and Boston, apparently, and the first few restaurants we called were all fully booked. We stayed at a lovely historic inn, Linden Row, in the historic centre, so eventually we just walked out and looked for somewhere that was open. We found a very nice restaurant, that did New American cuisine, and I had my best meal of the trip. A and S were less enthusiastic. Anyway, we wandered around a bit after that and then just went back to the hotel because it was so cold. We played a rousing game of Citadels, and the boys stayed up till midnight. I was in the shower at the time, and did not manage to prevent them from waking ADC up when they counted down the last minute of 2014 ...

Next day, we once again wandered around a historic downtown, following something called the Richmond Liberty Trail. This is not like the Boston Freedom Trail, which is a path on the actual pavement, with lots of plaques, but a blue marker every few metres that indicates whether to continue straight or turn. Any plaques along the way are those that have already been set up, and not connected to the trail, as far as I could see. Everything was closed of course, but we had a look at the Confederate White House, now in the middle of a hospital complex. It is much smaller than the real White House, and somehow seems symbolic of a kind of parasitism that the Confederacy had vis-à-vis the Union. I wonder if I only feel that way because they lost? If the war had ended with a negotiated peace and the CSA still existed alongside the USA, I imagine their executive mansion would look less like a pale shadow of the real thing. What was very interesting was the Richmond Slave Trail, which connects to the Liberty Trail. This does have a lot of plaques, which are updated regularly, for example with new information following the excavation of the site of a hotel/slave auction site/jail now underneath the I-95 and a parking lot. It's very strange to see how a dig for 200 years ago is regarded as digging up a distant past; in Israel anything like that is salvage archaeology, no university digs up anything so late, because we can go back 3000 years so easily. It is much easier to do 3D computer generated reconstructions when you have insurance blueprints and daguerrotypes of the original buildings, though! We started walking back to the car, which we had parked outside the hotel as parking was free on New Year's Day, after we reached the Reconciliation Statue, copies of which stand in Liverpool and Benin, in memory of and apology for the triangular trade across the Atlantic. I had not realised before to what extent Richmond was a major centre of the slave trade: 40 thousand Africans arrived here annually before the British navy outlawed slaving.

Once again, we were not able to find a restaurant for lunch, so we decided to start home earlier than planned and eat on the I-95, which we did successfully. We will come back to Richmond, it's close enough that it can be a day trip, and now we have to start thinking about our visit to New York on January 17-20. Despite a less than great last day, all in all we had a wonderful time, and I think we made excellent use of the winter break.
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This has been a very busy couple of weeks. Among other things I did a ton of knitting and also went to Baltimore twice, so apologies again for the lateness of my update on Thanksgiving and the week before.

I'll actually start at the end, what we did today, because it is closely connected to what we did two weeks ago: We spent the day at the Spy Museum. This involved a bit of sticker shock, as up to now all the museums we have visited in Washington have been free, but the children had been very eager to go since we arrived, and especially after we visited the cryptology exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library two weeks ago. That exhibition was extremely well done, and had several activities for children that S really enjoyed. The connection to the library is that two of the parents of American cryptology, William and Elizabeth Friedman, also researched Shakespeare, and were frequently to be found at the Folger, since they lived in Washington. The exhibition covered the entire history of codes and ciphers, with particular emphasis on the Renaissance (lots of names familiar to me from my article on possible Arabic influences on the development of cryptology in Renaissance Italy) and the Friedmans' career - William headed the team that broke Purple, the Japanese cipher used during WWII, and he considered Francis Bacon's idea of the biliteral cipher, where anything can be made to mean anything, to be binary code.

The Spy Museum of course covered much more ground. As you go in, you are asked to choose one of 16 covers, and throughout the museum there are places where you are asked questions relating to the cover and its associated mission. There is a long and interesting section on how spies are trained, followed by a smaller exhibition on the history of espionage from an American point of view, so a lot of emphasis on the Civil War and the Cold War. The current special exhibition is on the villains in the James Bond movies (very amusingly, a lot of the voice-overs throughout the museum have British accents, and the briefing movie, which starts the self-guided tour, almost sounds like Judi Dench). In addition to a lot of props, the most fascinating parts of the exhibition for me were the interviews with various retired intelligence operatives, either giving their opinion of aspects of the movies (like the CIA's equivalent to Q) or describing their own James Bond moments.

To go back nearly two weeks ago: on November 22, I spent the day at the MESA conference. I haven't heard so much Arabic in a long time - and the second most common non-English language apart from that was Hebrew. I didn't attend any of the talks, since there was no option of a one-day pass, and spent my time meeting people, either planned or unplanned. I had a lot of fun, and added two invitations to give talks to my future plans: one at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton in January, the day after my postponed talk at Rutgers (since it is on the way back to DC anyway), and another, to be confirmed once I am back in Israel, at NYU-Abu Dhabi (since I have a non-Israeli passport).

Abu Dhabi seems almost as far away as the moon, actually, but it is very exciting to think that I might go there. We saw two movies involving space travel - Apollo 13 at home with the children, and ADC and I went by ourselves to see Interstellar at the Air and Space Museum, where it was shown on IMAX screens. We also saw another episode of Cosmos, which discussed, among other things, black holes and wormholes, which was good preparation for seeing Interstellar. On reflection, I enjoyed Apollo 13 more, as the science made more sense to me. I will not go into anymore details, in case anyone is planning on seeing it and has not yet done so. But I think I am beginning to approach sic-fi the same way I approach historical dramas. Let me just say that I was impressed by the way Anne Hathaway's character was apparently able to cut her own hair very nicely and keep it trim through decades of space-time travel.

On a more mundane level, we went to ADC's uncle and aunt in Boston for Thanksgiving. It was lovely to see them, as well as their son and his family. While Number 2 Cousin is still too young (not a year yet) to really interact with A and S (although S did read to him and that was appreciated - by his mother), Number 1 Cousin clearly was thrilled to have new friends to play with and the three of them got on very well together. Unfortunately, it was much too cold to spend any time outside, where I think they would have had even more fun.

We arrived in Boston on Thursday, and basically spent our free time with ADC's family. On Friday, we spent most of the day at the Museum of Fine Arts, which was half an hour's walk from our hotel. We had been at the MFA during our previous visit to Boston in 2012, so there was less pressure, and we tried to see things that we had not seen before. ADC's aunt and uncle very kindly lent us their member cards, so we went in for free, and also got a discount at lunch and at the museum shop (which had a 30% Black Friday discount in any case). We had thought we would go to the Goya exhibition, but the queue was so long that we gave that idea up, and instead went to a number of smaller exhibitions: one on model planes and trains (and then continued to the permanent exhibition on model ships), another on the gowns and jewels of 1930s Hollywood, and another on current representations of national feeling, where we watched and excellent piece of video art called English Magic. Of course, the main thing that the boys came away with was a work from the mid-century American gallery, in which Andy Warhol took Jackson Pollock's drip art (and Marcel Duchamps' urinal) a step further by urinating on a canvas treated with copper sulphate(?) ...

Saturday was absolutely one of the coldest days we have experienced so far - and we spent a lot of it walking around. I am very glad I bought thigh-high terrycloth socks, they kept me very warm over fleece-lined footless tights. We spent the morning walking and shopping in Brookline's independent stores - Brookline Booksmith (where A bought the book of The Princess Bride and S bought both I, Robot and The Graveyard Book - I can hear my siblings cheering); Eureka, a games store where I bought (for S) a puzzle in which 120 cubes create together one of six works of art. This is obviously much more difficult than an ordinary jigsaw puzzle, since there is no help from the different shapes. I think we will work on it tomorrow while A is at flag football and ADC is playing bass for Abbey Road with his musicians' Meetup group. We met my father's cousin M for lunch, which was very nice. It always surprises me a bit when distant relatives thank us for making time to see them, because to me it was so much killing two birds with one stone: we have to eat anyway, so why not also meet someone at the same time?

After lunch we walked to Brookline High, and from there to ACD's uncle's house via Tappan Street, and ADC showed us where he had lived in 1984. We had the surprising experience of seeing a flock of turkeys cross the road (literally: a USPS van came along, the driver stopped and put his head out the window to ask: Why did the turkey cross the road?). We wondered if the school playing fields were a kind of common, like the cows that grazed on Parker's Piece and Jesus Green in Cambridge, but we were later told that the turkeys were a Brookline "thing" and wandered around people's gardens, usually.

Our last day in Boston was much warmer, around 9 degrees, and we went into Boston itself, and walked the first part of the Freedom Trail, from Boston Common up to Paul Revere's house. We decided not to go into any of the museums along the way, but to stay in the streets. We did go into the Old Granary Burying Grounds, which was fascinating. The link is to a handout that we used, which added a lot to the experience, even though the cemetery itself is very well signposted. I also really enjoyed the Old Schoolhouse, with the picture of a small John Hancock practising writing, a tiny Sam Adams standing and orating, with Ben Franklin running with a kite in the background ... We went past the monument to the Irish Famine, which I remembered from 2012, and noticed a new memorial, the New England Holocaust Memorial, six granite and glass towers with steam rising from eternal embers. The contrast between the abstract form of that memorial and the two sets of statues - starving Irish and well-fed Americans, who were actually the same people - seemed to express the different scales of the disasters.

The past week has gone by very fast. A has learned how to write a business letter (the assignment was to persuade the Board of Education that sports should be made compulsory in high school), and S has started a unit on swimming. ADC and I are trying to complete our self-imposed hobby-related tasks so that we can go back to reading and watching movies. We did watch the first half of Kurasawa's Seven Samurai this afternoon as a family, but we were too tired to watch anything by ourselves last night.
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My promised letter about our trip to New York last weekend has been delayed by the Arctic weather we have been experiencing: I suddenly found it necessary to knit both boys decent neck warmers that could be pulled up to protect cheeks and noses. So both ends of these past ten days have to do with knitting: last Thursday I went to the local mall and bought 12 balls of yarn for 37 dollars and change. (This comes to about 13 shekels per ball. I think the least amount I've ever paid for yarn per ball in Israel was 15 shekels, at the hole in the wall shop in Mahane Yehuda.) Once I complete all the planned baby/child gifts, I want to make sweaters for myself, finally. Anyone who is interested in anything for themselves may also put in a request (except for this who can knit themselves). The patterns I've chosen to begin with are Miette and Excuses.

So, last Friday we set off by train to New York. We walked to the metro (we ordered a taxi using an app, but it failed to materialise), rode to Union Station, took the Amtrak train to Penn Station and then the Long Island Rail Road to Port Washington - a total of six and a half hours door to door. I must say that Amtrak has very comfortable trains: there was WIFI and electricity at every seat, and wider seats and much more legroom than on any flight I've been on in years. The train started in DC, so we were able to sit in two rows, with the boys in front.

ADC's cousin AS and her dog Ella met us in Port Washington, and we walked to her house. Ella was very enthusiastic in her greeting, and AS said that she had been quite anxious before we arrived, since Ella associates the direction of the train station with going to the vet. Presumably part of her enthusiasm was relief at not having gone to the vet! AS has a lovely house, also with a finished basement (where the boys slept), and two storeys, the kitchen-livingroom-study and the bedrooms/bathroom. At the top of the stairs leading to the basement, she has a pantry, with lots of open narrow shelves, where you can see at a glance exactly what canned goods you have. I liked that very much, especially as our current pantry is a fairly deep cupboard above the countertop, where I can't reach the top shelf.

After breakfast on Saturday, we set off for Manhattan. It took us longer than we expected - I at least had not realised quite how far out on Long Island AS lives, and since it was the weekend, the train stopped at every possible station. We reached Central Park just before noon, and walked across it to get to the Met. The station we got out at is actually the station for the American Museum of Natural History, and probably when we go in January we will visit there, maybe together with OM and and her family, since they are members. A and S were very excited to see Central Park, which they recognised from Hair, and Shaul at least was slightly disappointed to realise that there were no hippies on the central lawn. It was really a beautiful sunny day, and as long as you were walking, it was not too cold. We bought chestnuts from a halal food truck with an Egyptian owner, and ate them just before going into the Met, where we spent the rest of the day - until 8 p.m. - apart from tea/supper with DF, GF and MF.

The Met is overwhelming - and it took us a while before we actually got inside, what with checking our coats and ADC's backpack, and buying tickets. A was very definite about wanting to see the Arms and Armor display, and that's where we spent the first hour and a half or so. The armour is interesting of course, especially the Japanese sets of long and short swords (the Met has the biggest collection of Japanese armour outside Japan), and there was a very nice set of two suits of armour made for Henry VIII, one from his youth and one, much bigger, from the last years of his life, but ADC and I were ready to continue long before the boys were. We then continued to two special exhibitions: one on Cubism, where I particularly liked the still lives, and the other on the Iron Age Middle East and Mediterranean. We recognised several items from the Israel Museum in that one! S wrote a report for school on our first day in New York. This was instead of the spelling quiz that he missed on Friday after lunch, and he took the assignment very seriously, starting with bullet points and then expanding on it.

We then took a break and met DF and GF (not forgetting baby MF) at E.A.T., a deli/restaurant close to the Met. We started with hot chocolate, continued to sandwiches and salads (except for S, who of course had roast chicken), and ended with cake. DF and GF are very nice people, and I'm glad we made the connection (DF is my first cousin, the son of my mother's late sister, whom I haven't seen since his own bar mitzvah, about 20 years ago). His month-old son MF is a very cute baby, who was quiet most of the time, but naturally waited for GF's food to arrive before waking up and demanding to be fed and changed...

After supper we returned to the Met for another couple of hours, going to the Islamic art galleries, at my request, and the Vermeer and Rembrandt portraits at ADC's. The boys were a bit too tired to appreciate the Islamic art, but perked up when we reached the Dutch Old Masters. When you see them all together, you really understand how much better Vermeer and Rembrandt were than their contemporaries. Rembrandt's use of light, in particular, is so much more subtle.

On Sunday AS went out and bought a huge quantity of bagels for breakfast. We have not yet found a good bagel place nearby, although we did get a flyer recently and have not yet checked the place out. Anyway, we had a slow start after a very hectic Saturday. After breakfast AS took us on a sociological tour of Port Washington, whose route she had not properly thought out, so we didn't get to see everything she had planned as we had to catch a train back to the city. We didn't have that much time on Sunday, as we had a 4 o'clock train back to Washington, and we spent it on Seventh and Eighth Avenue, window-shopping until we had lunch at a place on Broadway called The Counter where you decide on your own burger (they have a checklist for every stage - burger type and size, bun, toppings, sides). It was an entirely touristic experience, and was great fun. After that we went to Midtown Comics, where each big spent over $100. S completely wiped out his savings, but is very happy with what he got, as is A, who still has quite a lot of money left!

After that, we stated the long journey home. The train from New York does not start there, and at first we were scattered all over the carriage, but enough people got off at Newark for ADC to find two pairs of seats. The journey took much longer, as there were stops outside a number of stations to wait for a free platform, and all in all, we arrived in DC an hour later than anticipated. We took a taxi home ...

The main event of the past week has of course been the cold weather. I tried to stay at home as much as possible, and bundled the boys up for school (as you all saw). The house has proved to be very well insulated, but as the air conditioning is on a thermostat, I can judge how cold it is outside by how often it comes on during the day. ADC's fleece-lined pants from Land's End arrived just int he nick of time, and his only complaint so far is that the red flannel is shedding a bit on his underpants. A came home on Tuesday and said that his neck warmer (the second or third thing I ever knitted) was too loose and too short. So I unravelled it, and reknitted the wool in a smaller circle and added some extra black wool. Now not only is his neck warmer adequate to the weather, it in the colours of his favourite soccer team.

This evening both boys had events at school. ADC went with A to the International Evening, where ethnic food was eaten (8th grade had to bring dessert; ADC made a lemon cake) and there was a talent show emphasising ethnic music. It sounded like they had much more fun than S and I did at "Camp Read S'More", where, as we understood it, everybody would get into sleeping bags and read. In reality, there was and hour and a half of activities connected to reading: fishing for books (S received a copy of Stuart Little, so he is pleased), creating "story stones" and making s'mores. The s'more ingredients had run out by the time S got there, so we just came home early (and read).
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Our guest room continued to be used one more time before Halloween: My friend NN was in Washington for a conference, and had an extra night before she continued to another conference in Indianapolis. It was really a flying visit, but I was glad to see her, and she brought tons of stuff that she had missed during her own post-doc in Berkeley: za'atar, ptitim, couscous and halva. Well, she had to make room in her suitcase for all the American goodies she was bringing back for her kids ...

NN slept over on Wednesday night, and on Thursday S's school had a Fall Festival and parade. No scary costumes allowed (what?!), so S decided that his character Rorschach was in fact Moo, the spirit of cows. I went along to help get the children ready for the parade and ended up staying for the whole thing, as what parents were actually needed for was putting the Fall Feast out on the classroom tables. The amount of food brought was incredible, and there'd been no coordination, so we ended up with a dozen doughnuts for 28 children and more grapes than could reasonably be eaten, to say nothing of about 3 Capri-Sun juice boxes a head. Anyway, they all had fun and I met a couple of mothers I had not met before.

Halloween itself was something of a letdown in the end. S went trick or treating with some other children, A had to go out alone (it seems that at his age trick or treating is no longer done) and I think he mainly enjoyed carving a jack-o-lantern. To our surprise, not a single trick or treater knocked on our door - and as I had bought a 100-piece bag of Hershey fun-sized treats, after nearly having a nervous breakdown in the supermarket, this was a disappointment. Both boys returned with good hauls, and they have been very cooperative in sharing nicely. We have allowed them to eat up to three treats a day since Halloween, and they still haven't finished. ADC eventually made chocolate chunk cookies this past weekend to get rid of some the plain Hershey chocolate bars, which are almost inedible in their natural state.

Last Saturday, we went to another Smithsonian Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and American Art Museum, which share a building. We did not have very high expectations, and were pleasantly surprised by how much there was to see and how enjoyable it was. This time we concentrated on the portraits, which at the moment have an emphasis on the Civil War, and we'll go back to see more of the art. There was one fantastic stained glass window made in the 1880s that we walked past on our way to an exhibition of Time Magazine covers from the Sixties, that you just had to stop and stare at, though. The boys did us proud - we were there for about four hours, not counting lunch, and I don't think there are many 10- and 13-year-olds who can spend as long as that in any art museum (a good sign for visiting the Met this weekend when we go to New York).

Sunday both last week and this past one were quiet days, going to the market and buying some of the 20 different varieties of apples in throning and A going to flag football in the afternoon. His team is not doing very well, so the season will not be extended into the play-offs, but he seems to be enjoying himself very much. S is having fun with his ukelele, and has learned his first actual tune: Swing Low Sweet Chariot. I have asked ADC to concentrate on the relevant tunes so that at the next Seder, we can be accompanied when we sing at the end.

Both boys received excellent reports at the end of the first quarter - A is a straight A student, including English! I am very happy that they are doing so well. S regaled us last night with the pecking order in the lunchroom, and while he is not particularly high on it, he seems happy where he is, and points out that because he is "new", he can't be at the top anyway. We hear less details from A, but he seems to be doing fine socially as well. Not that they have much time to go to friends or have them over in the afternoon, with homework and capoeira. S is going to the monthly comics jam at the library later today.

We continue to be more social here than in Jerusalem: On Friday we went to IP and HP for supper, and it turned out that all their family was there, to predictable chaotic results. It's nice having an adopted family, to provide us with a substitute for Friday night in Kfar Saba and Omer. On Sunday night we had M's ex RM who also lives in Takoma Park, over for supper. RMl lives on the other side of Takoma Park, and considering the detailed rundown of markets and other food shopping options she gave me before we arrived, I had been surprised that we had not yet run into each other at the weekly farmer's market. We had a very pleasant evening, and it was interesting hearing about the school system from a data analyst at an education NGO who doesn't herself have children in the system. It's rather sad how deeply the differences between blacks and whites have become ingrained - even middle-class black people seem to to visit museums.

On Saturday there was the first real cold snap. Luckily, we have all already for our winter coats - ADC and S at REI, and I at Land's End. ADC is very taken with Land's End, he has now bought three flannel shirts and two fleece sweaters, and has two pairs of flannel-lined pants on the way at the moment. I am experimenting with fleece-lined tights and boots under skirts, as I think that this will be warmer than just trousers, and have ordered very long socks from Sock Dreams for the depth of winter.

Despite the cold, it was very bright and sunny. We went to Georgetown, and wandered around - a practice run for Manhattan next week in a way, as the forecast is for much the same weather there. We started by walking along the towpath of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal (the canal that was beaten by the railway in reaching Harpers Ferry), and then reached a busy shopping street, where people were standing in line up the block outside particularly trendy eateries.

I have been invited to give a talk at Rutgers, in New Jersey, in the first week of December, so am finally starting to work on research and not just editing. I will be giving a talk on the reception of Galen in medieval Arabic and Hebrew texts, and will have to make this as broad as possible, since I will be talking to the Medieval Studies Program and possibly the Classics Department, too. I can't be too philological, but will have to explain why this is an interesting and significant thing to be studying. (At the same time, further expanding my horizons, I am editing the dissertation of an archaeozoologist who did her MSc with ADC's late PhD supervisor, on the remains of equids [horses, asses and mules] found in Israeli medieval sites).
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It's been so long since I updated here ... probably because all the festivities have meant more frequent Skypeing with Israel.

It is already three weeks ago that we went to the National Mall, finally. A has been reading a book on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln for a book report, so we aimed for the Lincoln Memorial. On the way, we went through the World War II Memorial, and on the way back we went through the Korean War Memorial and the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial.  All the memorials were impressive and moving. The World War II Memorial has two arcs surrounding a central fountain. The eastern side is devoted to the European theatre, and the western one to the Pacific theatre, and right at the back is the Wall of Stars, with a gold star representing each thousand Americans who fell in WWII - I can't remember the precise number, but it is slightly less than those that died in the Civil War. When you consider who much smaller  the population was in the 1860s compared to the 1940s, it really hits home quite how bloody the Civil War was, making this a fitting preparation for the Lincoln Memorial. It was very interesting to read the Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Speeches, from which we all know a few phrases. I can't imagine any current-day politician using such complex sentence structures, and being remembered, rather than mocked. At the Korean War Memorial there was a group of veterans having their photographs taken with their families, all white, while at the MLK Memorial, all the families having their pictures taken were black.

The rest of that weekend was very social. After returning home from the Mall, we recrossed DC to Arlington, where ADC's host D was having a barbecue for his group. Very nice people, and D has a wonderful library, with a section devoted to spycraft and cryptography, so of course I said I would give him an e-print of my article on medieval Middle Eastern cryptography. I don't often get the chance to offer my articles to ADC's colleagues! Next day was spent in Baltimore, finally getting together with KM and AM as a family. The four boys, as usual, acted as if they had never been parted. After lunch, we had a great time just hanging out at their house, while CM, the baby, had her nap, and then we went to the harbour, where ADC took the three older boys on a paddle boat in the shape of a purple sea serpent.

Rosh Hashana was once again supper with the Ps on the first night, followed by supper with the Gs on the second night. Both evenings were very enjoyable, in their different ways - the Ps chaotic as usual (and with two cakes for dessert, to S's delight; A was more excited about the green beans - IP prepared 5 pounds, and A and YP ate most of that). At the Gs, we met their younger daughter J, who is also at the State Department, and who was very quiet. H was very happy to explain the American system of government to A, who is learning about the American Revolution (he's just had a quiz on the French and Indian War, and I must say that I never expected to know so much about the importance of the Ohio River). G was very pleased to hear about S's ukelele, and made him promise to bring it with next time we visited.

The boys had school on Friday, breaking up a long weekend, and then we had a strenuous couple of days. We spent Saturday at the Shenandoah Valley National Park, listening to The Seeger Sessions on the way - the same way we used to listen to Songs from the Wood in England in the spring. We had planned a route for a hike, and were shocked to arrive and discover that the relevant parking lot was tiny and completely full! We ended up walking along a random section of the Appalachian Trail, and enjoying ourselves, but overall it was a bit disappointing. We also saw lots of farm stalls on our way to Shenandoah, but on our way back, taking a different route, there were none. So, next day, on our way to Calvert Cliffs State Park on Chesapeake Bay, we stopped at the first farm stall we saw, and bought - among other things - corn that was still wet with dew, and red potatoes to make mashed potatoes for S's first birthday meal. Calvert Cliffs was great. We had been warned of insect bites, since it is a wetland caused by beaver dams, so we worn long pants and covered arms, necks and face with both Sano-Dy and Autan. This proved to be a successful strategy, as no one was bitten at all. We didn't see any actual beavers, only dams, but we saw terrapins, herons, water lilies and cardinal flowers. We took a meandering path to the beach, which is a major fossil site, where the boys paddled in the water and collected shells.

The next two days were spent on field trips - A went to Annapolis on Monday and S went to Mount Vernon on Tuesday. It sounds like S definitely had a better time, since he returned clutching the visitor's map and insisting that we should go there again as a family, whereas A came back and announced that there was no need to go to Annapolis. Tuesday also saw the beginning of S's birthday celebrations, which are not yet over, in fact, as I think that some presents have not yet arrived. So far, he has received a ukelele and accessories from both sets of grandparents, a video camera from his parents, earphones from A and games from his uncles and aunts etc. Everything has been received with gratifying enthusiasm, almost as much as the two birthday meals - breaded chicken with mashed potatoes on Tuesday and home-made pizza with green olives on Wednesday. The birthday cake was brownies, as we discovered too late that we had no cake pans. Can cupcakes be baked in the paper cups without a pan to support them? We weren't sure, and decided not to experiment, but brownies can be made in pyrex dishes, of which we have a plethora.

Yom Kippur felt rather strange, as it always does for me outside Israel. A and I went to hear Kol Nidre at the Adas Israel Conservative synagogue, one of the biggest in Washington, which has a free outdoor service. It rained on and off, during an abbreviated service (as usual, I was not happy with what was left out and would have chosen to keep other piyyutim), that still managed to go on for nearly an hour and a half until it started raining so hard that we were allowed into the synagogue building. At that point there were about 3 pages of the photocopied handout left, so we decided that discretion was the better part of valour and retreated to the Red Line and took the metro home. Next day, the rest of the family enjoyed a fry-up and joined the IPs for their traditional Yom Kippur hike, this time to Sugarloaf Mountain. I stayed at home, read the machzor and knitted. In retrospect, seeing as a cold snap started, and I normally walk to and from Hod ve-Hadar twice while fasting, in much higher temperatures, I probably could have participated in the hike. When everyone got home, we watched The Incredibles, and then rejoined the IPs for breaking the fast. We met several nice families there, one of which has two boys - one of whom is in A's US History class, and the other will be in flag football with him. ADC and I spent quite a lot of time talking to the parents, so we have probably made new friends.
As I said, we are having our first cold snap, and yesterday (Sunday) we all left home wearing sweatshirts. We spent most of the day at the Takoma Park Street Festival, which incorporated our weekly market shopping. Music played on three different stages, and there were all kinds of stalls, selling a wide variety of gift-like things. I bought a pair of purple glass earrings, ADC bought two serious handmade wooden cutting boards, we bought two ceramic bowls and the boys jointly bought a Lego set. I ate a vegan crab sandwich, with coconut meat instead of crab - obviously, I have no idea how close it was to the original but it was tasty!

Knitting update: Since the last time I wrote, I completed a baby sack and matching hat for my newest cousin, in New York. 20140928_084437
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We spent Saturday at the Maryland Renaissance Festival and Sunday at the Takoma Park Folk Festival, two very different experiences.

Yesterday was incredibly hot and humid - 36 degrees and 70% humidity at midday. I wore my Keen sandals for their first extended outdoor excursion, and they held up very well (ADC doesn't like his Keens so much, and he wore shoes and socks). The Rennfest is a completely different kettle of fish to the reenactments we saw in England. As befits the homeland of the Society for Creative Anachronism, there was less emphasis on authenticity and more on fun. I think that this was epitomised by the bellydancing girl accompanied by bagpipes, played by men in kilts and woad on their faces. Apart from the fact that it is only in Braveheart that woad and kilts are worn together, she would have died of exposure in the average Scottish castle. Actually, I have never seen so many men in kilts at once, nor so many women in corsets and off-the-shoulder bodices. The festival runs through September and October in a large site outside Annapolis, and is a mixture of Hutzot ha-Yotzer, junk food, and fantasy-styled theatre and reenactment. The crafts shops all accepted Master Card and Lady Visa, and many had a fantasy/dragons theme. We saw a glassblowing demonstration and bought a butter dish sized for American sticks of butter. Our search for a stopper for wine bottles remains unsuccessful.

The most historical accuracy could be found - unsurprisingly for the USA, I suppose - in the weapons. A and S each bought a wooden dagger, made of hickory from Arkansas, with a lifetime guarantee. The carpenter discussed the different kinds of swords and crossbows he had there with us and in another place a bowyer who made longbows explained how those were made. This was just before the long-awaited joust. Jousting is the state sport of Maryland, so we were told, so our expectations (or at least mine), were quite high. Here, if nowhere else, I expected authenticity. Well, I should cut both horses and riders some slack due to adverse weather conditions, but I was disappointed. I don't know if health and safety regulations got in the way, but one of my favourite exercises - man cleaves a cabbage in half at full gallop - was nowhere to be seen. Instead, four knights knocked a piece of Lego (at least, that's what it looked it) off a pole at a canter. The quintain was not in fact a quintain - yes, they had to put the tip of their sword through a ring, but the counterweight never moved! A proper quintain moves regardless and you have to avoid being punched by it whether or not you got the ring! But apart from that, everything else we saw was excellent. Even the Celtic bellydancer was good (she was a good bellydancer, and the music was good of itself.) A particularly good performance was the Barely Balanced acrobats - two men and a woman - who defied the laws of human physiology (I'm sure they took physics and gravity very much into account) to balance on each other and juggle swords. As well as being amazing acrobats,they kept up a constant patter which was actually funny.

We have subscribed to Netflix, and the first DVD we ordered was Kenneth Branagh's Henry V. It seemed very appropriate to end a medieval-themed day by watching that. Just in case the children had difficulty with the text, we watched using the closed captions for the hard of hearing (the alternative subtitles were French or Spanish, which we felt would not really be helpful). We had to stop once or twice to clarify plot points, but basically they were able to follow. S particularly enjoyed the Chorus (Derek Jacobi) and the set pieces (Harfleur and the St Crispin's Day speeches, because Henry "excited and encouraged" the ordinary soldiers). A liked everything, he said.

There was a thunderstorm Saturday night, and the next day was glorious. We spent almost the entire day at the Folk Festival, and I enjoyed "live whatsapping" to family back home (thank you for explaining how to take pictures, I was usually not close enough to the stage and/or there was a mix of sunlight and shade making photographs impossible). There were seven stages, playing various kinds of folk, country, roots rock, blues and world music, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. (we arrived at 10:30 and left at 5; we could hear one of the stages through the open window when we got home). Here too there were food trucks - with much healthier options than at the Rennfest, to say nothing of much tastier ones - crafts stalls (I bought earrings) and information stands for everything going on in Takoma Park. There was a whole row of religious stands, with the Quakers, Unitarians and some other denomination I didn't recognise but clearly mainly black, separated by the Movement for Secular Humanistic Judaism (I took their brochure), Tiferet Israel, the Farbrangen Cheder and Shirat Hanefesh. The Ps go to Adas Yisrael in DC, which have free services on Rosh Hashana and Kol Nidre, and that is where I think I will be going. Another stall was House of Musical Traditions, a local music store, and S - who has been resisting resuming guitar lessons - decided that he wanted to learn the ukelele. I am in favour, it's much more mobile, and definitely for playing music to sing too. That's a birthday present sorted, I should think.

Back to the Folk Festival - we wandered fairly randomly, hearing some urban folk, very good country/roots rock/Americana with a sense of humour, excellent Appalachian ballads. I skipped the Indian/jazz fusion in order to look at earrings, then heard a Pete Seeger tribute with Andy Wallace, a banjoist who played with Seeger himself, a bluegrass trio that did *not* have a sense of humour, and finally rock again. The festival is co-sponsored by the Folklore Society of Greater Washington, so I took a copy of their newsletter and joined their mailing list. It looks like they have a lot going on in Takoma Park, which is nice.
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It seems that Tuesday is my day for updates. Last week flew by, with the children spending quite a lot of time doing homework. S has to read 25 books by June, and keep a reading log of at least 20 minutes reading daily, to be signed weekly by a parent and handed in. On Friday the two of us went to the Takoma Park library, and registered for reading cards. His is on a lanyard, while mine, like all cards here, is small, oblong and has a hole for putting it on my keyring (I put it in my purse anyway). The adult library is mostly a reference library, it seems, at least the fiction section is smaller than the non-fiction - but it turns out that Shakespeare is considered non-fiction, so I need to investigate further. Meanwhile, I borrowed a historical novel and a murder mystery with Eleanor Roosevelt as the detective. S took out a compendium of Marvel comics and, at my insistence, a fantasy novel called "The hunting of the last dragon", by Sherryl Jordan. He began reading it this morning, and had to ask me about quite a few words, so clearly this will be good for him. I told him he could always take out a graphic novel so long as he also took out a real book, too. A didn't want to come to the library - he bought a book by a local author while we were in the Adirondacks, and I hope he will read it. He is starting to react to the change now, and I am trying not to pressure him too much.

Not that I always succeed in that. On Saturday, we went on a very pleasant hike to Mason Neck State park, in northern Virginia. We saw cardinals, white-throated nuthatches and very excitingly, bald eagles. However, a couple of hours into the trip, the boys started squabbling, and this continued on the drive home. When we got confused on the Beltway and took the wrong direction, going counterclockwise instead of clockwise thus extending our journey home by a good 40 minutes, causing ADC and me to become tense and irritable, they would not shut up in the back seat, and we ended up threatening them with confiscation of their weekly pocket money if they did not behave. We had to carry out this threat, and A got very upset, refused to have supper, refused to have a shower, refused to go to bed. We then confiscated his cell phone and left him be. He got up in the morning a sadder and wiser child, especially when the UPS man made his almost-daily visit with cellphone covers for the three of us. A now has a red and black cover, S has a green and black one, and I have a hot pink+jungle swirls one (plus a hot pink stylus, which has made texting a lot quicker).
Sunday was a quiet day at home. It was boiling hot, and A got up very late, having gone to sleep so late the night before. ADC and Sl went shopping by themselves, and came home with lots of different peppers and summer squash - and of course, blue potatoes. Sl would eat blue potatoes every day if he could, it's a pity they are so expensive. We made a very nice ratatouille for supper, with lots of wine in it - we realised on Friday night, after opening a bottle, that we did not have a stopper. Friday night was the first time in a long time that I lit my own candles (finally found tea lights at the Giant supermarket that day), and ADC made challah, which we covered with the cover that M embroidered - another step in making this house home. Further steps were buying good quality pots at Macy's in the Labor Day sale (plus the nice salesman made us apply for a store card and gave us an extra 15% discount), and ordering, at Bed Bath and Beyond online, a set of bedlinen, a knife sharpener (all the non-serrated knives we bought are not sharp. Why? You can buy a firearm anywhere but a kitchen knife is more dangerous?), various storage containers, a hand mixer and cutting mats. Almost all the order arrived today, so that ADCl came home from work to two large boxes of presents in the living room.
On Sunday, calm restored to all, we went on an even longer day trip to another state park in Virginia, Sky Meadow, which was described in the book KM gave A for his bar mitzvah as a butterfly hotspot. It really was that - we saw dozens of them (mostly silvery blues, white admirals, commas, and black swallowtails), and fortunately were able to buy pocket guides to butterflies and plants at the gift shop. Less fortunately, the heat and humidity were really bad (the humidity was around 90%), and S started feeling bad as we were slogging up a hill. We sat at the top of the hill and watched butterflies once we got there, and then split up on the way down - S and I took a short path, and ADC and A took a longer one. Once we reached the shade and started walking downhill, S perked up and discussed superheroes non-stop. After lunch, we took another brief hike to see woodpeckers. We took things very slowly and spent time identifying plants. The American sycamore and black walnut have very different fruits from the familiar European sycamore and walnut. The main flower we saw at Sky Meadow is called butterfly weed, so no wonder it is a butterfly hotspot.

When ADC baked challah, he re-discovered the fact that the oven is gas, not electric. This put paid to any idea I might have had about baking him a birthday cake myself, and instead I bought him a chocolate raspberry truffle cake from Takoma Bistro, and restaurant/bakery in downtown Takoma Park. We had that for dessert tonight after eating supper at an excellent Ethiopian restaurant, Langano, just up the road in Silver Spring. We had twwo combination platters, one meat and one vegetarian, between the four of us, and couldn't finish everything. Interesting , the one lentil dish that tasters familiar was called Misir Wot (wot seems to mean "vegetarian stew", and Misir is obviously Egypt, so presumably that's why). We asked the waitress at the end for the names of the dishes that we had finished, and now we know what to order next time.
We have started a Netflix account. ADC is a little disappointed in the selection available for streaming, as if you don't want TV shows iTunes seems to have more, but I am thrilled to discover that we can - during this first month - order DVDs for free, and Kenneth Branagh's Henry V is available that way. At last I will be able to show the children why Professors Lockhart and Trelawney are in fact great actors. Meanwhile, we watched ParaNorman (the children clutched at Ariel until he said he wasn't sitting between them again, but once it was over they weren't scared at all) and The Return of the Pink Panther over the weekend.
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Today was A and S's first day of school in America, at long last, after being sent home yesterday. I am happy to say that they both seemed to have had a good experience.
A is in the highest grade of the middle school, which sounds rather like ADC's memories of high school in Brookline: moving from one classroom to another, different people in every class, and the homeroom being mainly for administrative announcements and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance (both boys were rather bemused by that). He has already heard of a class trip, to Annapolis, for science where this semester they will be focussing on earth sciences.  Yesterday, in a rush, he had to choose three electives, and picked Spanish. He regretted that today and has already requested to change it: it turns out that most of the children studying Spanish I are in the sixth grade, and have break and lunch with the sixth grade (each grade has a different recess and lunch time , as well as being on a separate floor, thus A does not get to see Y). A reported that most of the children in Spanish class were Asian, with almost all the rest African-Americans, and only a few white students (maybe they prefer to learn French?). At the middle school, the different classes are numbered (e.g., 1 - English, 2 - maths, 3 - history), and on odd days one has classes in odd-numbered subjects and on even days one has classes in even-numbered subjects. Odd days are not Tuesday and Thursday while even ones are Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but the first day of term was an odd day, today was an even day, and the rest of the year rolls forward that way, thus school holidays do not affect the number of classes in any subject. Is this weird, or is it just me? I must say that my immediate response to this was "I am amazed that America is still a superpower."
S is in the final year of the elementary school, and he greeted me by saying "Mr Allen is the best teacher in the world!" Mr Allen, whom I met after school, as the fifth-graders have "specials" (art, music, library, sports - today it was the library) first thing while the homeroom teachers meet, struck me as very pleasant and approachable. Sl is in group 1 - the class is divided into groups which sit together, in his case three boys and three girls - and the only difficulty he reported was not understanding when they did a maths worksheet that involved rounding decimal fractions up and down. This  is because he has not learned decimal fractions at all, he is familiar with rounding up and down, and at least part of the problem was not knowing the terminology . Mr Allen asked all parents to e-mail him so he could create a class mailing list, so I took the opportunity to point all this out to him. I hope I came across as a concerned but confident-in-her-child parent and not a helicopter one.
Next week both schools have "Back to School Night," which is where we will hear about the various clubs and activities, as well as get outlines of the syllabi in the various subjects (A's math teacher already sent her one home: a detailed list of topics, learning objectives and more). I must say that I thought that the Jerusalem high school had a great deal of contact with the parents, but American schools clearly are much more concerned with keeping parents in the picture.
As for ourselves, ADC started going in to the Smithsonian yesterday, and has put the finishing touches to two articles. I have not been too productive yet, although I edited an article last Friday. I've been unable to concentrate with the children in the house, so today was my first real work day in a while, and I started on a long-overdue translation project. Research will wait until that, and another few paying projects, are finished, hopefully by the middle of September.
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I think I've reached the stage where I don't want to repeat the experience of bureaucracy by writing about it ... ADC has suffered much more, as he has been the one actually doing things like buying a car, but we are very ready to spend a few days in Vermont (not that they will be completely bureaucracy free, either).
Anyway, the highlights of the weekend and today: We have a car! And I have already driven in it! (Only a short way, behind Ariel as we had to return the rented car this morning). The rules of the road here are terrifying - why can you always turn on right on red or left on green unless explicitly forbidden?? - and apparently Maryland drivers are the US equivalent of Cape Town drivers in South Africa; in short, in terms of courtesy on the road, I may as well have stayed in Israel, so I am told.
The children successfully took the TB test, and their vaccinations are good for starting school (S is missing one to two as far as they are concerned, due to the differences in schedules between England, Israel and Maryland, but so long as he has them done within three weeks of school starting that should be OK). Apart from that, we still have not finalised registration, as our landlady's attempted work around did not work; in the meantime, we have received two pieces of official mail to our residence, so we can fill in a form saying that we share residence with her and thus prove that we have a right to send our children to school in Montgomery County. We were so fed up today, after spending nearly four hours at the same place we had gone to last Tuesday, that when we realised that the ESOL test was not intended to determine whether the children could function in an American classroom but whether they were eligible for help there, we decided to waive the test at this point (as soon as the woman there heard ADC and me speak, she suggested this, as there were no appointments until after the school year began, anyway). Our landlady is being very accommodating, and she contacted the county ombudsman on our behalf to complain (because the shared accommodation is really for cases when you are staying with your cousin and things like that), but in the meantime, in case things don't work out there, she is meeting Ariel to sign a form tomorrow and have it notarised (which can be done in one's bank for free, in this strange place. The level of trust in banks seems disproportionate).
And now for actual fun things: after ADC spent  Saturday morning buying the car, and despite running very late, we managed to get into DC to meet his cousin M (whom we had met at the family reunion) and her husband D (whom we had not met). They took us for a walk through central Washington, including the White House from several angles, and it was just a relief to do something recreational and touristy at last. We ended at their favourite gelato place, which was very lucky, since it allowed us to go shopping (again!) for food and small kitchen utensils (we desperately needed wooden spoons), despite the late hour. Sunday was very nice indeed. Finally, IP and her family returned from out of town, and we went over to their house, where the children were very happy to reconnect with her son Y, who is going into 7th grade at the same middle school that A will be attending. He is a fan of the Settlers of Catan game, as are both boys, while his sister, AP, is not, so a get-together to play that will definitely be happening. We then walked to the weekly farmers' market, where we finally bought edible bread, some very nice cheese, and blue potatoes, which S has been looking forward to since we started talking about a sabbatical in America. We got home close to noon, ADC and I collapsed, and then we made up for the truly disgusting frozen pizza we ate on Saturday night by preparing tacos from scratch (well, the tortillas were from Giant).
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Yesterday (Thursday) was possibly the most boring day I have had in a long time, so naturally I fell asleep before writing to you when I got home. I'll start by saying that Wednesday was great - we all enjoyed a day at the Smithsonian, in our different ways. It turned out that it was lucky that we went then, as on Thursday the public part of the museum was closed to mend storm damage before the weekend and its attendant hordes (the rain on Tuesday was apparently the second heaviest rain form recorded since scientific recording began. When we arrived in Cambridge in 2001, a similar occurrence took place; unfortunately, ADC and I do not seem to be similar rain-bringers when we return to Israel).

Anyway, on Thursday I went to Baltimore to check in at the Office for International Students and Scholars. As ADC had to take the children for a TB test and hoped to buy a car, I braved public transport. Incredibly, there is no reasonable way of getting to Baltimore from DC in under two hours (at the right time of day; at most times it takes close to three). I walked to the Metro station, and went into DC. At Union station, I changed to the commuter (mainline) rail, and waited 40 minutes for my train. The train took over an hour to get to Baltimore, stopping everywhere - including Baltimore airport, where very excitingly, a woman and her two children did not get off the train with their luggage in time, and had to continue to the next stop. This is a phobia of mine that has never actually happened to me, and probably never will, since I would have started getting ready to disembark long before this unfortunate woman did.

On arrival at Baltimore Penn Station, I spent a long time finding the bus stop I needed. I was indeed the only white person on the bus - which took a detour just before the stop I wanted to get off at. Thankfully, I was already in possession of a smartphone, which helped me walk to John Hopkins campus. The campus is huge, and the maps are very confusing, so it took me half an hour to reach the building I needed. Door-to-door: 7:45-11:00 a.m.

I will not bore you further with precise details of the administrivia I had to battle, I will only say that I was delayed by a lunch break at OISS, and every time I left a building I lost my way going to the next one, even when it was the third time I needed to go to the same building but to a different office. I finished everything and began my way home at 2:30 p.m. Once again, I lost my way trying to get off campus, and once I reached the street where I was supposed to catch a bus, I seriously considered just walking down the street back to Penn Station, just so as not to spend more time hanging around. As I began doing so, I saw what looked like - and in fact was - a university shuttle stop. Now that I had a JHU ID card, I had a number of free public transport options that had not been available on my way in! I caught the shuttle, immediately caught a train to DC, and then immediately caught a Metro back to Takoma Park. I walked back home, and arrived at 5 p.m. Door-to-door on the way back was a mere two and a half hours ... I will have to drive to JHU in the future, the departmental seminar is Mondays from 4 p.m., no way I am leaving Baltimore around six to come home at nine!

Today (Friday) is a quiet day at home. ADC has gone to the Smithsonian, and on the way home will hopefully buy a car (he test drove one yesterday, but needed additional documents for financing to be approved. The entire banking system here seems to the opposite of Israel's, where a credit card is the best security, while here it is the worst). I have just edited an article for a client, and shortly the children and I will plan a walk. I'm not going to the library yet, as I will need our lease to prove residency in order to take out library cards, and Ariel has that with him for the car buying. The children went to the comics shop yesterday and are quite happy not to be doing anything at the moment.
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Yesterday was a very long and exhausting day. It began with pouring rain, that lasted through to three o'clock, casting a literal pall over proceedings. ADC had to return to Social Security with his birth certificate (two passports are not sufficient identification), but things there went smoothly, and we spent the morning playing card games. While ADC was busy, the children and I devised chore lists. A is very eager to mow the lawn, while S was happy to be in charge of changing the rubbish bins in the bedrooms and bathrooms once a week.
We then attempted unsuccessfully to go to a comics shop, which - in retrospect - had decided not to open that day, getting thoroughly soaked in the process, and continued to the school interview. That really turned out to be a fool's errand that day, as it turned out that our landlady has not changed the registration of the house as her primary residence, and without that, we cannot claim to live there and therefore the children cannot be registered for school. We were able to get a new appointment for Monday, the day before we go off to Vermont, and hopefully the landlady will get her act together in time. We also have to take the children to have a TB test, but that is much more easily solved - pharmacies here do everything, it appears.

We went to restore our souls with retail therapy: we now all have phones: ADC still has a stupid phone, S has an LG Optimus, I have a Galaxy Light and A has a Galaxy 5s. He will text my siblings to thank them - we have free international texting, but not talking. We than continued to an even bigger Giant store than previously and stocked up on basics. We made our cashier's day, I should think. By the time we got home it was after six, and the children immediately sank into their new phones. We ate pasta in tomato sauce made by ADC, a long-anticipated event, and then A washed up the plates, cups and cutlery (each boy is going to wash up twice a week - let them practice on plastic).
Today should be a much better day: not only is the sun shining, but we are going to the Smithsonian. ADC can't wait to start work, and the rest of us are looking forward to the museum.

Day 2

Aug. 12th, 2014 11:51 pm
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Today we had what must have been a very boring day for the boys (although Sl said "It wan't a terrible day" when I apologised). We started by splitting up - ADC went to apply for a Social Security number, and the rest of us went to Target. The boys were quite interested at first, but by three hours' later, they were very ready to leave. I had fun choosing towels and cereal bowls and cups, and at some point S asked permission to go to the books' section. A stayed with me most of the time, pushing the increasingly-loaded trolley, and was able to find a number of items that I hadn't seen (in retrospect, of course the bread board would be in the same aisle as the knives ...).

Once ADC joined us, we descended on the food court where the boys happily sampled a variety of Asian versions of chicken pieces, before deciding on Thai food. A is getting quite adventurous (he enjoyed Salvadorean food yesterday), while S still has to be convinced to try. Anyway, they liked what they chose, and on the way out of the mall, we stopped at a T-mobile store, as ADC wanted to change the Sim card in his iPad. We ended up discussing a possible plan for all four of us, as the iPad could be considered an extra phone line for the purposes of the plan: unlimited talk+text+data for $100 a month for 5 lines. That seems like a good price; we just have to decide on the actual models.

After getting home and a bit of unpacking, we walked in Takoma Park, past S's school, which is about twice as far away as his previous school was, but still within walking distance. We went past a number of interesting shops, including a bike shop - although the landlady left a number of bikes, one of which will suit A, none was tall enough for ADC - and eventually reached a branch of Bank of America. Opening an account was quite simple, although a very lengthy and tedious process. We rewarded ourselves with excellent gelato before walking home via the Metro station, so as to time the distance there taking the most direct route (20 minutes uphill, so probably a little less when going to the Metro).

Tomorrow afternoon is the boys' interview with the Montgomery County school board, at the unit for international pupils. They are looking forward to it, as are we, because then we can finally organise the major part of their lives. I will try to take them to join the local library tomorrow morning, unless it continues to rain, in which case we will relax at home and play games.

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