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.

This used to be a city with gutters
But the scattererd spatterings of silty white
Amass to envelop and elide
The distinction between road and path
So that cars slow to a stroll so unlike autumn’s rush
It silences the sounds, the steps,
Each stride only deepens and imprints the soft
Snowy coat upon the pavement, upon the streets
And it keeps piling, turning the once-green once-red brown hills white.

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!”

As I packed, Rachel, who I would be going with, kept complaining about how many boxes of books she’d somehow acquired (from Wednesday-night bins outside Redpath; from an abundance of second-hand bookstores) since being in Montreal, and wondering how she would get it over to her new appartement. She gave up for the moment, but had some other things to take there before leaving, and we decided that we were out of time to walk there and then catch the Metro to Berri-UQAM. We went down to the taxi stand at the bottom of our street, and took the first in line. First stop Durocher; second stop Greyhound at Berri. She brought two bags up to the apartment, I waited in the taxi with a driver who clearly didn’t understand our instructions, as he pulled out and started to head off, then, upon being corrected, backed up again and pulled in, knowing it was time to brake when he tapped the car behind.

We did make it to the station on-time and there were surprised to meet George who would also be heading home to Boston for the break. We took turns at a quick mincha outside on a street corner, me under the pretense of a mobile phone conversation, and Rachel under the pretense that she could doo with out one and not be approached by a strange man speaking a strange language that would scare her indoors.

The trip itself was fairly uneventful, except for Rachel, suddenly awake despite having slept little over the prior days, deciding that tonight when she got home would be a good time to make sufganiot (jam-filled doughnuts). I thought it was a great idea in terms of eating sufganiot, but thought it an unlikely event for that evening. The border process was different to last time, and much quicker; as I crossed it I changed my phone to the US SIM card to upsettingly discover that it was “unregistered”. Oh and we also realised at some point that we’d forgotten the Chabad chanukiah that I’d been using, and candles, that we had intended to light and leave at some pit-stop along the way. And someone decided to take Rachel’s seat at one said stop, making the two of us move: Rachel away from her window, which meant she wouldn’t sleep, and me next to some guy who was carrying home a very small avocado tree in a pot so that it wouldn’t be lonely over Christmas. We watched a little John Safran vs God that I had acquired but not yet watched. Strange stuff.

We arrived in Boston’s South Station on-time, which was late at night. From there, we had to take the commuter rail (only coming 45 minutes later) down to Sharon, Rachel’s home-town, which took another 40 minutes or so. Finally her dad collected us from the station, and with 10 minutes of driving, we were in the middle-of-nowhere that Rachel calls home. Rachel without a driver’s licence, and me still not having driven on the right side of the road, I felt like we were pretty far from anything significant, but it was nice to be out of the city (even if it meant I was in the sticks). We lit candles, span some dreidels, and went to bed.

The next (Friday) morning, we caught the first train in that we woke up in time for, which got into Boston at 11, and we were going to have to catch the 2pm back. There weren’t really many choices about that, the train just doesn’t come very often. Rachel waited for Emma who she was urging to see, while I went outside to brave the cold and get lost in a new city.

So what’s there to see in Boston, anyway? Most tourists start with Boston Common and follow a red-brick (or paint) road, entitled the Freedom Trail, around some of the city’s highlights, intending to focus upon America’s liberation from its European mother. I first visited the public gardens; like a good tourist, I photographed a graveyard along the way; took a few pictures in the park; chased squirrels up trees, again with my camera; puzzled at why there was what seemed to be a cherry tree with fresh flowers—the weather’s unseasonably warm, but not that warm. And then I headed across to Boston common, where not much was on except outdoor skating on the Frog Pond, the sun bearing down upon their skates gliding through the ice.

The Boston history exhibited in the Freedom Trail was not that exciting. Or maybe I needed to take a tour: there weren’t any handy information posts along the way. There were a number of graveyards, with more or less interesting graves in them, I’m sure, but I didn’t go in to find out. I stopped to eat lunch at the kosher Milk St Cafe, and was pleasantly surprised by a very nice (taste, texture, service) soup and pizza lunch for $6.50. Not only was it handy to have something kosher in the middle of the city, but it was good food!

Passing shops packed with Christmas shoppers and decorations, and a Santa or two at South Market, I unexpectedly found myself in the middle of a street amid the New England Holocaust Memorial. Beginning with a few information- or quotation-bearing slabs of granite alongside a path, and an American tunnel, you eventually walk into a series of tall, blue-glass, steam-filled chambers. As you look to the walls, there are written quotations, upon glass filled with numbers, all of the same length, rising toward the sky. Between each chamber, a fact etched into the ground. After passing through them all (six, perhaps), the experience is completed with a pillar upon which small rocks mournfully rest. It is solemn, amid the commercialism of the city; visible, but unidentifiable until approached; unexpected, yet powerful. I was surprised at the memorial and found it quite effective: unlike others I have seen it attracted passers-by through mere curiosity, and spoke to those unknowing, while reaching to others through its many symbolisms.

Continuing through a haymarket of cheap vegetables, I bought some persimmons to bring home to the Katlers (which turned out to be underripe, or otherwise different to what I knew), and found my way back to South Station. Not findig Rachel, I climbed onto the packed train and just hoped to find her when I got off so that I would have a ride back to her home. Just as the train pulled into Sharon, I looked up from my books that were entertaining me, and saw Rachel at the other end of the carriage, and Elan, also a fellow Hillel and Sharon resident, spotted me at just the same time. I greeted him as we parted and as Rachel spotted her Dad’s car.

One hour was a bit too long to walk to synagogue for Friday night services, but we lit all the chanukiot for the grand finale and watched, waiting till the last wick burnt out, before beginning dinner. Vegetarian, for a change. A nice quiche, and salad, and latkes, and sweet potatos, and beans, and brownies for dessert. As I often do on Friday nights, I stayed up reading this and that until my eyes could no longer bear it (fairly early in this case), and prepared myself for the morning’s hike with a good sleep.

It was raining a little in the morning, but it was still nice to walk out, down by the lake, across Sharon to Young Israel, where I was told I’d know another 4 McGill students. It seems a nice congregation, and the bar mitzvah sponsored an equally nice kiddush. But I was warned that there would be food at lunch too. Rachel’s friend Gavriella guided us over to their house for lunch. She had two younger sisters and an older brother who had a girlfriend over for lunch, all currently at the school Rachel once went to; their mother is a Conservative rabbi. Lunch, too was dairy, although the milk in the peanut sauce for the ?Seitan was only from coconuts, bought as a box of 40 for the price of 5 that the family had slowly been getting through (juicing, milking, eating, sprinkling) or giving away. Some vegetarian cholent, and some baked salmon (which, surprisingly, I ate), too. The company and the conversation were very lively and enjoyable. We just hung around at their house throughout the afternoon, but in the evening they had to pack for the Caribbean the next morning. Nonetheles we took Gavriella home with us, as I discovered that (a) there is not much to do in Sharon; (b) I should organise trips earlier, because you (i) don’t always have internet, (ii) don’t always have a mobile phone, and (iii) can’t be assured that people will answer them when you do call; (c) T-Mobile deactivates To-Go (pre-paid) accounts after 90 days without credit, and that if I had unnecessarily bought $5 when I came down to NYC in September, it would have saved me a lot of hassle now.

Vayehi erev vayehi voker (and it was evening and it was morning): Sunday. First train to Boston leaves from Sharon at 11:30. So Marshall, Rachel’s dad, drove us in (after a French-toast breakfast and some time playing with and photographing their bird). We were going to meet Yael at Sharon station and go together to Harvard Square, Cambridge, mostly to satiate my touristy needs. But first we decided to take another walk around the city, and see if the Milk Street Cafe would feed us again for lunch. A pity, perhaps that it wasn’t open. But that’s okay, because we didn’t have trouble finding an open Ben & Jerry’s and finishing a pint of ice-cream together.

Up in Cambridge, we wandered around, saw small portions of Harvard’s elegant buildings; watched as people touched the golden shoe of the purported Mr Harvard himself (actually a statue of an arbitrary student attributed as Harvard), which is rumoured often the subject of urination in fraternity initiations. There Rachel also attempted to use the Old College Pump, but no water came. We then visited a favourite stationery store of Rachel’s where she would have bought fountain pens if they weren’t so expensive.

In addition, I visited T-Mobile who are meant to provide my US mobile phone service, to find out how much they wanted me to pay them to reactivate my account. The answer was, as I feared, a bit much: $50, and for a different phone number. Not quite worth it for a handful of days. Oh well.

On our way out, we were generally amused by a mass of birds competing over a muffin left on a bench. Just thought you might like to know.

As the sun began to set, and keeping our eyes on watches to ensure we could find a train back to Sharon, we went took the T (metro subway) down to Brookline where we hoped to find a movie and dinner. We failed to find a movie, and we fought between a few choices for dinner, but eventually ended up eating felafel and shawarma at Rami’s, before realising we should start heading back.

When we got to Sharon, though, we walked to nearby Jenny’s place where Yael was staying. Despite maybe expecting Rachel to call home and get a lift, we instead spent a few hours at Jenny’s place. There we ate popcorn, I chatted with Jen’s brother, gave some suggestions to add fun to a handful of shiurim her sister needed to prepare, and watched as Rachel and her friends studied enneagrams and other irrational personality classification systems.

When the night got late enough, Jen drove us home to Rachel’s, and if we did anything much before sleep, I can’t remember what it was. In the morning, though, I had to be up fairly early to catch a bus. Rachel’s dad drove me into Newton, and thankfully I was able to buy a ticket 10 minutes before the bus arrived to take me down to NYC.

A comment on Boston in general: I felt that, despite the occasional public channukah decorations, Boston was probably the least multicultural city I’ve visited along my way. Contrasting it with Montreal before and New York after, Boston was very white, with the general exception of those selling at the haymarket stalls. It is interesting, if ironic, that this is the case in the centre of the US’s academia and therefore a fairly liberal seat, where surely affirmative action has brought other peoples into the universities, but their general absence is still very notable.

I stuck to New York and, after phonecalls seemed to fail, sent messages on Facebook to potential hosts or advisors. Most returned negative responses. I called Yogi again on Wednesday night and this time got through. He told me one of his roommates would be out for the weekend and I could be pretty sure of a bed if I came along.

So I was immediately pumped and ready for a weekend at Columbia. I packed on Thursday evening after class, and then went off with Naomi and Arié to a Cat Empire concert I’d now been looking forward to for some time. For some reason I’d been unable to convince anyone else to join us (although the tickets were quite cheap). Although it was at times hard to see them through the thick crowd, and there was little room to dance, I think the band lived up to their reputation of offering a fun and exciting and very different style of music. It creatively blends ska, reggae, various latin styles, maybe a little hip hop, jazz, even a touch of klezmer, and overall has a lot of energy and a lot of talent. Nice ideas and visions for the world in the lyrics are also good (although often the words are more arbitrary). It did bring me back home a little, and yet while there were many Australians littered through the crowd, there was also plenty of Quebecois French. Mixing much old and new, the band went out after a second encore on a river of red red wine…

Having missed the 11:45pm bus (I’d only considered it a little), I got up early to get to Berri-UQAM for the next Greyhound to NYC, scheduled to leave at 7:45am. Although the bus left fairly on-time, we were held up a little at the national border (an experience foreign to Australia), and so that the bus that had been scheduled to arrive at Manhattan’s 42nd St at 4:15pm was now due in two hours later. Shabbat was due in at 6:12. I was approached on the bus by a French brother and sister who were in the same predicament “Will we arrive in time to get to our hosts for shabbat?” “No, probably not. Hopefully we’ll arrive early enough to get onto the subway before the sun is set.” While the sun didn’t stand still for us, we did alight from the bus early: at 5:50pm, giving me the time to get to Columbia by 20 past the hour.

I had put my US SIM card back into my phone, but all credit had expired, so I again couldn’t call or be called. Finding somewhere to sell me credit that close to sundown would have been problematic, and besides, Yogi wouldn’t answer this late on a Friday anyway. I had spoken to him earlier in the day: somehow there was wireless internet access at the border crossing, and I made use of it and later the phone of the French Jewish girl on my bus to check some details and tell him I’d be late. He gave me the impression that he’d be on the lookout for me near his apartment for which he’d given me an address of 70 Morningside, at W 118th St.

Thankfully I knew there was an eruv in the area, so I could at least carry my posessions around once Shabbat was in. So I walked along Morningside Drive, looking for 70 and looking for 118th. 70-74 were some offices underneath the East Campus Residence building. Either way, I didn’t see anything that looked like apartments (and at least in Montreal few stay in residence after freshman year). So I wandered around in hope that he was actually looking for me at the arranged time of 6:30. With my luck in decline, I was offered help by a few passersby, one of whom suggested that Morningside Drv was different to Morningside Ave, on the other side of Morningside Park. So I crossed the park (which I later discovered meant I left the Eruv—whoops) and looked there. I realised a few things: (a) 118th was nowhere near #70; (b) I was in Harlem and no longer Columbia student territory. These realisations signalled my return to the first side of the park.

One door of the 70-74 Morningside Drv offices looked appealing: nice blue walls, big lettering “COLUMBIA BARTENDING”, two friendly looking people inside, and piles of alcohol in boxes in the doorway. I knocked and entered, and with a worried face explained my predicament. “So you have a phone with the phone number, but you won’t use it, he won’t answer and it won’t call?” was the jist of the initial response. One took the phone and found the other number, the other started researching (with Yogi’s real name) on Facebook. They found his residence online and so were able to look up his room number. At the same time, the war was waged on another front and we discovered a message cleverly left on Yogi’s voicemail system for me! The guy played it back a second time on speaker: “A message for Joel: we’re at Mac (of Barnard) on the corner of Broadway and 118th. There’s a big sukkah there.”

When I then found my way back to Broadway (the subway had arrived there), I thankfully didn’t need to find the sukkah by myself. There was a group of very Jewish looking people on the street whose conversation I interrupted to explain my confusing predicament, and who turned out to be heading the same direction. Yogi seemed quite shocked to see me, that I had actually succeeded in finding him.

Columbia is a campus that has enough Jewish students to offer kosher meal plans alongside the usual (for a couple of dollars more), so the festival meals at Mac were arranged by the residence meal system. It was quite good food, and fantastic honey-dew melon, but I of course missed the flavours of home. I was still getting over mum’s temptation of Rosh Hashana’s overcooked tongue and turkey.

The first night and day were a little cool, so people escaped soon after overfilling themselves with matzah balls, carrots, kugels, shnitzel, salad, cookies… We went to one of the Barnard (women’s college associated with Columbia) residences to visit Ilana (my host in Los Angeles), and hung around there for a while with her friends, including Nira who I had met at a Sunset Blvd bar for Ilana’s friend’s birthday party in LA. As the night grew old upon us, I was finally able to unload at Yogi’s place and climb into Walter’s bed for a nice night’s sleep.

When I had gone walking through this same neighbourhood many weeks before with my Olympiyeda friend Simi, she had actually shown me to the East Campus Residence where I was now residing. “This is where lots of the Jewish students stay,” she informed me. And despite 24-hours of security guards and sign-ins at its entrance, it is quite easy to get in if your head is covered with a kippah. Due to the problems of being signed in on shabbat, all one needs to enter is to say “sabbath observer”. Technically, to my knowledge, you’re meant to flash your ID as well (but realistically one could have been outside of carryable areas so this would need to be excused as well). As far as I hear this works on most days of the week, too (which is sensible a few days a year for festivals, but usually would just be amusing). Me being a good boy, though, when the work-free days were over on Sunday night and Monday, I decided I wouldn’t excuse myself in this manner. But Yogi only came in with me once during this period. And yet, while the security guard was liable to lose their job if I wasn’t signed in by a resident, they recommended simply asking a passerby to do that task. Passersby were more than happy to stop for a second, copy my name from my ID and presumably affirm my good character (in a residence where many doors are left unlocked). Basically, the security is very superficial. Anyway, I think I was in the middle of sleeping, so I’ll get back to that…

I was very impressed by the view as I woke up. Yogi doesn’t understand why, and supoosedly the look of the urban slums of Harlem stretching out from behind the trees of Morningside Park doesn’t appeal to him. At least it was a nice sunny day, and yet this also meant we’d woken up a bit late. We attended the Ramat Orah synagogue, which Simi had actually shown me on our tour of Columbia and its surrounds. It was the first synagogue that I’d attended with both a mechitza (a gender-separation barrier that is a usual sign of orthodoxy) and a pipe-organ. They didn’t use the organ (a pity, maybe), and most suggested it was a relic of former incarnations of the building. I didn’t particularly like the accoustics there, either, but otherwise it had a very friendly, knowledgeable and charismatic rabbi, and was generally a pleasant place to be.

Lunch, as dinner that night, were again with Yogi and Ilana and friends in that same students’ sukkah. But after every meal, it was back to the apartment to do readings. It seems I had arrived at Columbia for the frantic mid-term exam period, and everyone was to be spending their spare minutes with nose-to-book. Yogi worked his way through a novel by Abraham Cahan, a Jewish American socialist of the early 20th Century, who would be the subject of a thesis. One of his roommates, Amitai, read up on drugs and psychology, while I tried to start my way through Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath for my Judaism and Poverty class.

I had been warned by Trudi that I had to visit the Carlebach shul before leaving North America. Once the official seat of famous chasidic musician Shlomo Carlebach, the synagogue on 79th Street continues to be led by his great nephew through song and spirit. Styled as “the singing rabbi”, Carlebach was not known so much for his voice, but for the hundreds of tunes he composed that have become part of weekly synagogue services and thousands of weddings across the world, while leading a hippy generation to a warm and spiritual Judaism. The services for the second day of sukkot (and this year the first day of shaking the lulav) were certainly very musical and spiritual. The congregation substitutes Carlebach’s nigunim for many more regular parts of the holiday tunes, which adds to the unique character of this congregation and allows all to sing along. But it also (IMO unnecessarily) extends the service and its difference can be frustrating. Although done with a lot of extraordinary spirit and beautiful song, the hallel service lasted over forty minutes. By the end of the morning’s proceedings (after 2pm) I was quite tired and hungry. I approached the rabbi to tell him that I was now a little late for a 12:30 lunch at the Columbia Hillel building on 115th St, and could I join them for a meal in the sukkah? I was thankfully taken in to eat with them, and had a very nice meal (alongside another three Australians, although my parents’ generaton). Although I did enjoy my time at the Carlebach congregation, I think I would have done better with a smaller familiar event like a usual Friday night, or the enormous event of simchat torah the following week where this shul is the self-proclaimed sea to which all the rivers of Upper West-Side Manhattan flow, leaving lines stretching for blocks outside its entrance.

I wandered back north in the afternoon through a beautiful day at Riverside Park where all varieties of New York families bring their children for walks through the warm air and ball games on a Sunday afternoon. I finally got back to Columbia at about 5:30, where I found one acquaintance, Yavni, on Columbia’s student-littered steps where many come to read, eat, chat, chill. Yavni stopped his reading and we chatted for a few minutes until it was time to head back to synagogue to take the festive day out.

That night, finally returning to Yogi’s apartment, I called up a friend from Montreal, Becca, who I knew was at home in NYC for the weekend. Surprised to hear from me in her home city, Becca apologised for not being able to take me around town: she was returning to Canada on a midnight bus. Yogi, Amitai, Ilana, were all still reading, readying for exams. I was no longer sure if I would find something to do for another day in New York. Ilana suggested a certain club with music, but after I picked up some dinner from Cafe Viva (which I had already disliked many weeks before but didn’t recall until I got there) and got to the club, I would have to spend $20 on drinks for myself just to stay and listen to latin jazz. Having moved from Walter’s room to Yogi’s (Walter would be returning), I slept on a surprisingly-comfortable blow-up mattress.

Still unsure what I would do for the day, I woke up in time for the second shift of morning prayers at Columbia. Yogi had set his radio alarm clock, which proceeded to tell me which roads in New York would be more congested than usual, and that 5th Avenue would be closed off from 44th to 82nd St for a Columbus Day parade. Columbus Day is a minor holiday in the American calendar celebrating Chris’s arrival in the New World, maintained as Thanksgiving in Canada and other names in various South American countries. While many institutions are closed, Columbia University ironically persists in calling their students in on this day. Many also see the day as representing the first Italian-American immigration and hence it has become a day for Italian-American celebration and pride.

And although it was a little unusual, and Americans seems to have a parade for anything they can, this is what I found when I finally got to 5th Avenue late on the beautiful, sunny Monday morning. Families were squeezing at the barrier looking out onto 5th Avenue on the east side of Central Park, being handed small Italian flags for them and their toddlers to wave, some shouting “Viva Italia” or responding to calls from those passing in the parade. There were many groups of policemen from New York and New Jersey, in cars, motorcades of light-flashing motorbikes, to the march beat of captains. Some were particularly Italian-American groups, and others seemed a more arbitrary way to get the day off. Small civillian groups marched representing numerous localities in Italy, while vehicles owned by the sanitation or correctional services carried red-white-green flag-bearing children or dancing women. The usual sousaphone-armed school groups, disciplined drumming GIs, bagpipe-bearing kilt-wearing groups and another band with a folky klezmer sound. Troops passed and repeated calls after their unit leader. Floats came by bearing small visual acts from ballroom dancing to fire-throwing and labels dedicating them to different communities across the map of the Mediterranean boot. Lambourghini owners slickly rolled by. A few small operas, and another singer stopped by a grand stand of VIPs to sing “New York, New York”, before proceding along their way to sing for us “That’s Amore”. It was a fun and different morning to be out there, and was a wonderful day for the event and for a walk in Central Park.

I was heading back across the part towards West 72nd, since I’d been told that if I was to complain about North American kosher Chinese food, I had to try the real thing at Eden Wok. On the way I got caught up watching people at the Bethesda fountain and on the lake, and then for a good half-hour at a suprising gathering of people, near the western exit of the park, but I’ll tell you about that below, because I returned there after lunch. So I arrived at Eden Wok, a little late for the usual lunchtime, and I was surprised that they actually gave me a reasonable price for a large lunch meal including a wonton soup, chicken-cashew stir-fry, rice and a packet of chow-mein noodles (read sippets / soup mandel) which I would save for the bus-ride north. I walked down to 69th and Amsterdam to eat in the beautifully-decorated Lincoln Square Synagogue public sukkah. The soup was nice but fairly plain. And maybe I should have maybe selected a meal that was less pop-Chinese if I wanted to taste the real thing, but the stir fry had a good flavour and for once not too much of it (flavour that is), or of oil. And yet its main vegetable ingredients were celery and cucumber, which I don’t consider so traditional (but may be wrong). At least they were left with great texture, aided by cashews and water chestnuts. It was a good meal anyway, and I spent it talking to another patron of the public sukkah who had come with his baby and a pizza. Still, it’s nothing quite like the delicacy of the real Asian cuisine I know.

So I proceeded to spend the rest of the evening at Central Park where I had been held up before lunch. It turns out that the 9th of October is John Lennon’s birthday, and so his Strawberry Fields Memorial near the W 72nd exit of the park was the focus of many aging hippies, younger and older fans with flowers and messages to deposit on the mosaic floor design, and many passersby who were caught up in a frenzy of music, nostalgia and free-flowing messages of love and peace. There a keyboard and drum-kit were set up; electric guitars and basses were plugged to their own small amps, and many others attended with their guitar, clarinet, or maraca. The rest stood and sang, or merely gawked, or shed a tear. It was all John music. I think they may have even avoided non-John Beatles tunes. I certainly was reminded of my ignorance of a large corpus of Beatles music, though, while at other times was able to sing along and hit the higher harmonies. Looking around it was easy to be reminded how music and dreams could unite such a variety of personalities and backgrounds for so many years. I also met a guy named Adi from Melbourne who has just arrived in New York where he is considering moving, influenced in his choice by the strength of the Bund (prominent in few places out of his home city). For now living in a hostel, he is a jazz singer that was too surprised by the amassing of people and music at this site and simply failed to leave at his first attempt. Expecting to catch a 9:30 bus from Port Authority Bus Terminal on 42nd, I was going to leave at 5 to get my bags from Columbia. Then at 5:30. Then at 6. 6:15. 6:30. I finally went.

Collecting my things from the apartment, I expected Yogi to return and farewell me, but I waited, and couldn’t wait forever as I still needed to eat (at J2 Pizza on Broadway of course) before catching the bus. On my way to the station I stopped a random person to ask him if he knew which way I would have to go when I got to Times Square: west or east. He had the brilliant idea of looking at the subway map along the way, but I was more intrigued by how similar his story was to mine. His first response to me was to ask where I was from: James too was from Sydney (although living in Tasmania of late), and was currently on exchange at a university in Ithica, but had come down to New York for the weekend. A curious coincidence.

I arrived in Times Square somewhat later than anticipated, where trumpet-wielding buskers boosted an already musical weekend, and then was given the wrong directions to J2 pizza which sent me heading north instead of south. I did get there eventually, bought a slice of pizza, squeezed into a mobile sukkah with my big bags, ate, arose and ran towards the bus station. There I had to wait in a long line of people returning after the long weekend, but did get a place on the bus, next to Alex who studies at Concordia and lives a drunk stumble from Rue St Laurent in the Plateau. Sunrise came, the bus found its terminus, I farewelled Alex saying I might see her on a drunk stumble down St Laurent, and headed to the Ghetto Shul for a 7:30 start to the day.

It was so sudden and short that now, a little more than a week later, I’ve managed to forget my hosts’ names. The mother of the house was Rina. She welcomed and was glad that I had just enough time to get ready and get to synagogue just a little late. I ate dinner with Reuben, Golda and her mother (who lives in the neighbourhood), a relaxing and cheery affair to end a tough day.

Over the day I only attended the one synagogue in Woodmere (although the reason Golda and Reuben had wanted me to come in the first place), known as Aish Kodesh, it’s a fairly young but very successful community following the leadership of Rabbi Moshe Weinberger (“the Woodmerer Rebbe”). The community that attends is somewhat mixed in its background, but the shul has a distinctly chasidic flavour (not really one with a dress-code, but still I probably stood out in white trousers and sneakers instead of a suit) particularly in the magnetism to their rebbe, and the singing style at times. And in the fact that the rabbi (if only him) wears a streimel. Very nice singing, though, and the Rabbi spoke very well (although both times about “the situation” in Israel, rather than his famed talks on faith and lifestyle). His largest talk of the day is usually given in the afternoon, but for my visit he replaced it with a class for women only. The building of the synagogue is also remarkably beautiful. It was designed to incorporate components from synagogues destroyed in the Holocaust, while being built completely with stone from Jerusalem. Certainly a very interesting, lively and vibrant community.

Leaving Woodmere was nearly as much of a rush as arriving. I had arranged to meet up with Yogi, a New Jerseyan who had studied at Melbourne Uni for a semester and who I had met up with (at Nikki’s persuasion) in Surfers’ Paradise in April. But our meeting place would be some club in Manhattan’s Upper West-Side, while I was carrying a heavy bag and the train would arrive only hourly. So I rushed out, caught a train back to Brooklyn, used a key and a code to get in and returned to Manhattan. It was a fun party, just a group of fun people hanging out at a bar (certainly not buying many drinks—they were way to expensive), with a little dancing, and a craziness that is expected when a group of Americans are thrown into a bar (especially when they include Yogi).

Sunday I decided (after the slow start that Sundays always bring) that I would take 2 at crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. It was no Golden Gate, but it’s a nice area to walk, with lots of interesting fellow tourists. A German woman (with a few old and sophisticated cameras) decided that she would take a photo of me with her camera as well as mine (“I usually only take picture of couples…”, so I’m not really sure why me all of a sudden). I landed up chatting and walking along with a group of 5 Jewish folks from various places (NYC, Argentina, other places) for no apparent reason. We parted at the end of the bridge so that they could catch a subway to dinner and I could wander around Downtown Brooklyn, which wasn’t really very exciting (at least not on a Sunday evening). So I took photos of the Borough Hall, wandered about a little, and jumped on the subway as well.

I tried to find something to do later that night, but it seems that the city that never sleeps sleeps on Sunday evenings. And Monday nights too. Really it only stays awake Wednesday through Saturday night (except for Dunkin’ Donuts and a few other places that are hubs of culture and really don’t sleep).

Lots of things also sleep on Monday. That’s what I found out when I didn’t read my guide book correctly and turned up at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens to find it closed. So most of the plant-life that I found and photographed was dead.

So I wandered around a fairly trendy neighbourhood of Brooklyn called Park Slopes, before heading to the famed Crown Heights to meet up with Meir (who had come to study with Chabad in Sydney and was involved in Hineni with me for most of a year). Getting off the train at Kingston Avenue’s intersection with Eastern Parkway, it was clear I was in Lubavitch territory. The chins that were bare in Flatbush were here full-grown beards to be found all down the street. Standing on a corner waiting, people kept on leaving a building and speaking Israeli Hebrew, which I was a little surprised by. I’m only a little more surprised now, because it turns out that is the main beit midrash of Chabad-Lubavitch at the Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson’s former residence at 770 Eastern Parkway.

This building, of course, was the first stop on Meir’s guided tour of the neighbourhood. He took me up into a small museum room that primarily exhibits some of the items that was given to Rabbi MMS while he was Rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch. There I wandered among portraits of the rabbi himself, a model of Jerusalem’s Temple, keys to many of the world’s cities, medals from units in Israel’s Defence Forces, and letters of birthday congratulations from various governments. I think for the first time there I really understood how people could come across the thought of this guy being a messiah. In many ways, he had much greater recognition during his life as a “king of the Jewish people” by the wide world than any other prior “messiah” has, while at the same time maintaining a humble lifestyle. A very Jewish picture of the messiah figure. Still not reason to follow with certainty that assumption, but it was an interesting realisation.

We wandered through the house a little, and down into the beit midrash (house of learning) where books were strewn over tables, and students young and old sat, stood, talked, read, wandered, taught, learned. Thousands of books piled along the shelves were sorted into general sections. Prayer groups were setting up and completing service constantly on the side. One hundred and thirty-six small holes in a wooden cabinet collected money for as many organisations, although children made their way around the room with open hands for any further spare change. Outside in an entry foyer, many watched RebbeTV (okay, they didn’t call it that) which 24/6 plays various recordings of the Rebbe in his daily events, activities and teachings. We soon left to Eastern Parkway, where outside the building lay piles and piles of garbage bags; around the corner a man sold stock from the nearby printing press.

On our way to lunch at Crown Heights’s newest bagel place, we did a little catching up. And I asked what JB was up to. JB had been in Sydney studying with Meir and helping at Hineni, but I’d failed to contact him before my trip and would not be getting to his home town of Miami, Florida. A moment after we began to talk, Meir received a phonecall. It was JB. He was back from a summer camp in Los Angeles and was in fact with his family in Borough Park, New York. With this surprise, we all planned to meet up for dinner.

In the meantime, Meir had things to do and suggested maybe somewhere to see would be the shore of Manhattan up along the Hudson River. In the end I did the walk, but it wasn’t really so exciting—there wasn’t really much of a shore to see. A little water; otherwise mostly joggers, cyclists, tourists.

Meeting Meir sometime later back at 770, we walked down to the restaurant where we would meet JB’s family for dinner. Although one of his sisters turned out sick, leaving only a few of us there, it was great to meat up with the two bochurim. And for a couple of hours before the night had to end, I sat outside with JB and his brother Velvel (and later some other friends who stopped by) having a small kumzits (singalong) on the street.

The night had to end, because the morning was bound to come. I was to meet up that Tuesday morning with Simi, a friend who I met in 1999 on a short trip to Israel. We were to meet at 10am (although I promised to be late) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So we finally met up at 10:40, her recongisable even from a distance despite the seven years between sightings. The vast museum includes collections from Ancient Egypt to Modern Japan, from armory to jewellery. Of course, their intriguing permanent exhibition of musical instruments was closed for the moment. One room just displayed row after row of the museum’s American collections from recent times on numerous sorted but unlabelled shelves of everything from portraits to drinking glasses to picture frames.

Close to closing, we exited the museum, and found a group of street performers amassing an enormous crowd of escapees from the Met. Their acrobatics wasn’t bad either, but we decided we would go elsewhere instead. Simi would show me around her former campus of Columbia, which had been suggested (by someone a little biased) as something nice to see. Its buildings were reminiscent of a common style for official American buildings. Lots of big stone columns, and often domed roofs. We soon found ourselves outside the Cathedral of St John the Divine, an enormous structure begun construction in 1892 and still unfinished. It is also accompanied by a somewhat unusual statue of the Saint with many animals and the Devil. We landed up talking for some time at the Riverside Park before parting (and me on my way home eating the worst pizza in the US so far…).

After Tuesday comes Wednesday, to be my last full day in the USA for some time. I decided I would finally see the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, which I had already failed to get to a few times. A spectacular collection of gardens (although I came out of bloom for many of their flowers), among my favourites was definitely the Fragrance Garden. Here you can walk around and smell a collection of common and uncommon scents and flavours, from parsely, sage, rosemary and thyme to “popcorn bush”. By the end of my time there (somewhat longer than expected) I had filled my camera with so many photos of roses, cherry trees, lilies and bonsais, that I needed to return to the Flatbush apartment before continuing with my day as a tourist.

On the subway southward to home, I met a man on the train who was in NYC for a wedding and to explore graduate study options. So I helped him by showing him to Brooklyn College (he had heard it was pretty, and it was, but nothing so special IMO), and soon to the Jewish area of Flatbush where he could find kosher pastries much more readily than in his home of Michigan. I also showed him to Eichler’s, the “largest Judaica store in the worled” which, when visiting a couple of days earlier, I had found hard to leave once in there. This time I had the specified mission of finding something for my hosts (Reuven and Golda) who most certainly would not require or desire anything from me. It is always a hard type of gift to find. Still, I think I found it.

Eventually checking out, I looked at the time and realised I was certainly too late to bring the gifts back to the apartment. After all, it was 5:30 and I wanted to make it to a 7pm baseball game in Shea Stadium, Queens. So I took the wrapped glassware and caught the subway, to switch at Times Square. Running to the number 7 train (which would take me to the Mets game), it took a while to realise why there were two trains standing there for such a long period of time (while I was going to miss the singing of the anthem). It turns out there was a fire further on down the track, and Mets fans would have to catch a “W” or “B” and change to a “7″ at Queensboro. So that’s what I did: I crammed onto a “B” but only having met a group of people who would help me with my baseball cluelessness for the rest of the night. It turns out they were to be assistants at the residences belonging to the Jewish Theological Seminary on a group outing to the ball game. So we made it there late, but it seems that’s fairly normal. My new friends guided me in buying a ticket, and once seated in what was going on on the field below me, and where to find a kosher hot-dog vendor. It was a fun and new evening for me, even if I didn’t know how to sing along to “take me out to the ball game”.

Only by that time, I was just starting to realise that I was coming to the end of my USA travels. That within half a day I would be in another country. That I would be soon moving into a room with drawers and cupboards awaiting my clothing. Relieving, saddening, overwhelming.

I stayed up quite late scratching out a thank-you note on the computer and packing my belongings back into their bag, and finally slept for 3.5 hours before having to prepare and leave for a 10:30am flight (ie leave the house 7am latest to get there 2 hrs early as recommended; of course I got there late). Ticketing counter for Air Canada, please?

The other annoyance is more just a feature of New York’s famous arrogance. It is hard to walk down a popular street without seeing a restaurant that advertises itself as “the #1″, “the best”, or “famous”. Sometimes, if you are lucky, it will qualify this statement of grandeur with a limitation like “in Park Slopes” (a neighbourhood of Brooklyn). Still, I wonder how many people are more likely to go into a restaurant that advertises itself (without citation) as the best in town…

But NYC is still good. It has 24/7 kosher doughnuts for instance.

One of my mistakes was not properly confirming that the HI hostel in NYC’s Upper West-Side would be accessible on shabbat. I wasn’t sure about staying there in a dorm in the first place over shabbat, but considering that a synagogue congregated there weekly I had assumed that the building must be accessible with non-electronic keys. My second mistake was to book it too late, landing me only one night’s tenure. This meant I would have to check out on shabbat, which would be difficult. So it was only on Thursday that I managed to get out emails asking some shuls for a place to eat (which came readily), and on late Thursday night asking for a place to stay. Again this American summer craze of everyone going away meant that one of my contacts in the area wasn’t able to find anything. The other seems to have not got my message and won’t check the phone machine till Monday. But some of this I wasn’t able to check until I got back from DC.

And that was also a story. I had in fact fallen asleep, wrapped in a towel, working on my computer, light on, at the Schmidts’ place in Silver Spring (just outside DC). Indeed, I hadn’t yet booked the back bus to NYC, nor set an alarm to wake me. Somehow I woke up at 5:30am. I booked a ticket, realising after I had written some long-awaited emails that I would need to even then hurry to catch the 9:30 bus. But the morning went well and I got to speak Daniella, and we went to pick up a sandwich for lunch on the way to the train station that would take me down the road from the bus station. The sandwich took a number of minutes to prepare and I went across the road to get a banana to eat then, returned and it was still being made, then sealed on the grill, then cut into a foam take-out box, then passed into my hands. I ran into Daniella’s car, where she waited in her pyjamas, and she drove me to the station. I ran down a very long flight of stairs and jumped aboard a train, which proceeded to crawl along the tracks, citing another train immediately in front of it. A 22 minute ride took 32, and I jumped off the train at Gallery Place at 9:24. I ran up the escalator, up the road to I St, and looked for a bus, which I boarded at 9:27.

The bus got me back into NYC at 2, when I soon tried calling a few people who may have been promising for an Upper West-Side weekend. No go. In all cases I was headed back to Brooklyn where I would be able to get my shabbat clothing (I otherwise had only a 3-day-pack) from the appartment where I stayed last week. When the train arrived I wandered down the streets, worried about the situation but knowing that Brooklyn again was at least an option. Reuven and Golda, who I had been staying with, would be away for Shabbat, at Woodmere in Long Island (they’d actually been suggesting last weekend that I spend this shabbat there). So I arrived at their home door, keyed the combination, turned the handle and was locked out… I called Reuven to clarify (I should have a day earlier, but when?), and found that Golda had double-locked it, not realising I had things to collect before shabbat. A little more frustrated, I logged online on their front step and just confirmed that no life-changing emails had come in.

So there I was, with no clean clothes and no place for shabbat. Okay, maybe more than no clean clothes. There was a shirt that I didn’t use in DC because I didn’t really get out out night, because Daniella was sick. And there was a pair of pants that I spilt my breakfast on on Thursday morning, that was subsequently washed of its milk. I soon found a target to buu

Reuven offered that we could meet to exchange keys at Atlantic Ave Station, but that he would probably be able to find a place for me to stay at Woodmere. Another call with no results in Manhattan; Reuven not answering his phone while at Atlantic Ave, so no key to Brooklyn (it turns out he was late). Eight dollars later I was going to Woodmere, Long Island…

The taxi was Hadar’s suggestion. Hadar, another friend from her exchange in Sydney, was the person whose father I had stayed with the few nights before in Brooklyn. She was staying a few weeks with her mother in Baltimore. The taxi driver was friendly, and the first woman taxi driver whose driven me here. She spoke of her husband in Sydney who lectures in political science at some university she can’t recall. Maybe Macquarie.

She also took as long as it takes to get to Hadar’s—a long time. It was the highest taxi fare I’ve ever paid. More than total interstate travel from NYC to Baltimore, Baltimore to Washington and back to NYC. More than the 6 hours from LA to Vegas. Yikes. But once you’re in the taxi and halfway there, there’s not much you can do, especially at that time of night. You just keep on hoping and expecting that your destination is only a minute away, and then it isn’t.

After arriving and eating, I proceeded to show Hadar all my photos, which took a few hours before bed. Bed and breakfast. Peanut-butter-jelly sandwiches prepared for lunch. Out to see the sites of Baltimore. There aren’t too many of them (and maybe I could have done with the spare day in DC…), but we went down to the Inner Harbour area, and first checked out the Star Spangled Banner Museum.

This odd museum is built in a house that in the early 19th century was home to Mary Pickersgill whose occupation as a flag-maker and connections with important people led her to the task of sewing the absoulutely massive Star Spangled Banner (9x14m US flag with 15 stars and 15 stripes) that flew after victory in an 1812 battle with the British at Baltimore. The guided tour through Mary’s house (belonging to the museum since about 100 years after her death) brought us into 19th-century living as a widow, sewing flags and ensuring meals for 9 in the 3-storey house (of course she had a couple of servants on site to help in the hot stone-floored kitchen). The museum outside of her actual house focussed mostly on the historic battle, a little on the sewing of the flag and Mary’s family possessions, and also on the writing of the national anthem reflecting on the flying of the flag. Its opening presentation also included an amusingly poor reenactment typical of small museums. It was, though, surprisingly interesting and fun to see.

Hanging out in the Inner Harbour area (wandering along the harbour-front, avoiding the aquarium), we went into a shopping mall that’s mostly filled with souvenier shops (t-shirts, hats and what-not) and food shops. There we discovered the Fudge Song, sung by the workers of the fudgery as they fudged their way around. Basically, selling sweet food with entertainment and charisma while making it in front of the audience. Was interesting. And peanut-butter-jelly (jelly being grape jam) sandwiches are nice but not great, IMO.

In the afternoon, out of things to do, we visited the new Museum of African American History & Culture. We had to rush a little, though (I’ve said this many times about going to museums in the afternoon—bad habit of mine). It was interesting at times but I found it rarely revealed much new and interesting information to me, and was organised in such a way that it was not particularly easy to make one’s way around an exhibit. It included galleries on African Americans in culture and in politics, in families and in history. Its special exhibit was on African American farmers, and while it expressed their plight and the discrimination in a white-dominated industry (related to historical land-ownership rights), it was simply a little obscure. So not bad altogether, but I expect the upcoming Smithsonian museum in DC will be more comprehensive and, of course, free.

And on the topic of DC, it was soon after leaving that museum that I caught a train, walked and caught another to the nation’s capital. There I was to stay with the family of Daniella Schmidt (actually in Silver Spring, Baltimore) who had spent the first semester of 2006 at the University of Sydney. But more than anything on my arrival, I was excited that the gates to insert my ticket and enter the train station were similar to Cityrail’s back home. A little bit of urban nostalgia. Only the tickets were more expensive than any other city I had been in, while working somewhat more sensib than Sydney’s system (buy one ticket and reuse it until you’re out of money).

Okay, I guess I was also excited about seeing Daniella. But first I got to meet her parents, who I chatted with while I ate dinner after her father had collected me from the train station. The family is Big on Habonim and their other two children had just got back from camp, so one was hyperactive and the other unwakeable. Daniella eventually arrived home and very excitedly greeted me. Soon I was showing her too my photo collection, but sleep beat us to completion.

The morning sun rose, and eventually so did I. Not as late as some days, but maybe not as early as I’d hoped: only two days in DC and so many free museums to see! The first (after my Cheerios and a bus-train collaboration to get me to the National Mall) was the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The museum will soon be under renovation, so most directions I turned were met with big yellow signs basically saying “back in 2 years”. This wasn’t so bad seeing as I was short of time even with the few exhibits that were open. I spent most of my time at “Americans at War” which showcased weapons, maps, flags and propaganda associated with all of the wars of the USA. Other sections of the museum focussed on popular culture and media or on technology and industry, and while I didn’t get to all that I would have liked to, I did get to see a collection of original Muppets.

Soon enough it was lunch time, and I wandered over through the sculpture garden (at Daniella’s recommendation of seeing a house that is actually a concave structure and an optical illusion) to the National Archives. There they exhibit some major documents of the country’s history, such as its Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and its amendments, and an early copy of the Magna Carta, while providing exhibits to illustrate the archives’ purpose: patents, declassified police records, historic recordings and documents, and a Presidential Library collecting photo and film detailing the lives and families of Bushes, Clintons, Kennedys and Trumans.

For those of you who have never been to Washington DC, many of the Smithsonian museums are lined up along what is known as the National Mall. This “mall” stretches westward from Capitol Hill (where congress congregates), past many museums to the Washington Monument (pointy phallic thing), via many government buildings to the Lincoln Memorial, where big Uncle Abe sits idly in his Greek temple. On the grass patches where there are no tourists wandering or on segways, there is usually a group of athletes training or kids playing soccer.

So I crossed the mall to the National Air and Space Museum, also a Smithsonian enterprise. There they document the history of humanity’s ventures off the face of our planet. Much of the aviation industry was built through American innovation, so the museum inevitably focusses on this: Wright brothers, space races, moon-landings, Bell labs’ microchip-powered systems, jets and helicopters at war, space stations… Incidentally, while deliberations were ongoing about the definitions of planets, their exhibit on our own galaxy at large was closed for renovation. With some very large artefacts on display, the museum was quite impressive and fun.

But it did close at 5:30, as many of the museums do on a Wednesday, leaving only the Museum of Natural History to hold its breath for another two hours before gasping the tourists out its doors too. Possibly the most famous of the Smithsonian collections, it follows through the story of life, showing off a wide array of fossils (trilobite collections) and stuffed animals (and by that I don’t mean teddy bears). I also saw some collections from human life with an exhibit on the Sikhs, and another on African cultures, and the interactions of Lewis and Clark with the native peoples in their expedition across North America, as well as a gallery of photographs from Antarctica. Due to that closing time, I saved the geology-focussed parts of the museum (including the Hope Diamond) for a day that didn’t come on this trip.

The end of the day had come and I looked for dinner, and found veggie patties to heat up in the oven. Daniella meanwhile had put herself to bed, ill. I soon put myself to bed, well.

After all, I was rising early to get to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The museum was very moving and well-arranged. It effectively gave the feeling that each component in the leadup to this great tragedy and Final Solution came so suddenly, and in that sense was very overwhelming. While many of the materials on display were disasterously impressive, this museum as compared to others was much less about collection and more about experience. Out of the permanent exhibit they also explored other genocides of our world, and implored the emergency of awareness of what is happening in Darfur, Sudan; also a collection of editions of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, giving the forgery’s history and a story of its continual revival in various communities acrosss the world.

The afternoon I spent at the International Spy Museum which Hadar had initially recommended. Annoyingly, though, this museum was both a walk from the mall and not free. But while it was nowhere near as big as the Smithsonian wonders, this museum was both fun and on a much more unusual topic. It begins by trying to put you in the roleplay position of a spy, which I found it didn’t do so effectively: while it tested you on memorising a few facts, the roleplay wasn’t continued throughout the museum. Still, they began with fascinating exhibits on spying technologies and skills: bugging, lock-picking, information gathering and transmission, weaponry, sabotage and disguise (to recall a few). It then had exhibits on the history of spying and intelligence, highlighting many interesting cases, as well as code making and breaking, and spying in the Cold War. The museum was actually a bit long and unidirectional, and with all food and drink forbidden this made for a bit of an uncomfortably hungry experience by the end of the museum; it was also quite America focussed (and biased) for its “International” title (see an interesting Washington Post review). I also wonder, with all the technologies on show that seem very clever, how much more advanced the materials must be that are currently in use in the field.

That evening (after consuming some snacks to keep me going), I decided to stay out and see the sites of DC, and maybe Daniella would come out and join me on the town. So I wandered down to meet Abe Lincoln, and spent some time in his temple. I also visited Al Einstein bronze and slouched in some corner behind the street 5 minutes walk from Lincoln. I tried to contact Daniella, continuing up towards George Washington University. The uni looked nice, although I didn’t see too much as it was dark, that is except for a group of freshman girls being cruelly inducted into college life by their dorm advisors. I finally got onto Danielle. She was still sick and not coming out.

I continued north by foot to Dupont Circle where she said there might be some night-life. There was a little life out there, but not the sorts of atmospheres that I felt like entering by myself. I wandered around. I had a donut (doughnut…?). I gave some money to a guy on the street so that he could have one too. I went into a bookstore/cafe/bar and flicked through a few books and listened to the mediocre live pianist. I realised that I still had a train and bus to catch and was only hoping the bus still ran late enough. I caught the train, and waited for the bus. I waited a little more, and started looking for a timetable. I was too late—the next thing to find was a taxi. The taxi only cost the price of 5 bus rides anyway, so I did get to the quiet house eventually (and attempted to write this blog entry but it still took another week to publish).

PS: A big mazel tov to everyone getting married, and a small boo to those who didn’t tell me. =)

Finding out where exactly it was I was meant to be, I eventually made it down to Flatbush (not a short haul from Laguardia) and unlocked the door after many attempts at a code I’d been given. (On the way I got my first experience of a New Yorker when she started shouting at various people on the bus from the airport in her thick NYC accent about some great injustice that had been done her. She left fuming.)

The homeowners would be home soon. Reuven had been married to his second wife Goldla for five years. By accent, you can tell that Reuven isn’t a local while Golda, his wife, very much is. The two together enjoy together a very apportioned life when it comes to food (favourite: frozen fruit) and Jewish study (slowly making their way through many classics a paragraph at a time). And above all they’re very welcoming hosts. This is made easier by the door-lock being accessible by code instead of key.

My first morning in NYC I took care of business. I got a haircut (sorry to those of you who like my hair long- it was just getting out of control). And I ate some pizza. Then I caught a train up to see Times Square. While I was a little overwhelmed by the lights and moving pictures in Vegas, Times Square consolidated all these together in its ads, while adding tickertaping news and share prices, and current sports games.

Now, other than lights, the Square is known for its broadway, and for the enormous commercial stores that line 5th Ave all the way up to Central Park. So I visited the enormous Toys “R” Us, which features a big Ferris wheel of toys spinning around a big Cyrillic “ya” (backwards R) in scare quotes. The shop itself includes some impressive Lego models, a moving plastic dinosaur, crazy inflatable missiles, a magic demonstration, and a lot of Israelis between the shelves. Of the big stores I went into that Thursday, Toys “R” Us was by far the funnest (maybe also the biggest), but I also visited southern Central Park and an enormous Apple Store with people checking out iPods, iBooks and iDon’tKnowWhatElse.

Friday was designated to Lower Manhattan, where I saw the World Trade Center site, which, being a construction site, wasn’t really that interesting, and probably held a lot more emotion for those who had at least seen the NYC skyline with its two giants. It was interesting how they tried to turn the location into a pseudo-sacred site… I made my way from there through the financial district: to Wall St, which to the outsider is merely a series of large and ornate buildings.

Going south (after going a little north to find lunch), I found the National Museum of the American Indian, seemingly a subsidiary of the same-named Smithsonian on Washington DC’s Mall (which I didn’t visit). Situated in a former US Customs House, the museum collected many artifacts (artefacts for Americans) of Native American culture from various regions, as well as contemporary reflections on that culture. Among the collection was a large collection of piggy-banks and armadillo-banks. A sign explained that European Medieval saving jars were made of pygg clay, later moulded into pig. Maybe by the added virtue of the pig’s luckiness in Peru, these animalia banks became part of a collection of South American ceramics.

The afternoon brought me out on a ferry to Staten Island. The only reason most people take the free ferry is to see a tall blue French woman with her arm raised along the way. The boat unloaded all its passengers on the island anyway, so I decided I’d catch a bus (I had a weekly pass) to see a little more of it. Lonely Planet’s first suggestion was Snug Harbour Cultural Center, and when I arrived there, it seemed like an interesting and large site of various cultural things, but it was highly unenticing to someone who had other things he wanted to do in Lower Manhattan, and a home to get to in Brooklyn before shabbat. Back in Manhattan, I visited battery park, which included some impressive street-performance and some interesting memorials, including a sculpture from the WTC site that had been damaged in the September 11 attacks. After all this, I tried to get to the Brooklyn Bridge to cross it, but found my time had run short.

So Shabbat came, as it always does, to bring change to the week. I had been given a smorgasbord of synagogues to choose from, so I went to a Young Israel congregation, which was nearly my sort of crowd, only with a lot less singing. After a pleasant dinner with Reuven and Golda, I had a pleasant sleep, and then decided to try out a more singy congregation, usually led by Rabbi Mordechai Twersky. But Rabbi Twersky was away and the place was noisy with conversation and laughter, and the singing was loud and rowdy and in unfamiliar tunes. So I considered returning to Young Israel when someone came in saying they needed a few congregants down the road (four to be precise, which is a high ask). It turned out later that the rabbi inviting (at 10am) extras to his small congregation had also promised to finish by 11:15am. Yikes! So all the rite and process happened, just very quickly.

I ended up at the place of this rabbi, Joseph Rosenbluh, for lunch. He lived just down the road from where I was staying, and although his apartment was by no means tidied, he was more than happy to have a guest. So at the table with him and his mother, we discovered a number of common interests, mostly centred around Hebrew language. As for his congregation, he was amid relocating, explaining (at least a little) the strangeness of his invitation. And when he found out my surname, he commented that he had a cousin whose name was Northman, although an uncle had said that this was an Anglicisation of the name without the ‘r’. A few hours later I would look up the appropriate trees and find that this Northmann was a great great great grandchild of my great great great great great grandfather, Jesaya Nothmann, which makes us third cousins twice-removed. Certainly one of the more obscure games of “Jewish Geography” that I’d ever played.

Finally, my lunch host invited me to experience a nearby synagogue run by the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn for the sabbath’s exit. Usually they use a much larger, grander synagogue, he told me, but during the summer it’s reduced to a smaller place across the road. Like everything here, the synagogues run minimally-to-nearly-shutting-down during the summer vacation season. The normal site, although I could only view it from the outside, was indeed grand. The summer site was still very nice. The tunes, the accents and the food were very interesting. Mmmm pita and humus and zatta and olive oil for seuda shelishit… Also interesting is their use of long traditional tunes in the prayer service for after Shabbat. While in European communities it is often rushed through, here they would mournfully extend the holy day’s exit with a kaddish that would take a few minutes (including oscillating between a note and a half-semitone step below, something I’d love to be able to do). It was an intriguing and different cultural experience, while still being very familiar in so many ways.

While I’m talking about eating, I think I should mention something: Hadar (whose father I was staying with) tells me she had competed with Trudi (for those of you who know her) about whose father was more careful and crazy about what went into his mouth. Trudi’s father, a nutritionist, has been preparing Trudi for a healthy diet for many years and counts each steps he walks daily, while Reuven and Golda have recently begun on “the plan”. Both have very selective kitchen cupboard contents. I still haven’t seen Trudi’s dad’s kitchen in action, I have only seen Trudi’s reaction when tempting food with high GI appears on the table, things usually out of the question at home. “The plan” on the other hand, requires carefully measuring out quantities of different foods each day (x ounces of fruit, y ounces of yoghurt, z of chicken…), and having to declare the menu to a friend each day. It was interesting that Golda pointed out that most people see it as very restrictive and constraining, but explained that with something like this, there is no temptation. She paralleled it with keeping shabbat (for those of you with that experience), which many on the outside see as constraining, while those that do it feel so freed by not having any compulsion to do work, or check email, or drive, or purchase, or think business. Desire is out of the question. So I guess she sees her diet as a little divine…

Anyway. Narrative continues.

Sunday was set to be spent with Anthony (from Sydney) and Nomi (from Philadelphia) who I sang with in USyd’s Madrigal Society. But I’d failed to contact Nomi although I tried numerous times the number in my phone. Finally, exasperated, on Sunday morning I looked at my contact lists and found that she had a home number listed. By calling it, I found out that the number I had been calling was of the apartment she’d be returning to in Boston. So, finally armed with her correct cell phone number, I managed to work out where Anthony and Nomi had got to. But on the way, I went to pick up a discounted ticket to Avenue Q, which the two of them had long arranged to see on Broadway. So the day proceeded to consist of: wandering around mid-lower Manhattan (not sure what it’s called), cooling off at a fountain in Washington Square, eating knishes in the lower east-side, catching a train north, going to the Jewish Museum, getting drinks, seeing Avenue Q, and eating Pizza at Jerusalem II.

Avenue Q is basically an adult take-off of Sesame St, about a guy named Princeton, newly with a BA and in New York City, who is trying to find his purpose in life. It is enacted with puppet characters and human characters, all of whom performed very well. Some of the puppeteering was quite impressive, with basically four puppeteers acting out eight characters. Still, my favourite may have been the human character Christmas Eve, a highly exaggerasted and aggressive Chinese-American woman. Many times the musical managed to shock the audience through its sheer bluntness and use of tabboo: there was no shortage of “sexual references” (or for that matter, puppet nudity) in this production.

The knishes and pizza were pretty good too.

Until that day, I had thought I would be going up to Washington DC or maybe Baltimore on Monday morning (earlier it had been Wednesday, but that changed after pushing off a Tuesday arrangement for a week- does that make sense?). But Nomi and Anthony had decided to see the Museum of Modern Art in New York before Anthony left town (they would have seen the Met, but it’s closed on Mondays), and I thought this would be a good time for me to go too. So I went. For a number of reasons I had to get there somewhat later than the others, and between an SMS not reaching me and Nomi switching her phone off in what I see as over-curteousy to fellow museum visitors, we didn’t meet up except by accident Anthony appearing behind me at 2pm. At that stage, A & N had seen floors 5, 4, and half of 3, while I’d seen 1, 2, and the other half of 3. Whoops. So we went out to near Central Park for a lunch of (my classic) fresh bagels and avocado, and returned to the museum to go our separate ways.

And by that Monday evening I needed to find the bus station to head up to Baltimore. Although I had one other challenge: I had a weekly pass for the transit system that would only expire on Thursday, so I found someone homeless on the street, and only hope he put it to good use, himself, or in bartering for food or cash…