End of the year

Last  time I wrote, we were about to embark on a very busy weekend. On May 30, we spent the day at AwesomeCom, which really was awesome. We went to a Q&A session with John Rhys-Davies and Sean Astin, which was hilarious; a panel on the "strong woman character" trope in genre and its problems, which began slowly, but quickly developed into an interesting discussion once audience participation began; tried new games; and wandered around the immense exhibit area, looking at t-shirts, original comics, merchandise and more. The most fun was looking at all the cosplayers, some of whom had amazingly detailed costumes, and some of whom were just having fun. A and S fell into the latter category: A bought a Deadpool mask a few weeks ago, and wore red and black, generally, while S recycled his Halloween costume of Rorschach (whom he has no real idea about, just thought the mask looked cool on Amazon - I have no real idea who Rorschach is either). The food situation was not great, and in retrospect it might even have been quicker to go outside the convention centre for lunch, but we made an executive decision to regard food as fuel that day, as we barely had time for a very early supper before heading to Strathmore to hear Fauré's Requiem. I had never heard it before, and I enjoyed it very much, especially as the program kindly provided full words with translation, so we could follow along. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the wording looked like slightly skewed versions of Jewish prayers. 

Next day, we spent the afternoon at the Folger, watching Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. I had such fun! I saw the film with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth when it came out in 1990, in one of the now-gone cinemas in north Tel Aviv, and I remember laughing out loud at some point, and being the only person in the theatre to do so. That certainly didn't happen this time, everyone was laughing at all the jokes, including A and S (when S saw The Lion King on the last day of school, he came home convinced that Timon and Pumba were Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - or vice versa). I'm not sure that they have seen enough live theatre to undesrtand all the conventions that were being played with, but they have seen Hamlet, so they had an idea of what was going on. In this performance, the Player was particularly good, much more of a presence than I remember Richard Dreyfuss being in the film. Guildenstern (Adam Wesley Brown) and Rosencrantz (played by an understudy, Luis Alberto Gonzalez) were both excellent, too. When I saw the movie, I don't think I had much of an idea who the main actors were, and I was surprised to meet them years later as Sirius Black and the Abomination. The play owes almost as much to Waiting for Godot as it does to Hamlet, and ADC asked me why I enjoyed R&G so much, yet disliked Waiting for Godot. Well, to begin with I think that WfG would have been improved - the one time I saw it live - if I had not just come off a five-hour flight to London. I fell asleep there, but I am told that I did not miss much, as nothing happens in the first half, and that is recapitulated in the second half. I don't think that that is true of R&G - yes, they spend a lot of time waiting, but things do happen. Also, since I saw this first as a film, I didn't experience it as occurring on a single stage set, but in a variety of settings, with the journey actually taking place on horseback etc. Finally, I am sure that my own enjoyment of verbal dexterity deriving from a great classic has a lot to do with it; I may simply prefer the register in which Stoppard works to Becket's.

The following week was "spirit week" at the elementary school, and S had to wear interesting clothes all week, culminating in a superhero outfit on Friday - he was given a Batman suit by a friend. Pity he didn't get it in time for AwesomeCon, but he is now sorted for Purim next year. A was invited to the honors evening at school. About 800 names (some two thirds of the student body) were called up to receive some kind of honor, with some children being called up more than once. A was in the next to last group, children who had received straight As all year (the last group was 27 children who had received straight As for eleven quarters, their entire time at TPMS). I am glad that ADC went without me, as I think I would have very much resented not being able to knit had I gone. This paragraph kind of sums up the entire year's experience for the boys: S had a great time, and A was rather bored. 

Last weekend, its first half  - Friday evening through Saturday afternoon - was spent visiting the Ms and their kids in Baltimore. We were very pleased to be invited for the weekend, actually just as ADC had been about to call to ask when we could see them, as this will be our last chance to see them before we come home. As we left Takoma Park during Friday evening rush hour, Google Maps took us on a different route from our previous visit, and after a whole year in which I had only seen the part of the Baltimore that was the route between Penn Station and Johns Hopkins' Homewood Campus, this weekend I saw two areas that were quite different. To begin with, we ended up going through a rather depressed area of Baltimore before we reached the Ms' house, on W 34th St. We discussed with the boys how you identified a poverty-stricken area: peeling paint, boarded up windows, no greenery, no chain stores but rather corner shops prominently advertising liquor. A added children playing outside on the pavement and adults sitting on the steps leading up to the row houses, and S added that those adults were smoking. As we moved north, the neighbourhood improved - this seems to be a near constant, north is better than south (if your city has an up and a down, like Haifa does, with Mt Carmel, then up is better). I wonder if there is any explanation for that. 

After supper, we went to get ice cream at the Charmery, just around the corner on W 36th St., and saw another side of the city. This was the hipster Baltimore, which KM and AM had said was like Zichron, with boutiques selling various kinds of handmade food and clothes. They were quite right, and we were sorry to see that we had missed happy hour at a chocolatier. We were not too late for an oyster stall, and to our surprise, S agreed to try one (we assume because IM, rather than one of us, told him that it tasted good). He wasn't impressed, but at least he didn't reject the suggestion out of hand. We had planned to go to the Aquarium in the morning, but once again we didn't make it. IM and AW are very big on board games, and had specifically requested that we bring Seven Wonders with us. We played after coming back from the ice cream, and ended up going to bed very late. Once we got up in the morning, AM made waffles, after which the boys (including the fathers) began playing Clue, while AM and I took sixteen-month-old CR to the playground. When we got back, because CR was getting hungry, the game was still going on, and by the time it finished, we decided to just go back home and do homework and watch You Can't Take It With You, which is exactly what we did.

First thing Sunday morning, ADC mowed the lawn. He did a much better job than A does, a combination of greater weight and power brought to bear when pushing (although it is an electric lawnmower) and greater motivation (I think no one could be less motivated than A: he liked the idea of mowing the lawn - similarly to the idea of shoveling snow - much more than he did the reality). This set the stage for a horticulturally-focused day. Our previous visit to the National Arboretum was the day after a snowstorm, and we decided already then to returm in the spring. As we are now almost at the summer solstice, and running out of time left to visit, we decided to go yesterday, after a rainy week that ended in sunshine and humidity. Sadly, once again many flowers were not yet blooming - although many other were already past their peak. It seemed as if what would have been the best areas to look at are now out of bounds due to the nesting bald eagles, which is a great pity, to my mind. However, we did see the late-blooming satsuki azaleas, and found a Japanese-style pond, with godfish, water-lilies in bloom, and most excitingly, several frogs, one of them almost on a lily-pad, in best Princess and the Frog style. The herb garden was at one of its peaks, too, and I really enjoyed that: there was a whole row of mints in pots, and you could rub the leaves and smell the differences as you walked along. It was fun seeing all the familar names and shapes in the industrial and colonial sections, as well as noting which plants appeared again and again: seasonings and bases for alcoholic drinks :)

The last week of school was fairly uneventful, with a lot of time spent on final exams. The last quarter report card will arrive in the mail, apparently. Oh, and S had his class trip to Baltimore on Monday. His main comment, when he got home, was that he didn't understand why, after having seen a film about the Star-Spangled Banner at Fort McHenry, they saw another such film at the Science Museum instead of doing something related to science there. 

Friday was the last day of elementary and middle school in Maryland. Since A has finished 8th grade and S has finished 5th grade, Friday was devoted to their promotion ceremonies - a new usage to me, BTW. I had not previously run across "promotion" in this sense. I would have just said "finished primary school" and/or "finished junior high". Anyway, we split up, with ADC attending A's ceremony (12:30-14:00) and me attending Sl's (11:30-12:30, clap-out at 15:15). It sounds as if both ceremonies were very similar: the children marched in, speeches by the principal and student representatives, a musical number, prizes, names of each student read by homeroom teacher. A's ceremony, from his report, was of course more elaborate, with a PowerPoint with pictures of all the children and a short film with all the teachers wishing them luck. The TPMS principal apparently spent her day going to various promotion ceremonies, elementary schools in the morning and the middle school in the afternoon. S received his certificate in his classroom. While everyone was milling around before the children had a picnic lunch (parents were sent home and returned to clap the mortarboard-wearing children out of school at the end of the day), I took pictures of S and his teacher and best friends on my cell phone. I hope they are viewable. ADC said the same for his pictures of A's ceremony, taken on a real camera and by a far better photographer.

On another note entirely, I spent quite a lot of time this past week on crafts: I finally finished my hiking shorts, which I decided to lengthen by adding a cuff (just in time to go rafting on Saturday), and I swatched my next cardigan. It seemed oddly appropriate to be knitting while watching Terry Gilliam's Brazil on Thursday night. Very excitingly, when I logged into Ravelry on Friday, I saw I had a message from the designer of the baby blanket I knitted for my latest neice, asking permission to feature my project on the pattern's main page. Admittedly, I knitted the blanket in December, but only added the pictures (again, ADC must be credited) a few days ago. What a compliment! 

The weekend has been boiling hot, and spending Saturday on the Shenandoah River was a very good idea. We reached the rafting company at Front Royal around 10:30, and were on the river just after 11:00. We floated along until 15:30 - the Shenandoah was much wider and slower than the Jordan was when we went rafting there, and we got stuck at every "riffle" - places where rocks are high enough to cause very mildly choppy water, but it was still great fun. ADC and A did most of the rowing, and every so often we stopped at an island and had a dip in the lovely cool water. I am still trying to get the algae out of my shorts - admittedly I made them for this kind of activity, but still, I'd like them to look newish after only one wearing. You can float so well when wearing a life jacket! The boys insisted on racing the other people who had been in the shuttle to the rivers with us - two men who were camping with their six-year-old sons. Unsurprisingly, we reached our end point - 7 miles from the start - before them. On the way back, we decided to take a scenic detour along the Skyline Drive, in the Shenandoah Valley National Park. We had been there before, in early October, and this was our last chance to be there again. Unfortunately, I think we were too tired to appreciate it properly - and also the view, when we stopped at overlooks, was quite hazy. After such an exhausting day, we had a much quieter time yesterday. Ariel finally went to buy bagels for Sunday breakfast. He said that he was one of the few male customers not wearing a kippa, and that all the staff were clearly Orthodox Jews - which to my mind seemed a good indication of quality control, and indeed the bagels were delicious. I wonder why American bagels are so much softer than the ones Granny and Grandpa used to make - a difference between Polish and Lithuanian traditions, perhaps? We then slowly wended our way to the weekly farmers' market and listened to a few acts at the Takoma Park Jazz Festival. It was incredibly hot and humid - Tel Aviv seemed cool and dry in comparison - so we didn't stay as long as we might have. We ended the day by watching Flash Gordon, which A had been very eager to watch due to the soundtrack being by Queen. I saw sometime in my childhood, but remembered very little of it. It was quite hilariously campy and bad, with enough woodenness to furnish a carpenter in every scene with Flash and Dale Arden, on the one hand, and Brian Blessed chewing all scenery he came within point blank range of: "Hand me the remote control!!" sounded just like "Release the Kraken!!" 

Today was the first day of the summer holidays. The boys and I have begun packing - in the sense that they went through all their school stuff, and there is now a pile of paper almost 23 cm high waiting to be recycled - and I began inventorying which of the things we bought for the house we plan to send in a lift and which we plan to leave behind as it's not worth sending them, when you factor in the cost of shipping and customs. Tomorrow a rep of one of the shipping companies I contacted is coming to do an in-home survey; another company estimated (based on my very preliminary listing) that we had about 5 cubic metres to ship. I think the cost of shipping will come to almost equal the value of the things that we are shipping, and that's before customs is calculated. The state really wants you to buy things in Israel, rather than importing them personally!

Next letter will probably be after the Fourth of July, for which we apparently will have front row seats for the fireworks, as they are let off at the middle school sports fields across the road.

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, 28 October 2014: Fall colors

We spent the past weekend in George Washington National Forest, in northern Virginia, where we stayed in a cabin in the woods and admired the fall colours. It was like being in a series of postcards, and I feel a deep need to knit a shawl in foliage tones.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Since I last wrote, two visitors have come and gone - ADC's post-doc B was succeeded almost immediately by my friend TB. He timed his visit - on sick leave due to carpal tunnel syndrome - for a long weekend: the children had Friday the 16th off school, due to a teachers' professional day. We decided to take advantage of the good weather and visited Black Hill Regional Park, which is a well-known butterfly hotspot, very close by in Montgomery County. TB is very keen on butterflies, and was able to identify several varieties in flight that we would have probably lumped together or been unable to identify with our pocket guide. As soon as we arrived we realised we had come to the right place: not only was there a butterfly garden, the Monarch butterfly there had been tagged, something we had never seen before. We all wondered how this was done ... At the end of our hike, and after lunch, we went back to the visitor centre, which had been closed when we first arrived, and the guide there explained that they brought larvae in from the garden, and provided them with food inside a special enclosure until they underwent metamorphosis (see The Very Hungry Caterpillar for details; this is not ADC's favourite children's book for nothing). Once the butterflies emerge from the chrysalis, they are immediately tagged on the underside of the wing. We were very lucky to see them so late in the year; usually they have all migrated south by now.

I should define our hike at Black Hill Park as a stroll, really, as we went quite slowly. Usually I trail behind because I want to stop and identify all the plants, and I was very pleased that TB proved to be very cooperative, since it is much easier to identify plants with four eyes rather than just two. In addition to seeing Monarch, common sulphur and painted lady butterflies, and a cormorant on the lake, we saw two kinds of oak, American elm, yellow poplar, black gum, red maple (the kind that doesn't produce syrup), flowering dogwood (Maryland's state tree), loblolly pine and possibly a crabapple tree. These are the most common trees in Maryland and Virginia, and we saw almost all of them again in George Washington National Park, but in much more advanced fall colours.

We continued from Black Hill Park to Harpers Ferry, not realising that October 18 was the anniversary of John Brown's raid on the armoury there. As a result, there were very many tourists there, and it took us a long time to find parking - we actually left the town and came back in again after our search took us too far away. The weather turned as we were driving, and the first thing I did once we got out of the car was to buy a warm top. As I refuse to buy hoodies with place names on them, I was lucky to find a technical top, which actually filled a gap in my wardrobe, and which I wore all of the past weekend, too. Harpers Ferry was a very interesting place. It's not just John Brown who is part of its heritage; this is also the site where Lewis and Clark gathered their equipment before setting out on their expedition to survey the West. The ferry is the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers, and today marks a meeting of Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia (Harpers Ferry itself is in West Virginia). We walked partway across the bridge, but did not have time before dark to attempt any of the trails. This is also considered to be the point where canals gave way to the railroad, since in the race between the two to reach the Ohio Valley, the railroad went through Harpers Ferry several years before the canal did.

Next day, Saturday, we went to the Air & Space museum. In our previous visit, we stuck to Air, and this time, we went to Space, looking at exhibits mainly about rockets and the moon landings. We have begun watching Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson as a result. I must admit that this is not my favourite subject; I am not so interested in manned spaceflight, although I do find cosmology and the stars themselves fascinating. I am enjoying Cosmos more than I enjoy that part of the Smithsonian. When we left the museum, a sun telescope had been set up on the pavement outside, and everyone else enjoyed looking at sunspots and the solar winds. As usual, I saw my eye, like in the Thurber story. I don't have this problem with normal telescopes, but I do have difficulty focusing microscopes - clearly I made the right choice in specialising in the humanities.We continued to a neighbourhood called Capitol Hill, to the east of the actual Capitol. We had an excellent Salvadorean light lunch, and then wandered around the streets, looking at the gardens, the different kinds of houses, and the early Halloween decorations, which of course have become more extensive ever since. This really needs to be accompanied by pictures, and I will add some once ADC completes his photojournal. 

TB stayed with us through Thursday morning, and "did" Washington quite thoroughly, spending Monday walking the entire length of the Mall, visiting the Capitol and Houses of Congress on Tuesday, spending the day at the Natural History Museum on Wednesday (when it poured with rain), going up the Monument on Thursday, and taking us to an excellent Ethiopian restaurant. We now have several brochures to look through and plan our next inside-DC walks.

This brings me back to the beginning of this letter, and our weekend at George Washington National Park. We set off on Saturday morning, and started with a short hike up to Woodstock tower. Like Mt Okemo in Vermont, this is a hike that ends by going up a lookout tower, and at some level I was expecting an experience similar to Mt Okemo. In reality, this was much easier going, and very unusually for us, we took less time than suggested to complete the trail. As we reached the top, we saw a large woodchuck eating some leaves. This was definitely the highlight of the weekend in terms of fauna, at least as far as I am concerned (I was unmoved by seeing bear scat the following day. I have zero interest in ever meeting a bear). We then continued to our cabin in the woods, located at the end of a gravel road and truly in the middle of the woods. There were rocking chairs on the porch, where I sat to rip back a few rows of LR's shrug, so that a design element would be equal on both sides, and a swing where the children sat to look for birds. After supper, we bundled up and went outside to look at the stars. Even with some light pollution from the cabin, it was amazing. We were very lucky, we came for two days of relative warmth sandwiched between icy winds and frost, so we spent quite a while outside, looking at Andromeda and the Pleiades.

On Sunday, we went on a much longer hike - 3.5 hours according to the website, and 5 hours in reality. Except for a couple we met towards the very end, we were completely alone. The foliage was truly amazing on the Hone Quarry trail, and perhaps a bit too much of a good thing - the leaves were so thick on the ground that it was quite slippery and treacherous in places, because you didn't know whether you were going to hit a rock or a root or anything else when you stepped forward. I am glad we did not do this after rain. As we went along ADC and I speculated why the phenomenon of "leaves on the track" that disrupts British Rail's schedule every October and November seems not to exist in the US, because there certainly are many leaves that fall on the ground! We eventually decided that the reason is what causes fall colors in the first place: the combination of cold nights and sunny days, in contrast to the damp and drizzle that possibly causes British leaves to stick to the track. American leaves are probably too dry, and just fly away as trains approach.

Apart from its length, the hike was absolutely perfect. We had great weather, not too hot and not too cold, the right level of exertion - ups and downs, but no scary bits. A bonus before the hike began was a totally unexpected encounter with a fairly large number of Amish, all going for a post-church picnic at Hone Quarry. We had seen several Mennonite churches, but were not expecting this! As we drove along, ADC noticed a "Beware of carriages" graphic sign, but we didn't take it seriously until we actually saw a horse and buggy coming towards us. Shortly after that, we found ourselves following a whole convoy of horse-drawn buggies, all with cooler bags in the back and indicator lights, that flashed appropriately when they turned! The children waved at the Amish children, who waved back. They looked rather like Haredim, especially the young boys, who wore fedora-style hats, and in their flannel shirts and dark non-jeans trousers, looked like pre-bar mitzvah Haredim. It was slightly surreal, going along behind a horse and buggy and occasionally a pick-up truck would come in the other direction.

ETA: They weren't Amish, but Old Order Mennonites: http://www.motherjones.com/photoessays/2010/12/old-order-mennonite-photos
http://www.virginialiving.com/exploring/the-plain-people/

Cross-posting from LiveJournal, 14 October 2014: Weekend in North Carolina + open house at school

Our first visitor is here - B, ADC's post-doc - and I am taking advantage of their being at a Phylopizza evening to write sooner rather than my usual later. For those of you who are planning to visit us, B reports that the bed is very comfortable.

We set off on Friday after lunch for North Carolina, to visit our friend SG, who teaches at Duke and lives in Durham with his wife and two small children. Having been warned of Friday rush hour traffic, we took the boys out of school early, and left the house about 15 minutes after our planned departure time (having discovered that S had mislaid - terminally, it appears - his raincoat and trying to find it), around quarter to two. Google Maps and Waze had earlier informed us that the drive should take about five and a half hours. We arrived at our destination at 9 p.m., having had the choice of bumper to bumper traffic jams or thunderstorms and pouring rain in the dark the entire way. It took us over two hours to get to Fredericksburg, the next sizeable town south of DC (and still considered commuting distance), including a section where Waze took us off the I-95 and onto country lanes where we had no idea where we were going. Did I mention that it rained all the way? After three and a half hours, we still had not reached Richmond, and I took over from ADC. I have never driven in such severe conditions in my life (I can hear you laughing, J. I would much preferred to have been in Cyprus with you!) - it seemed as if we were sliding along, we were going so slowly and the road was so slick. Much to my relief, ADC got back behind the wheel before the thunderstorm reached us - but he was totally out of it by the time we reached SG. Fortunately, the boys were unusually well-behaved for such a long car trip. The fact that we were on main roads and A could play on his phone probably helped a lot. 

We spent Saturday recuperating, basically. After a late breakfast, SG and IG took the two children, YG and MG, in different directions for their Saturday morning activities, and we went for a walk around the local lake. It was incredibly humid and very warm - I wore a short skirt and didn't need any base layer. The lake was very pleasant, and the neighbourhood was classic suburbia, with no pavements, and two cars in every driveway. We had lunch in the sukkah, and not a moment too soon - shortly after we finished it began raining again. ADC and SG spent the afternoon cooking for supper, when we met another Israeli expat family, that of SK, who had also been part of ADC's D&D group way back when, and who had been on the executive committee of the graduate students' union together with me. The children played together - mostly S with YG (who is in second grade), and A with MG (who is three). I made a lot of progress on LR's shrug. 

Following S's recent announcement that he was now much happier at school because he had "found the geeky kids", a great deal of the conversation involved the question of the difference between geeks and nerds. Considering the fact that there were four PhDs present, it is not surprising that geeks were declared to be Good Thing to be, but as A pointed out, there is very little that is geekier than debating what makes a geek ... 

On Sunday, it was cool and drizzly - not quite English weather, it was less cool and the drizzle was heavier, but enough for us to decide that we would not do anything special on the way home, but simply leave after lunch and hope not to be caught in traffic again. We spent a couple of hours at the lovely Sarah P. Duke Botanical Gardens, while IG taught Hebrew to children (including her own ones) at the JCC, and then met up again for an all-you-can-eat Indian buffet. As we had learned the night before that SK lived in a town where the children played cricket, rather than baseball, this seemed a safe bet, and it was. S outdid himself by eating six pieces of Tandoori chicken, while A was more adventurous and ate gulab jamun for dessert. We had an uneventful trip back, which indeed took the advertised five hours, so that we arrived home in a much calmer state of mind. 

SG gave us a number of AA guides to the mid-Atlantic and southern states, so we are now better placed to plan our winter break. I think that driving all the way to New Orleans is not realistic, and a lot will also depend on the actual conditions in December. 

Yesterday was Columbus Day, and lots of people had the day off work (a possible explanation for the traffic conditions to and from Durham). A and S had school, though, and not just an ordinary day - it was Open Day, and parents could come to class! I started with A, whose school day begins earlier, and attended US history, science and maths. In history, they practiced analysing evidence, using visual and written sources about "the event in Boston on March 5 1770" (commonly referred to as The Boston Massacre, in which 5 people were killed - but of course that is an interpretation in itself). As this was the first lesson of the day, time was given to the school TV station, Wake Up Takoma, and the Pledge of Allegiance was recited. I stood up, of course, but didn't quite know what to do - obviously I couldn't say it, and even putting my hand on my heart without saying anything seemed inappropriate. I eventually settled for crossing my arms, and had a bit of a flashback to assembly at Boston Primary School in South Africa, where everyone knew the words to Our Father except me.

In science, experiments involving air pressure were conducted at six stations, and now I finally understood why A had had to bring an empty soft drink can (we actually brought an empty beer can all the way from North Carolina) - some water in the can was heated over a hot plate, and then the can was quickly flipped into a bucket of ice water. If you were quick enough and hit the water at the right able, the can would implode. I enjoyed that lesson. I also enjoyed maths, because it turned out that I remember much more about linear functions, solving equations and deriving equations from story sums than I thought I did. All those extra lessons in high school were worth while, I guess. As I came into the maths classroom, a boy in A' group asked me if I was British like A, to which I felt that the only possible reply was "Even more so." When I took S to have his haircut on Thursday, the hairdresser - who is Portuguese - identified my accent as being "not British", but almost everyone else here thinks that I am. 

I spent less time at Sl's open house, because that only ran until 11:30, the third-grade recess. I attended science and maths classes again. S's class is learning about motion, and they did an experiment involving measuring how far a container of sand could be propelled by a large rubber band placed around the back legs of a chair. As this meant lying on the classroom floor, I am sure that everyone had a lot of fun. In maths, S is in a different group, which is moving through the material faster, and they are currently learning decimals. We played a game where everyone had to say the decimals in full - not "two point five six" for 2.56, but "two and fifty-six hundredths". I didn't go to social science, but we received a note from S' teacher saying that they were going to start learning about the French and Indian War - the subject of A's most recent quiz in US history, as you may remember. I also had to miss seeing Conflakes, the teacher's pet corn snake, eat Lunch (a mouse), which apparently was a very exciting event - "one of the coolest things I saw in my life," S assured me. 

If anyone wants scans of quizzes/worksheets/assignments that the boys have got back, just let me know. Also, for the ladies - I have been shopping online quite successfully, and now have several skirts and two pairs of boots to wear. I can send links to the precise items if anyone is interested.