Baltimore

I flew to Baltimore from New York . This was not a good idea - the flying, I mean, not visiting Baltimore - especially from Newark Airport. When Barry made my bookings I was not sure whereabouts in the New York area I would be: had I still been staying in NJ, Newark would have been the ideal choice, but from E 23rd St, La Guardia is much closer and the cab fare would have been about 1/3 of the fare to Newark. Plus BWI airport is a long drive from Baltimore along the infamous Beltway, so the trip is not exactly pleasurable for the driver, who happened to be my brother, who in fact had a small no-discernible-damage-done bingle on the way to pick me up. But as my flight was delayed also, I didn't have long to wait at the airport, and mobile phones really help in these kinds of situations.

Next time I will take the train, as Amtrak leaves from NY Penn Station, close to Ben and Lissy's, and I recall that it is a lot easier to get to Baltimore Penn Station than to the airport. It would have been cheaper and possibly quicker, with all the time spent in security queues and long rides to and from airports offsetting much of the extra travel time. Future travellers, take note!

I had a lovely time in Baltimore hanging out with my brother Yaacov (aka Jeffrey or even Jeff, depends on what publication he is writing for) and his daughter Esther and the five kids currently living at home, in steps and stairs from 3 months to about 12. The two oldest boys are away learning in yeshivot in other cities. Also briefly caught up with her husband Dovid over dinners out or at their home. I am attaching a few photos. The new baby, Leah, named for Jeffrey's late wife, captivated me - what a calm, smiley charmer she is, but all the kids were really great though it took some of them a little time to warm up to this great-aunt from the land down-under who pops in and out of their lives infrequently. Again with the aid of a local map, I went for a long walk around the neighbourhood each day, though not in the evenings, as there was a mugging in a back street between Jeffrey's apartment block and Esther's house my first evening - we were delayed by the community and police patrol cars while driving home from dinner at the local Iranian Glatt Kosher Chinese restaurant (however implausible this seems, I am not making any of it up). The photos were taken at Esther and Dovid's house and at the restaurant. You can find these at

http://picasaweb.google.com/bjoymarsh/BaltimoreSeptember07

and I suggest you try viewing the slide show. I am still having trouble with timing out while trying to embed the pretty slide shows from Apple's iPhoto on Barry's Mac, so this is the best I can do!

New York and New Jersey Adventures

Barbara and Ben in the kitchen, Summit NJ, September 07.

Well, not all that adventurous. I seem to have packed a lot into a week. Emily, my oldest friend in New York, picked me up at Newark after my flight from Montreal - no mean feat for someone who lives so far away, but for her troubles she also got to see Barry for 5 minutes before he caught his connection back to Mexico. We headed back to her place in Briarcliff, NY ( near Ossining, famous as the site of Sing Sing prison), but stopped en route on the Upper West Side in Manhattan to pick up some groceries at the wonderful Fairway. I may have mentioned this enormous supermarket in dispatches in the past. There is a cool room which is very large: outside there is a rack of coathooks with heavy silver parkas to wear, as it is very cold in there! There is a very extensive kosher section plus a huge range of organic produce as well as the regular range of stuff available in NYC. For the Aussies, it is the one place I have found Vegemite in the past: maybe a bit past its use-by date, but I figure anything with so much salt in it can't go off anyway!

Along with some organic fruit and veg (including the bagged baby carrots they sell here which make the perfect snack - we scoffed most of them in the car during the long drive home ) and some fresh wild salmon for dinner the following evening, we were mostly shopping for the ingredients for honey cake. I had invited myself to bake in Emily's kosher kitchen, so I could take a cake to Lissy's parents' place in Summit, NJ, for Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year). I figured I needed to make three, one for Ben and Lissy, one for her parents, and one to leave at Emily's. We found self-raising flour (a rarity here, where it is called self-rising flour, for future reference in case any Aussies happen to be searching for it while in the USA), tried several types of honey, got a few spices, canola and grapeseed oils. We couldn't locate any foil baking tins of the right shape or volume, so we stopped off later almost at Emily's to pick up some candidates at her local supermarket - none seemed quite right, but Emily thought one of her Pyrex dishes would work, so these were for back up.

We eventually got home, joining Bob and Daniel, and I caught up with everyone and before and after supper tried to assist Bob who was assembling a trolley so he can have several computers going at once in his work space at home. Don't laugh - although I am not exactly renowned for being handy, and frequently get right and left confused, I am very persistent and logical - these traits should be useful in home assembly tasks. We established over the next couple of days that they had sent the wrong parts, so our difficulty was not entirely self-inflicted! It is always lovely to be with Emily. She was my first friend in NYC and meeting her in early 1968 is the reason I stayed 4 years though I had only come for 3 weeks.

I realize I didn't finish the Mexican honey cake saga a couple of entries ago: for those of you still wondering, my third Mexican honey cake came out perfectly: I was meticulous in following the high altitude recipe and method modifications, used a lower shelf in the oven and a lower temperature, and a Pyrex dish as the cake tin. The final cake looked good enough to cool and freeze for Barry to take to Elias and Silvia for their Rosh Hashanah lunch. What's more, I found a FedEx box which would just accommodate it and sent a text to Barry to remind him to take it with him, and it all worked out well, with many requests for the recipe (maybe I need to translate it into Spanish?) So when Monday dawned and with it the great NY honey cake bake-off, I was fairly confident except for the size of the cake pans. Emily was at the dentist when I started and I couldn't find the beaters for the hand-held mixer at first. Although the ones that I found were not the ones I had used once before, and certainly didn't look familiar, they clicked into place OK and seemed to work well. But I didn't quite master the oven settings, confusing the timer and temperature buttons. When Emily got in she found me the correct beaters (the ones I had used were from her food processor - how amazing that they even fit the mixer) and set me straight on how to manage the temperature and timer. But notwithstanding all of this, and that I had inadvertently turned the oven off at least twice while baking the first cake, it still looked OK and smelled terrific. I decided the Pyrex dish was a bit too shallow so decided to make the next 2 in foil dishes. Because I was using a hand held mixer with limited capacity, I had to make the cakes in sequence rather than do a triple mix, so it ended up taking a lot of time, but I must say the house smelled delicious for 4 hours instead of just an hour and a half!

I decided to take a walk late in the afternoon, and though I only made 3 turns and only walked down 3 different roads the whole way, thinking I was heading in the general direction of home, the area clearly in no way resembles a grid. I got so completely lost that I had to call Emily, who was getting organised for dinner, to come and rescue me. This took a while as she had to contact the guests and reorganise things a bit, so she gave me instructions on how to proceed to somewhere she could find me. After an hour and a half's walking I was still about 3 miles from home! Despite my disruption of the schedule, we still had a delightful dinner on Monday night - one of the guests was Judy Boehr, mother of our house sitter, Rachel, whom we hope will visit Melbourne next year.

Emily drove into Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon and we went downtown to Ben and Lissy's apartment to drop off my suitcase, and from there we went out to dinner at one of many local Indian places (the neighbourhood for obvious reasons is referred to as Curry Hill, I guess it's not too far from Murray Hill either) with Lissy and Daniel , Emily's son, who had been working in town that day. Ben joined us at the restaurant after having his hair cut after work, so he was a bit itchy. I spent that night at their apartment, then the next day went uptown to Joan's for lunch and a walk in Fort Tryon Park .

Last April Barry and I stayed at Joan's while she was in Denmark, so we missed seeing her then, and I had never met her dog, Lille Ting (no idea how to spell this, it means Little Thing in Danish) whom she acquired after my previous stay in her apartment in October 2005.
Catching up was lovely: note the fall crocuses in bloom in the Park, but I decided not to post the view of the George Washington Bridge from the Park as it is a bit too hazy.


Then back downtown to go to Grand Central with Lissy, again meeting Ben straight from work, to head off to stay with her parents, Barbara and Bernard, in Summit, NJ, for Rosh Hashanah. We went to their Synagogue, a Conservative Temple some way from Summit, where Bernard's parents used to belong. It is hard to get used to how large the Jewish communities are in parts of the US, and how vast the Synagogues can be. I have only recently joined the only Conservative Synagogue in Melbourne, having always belonged to and attended Orthodox Synagogues before. I enjoyed the egalitarian and inclusive services, and particularly their shofar-blowing. They had about six different teenage blowers, very well-rehearsed, stationed around the synagogue who shared the blowing. So we had surround sound and a lot of participation, which was a novel twist.

Both our Rosh Hashanah evening meals as well as Shabbat dinner on Friday were eaten at Lissy's Aunt and Uncle's house in nearby Springfield, but the lunches at Lissy's parents' were also large and delicious. It is always so difficult to eat moderately during Jewish festivals! Maybe I would show more restraint if I didn't love all the food: I always pass on the kugel (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugel) as that is the one dish I have convinced myself I don't really like in any of its very many forms, but I try a little bit of everything else on offer. Partly to offset the large amount of eating I got about an hour's walk in each afternoon, armed with a map torn from the local Yellow Pages and some directions from Bernard, and I got home otherwise unaided each time. But I missed my pedometer, which I inadvertently left in Mexico. There were few pedestrians to be seen, though I ran into three women campaigning for a mayoral candidate who told me that the Victorian houses in that area were built right in amongst the native forest, hence the age and height of some of the magnificent trees still standing. It all looks so very green and lush, especially by comparison with the drought-affected landscapes at home. In Melbourne, as in Mexico, the fancier the neighbourhood, the higher the fences - in Summit as in most American suburbs, there are no fences and often no footpaths, and rather little happening on the expansive front lawns, though I saw a couple of dogs and just one family throwing a baseball around.

One of Lissy's sisters, her husband and their 3 year old daughter Lily were also staying with Barbara and Bernard, Lissy's parents. She is very sweet and we spent a lot of time playing with her. Here is a photo of Lily.

We returned to the City on Saturday evening and managed to connect with Sam Langer, a family friend from Melbourne on his first trip to NYC . We went out for sushi at a favourite place of Ben's and after walking me home the boys went out to a series of bars. Sam is completely blown away by the city. It really resonated to see him, just a bit younger than I was when I first arrived in New York nearly 40 years ago, and having exactly the same reaction. It seems to me people either love or hate NYC, it is rare to be neutral about the place (I fall into the lover category).

The next day was Sunday and we arranged to go to Scarsdale to meet up with my first cousin Jeremy and his family, who have been there for about 10 days, having just relocated from London. He and his American wife Tara have 3-year- old twins, so I seem to have encountered a lot of small kids on this leg of the trip. The path to Scarsdale was not entirely smooth, however. We left the apartment (on 23rd between Park and Lexington) with not quite enough time to walk up Lex to Grand Central (at 42ndSt) to catch the 1 o'clock train, intending to take a cab the few blocks. As we walked out of the building onto 23rd St (it is one of the 2-way cross streets which carries a lot of traffic) we couldn't help but notice a lot of Harley Davidsons riding in convoy along the street. Quite a sight as well as quite a sound! However after seeing what we thought were already a whole lot of bikes, a couple of motorcycle cops with full sirens blaring raced along the street to the corner of Lex and parked in the middle of the intersection, holding up all up- and down-town traffic while many hundreds more motorbikes rode their way across town! After watching bemused for a few minutes as the lights continued to change but no traffic moved on Lexington Avenue, we realised there would be no cabs to Grand Central for us till the traffic started again, and appreciation dawned that we would almost certainly miss the train! We started sprinting up Lex, and maybe 5 minutes later got a cab, but we arrived in the ticketing hall a couple of minutes after the train had pulled out. The next train was not due for an hour. It wasn't bad news for everybody, as I realized afterwards that in my rush to pay the cabbie I had included a $10 note instead of a $1 in the fare! We called Jeremy, who conceded that we couldn't possibly have made up such a tall tale to excuse our lateness, and proposed we take the next train to White Plains where he would pick us up and drive us back to Scarsdale. With the able assistance of his rented GPS and some innate sense of direction which was needed because the suggested route was closed for a special event (I wondered if it was the end point of the Harley rally!), we took the scenic route to Scarsdale to meet up with the rest of his family at a restaurant. As a restaurant critic and hotel consultant, it hasn't taken him long to suss out the eateries in town which cater best for kids! Jeremy and Ben had not met for more than 15 years, so each was glad to re-establish contact with a fairly close family member on a new continent. There is a chance that Jeremy and Tara could come to visit us in Mexico too, so I am looking forward to that.
Here are photos of Ben and Lissy and Tara and the twins Jonathan and Jacob at the restaurant in Scarsdale.


When we returned to Grand Central, Ben and Lissy went on to their next social commitment downtown while I wandered home, buying some new runners on the way. I called a few friends and was trying to get my packing done when the kids called and said there was a street festival on in Little Italy, and suggested I join them for dinner. So off I went to the festival of San Gennaro, who I suspected when I hit Mulberry Street must be the patron saint of cannoli. In fact he is the Patron Saint of Naples - read about the festival at http://www.sangennaro.org/

For those of you who live in Melbourne, imagine the Lygon Street Festa and multiply by about 400. Dozens of restaurants had extended out to the street and were in fierce competition with the street stands. The most amazing thing I saw was the battered and deep- fried Oreo cookie. Words fail me at this point- here is a photo to prove I am not making this up.

Also, now I know why mobile phones were invented. I would never have found Ben and Lissy or the restaurant they had chosen amongst the incredible crowds without their guidance over the airwaves: it was hard enough catching their directions over the extremely loud ambient noise. It's a shame I can't capture the smells: I could have done without the deep frying odours, but the fennel of Italian sausages sizzling, the frying onions and the pervasive garlic from the variations on Italian street foods, the waffles - it certainly worked up an appetite for the meal we had at the restaurant, though it was a bit late to have a coffee to finish. A fine end to a busy few days, but I am resolved never to spend such a brief period in NYC again - I hardly caught up with any of my many friends in the city, didn't visit a single museum, and never even went shopping!

Old Montreal

I spent most of yesterday wandering about Old Montreal, down by the quay of the old port and through the old streets were the neo-Classical buildings, old sites re-cycled as malls and gardens, and many old churches mingle with old warehouses and really pretty streetscapes, galleries etc. I didn't see many shops - I have discovered them since in the more modern part of the city, but I guess because of the weather here, most shops are within malls underground or inside buildings which don't necessarily display any shop fronts to the street. While walking about in the newer sections of Montreal, I haven't bothered to take shots of sky scrapers and contemporary streetscapes.

There are many lovely looking churches scattered about, both Catholic and Protestant, catering to both English- and French-speaking communities, the space around them severely restricted by new development for the most part, and lots of banks. I took a photo of a gorgeous building labelled as Molson's bank, I knew this was a famous brand of Canadian beer, and that owning a brewery was like a licence to print money, but now I wonder which activity funded the other!

McGill University is in the City Centre and there was a street gallery I saw today which I think is associated with the campus showing an outdoor exhibit of then and now photos, on themes like family, work, leisure, housing etc., taken from the 1860's to 1905 contrasted with ones from the 1970's to '90's. What surprised me was how most of the older photos didn't seem dated. One example was the ice hockey team of a school taken at the turn of the century, and the boys looked much more modern than a school footy team taken in Melbourne at the same time would have looked, from the glasses to the haircuts to the faces.

See the little slide show below: I apologise for a couple of the pics which are dark but it is just a quick overview. I have since been back and looked at some galleries and more little streets, old buildings and cafes, and it is indeed a very pleasant spot, particularly on a sunny day.. It seems very busy on the weekend.


I tried very hard to insert a slide show here - perhaps because of limitations in the hotel's network access, I never got it to work. So I tried posting 2 sets of photos: from Emily's computer, but this failed also. Will try one more time but not much point to this post without the visuals! Eventually, I have settled for pointing you to the Picasa album, this time from NYC on Ben's computer: I suggest you view it as a slide show. Here is the link:

http://picasaweb.google.com/bjoymarsh/OldMontrealSeptember07

CableVision, Breathing machines and hairdressers

Barry has sleep apnoea, and uses a Fisher and Paykel CPAP machine to improve his sleep and stop his appalling snoring. I love this machine, which vastly improves my sleep by removing the Harley Davidson from our bed. Last week a small but key part of the face mask for his machine went missing and neither of us has slept properly since. Barry found a couple of listings for suppliers of Fisher and Paykel medical equipment, but didn't get onto them on Friday due to other commitments. Luckily on Saturday someone picked up her mobile and said she would look up the catalogue to see if the part was in stock, and let him know. This morning, while the guys from Cablevision were installing our service at a very reasonable hour, she returned his call saying they had a compatible mask. There were some complex instructions about where the place was, and I agreed to get a taxi there and have him wait while I picked it up and paid for it. After Barry went off to work, I headed down to the local taxi rank and told the cabbie where we were headed, and off we went. I noticed the guy crossing himself and muttering a few prayers at one point - not sure if he does this on each journey or there was some significance to the place where he did it - maybe it is a particular danger spot? Or maybe someone he knows had an accident there? (I have noticed other cabbies doing this also - I suppose it can't hurt!) He had a plastic Jesus (or maybe a Saint? I am not so good on distinguishing amongst figurines in robes with cloaks and staffs) screwed into the dashboard right in front of the steering wheel, and a large circular multi-coloured mother of pearl icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a rosary and an image of the Virgin embroidered in gilt and silver thread on a black background hanging from his mirror, so I figured we were in good hands, but I'd still have preferred him to obey the traffic lights and merge a little less recklessly.

We got to the street we were seeking quickly, but the numbers seemed entirely crazy. We were after 557. I saw number 4, then 160 on one side of the road, after a long stretch with no numbers as there was a golf course and another sporting complex on either side of the road. After 413 there was 484 then 573, then more numbers in the 600's and some in the 400's, then we ran out of street. We did a U-ey and looked more carefully, this time looking on both sides of the street, and eventually found the very number on a blank brown metal fence, with a bell up one end. It indeed was the place. I got the taxi to wait. An armed guard let me in, took my name (Sra Carr seemed an advisable simplification), told me to take a seat in the cramped ante-room, and called the person I was supposed to be seeing. I had time to admire a robot on the guard's desk made from many Marlboro packets, with black thumb tack eyes and a red push pin nose. The person I was meant to contact there, Sra Diana, went up and down some stairs a couple of times and returned with an invoice and the mask, which looked compatible though not identical to the broken one I had wisely brought with me. She also tendered a large plastic bag, which I said I did not need as I stowed the mask in my shoulder bag. She had the guard make a copy of the invoice inside somewhere, then sent him out for change, as only cash would do and I didn't have the right money, which took him several trips. The journey back to Coyoacán was a lot easier, and I didn't detect any more overt praying. I got the driver to drop me at the rank and I checked out a couple of hairdressing salons nearby - my cañas (grey hair) are showing and I decided to have an interim colour before we head north.

The salon down by the rank seemed quite expensive so I came home , dumped the mask and regrouped for the next outing, and went to look at 2 little places on Higuera, the diagonal street that takes us up to the Plaza. But I guess they don't open on Monday, so I had to go a bit further afield and chose a place just opposite the Museum of Popular Culture, close to the Plaza. As far as colour went, I think they did an OK job, but after washing off the dye they proceeded to blow dry my hair into some hideous helmet: just before she was finished I screwed my courage to the sticking point and told the young woman murdering my hairs that I hated the style and preferred a messy unstructured style allowing my natural curl, which I thought I had asked her for in the first place. Quite graciously she wet my hair again, applied some mousse, did a bit of scrunching but in the absence of a diffuser to put onto the dryer, she seemed to decide to leave it damp and let me do my worst at home. By this time it was pouring, really hard - I was in 3/4 pants and sandals, but did have an umbrella and a hoodie so set off for home.

I thought better of it after 5 minutes in the torrential downpour, so I decided it was about time I stopped at a cafe on the way home which has a good reputation for its salads. By now I was really cold with very wet feet so the salads didn't sound so attractive, though I saw a few that looked good. Most things on the menu contained cheese and/or creamy dressings, so I ordered a salmon salad - it did say it came with grilled pineapple but I couldn't believe that, and figured it must mean pine-nuts. Well, the bits of salmon were smoked, and it was indeed grilled, chilli-marinated fresh pineapple - a horrid combination. They brought out a small loaf, a kind of large roll they call a chapata with a little pot of herb butter, but though it was not as sweet as most Mexican bread, it was very soft and I only ate as much of it as I did because I was chilled through and hungry. I also ordered a cappuccino, with full cream milk which was all they had, another mistake though it did warm me up a bit. However there was a guitar player with harmonica and a tambourine playing a somewhat limited selection of early Dylan music, so I enjoyed that and it stopped raining so I came home and changed into dry pants, warm socks and a fleecy top, and after a bit of towel drying my hair looks more like me again. Note to myself: don't go back to that salon!

I am disappointed that the salon I used last time we were here, with an English-speaking receptionist and the very obliging and chatty Lourdes who cut and coloured my hair well, has disappeared. It also offered decent coffee and Yoga and Pilates classes. Their Bio-Spa signs and banners are still there, but the place is plastered about with signs announcing it was closed for breaking the law: whether this means late or non-payment of taxes, opening beyond permitted hours, or maybe not paying the right bribes, who knows.

For visual relief, and to give you an idea of the charming streetscapes of Coyoacán, I am inserting a slide show of random shots I have taken over the last three days while walking in the neighbourhood. The prevalence of flags is due to the upcoming Fiestas Patrias, Mexico's National Day holiday, when everyone hangs out flags and the paper cutouts you will see a sample of on the last shot in the slide show. The stalls selling these have blossomed everywhere since September 1.



I have been trying to make a honeycake for Barry to take to Elias and Silvia on Rosh Hashanah, while I will be in New York. Melbourne readers will have tasted this excellent cake, from the Bialik Cookbook: it has always been a no-fail recipe for me. I found something about high altitude baking on the Internet, and tried to follow instructions as Herzonia and I collaborated on the measuring and mixing. The process was further complicated by the absence of self-raising flour from stores outside of the British Commonwealth (though I haven't looked in Canadian stores!). This means I had to add baking powder and bicarb and salt to make the equivalent of self- raising flour, then discount by the amount of leavening required by the altitude. Also in the absence of my usual sized baking tin, I was using 2 new ones I bought, and computed that I would need 1.5 times the usual quantities to fill these tins. The cakes taste good but collapsed in the middle. Once again I have helped myself to spices and cocoa from Herzonia's kitchen, and having now purchased all the other ingredients (the bicarb was a real challenge, got some at the pharmacy in the end) am going to try again in a Pyrex container and maybe a slower oven. At worst we will have 2 delicious but ugly honey cakes in the freezer, but with luck this one might be presentable enough for Barry to take from the freezer and present to Silvia along with a bunch of flowers. So I am off to try again and when it is in the oven, finish packing for Montreal and my trip to the US. There may be a lengthy blog silence till I get back to Mexico, or I may find time on friends' computers in the US to do another couple of entries.