East Coast trip Part 3: New York

A birthday candle in my  dessert at Fish Restaurant in Greenwich Village

In what is now a familiar ritual, Yaacov dropped me off at Penn station in Baltimore in plenty of time to get the Amtrak train to New York.  I have now figured out where the elevator is so I don't have to schlep my suitcase down the stairs to the platform.  There was a strange-looking carcase on the tracks: the consensus of my fellow travellers was that it had been a deer which had probably travelled some distance on the underside of a train and got partly roasted before being deposited here! Not sure about the quality as I snapped it with my iPhone. Usually if you click on an image in the blog it will enlarge it.

Strange deer carcase on the tracks at Baltimore Penn Station

Leiba  Marsh with baby Dina

When I got in to Jay and Ellen's, I called Lissy and arranged to go down there the next day to make honey cakes for them, for the in-laws and a small one for Jay and Ellen. Ben, whose palate is rather discriminating, said the cake was not up to the usual standard, and we singled out the cause as the canola oil, which might have been a bit older than desirable.  At home I never buy huge containers of oil, flour, etc. despite the unit price seeming much lower: we don't use them up fast enough to maintain quality, and it's false economy if you end up chucking it out! But the cakes all got eaten - they were not bad, just not as good as usual.  Next day, I took the train to Lissy's parents' house for the pre-Yom Kippur meal, and accompanied the family to their Temple in New Jersey on Kol Nidrei and Yom Kippur. We broke the fast at Lissy's uncle and aunt's house - Isaac and Melanie are wonderful hosts and I feel so included there, it is really lovely.  We stayed over as the day after Yom Kippur was a Sunday this year, so there was no need to race back to Manhattan for work the next day.

My Nephew Moshe with oldest daughter Chaya

We had arranged to visit my nephew and his family in Lakewood, and borrowed Bernard's car for the drive.  It was much quicker than getting a bus from the Port Authority Terminal in NYC like we did last year.  Leiba turned on a splendid lunch for us, and we enjoyed a bit of time with the kids including the newest baby, Dina, who you can see smiling away as she dances about with Lissy on the video below.






 http://picasaweb.google.com.au/bjoymarsh/2010_09_1927LakewoodWhitePlainsNYC#5526657845540762178

Leiba with middle daughter Shifra

The older girls took me outside to show where they had planed some dried beans from the package they use for cholent - they assured me they would grow into peas, as the neighbours' had. I tried explaining about peas and beans being different plants but I got the distinct impression they had no idea what I was talking about - I guess I need to brush up my communication skills! Still, any gardening is a good thing - right? I had trouble getting Yisroel to keep still for a photo, and the video with him and his friends playing is very chaotic so I haven't posted it here.

I spent a bit of time in New York looking at 2-bedroom apartments to rent on the Upper West Side with Lissy and occasionally with Ben.  The lease on their current 1-bedroom expires November 1, and they need the extra room for the baby, and want to be near an express subway stop on the Broadway line for Ben’s shortest possible commute to the Financial District.  We saw some dumps for not much less money than some pretty nice places, mostly older buildings but some new developments.  Only in New York could two-bedroom apartments starting from $4500 a month be considered middle income rental housing!  I am well aware that house prices in Melbourne are far higher than in much of the USA, but at least you get a bit more space, indoor and outdoor, for your money. But Manhattan is a very desirable place to live and there isn’t much space, so I guess it is all about supply and demand. As I write this post, they have signed a lease, so I know where we will be staying when we return to NYC in December.

The house-hunting occupied quite a bit of time, but I did get to one museum I hadn’t seen before, the Frick Collection on the Upper East Side. It reminded me a bit of the Barnes collection that we saw in Philadelphia about 3 years ago – housed in a purpose-built mansion, selected and arranged by an individual according to his own taste – but without the didactic purpose so apparent in the Barnes. Also the Barnes collection is much larger and the art works mainly date more from the Impressionist period through cubism and early modernism, leavened with some African work from many periods whose influences Barnes detected on the European works in the collection.  But the quality of the works in the Frick is outstanding – Gainsborough, Reynolds, Sargent, Constable, Cellini, a Renoir, Hals, Goya, El Greco, Titian, Turner, Van Dyck. For the art lovers amongst you I would highly recommend both if you are ever on the East Coast of the USA, and here are some links for you to explore the collections:

http://www.frick.org/

http://www.barnesfoundation.org/

I met our friend Ruth at the Frick – she had been in NYC for a few days at the UN General Assembly presenting on Australia’s position on bio-diversity, and engaging in negotiations around the topic as part of DFAT’s delegation , accompanying the newly-appointed Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd.  After an hour or so for a very quick look at the house and the collection, with no time to listen to the audio tour that is included in the admission price, we wandered around the East Side a bit, looking for a place to eat lunch.  We eventually came across somewhere suitable, where we had to wait for a while but finally shared two really excellent salads, excellent bread,  and some wine. The Upper East Side is out of my comfort zone. We had been wandering up Madison Avenue, but after walking Ruth to Park Avenue for a taxi to the airport I continued further east and realised we had just been on the wrong street for cheap and cheerful eats – Lexington Avenue would have suited our quest much better.  Still, we did see many designer clothing, jewellery and accessories stores as we walked!

I also took the train up to Emily and Bob’s place for a couple of days, including the second day of Sukkot when we went to Shule and to my surprise I was honoured with an Aliyah. I guess there were not so many people there and they were welcoming a stranger to be a part of things.  Having grown up as a woman attending Orthodox Shules I am still not blasé about participating fully in Conservative Synagogue services, and I get quite an emotional response to being considered a fully functioning member of the kehila.  It was a very nice experience, topped off by lunch in the Sukkah with some of Bob and Emily's friends from the congregation: bagels, all kinds of herring, lox, salads, fruit, even hot coffee, and I could not resist a brownie.  Unfortunately I had a pinched nerve in my neck, probably from carrying a back pack slung over one shoulder on the crowded subway train and waiting in the station for the Metro North train to Pleasantville, where I had met Bob and Emily  the evening before to go to a show at the Burns theatre (it was a documentary about the history of the animation unit at Disney, called Waking Sleeping Beauty. ) This is on a different train line than the Hudson line I take to their town, which is a gorgeous leafy ride alongside the river - I missed the views!

Emily got me an appointment with a neighbour who is a chiropractor. He diagnosed the source of the pain and treated it with ultrasound and an activator (I had a chiropractor in Mexico years ago who used this little instrument well, but since then I have only been treated with it a couple of times and haven’t felt the practitioner was using it all that well.)  Net effect was to partially relieve the pain right then, but over the next 24 hours I improved vastly. It probably also helped that I rested quite a bit, reclining in Emily’s special chair and reading a couple of novels from the Number 1 Lady’s Detective Agency series, and took some anti-inflammatories.

We got to share a few meals in Emily's screened porch, the newest addition to the house and a lovely indoor/ outdoor place to sit, mosquito-free, and enjoy the garden at this time of year. It was just about finished last year when I visited, but since then there are a lot of potted plants and various other creature comforts, and a pretty spectacular barbecue just outside where Emily grilled marinated chicken and lots of great vegetables, including portabella mushrooms. eggplant, zucchini and red peppers, all my favourites.  Yum!

Ben and Lissy at Jeremy and Tara's

My first cousin Jeremy, wife Tara and their twins Jacob and Jonathan now live in White Plains, only about half an hour from Emily's.We stopped off at  the station to pick up Ben and Lissy and Emily dropped us all off and barely had time to say hello before racing off to meet Bob watch her French nephew, now boarding at a school in the area,  play in a soccer game. Jeremy's sister Angela was visiting from London, so we all enjoyed catching up. We enjoyed lunch in the Succah, where it was extremely hot, and went for a walk nearby (where we took a few photos on the edge of the golf course) before taking the train back to Grand Central. 

I also took the train up to Emily and Bob’s place for a couple of days, including the second day of Sukkot when we went to Shule and to my surprise I was honoured with an Aliyah. I guess there were not so many people there and they were welcoming a stranger to be a part of things.  Having grown up as a woman attending Orthodox Shules I am still not blasé about participating fully in Conservative Synagogue services, and I get quite an emotional response to being considered a fully functioning member of the kehila.  It was a very nice experience, topped off by lunch in the Sukkah with some of Bob and Emily's friends from the congregation: bagels, all kinds of herring, lox, salads, fruit, even hot coffee, and I could not resist a brownie.  Unfortunately I had a pinched nerve in my neck, probably from carrying a back pack slung over one shoulder on the crowded subway train and waiting in the station for the Metro North train to Pleasantville, where I had met Bob and Emily  the evening before to go to a show at the Burns theatre (it was a documentary about the history of the animation unit at Disney, called Waking Sleeping Beauty. ) This is on a different train line than the Hudson line I take to their town, which is a gorgeous leafy ride alongside the river - I missed the views!

Emily got me an appointment with a neighbour who is a chiropractor. He diagnosed the source of the pain and treated it with ultrasound and an activator (I had a chiropractor in Mexico years ago who used this little instrument well, but since then I have only been treated with it a couple of times and haven’t felt the practitioner was using it all that well.)  Net effect was to partially relieve the pain right then, but over the next 24 hours I improved vastly. It probably also helped that I rested quite a bit, reclining in Emily’s special chair and reading a couple of novels from the Number 1 Lady’s Detective Agency series, and took some anti-inflammatories.

We got to share a few meals in Emily's screened porch, the newest addition to the house and a lovely indoor/ outdoor place to sit, mosquito-free, and enjoy the garden at this time of year. It was just about finished last year when I visited, but since then there are a lot of potted plants and various other creature comforts, and a pretty spectacular barbecue just outside where Emily grilled marinated chicken and lots of great vegetables, including portabella mushrooms. eggplant, zucchini and red peppers, all my favourites.  Yum!

Scallops with spinach

Lobster Salad

Joan, Jay, Ellen, Emily, me, Lissy, Ben

In between all the running around, I managed to spend a bit of time catching up with Jay and Ellen. I got a pass to use the Manhattan JCC, which is just around the corner from their house, for several days. They have a reciprocal agreement with the Berkeley JCC, where I am a member.  So I got in a swim every couple of days in the 25 metre pool, but couldn't quite coordinate with Ellen to attend her yoga class ona Wednesday.  It was my birthday towards the end of the trip, so I had an indulgent swim and a massage at the JCC, before Ben and Lissy took me out to dinner at a restaurant in the Village called Fish.  At the last minute Jay and Ellen joined us along with a couple of other friends and it turned into a little party for me. Very delightful - see a couple of the dishes we had above.  We shared some desserts, one of which was billed as a Chocolate Merengue Cake.  The better spellers amongst us wondered if it was going to get up and dance.

I dropped in to Goldman Sachs to visit Ben at the office around 5.30 the day before I left New York .   I don’t know about dark Satanic mills, but the hundreds of knowledge workers on his floor at their workstations with 4 to 6 screens each and just a bit of bench space did bring to mind a knowledge or maybe money factory.  I saw the cafeteria with its variety of seating and views over the harbour, Ground Zero, the Statue of Liberty, the Financial District Marina, and some of the meeting spaces.  I met and chatted with many of his team mates in the group, many nationalities, races, even a couple of women! They seems a friendly bunch, quick, smart and very well-read, but I can’t explain why there were bottles of hot sauce on many desks (Ben also had Vegemite and a chunk of honey cake, easier to explain). 

East Coast trip Part 2: Baltimore

Chani in her stroller

One thing I didn't mention in my Cleveland post was the pink hair. My hair had grown a bit since the extremely bad colour I had done in Berkeley, and now the roots were just pink, rather than mauve or orange. Ben,  who is nearly 6 ft tall and can see the top of my head, informed me that if I could actually see the state of the colour, I'd certainly want to do something about it, so with help from Aunt Flo I found a hairdresser open on Sunday who was able to repair most of the colour damage, bringing the roots back to the same colour as most of the rest of my hair, and also "fixed" the cut, which she said was way longer one side than the other and lacked the structure it needs at the back to encourage the curl. So I felt I was fit to go out in the world again, though in my brother's world, women keep their hair covered so mere exposure is the outrage, not whether it is pink!

The SouthWest airlines flight I took from Cleveland to Baltimore on a Monday was an Embraer, a small jet made in Brazil. It was not very full, and was very cheap at under $60 including all charges and taxes (and checked bags fly free, very rare in the US).  I never feel totally relaxed on these little planes, though I have not checked their safety record against that of larger planes, but it landed early and safely and my brother Yaacov picked me up. He and Miriam had to attend a funeral that afternoon, so I stayed home, unpacked the few things I needed for the couple of nights I was staying, logged in to their wireless network, and caught up on my email.

Esther, Leah and a bit of Shifra

Sarah,  Feigie and Shifra

After they got home and we had a snack, Miriam and I started making honey cakes for Succot, when the older grandchildren who are off at various yeshivot around the country will be coming home.  That evening was the only one that worked to go out to dinner with Esther's family, as there were Parent-Teacher meetings and other commitments on the next night. The cakes were still in the oven, so Miriam stayed home to take them out when done, while Yaacov and I proceeded to meet Esther, Dovid and the kids at the Royal, the extremely kosher Iranian-run restaurant which offers Chinese and "American" food,  where we go for our now regular family dinner.  Miriam was planning to catch the late shift at the JCC pool, so wasn't going to eat with us anyway, but she joined us at the restaurant a bit later.  This was my first opportunity to meet Chani (see her in her stroller above- that is not a halo!) , Esther and Dovid's newest baby, their eighth. Their two oldest boys, young men by now, are away at Yeshiva in New York, and I haven't seen them for ages. The last three girls all look very much alike (see Chani, Leah and Shifra in the photos), and like all the children, they are very calm and quiet and really look after each other. We all ate very well, and there were lots of leftovers for Esther and Dovid to take home, as the servings are large and the kids are not such big eaters. I am delighted to be able to give Esther a couple of night off from cooking, which must become quite onerous with such a big family.

Dovid

Yosef Moshe

Miriam and I swam together at the JCC during the Tuesday evening and Wednesday afternoon women only shifts: the pool was not very busy, especially on Wednesday when I had a lane to myself for nearly the whole hour. As I belong to the JCC in Berkeley, it is excellent that the JCC here as well as in NYC offers reciprocal rights to use their facilities for a few days.  It is a 25 yard pool, where I have to be careful as I run out of pool because in Melbourne I swim in  25 or 50 metre pools - especially when swimming backstroke,   I have been known to smash my head into the end of the pool if I am in the meditative state I often get into around the middle of my laps. 

On Tuesday morning I had gone for a very  long walk - I had intended to take a long one,  but took a wrong turn - so as well as the couple of kilometres I swam, I also walked close to 10 km. All of this may help burn off some of the delicious food I over-indulged in during the trip to Cleveland! That afternoon after school I spent time at Esther's with the littlest kids - the older ones were still at school.   Leah has just started kindergarten, and was home asleep on the sofa when we came in. For the first time ever I heard her crying when she woke up, and I observed Esther working with her quietly and calmly to find out what was wrong.  Turns out she was over-tired and needed to go to bed for a bit.  I am very impressed with how wonderful Esther is with her kids, and how calm they all seem to be in response. The baby is very cute and about to start crawling: I took some videos but I am only posting one here.

East Coast trip- 3 weeks of family and friends - Part 1: Cleveland

Uncle Henry and Aunt Florence at home

Very early flight to Cleveland, after a late night - called for a nap!

I left Barry to his academic duties in Berkeley while I went east for the 3+ week trip I take to spend time over the Jewish Holidays with my family and friends on the east coast - Cleveland, Baltimore and New York. As always, it was so nice to be with Uncle Henry and Aunt Flo in Cleveland , and even nicer because Ben and Lissy came in to join us for part of Rosh Hashana (they stayed at Pam and Stan’s). 

Pam and Stan

 There was the regular ritual of the baking of honey cakes for Aunt Flo and Pam, and this year I also made some egg and lemon sauce from the liquid the gefilte fish had been cooked in.  I remember making this kind of sauce for boiled fish with my mother, using a recipe from the bible of English Jewish cookery, Florence Greenberg. But I couldn’t find the recipe on the web. Then I realized it was about 9.30AM in Melbourne, and took a punt on Anna, one of the women staying in our house in Kew, being at home and working on her PC at that hour. She was in, and via a Skype call was able to locate the recipe for me, from the various sections of the decrepit old Florence Greenberg Penguin scattered amongst the more intact cookbooks on the kitchen shelf.  

Mitch with Ben and Lissy, tie-dye stall in the background

While we were in Cleveland Ben, Lissy and I went to the Rock and Roll Museum and Hall of Fame again. I always think I will get sated here after 2 ½ to 3 hours as I do at most museums, so when we split up to do our own thing after going through the special Bruce Springsteen exhibit together, we set something like an hour and a half to wander, listen and view till we met up - and as usual we hadn’t really allowed enough time to see all the things we would  have liked to. But we had arranged to go on to a craft fair, part of a special Cleveland weekend happening, where our cousin Mitch had a stall selling her  tie-dyes, so we left as agreed and took the Rapid to the West Side market.  It was about to rain so we helped Mitch pack up her stall, quite an undertaking. I am amazed at how much she manages to pack into her small station wagon, both merchandise and the stall and display racks and canopy etc. 

Lissy, Ben. Mitch and Sara-Lila

4th Street pedestrian mall with  bars and restaurants

 

 

Then we checked out the covered market, which reminded me of the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia, or the deli section at Vic Market, only less lively at that hour. We took a free trolley ride through some of the areas which would certainly have been no-go areas a few years back. It is many years since I have looked around parts of Cleveland far from the suburban area where my family lives, and a good deal of gentrification is going on, with all the tell-tale signs - new trendy restaurants and galleries, re-purposed older commercial buildings, and houses being done up  block by block . 

We ended up on 4^th Street, where Sarah-Lila, Mitch’s 17-year-old daughter, has a part time job as hostess at a fancy restaurant where we had some drinks and snacks (and complimentary dessert!) before heading back to the Rapid to go back to our dinner date with Pam and Stan at a Brazilian restaurant with lots of small plates to share.   Unfortunately the rain had set in as we raced the couple of blocks to the Rapid station, and we had just missed our train so had to wait around for more than 20 minutes in sodden jeans and squelching shoes , not a bit comfortable. 

Aunt Lil, almost 91,  and me.

We fitted n a quick visit to Aunt Lil, who has moved into a different section of the aged care facility she has lived in for some time.  She was in fine form and she particularly enjoyed meeting Lissy for the first time.  Her son Jeffrey also popped in for a quick visit at Henry and Flo's on my last evening in Cleveland.

San Francisco - Walking Tour of Japantown

Peace Pagoda, Japantown, San Francisco

On the Saturday of the Labour Day weekend, we decided to catch another of the San Francisco City Guide walking tours.  Most on that day started a bit early for us, but with a 2PM start we figured we could have lunch in San Francisco first.  We parked the car at North Berkeley BART and caught a train just as it was leaving , which  turned out to be the wrong one. But we didn't notice at first because a man got on with a very big but clean and well-groomed short-haired dog, who leapt up to sit with his owner on the seat beside us.  The dog looked kind of worried, and had his large head resting on the guy's lap - the guy explained the seat really wasn't big enough for him, which we could certainly see!  They were on their way to a dog show and we were so fascinated by the goings on as the several kids with the man (who were relegated to other seats) were dispatched to check the maps and practised various dance moves in the aisles that we didn't watch the station names till we had gone beyond the last cross-platform transfer point. As is often the case, we couldn't make out what was being broadcast - the sound system or else the drivers' diction is unclear on BART trains. When we noticed eventually we got off, waited for a train in the other direction and retraced our steps.

We got off at Civic Centre, near the grand public buildings including the Opera House, Public Library, City Hall and Symphony Hall, and walked from there. We checked out a San Francisco art collection at the library, bought a couple of mysteries at $2 for my plane trip, had a coffee and checked out their loos.  One of the first things I noticed was that on the street where I have always noticed the City Car Share and ZipCar  parking slots, there is now an electric car slot:

Plug in spot for a shared car opposite City Hall

We didn't wait till we got to Japantown to have a sushi bento lunch, which probably was a mistake as there were so many eateries there which looked more interesting than the place we chose.

The themes of the walk were urban renewal and racism, as shown in the shameful history of the forced expulsion of Japanese Americans, including citizens, to concentration camps, and the confiscation of their property.  We began at the Peace Plaza where the pagoda, designed by Japanese architect Yoshiro Taniguchi, was given to Japantown by the people of Osaka, San Francisco's sister city in Japan.It is sited between 3 large shopping malls built in the Japanese style in the 70's.

The malls were quite crowded.   Currently some planners want to demolish them as they are older, inward looking with no street frontage, and not in the style currently favoured for malls.  We, as always, enjoyed looking at the local branches of the famed 100Yen shops that Barry loves in Japan, only the common price was $1.50 rather than the $1 /100Yen price he was expecting (he was outraged by this!). The stores and eateries were very busy, and though very few Japanese ever returned to this district, where they largely lived before WW2, they do come to this area for the shopping and the cultural institutions. Many of the stores had Japanese chachkes on sale, and this window display was one of the flower arrangements of one shop-front where they teach Ikebana.  Other shop-fronts advertised classes in dance, Japanese drumming, and various social activities for both young and older community members interested in aspects of Japanese culture.


Rather than tell you all about it here, I will refer you to the Wikipedia entry about Japantown, aka Little Osaka, where you can read a brief entry about the history of the neighbourhood, the internment etc.  I was reminded of the efforts in Melbourne to save Carlton from demolition after it was condemned by town planners as unsanitary and overcrowded - large parts of Japantown had lots of wooden Victorian houses which were torn down, leaving only a few, which by now have mostly been restored as the area is gentrified (sound familiar to Melbourne residents?)  The planners who want to redevelop the shopping centres are encountering significant local opposition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japantown,_San_Francisco

A plaque commemorating the eviction and dispossession

One of the finer renovated Victorians

These shots were taken near the corner shown below.  Buchanan Street is named for the US president widely regarded as the worst ever - but at this corner you can see the challenger!  (You may need to enlarge the picture to see it clearly: click on the image to do this.  The Bush the street is named for is indeed a forebear of both Presidents Bush.)

Intersection of Buchanan and Bush.

I just loved this street tree with its hanging golden trumpets

One of the other little aspects of local history our guide covered was the story of Mary Ellen Pleasant, another of the colourful characters that abounded in 19th Century San Francisco.  She was an African American woman, a former slave who could pass as white, but later in life changed her official racial designation from White to Black, and who had a long association with helping slaves escape via the Underground Railroad.  When she got to San Francisco after her first husband died, she ran boarding houses and restaurants for businessmen, listened to their tips, invested in the share market based on this inside information, and made a fortune.  Later she was part of a somewhat unusual household with a man officially married to someone else, and was the target of a great deal of vilification. She could be considered the Mother of Civil Rights, as she fought and won several legal battles including one to desegregate public transport in San Francisco, many decades before Rosa Parks. Her Wikipedia entry is pretty bare bones, but there are other sites with more information is you Google her name.  We stopped at this plaque outside her former  mansion, amidst a row of huge eucalypts she planted, and heard her life story in brief.

Memorial Plaque to Mary Ellen Pleasant.