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Now, as winter break is consigned further and further to the annals of my memory, I will try and pull out a little more of it to relate to you, faithful reader.

My stop in New York (on Christmas day) this time was just that. Arriving (from Boston) in Port Authority on Christmas day in time for lunch, I called up Ezra from a public phone (as my mobile wasn’t an option). Following his instructions, I made my way first through 42nd St Station, with its placards of submission to the Lord Jesus, and its buskers, and then to the northernmost stop on the number 1 line. There I called again for a rendezvous at the Dunkin Donuts. Walking to and dropping my bags at his place, we had little more time than for Ezra to toast some English muffins and cover them with jam, before his friend came to take us to the standard Christmas day activity: the movies.

We arrived to a carpark that was empty despite the large shopping centre, except by the cinema where it was full. The theatre was similarly packed, and we had to sit close-to-front, where Ezra was excited by each preview (me a little less so, but I’m not a big movie-goer) before the feature: Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie in CIA-birth fiction, “The Good Shepherd“. As well as not explaining the title’s New Testament reference to those of us not so familiar, the movie is tiringly long, and often hard to follow in terms of person and place.

Organising that evening took a while: Ezra was considering a friend’s birthday party somewhere in Lower Manhattan; he, having turned 21 recently, wanted to go check out some of New York’s bars. So we spent a while in the dark and smoky hookah bar where his friend had her party, watching the little-clad belly dancer go by as midnight came around. Afterward we (5 guys) went and hopped through a few bars: me trying to conserve the few dollars of American cash I had (and not wanting to pay international withdrawal fees) only got two beers. By the time we had been to three bars, I was dead tired (having woken up early that morning in Massachusetts) and was going to be waking early the next morning to head out to Philadelphia.

Ezra drove the group of us home. I said good night and thanks and farewell before going to bed. I would be catching a 9:30 bus out from Penn station (ironically I guess to Pennsylvania), which meant waking at 7. The “Chinatown bus” I took left ontime-ish and arrived earlyish.

I stepped off the bus in Chinatown, Philadelphia, with a big bag on my back, another in my hand, and my Lonely Planet guide. Orienting on a street corner, I managed to navigate my way to the Greyhound bus station where I hoped to find a locker for my backpack. There was none. But I did pass on the way a nice-looking vegetarian Chinese restaurant. What’s more, it had a certificate of Kashrut on its window. It’s a pity that the hekhsher was Conservative, but considering that I usually eat in vegan restaurants anyway, denominational dispute wouldn’t stop me if I got hungry later in the day. I marked the spot on my map and kept looking for somewhere to stow my bag.

Philadelphia is one of those cities that is pretty tourist-friendly. Lots of signs mark the way to the different tourist districts. But the primary one is in the vicinity of Independence Hall where early events in the history of American independence happened, including being the first capital of the federated states. There is a thematic focus there on liberty, and as a result, multiculturalism, with museums and monuments to the Irish, the Jews, the African-Americans, and of course the Quakers, to whom the province of Pennsylvania was given by King Charles II as recompense for a debt to the Penn family. So, just as William Penn sought liberty for the Quakers, other groups and other notions of American liberty are brought into the equation in the city’s self-image. I hoped that somewhere in that touristy area there might be services for those of us with backpacks, or along the way, or at least someone to ask; and if not, tourist sites. So I followed the signs.

I had no luck until I got to the Benjamin Franklin-filled visitors’ centre, where a woman behind a desk pulled out a map, explaining that all the locker services had closed up, and the best I had was the sizable walk to Society Hill where I could lodge my bag with the bell boy at the Sheraton. Already getting on into the afternoon, it was a tough decision, but wearing my bag all day really wasn’t a pleasant thought. So I walked east towards the ocean and headed south to the Sheraton, where I lodged my bags for a dollar each, plus tip. Not too bad, and done with a smile. But not before being told that “for security reasons, we don’t do this anymore except for guests, but since you came all that way…”

I was starting to long for lunch and wondered if there was anything nearer than Chinatown, but stopped by some historic venues on the way back downtown. And I went into the American Jewish History Museum where they were conveniently able to supply me with a list of Kosher restaurants. I was surprised at how many kosher vegetarian Chinese restaurants there were—although essentially kosher, they’re often ignored by kashrut authorities—but again, most had the Rabbinical Assembly by their name. A few of them also had “kosher” in their title, which made them less appealing; the main reason I would go to a vegan Chinese restaurant rather than a kosher Chinese restaurant is that the former may actually resemble Chinese cuisine.

I did consider some of the alternatives, but found the venue that I had originally seen to have the best offer for lunch. I think it was something like $6-7 for a meal. But because of the novelty, I decided I would get an entree as well, and ordered pork buns followed by an eggplant and black bean dish. It turns out, though, that I didn’t read the menu properly, and the lunch meal came with soup, and rice, and tea, and a fortune cookie, and two small banana fritters. I was very full by the end of it all, and while I didn’t trust the fritters to keep so well, I stuck the cookie in my pocket and returned to the streets of Phili.

Unexcited by the (surprisingly small and unexciting) Liberty Bell, and too late to sign up for or see much, I landed up at the Liberty Museum, which had been recommended to me by my lunch host of the Saturday prior. The museum was interesting, but not largely in the way it might be. The museum is a monument to tolerance, peace and liberty that is iconised within the American borders. (Not surprisingly most of the sponsors bear Jewish names.) It curiously accompanies its exhibits by artistic creations, primarily made of glass, possibly suggesting the fragility of liberty. Nonetheless, the picture it presents is not one that is thorough or historical, but one that is very naive and simplistic. Although a large proportion of its audience may be school children (all the way up to high school), that doesn’t excuse it for lacking depth or content. Altogether it was under-critical. It presents a dreamy image of all the peoples who have flooded to America for whatever reason, and is careful to note that many races and nations were not permitted entry until 1965, but does not discuss at all the context of this change in perspective, how America has and does treat its immigrants, and so on. Similarly, in an awkward room devoted to religious images of liberty, it attempts to harmonise religions, and show their setting of an example toward peace; again it lacks any form of suggestion that there are also bad messages perpetrated by religious groups, or that religion has been a cause of major conflict. And for some unexplained reason it has a corner devoted to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Highly random. Across the way is a room which displays a picture of America’s presidents, as well as some other works, and an annotated collection of each “Medal of Honour” that the US government bestows to the heroes of its society. Thus the museum elevates the notion of the patriotic hero. This trend was continued downstairs in an area labelled with “Heroes from 40 countries; 22 evil dictators preaching hatred”. Sounds very Bush-esque. Drawing a great dualism between the good and the evil. A final area looked at violence in America. I think this is a very important topic, that the museum of course treats poorly. Among my least favourite parts of the museum was a series of large-lettered panels telling of how some consider modern entertainment to induce violence in youth. It gave one-point examples from the film industry, the video games, etc, and music, where it gave the regularly cited story of the 15-year-old who commited suicide while listening to Marilyn Manson music. After these panels, it concludes “Is it just entertainment? You decide!” Ugghhh… *Shudder*. They fail to mention the number of suicides committed to Britney Spears or Mozart, and the number of Manson fans that are still alive of their own volition. Basically, the museum was a strange symptom of naive American patriotism and set ideology, which looked at history with tinted glasses and failed to give the richness of knowledge that you could find elsewhere. A good museum should present simply for the simple, and in detail for the knowledge-hungry. This, I felt, left both starving. But glass is pretty.

I left the museum shortly before closing, and so I was left to visit a few sites that would be bearable in the dark on the way to retrieve my luggage: a large and old synagogue; some war memorials; a very (almost unsurpassably) phallic monument to Christopher Columbus. I tipped another bell-boy at the Sheraton and redeemed my belongings.

Then I decided it might be a good time to get in touch with the people I would be staying with that night. I had expected to make my way over to the suburban home of Nomi R (a friend from her exchange at USyd), and so called her up when I got to a train station. But she was all confused about directions and put her mum on to speak: “No, I’ll come pick you up… It’ll take half an hour, which means dinner will be late. Where are you waiting?” It was a little wet out so I did most of the waiting under the shelter of the train station, reading (teaching myself French from a book I bought second-hand in Boston). Climbing out of the station and waiting for a few minutes, I was tempted by another second-hand bookshop, and sneaked in to look at the languages section. Nothing on Arabic. Back out, but it turns out that in those couple of minutes, I had missed Nomi. We eventually found each other, and I eventually arrived in the suburb of Elkins Park, PA.

Nomi and I spent a while reminiscing, listening to the latest recordings of the Madrigal Society which we sang in together at uni, all the while me getting more tired after a short night and a long day. Our help towards dinner was refused, and eventually there was word that it was going to happen, around 9:30. Nomi went down and threw together a salad, which topped the late meal off. Now I understood why it took so long: the table set for three included soup, salad, other vegetable dishes (Nomi is vegetarian after all), shnitzel, and eventually a dessert of baked apples. I was certainly not going to be under-fed there. But, considering my condition, right after dinner came bed.

The following day, I took Nomi out to be a tourist in her own city. We visited, for instance, a Free Quaker Meeting House which was pretty unexciting, and only particularly informative if you asked questions of the guy sitting there with the silly hat like you see on the oatmeal packets… So we listened and let other people ask. We visited the Jewish History Museum again, but there was little there except a small exhibit on food, an old Sephardi synagogue, and a suggestion to come back for a 10-storey building in 2010. Considering the size of our breakfast (smoked-salmon bagels) and the expected size of our dinner, we skipped lunch, and visited the National Contitution Center on either side of our time-allocated free tour of Independence Hall. The hall was an interesting and beautiful historical site at which the US contitution was signed; the Center, on the other hand, is a museum devoted to that document. While it, like the Liberty Museum, is in some ways over-patriotic, it is also critical of America’s past and present in many ways. It is an interesting museum, in the way that it presents the nation’s history in the context of the interpretation, amendment, and reinterpretation of the federal constitution. Travelling throughout the country, museums show different angles of the same events, people and places; a museum or monument dedicated to a war, one dedicated to history, one dedicated to a person, and here one dedicated to a document.

It is also interesting to see how value-centric America takes itself to be. This was prominent in most of the sites I saw in Philadelphia, where words like “liberty” kept on being reasserted, as well as ideas of heroism and leadership. Australians don’t have as much of a care for such principles, or certainly don’t show it in their museums; they don’t worship their political leaders either. They rather just enjoy the sun and the footy and its freedom, without all the unecessary patriotic nonsense.

We took the suburban train out just as we had taken it in that morning, in time to catch a 6-o-clock dinner necessary for catching an 8-o-clock bus. The dinner, of course, was of four courses again (quiche at its centre), and after dessert I was offered some biscuits (by which I mean cookies), maybe under the assumption that I might be hungry. Although I wasn’t, Nomi’s mother was convinced that I would be by the time I got to DC (I wasn’t), and so packed me a collection of them before taking me (via a glimpse of the Frank Lloyd Wright-built Beth Sholom synagogue) to the Greyhound station.

Nomi, a day before excited to see a person she had met on the other side of the world, and now missing all she had enjoyed there, sent me off with the words “I’ll never see my friends again!”