So much snow ...

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.

Cross-posting from LiveJournal, 21 February 2015: Tempests of various kinds

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!

Cross-posting from LiveJournal, 7 February 2015: New York and Princeton - 10 days later

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.

Cross-posting from LiveJournal, 6 January 2015: Winter break in the South

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.

Cross-posting from LiveJournal, 7 December 2014: Thanksgiving in Boston

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.