On the beach and at iCon

For the past five years, my parents have been taking all of us - me, my siblings, our spouses and children, now 16 people in total - to the holiday camp at Dor for a few days during Sukkoth. Traditionally, time is spent sunbathing, swimming and eating. My father gets up early to go fishing, and various children and adults accompany him. There is barbecue two out of three nights, and ADC and I make a vegetarian meal on the third. We get away from the beach for one morning or afternoon. 

This year, we arrived later than usual, as we went to the market on Friday morning and then continued unpacking until S got home from school. When we arrived, it turned out that we had more space than usual, as my parents had bitten the bullet and instead sharing a chalet with eumelia , she was by herself in a honeymoon suite / 2-person igloo, including a jacuzzi, which meant an extra kitchen and fridge, as well as empty floor space for the traditional board games played by the boy cousins, ADC and myself in the afternoons. We also had a slightly different location from the usual one, and it was even more peaceful than in past years.

On Saturday, S and I joined my father for fishing, together with my brother-in-law, R and his children SR and LR. While the men fished (quite successfully), LR and I looked for shells and talked. I haven't spent much time alone with LR, and I enjoyed the bonding experience. She is very conscious of being a girl, and in some ways she is very Victorianly accomplished- she plays a musical instrument (cello), learn dancing (flamenco) and loves drawing (on Monday she sketched the fishermen and the fish); so Victorian with a twist, I suppose. It was warm even at 6:30 a.m., and I was glad to be wearing an activewear t-shirt and shorts (the first pair I made) over my swimming costume, for a bit of extra protection. 

After breakfast, we had a quick swim and then showered and changed before setting off to visit NN, almost exactly a year after she visited us in Takoma Park. It took us a long time to find her house, as none of the houses have actual numbers, and their name is quite discreet, since they are renting. Lunch - made by her husband AN-D - was mainly quiches, with the correct ratio of vegetables to pastry/filling, i.e. about three times the amount of vegetables you find in commercial quiches! We had a good time catching up, although as usual - NN is so polite and I'm not - we talked more about what we were doing than what they were doing, before moving onto politics and academics, and ending up playing a new-to-us board game, called Dixit, in which the three C family teams took the first three places. At least I was able to compliment AN-D on the new machzor (prayer book for the High Holydays) for Yom Kippur, as he was on the committee that compiled it, and to tell NN that my father missed her Torah reading. 

As soon as we got back to our igloo, we began preparing supper - this year, the vegetarian meal was on the middle night, since guests had been invited for the third night, which also happened to be the first night of the Sukkoth festival, the week-long festival ending the series of New Year festivities in which observant Jews spend as much time as possible in transient structures, whose sorts are covered with plant material through which one can see the stars. (A funny story about the rabbi of ADC's parents' shul in the Negev desert: when he made aliyah to Israel from Minnesota, he included his sukka in his lift. As the sukka was meant for mid-September/early October in Minnesota, he has never used it since, the temperatures in Israel at that time of year being far too high for it. I digress ...) This year's theme for our meal was Persian food, including spinach cooked in pomegranate juice until it was completely reduced (very yummy and worth doing again). The only leftovers was the plain rice we'd made for the younger members of the party who reject any kind of sauce as the devil's work. 

On Sunday there was no fishing, as my father had to make the trip back to Kfar Saba and open his pharmacy for several hours. We spent the morning at the beach (at the next lagoon over, where there are fewer people and more waves than at the main beach, and some people did not apply sufficient sunscreen; fortunately, all my nuclear family were sensible) and then played Kingmaker in the afternoon until the guests arrived and a fish barbecue was prepared. A and S had a major epiphany: they do like fish! (Or at least, they like fresh sea bream cooked over coals). Everyone was very excited and my mother immediately began planning to serve fish next time we come for supper. 

On Monday, S and I once again got up early for fishing. It was less successful this time, but still enjoyable. We left Dor shortly after lunch, as we had another exciting day ahead us on Tuesday, and got home in time to complete unpacking, apart for the children's books. I even had ADC set up the converter for my sewing machine. Happily, he found an unused electric point next to the dining room table, so I will be sewing there - with much more space - rather than at my desk. 

Yesterday was something completely different: we went to the major Israeli sci-fi and fantasy con, called iCon. This was only our second time, and once again I was struck by how exhaustingly hot it is in Tel Aviv. The cosplayers all seemed a little miserable after a while, and the people wearing t-shirts proclaiming "Winter is Coming" are clearly delusional, at least for the next few months. I spent most of my time at lectures, two of which were very good and one of which was terrible. We also all went to a game show on logical fallacies, which was very amusing. The two good lectures were a panel on translating books featuring time travel, which quickly became - at the audience's urging - a discussion of the difficulties of literary translation generally, and of translation of speculative fiction in particular; and a really excellent talk on dragons and their natural/cultural history, given by an arachnologist who is a technician in the collection ADC curates and hopes to become one of his doctoral students (as soon as there is funding). The bad lecture was quite appalling: purporting to discuss "the Odyssey: from Homer to Tolkien," the unfortunate lecturer quickly proved to know very little about either Homer or Tolkien. This did not prevent her from retelling the stories before getting to the point that Bilbo = Odysseus and the trolls = the Cyclop. If there are parallels to Homer, could it be that this is because Tolkien had read him?! I don't expect an academic lecture; I do expect to be treated like an intelligent person. I expatiated on this to eumelia , who met us for ice-cream after her work and before we went to the dragon lecture, and she suggested that I give a talk myself next year, on Snape and Richard III. Definitely food for thought ... ADC (who was only persuaded to stay in the Odyssey talk because there was air conditioning) is also thinking of giving a talk. Happily, A and S only had positive experiences: they heard a different lecture, comparing the cultures of Marvel and DC comics (one is a workplace and the other is a family, in a nutshell), which provided them with a prism they hadn't thought of before. S also blew about 500 shekels (about $130) on comics and action figures - but this was his birthday money and savings for him to spend, so I can't really complain. We returned home tired but happy.