JoelNothman.com

Nearly a month late, I thought I’d take the opportunity to wish people a happy 2007, and tell you a little bit about my New Year’s excursion to DC. I think, though, that unless I want to keep lagging behind on my tales, I might need to do it in summary form (nup- didn’t succeed). I could just ignore it, but one of the main reasons I blog about my travels is to save some memory of them, a little like a diary, only more public. And then I wish I could blog about every week of life here when something new happens, but it’s not as distinct as when I am travelling, and much harder to keep track of and find time to write about.

So I arrived in DC on the night of Wednesday the 27th of December, 2006, off the Greyhound bus and into the care of Naomi and her family, still carrying the cookies left with me from Philadelphia. Naomi informed me that her parents had, by surprise, decided to fly her brother, David, in from Portland, Oregon, on the previous Saturday night, so the whole family would be at their home in Arlington. Although I was quite tired, Naomi’s dad took me on a sample of his nighttime tour of Washington, around the Capitol area and across the Potomac River into the state of Virginia.

Naomi had the whole trip planned out, Wednesday night through Monday when we would get on the bus back to Montreal. Thursday was allocated to the artworks of the National Gallery and the Hirshhorn, but then she realised I needed to see the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson Memorials, and we left home late, and so we lost most of the morning, and with it the Hirshhorn. The FDR Memorial is a lot less imposing than the Jefferson, or Lincoln, or Washington monuments, but is possibly more meaningful. The outdoor memorial takes one through a chronology of water, stone, copper, and words related to this innovative war and depression-time leader. From there we walked to the Jefferson, another large pillared structure, but built in a Roman style, as opposed to the Greek Lincoln and the Egyptian obelisk in Washington’s name. There we ate lunch and were collected by Naomi’s mum who would give us a tour of the National Gallery.

As an official tour guide, Florence was able to show me features of artworks that I would have passed by in the Met or MOMA or NOMA. She took us through her personal picks from the collection: a pentamento hidden under the surface; a two-sided portrait by Da Vinci; Monet’s different construction of colour; the challenge of the third dimension; socological factors in colonial American art. She left us to decide between the west wing and the Hirshhorn, both of which would give us a more contemporary image, but even then we weren’t in the west building for long before closing.

Outside, Naomi and I played around taking photos with my camera of the sunset and the mall’s buildings. Going via the closed Hirshhorn sculpture garden, and a walk through the Haupt Gardens, we caught a train back to Arlington. Dinner (the Brodkeys had made portions of their kitchen kosher/dairy for me) was eventually followed by a screening of My Fair Lady (or was that another night? I can’t remember) which had been on our movies-to-watch list for a long time. But we started it late, and Naomi slept through large portions of the movie, even though it was a favourite. As for me who had never seen it before, I only fell asleep for the last few minutes of the movie which I didn’t expect to be quite that long.

Friday morning, Naomi had decided to take me to the Washington National Cathedral. Supposedly, many think that because of it’s size and style, that the church must be Catholic. But no, it’s just big and gothic-looking. We joined a tour around the building which was the subject of preparations for former-president Gerald Ford’s funeral on the upcoming Tuesday. Many soldiers were in attendance, practising carrying coffins (with whom inside, I’m not sure), marching and the like.

From there we went to Georgetown where, having run out of time, we didn’t get to do that much. We saw the old neighbourhood a little, and I bought some Frangelico liquor for dinner that night, and soon we were on our way to meet up with Naomi’s friend Paul and his girlfriend Charlie. We ambled with them through the trendy Adams Morgan neighbourhood until we came to a large coffee shop where we couldn’t get more than a table with two chairs for the four of us. Still, the drinks were nice (something chocolate-peanut buttery for me if I recall), and the atmosphere was exciting, and the company was friendly and entertaining. But it was Friday afternoon and getting late, so we walked back to the car a little quicker than we walked from it, although I detoured via a florist.

Back home we prepared for Shabbat evening (partly by relaxing in front of the fireplace), where the family would be having Naomi’s “Dutch Uncle and Aunt”, Toto and Tata, for guests. It was a fun dinner, with good food and discussion, lots of laughter and singing, and enough alcohol to keep things light. And ice-cream with Frangelico and fig purée for dessert…

Shabbat morning was a different experience, mostly because in there being no synagogues in Arlington but the Reconstructionist Kol Ami and the Conservative Etz Hayim. I could have opted to stay at home but I instead went to check out the latter option, a short walk away, where the Brasilian Rabbi Lia lead the congregation in a discussion on the parsha. The synagogue, it seems, was on the more egalitarian side of Conservative Judaism (ie. appropriate changes to the prayer text), and of the few Conservative congregations I’ve been in (as compared to the fewer Reform congregations I’ve seen), seemed the most Reform-like. And they did a few strange things in general, like assuming there were no Kohanim present. But the kiddush afterward served as a good lunch before walking home via a playground beside a United Church around the corner from Naomi’s where we sat in a tyre and talked for a while.

The day passed and night came. A night in which we didn’t do very much, but in the end went with Naomi’s brother and his friends to a bar at which they serve beer brewed on site; I’m still not sure whether I liked my selection.

Visiting cemeteries is not something I usually do, but it’s what Naomi decided we would be doing on the Sunday. It is an interesting place to be, to see who else is wandering through the green hills filled with neatly-spaced white stones, in places distinguishable only by name, number, dates, religious icon; in places each one distinct, of character, in large, shaped granite blocks. In this major national military cemetery, the assassinated JFK is buried, along with his family including his stillborn and infant children, around an eternal flame. Another main feature is the guarded Tomb of the Unknowns, containing an unidentified soldier from each of WWI, WWII, the Korean War, and formerly Vietnam. The hourly changing of the guards is a popular and silencing choreographed sequence of precise leg movements, rifle-spins and boot-clicks.

At the top of the cemetery’s hill is the former mansion of famous Confederate Army General Robert E. Lee, known as “Arlington House“. While it and its slave quarters seem like interesting historical sites, the house was under renovation, so all the rooms were empty of their usual furnitures, with pretty pictures of what it would have looked like if they weren’t renovating.

From death, we went to life. Well only in a sense because what we went to was a Torpedo Factory, obviously in theory more about death than life. And yet it has been converted into a hub of artist studios. Painters, sculptors and various other styles of artist play with and cast their minds onto their canvas or lump of clay here on the edge of the river while you browse through their works for sale. Nothing cheap enough to actually buy, of course, but interesting enough to watch and to ask.

From there we drove to and walked through the streets of Old Town, where we disvovered the new location of a favourite shop of Naomi’s, Ten Thousand Villages, which sells the creative produce of African and other villagers for their benefit. It took a while but I was eventually tempted to buy a few things, only to discover on our way out that Montreal has one.

Finally it was New Year’s Eve. Naomi had long been despairing over whether the parties with the right groups of friends would be happening. In the end we went to two, neither of which was fantastic. The first (at someone’s house) had champagne that I didn’t drink, and friendly people, and for the first time I had the opportunity to watch the ball drop while in its own timezone, but a few peoples’ heads were in the way. Following the roll-over into the new calendar, we headed into the basement to dance, but few really did. Either way, we decided we should check out the other party of Naomi’s school friends (at another house), but that turned out to mostly have drunk guys being loud and playing exciting games like beer-pong. Not so much our scene. Although there was still somewhere else to maybe go, we were hoping to get the Hirshhorn in alongside packing on Monday, and so ended up with a short night.

Monday, of course, like all other days in my stay in Arlington, started late. Eventually we got to packing (Naomi had a lot to choose from), and I selected a few books from the shelf to help me learn French over the coming semester. The day too easily disappeared and we didn’t make it back to the mall. Save the Hirshhorn for another year.

At the Greyhound station we were twisted in long spirals of New Year’s refugees, but eventually we made it onto the bus for a night’s ride home.