All in cultural musings

The Two Walls of Israel

The Two Walls of Israel

Laurie Gilberg Vander Velde
cultural musings, travel essay

words + photos by Laurie Gilberg Vander Velde

This is a story about two walls.  They are both in Israel.  One is holy; the other I found to be horrible.  In the short span of 24 hours I had an intimate experience with each of these walls. 

The horrible wall is grey, massive and foreboding.  It snakes over the hills and valleys, reminiscent of many photos I’ve seen of the Great Wall of China.  But this is not a “great” wall.  Its purpose is the same, however:  to keep others out, to make a separation barrier between us and them.  To enter Bethlehem we had to pass through the wall by first entering a large concrete building.  A colorful sign outside said “Peace Be With You” in English, Hebrew and Arabic and was signed by the Israel Ministry of Tourism.  I didn’t really feel like a welcomed tourist as we wound our way through chutes, past large turnstiles with lights that said “green” for “go” and “red” for “stop.”  A flash of our American passports and we were waved on.   We exited through a simple doorway to the other side of the wall, to a different world.

The wall towered above us, probably 20 feet.  No longer just grey, the wall was covered with graffiti.  The graffiti wasn’t just words, but artful angry pictures, one of a lion devouring what appeared to be a white dove with the English words “Stop the Wall” and “hypocrisy.”   Instead of the field of ancient olive trees we’d seen on the other side of the wall, we were right in the midst of a neighborhood.  A woman, her head covered, called to her daughter below from the balcony of her house just 40 feet or so from the wall.  Children played in the street. We spent time with friends of our son Josh, Palestinians who work for peace but who are trapped on the island that is Bethlehem.  We had coffee in Josh’s friend’s home where his mother served us cookies and proudly picked mint and lemon balm from her rooftop garden so we could savor the scent.  

Kandinsky and Kindness in New York City

Shirley B. Moskow
Art and Culture, cultural musings

by Shirley Moskow

They were meant to be together so when I learned that the Guggenheim Museum was celebrating the 50th anniversary of its landmark building with an in-depth retrospective of the Russian avant-garde artist Wasilly Kandinsky, I knew I had to go.

“The Angel in The Architecture,” trumpeted The New York Times headline for the review of the Guggenheim show, which runs through January 10. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the building especially for the museum’s founding collection of Kandinsky’s non-objective work.

I drove into New York City from Boston -- a tactic I do not recommend. And, speaking of angels, one must have been watching over me because I found a parking space within walking distance of the museum. Easy, right? Nope. I had a problem with the parking meter, a style that was new to me. Directions said it took credit cards, but when I slipped my Visa card into the slot and punched in the length of time I expected to be gone, nothing happened. I tried to remove my card from the slot to try again. The parking meter held the card in a vise-like grip.

A father with a curly-headed toddler in hand saw my predicament. He forcefully yanked my credit card from the machine and counted four quarters into my palm. “It’s easier with coins,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said, handing back his change. I certainly appreciated this random act of kindness, but I already had quarters.

“Keep it,” he insisted. “You may need it later.”

I thought about his kindess as I approached the Guggenheim.

A Sixty-Year Love Story from Morocco, Israel and France

A Sixty-Year Love Story from Morocco, Israel and France

Bethany Ball
Personal essay, cultural musings, life

by Bethany Ball

Marco and Aliza descended on our house in Nyack New York with their irrepressible energy.  Aliza, who is visiting from Israel, is the mother of our dear friend Sagi. And Marco is her boyfriend visiting from his home in Bordeaux, France.  They were staying with Sagi in his tiny apartment in Williamsburg and had come over to cook a meal for Sagi and his friends. Marco immediately settled in, a spry, fit man in his early seventies, making the most of our ill-equipped kitchen (I asked myself: Where are my kitchen scissors? Why do I not have large cutting boards? Or serving dishes?). Marco speaks French, Portuguese and Hebrew. Everyone who came for dinner spoke a smattering of one or several of those languages. If we got stuck, Marco spoke to Aliza in French and she translated in Hebrew or English. There was moule (en francais), moulim (b’ivrit) or mussels with a butter sauce that we were instructed to drink. Our friend Anthony (a native New Yorker married to an Israeli) brought lamb kabob and sharpened knives. Kristen, a native Alabaman chopped parsley. Sagi worked the grill, along with my husband. Anthony’s Israeli wife Abi and I chased after our not-quite-two-year olds and filled in the gaps--like searching for kitchen appliances and washing dishes. Abi set the table and tore and folded paper towel for napkins (why do I never have napkins?). Kristen’s boyfriend Etay played DJ, chopped vegetables and teased Marco. “Marco! I put on French music! Just for you.”

“Bah!” he said, making a face, “It is Carla Bruni. She does not sing. She talks!”

“Give us some Yves Montand,” Aliza called out.

Marco served my grilled fish, branzini or Mediterranean Sea bass. He called it by its French name, Loup de Mer.

10 Ways to Start Your Day around the World

Vera Marie Badertscher
Culinary Travel, cultural musings

by Vera Marie Badertscher

I am not one of those Americans for whom a familiar breakfast serves as a security blanket.  You know what I mean.  “I must have fresh ground coffee.” “I have to start the day with a three-minute egg. Don’t those people have an egg timer?”

I welcome that plunge into local culture, as, not quite full conscious, I am confronted with something on a plate or in a bowl that seems, well, foreign.

 photo by Meaduva via Flickr

 

How to Eat Breakfast around the World


1. New Zealand

Baked beans. Okay, get over it.  Beans are a good source of protein, have a touch of sweetness, and the fiber equivalent of stewed prunes.  The milk for your tea will be down the hall in the hotel in a small fridge. 

2. Austria

Loosen your belt. Several times a day, stop in a café for Austria’s favorite sport—piling schlag (whipped cream) on coffee mit chocolate mit maybe a slurp of rum. But that is not for breakfast. At breakfast time, stack your plate from the tidy buffet with meats, pink and brown rounds, cubes, rectangular slices marbled with white.  Beside the meat, platters with neatly arranged stacks of cheeses—hard, soft, pale yellow to pumpkin orange, and hard boiled eggs in egg cups. Appel strudel and amazing breads. Try the sour pickles—honestly they go well with the meat.  Be sure to walk a lot between castles and churches.

3. Switzerland

Same as Austria, but with more cheese. Stuff your pockets with Gruyere and break it out for lunch on a mountainside overlooking a lake.

4. Ireland

Ireland cooks up the kind of breakfast that leaves you in a stupor. Three kinds of meat and four kinds of bread (including Irish soda bread and heavy country wheat bread) and butter so good it makes you wonder if calling that yellow stuff wrapped in foil that you eat at home should be prosecuted for false labeling. Pile on some fried potatoes, some eggs, and take a nap before lunch. Only a few cups of strong Irish tea will keep you alert.

DRAMA AT THE 99cent store

Gwen Davis
Life Lessons, cultural musings
I went yesterday to pick up a prescription at the CVS pharmacy on Lincoln Boulevard in Venice (California, photo via Flickr by ElFreddyless fortunately, but not so bad), and as I parked saw a police car pull up in front of the 99 cent store. Three young officers, two of them men, got out of the vehicle, triangle-cornered a short, squat, fiftyish Chicano just getting onto his bicycle with a green backpack, and guns drawn, told him to lie down on the ground. Guns drawn. No shit. They first ordered him to put his hands on his head, and as he was slow to do so, obviously shocked and frightened, with an apparent language difficulty, got him to lie down on the ground, in increments—I couldn’t hear what they were saying so all of this played out MOS—but first he was on his knees, then fully face down on the sidewalk, where they put his hands behind his back for him, cuffed him, got him gingerly onto his feet, and walked him to the trunk of their police car, made him lean against it, frisked him, and started going through his back-pack.


As it was outside the 99cent store and I had noted great congregations of homeless outside it the day before, I assumed they had been called for a suspected shoplifting. But guns drawn? Three of them, including the young blonde policewoman, holding their weapons with both hands and aiming it at him as if they were breaking into a meth lab.
Fresh Eyes

Fresh Eyes

Jules Older
Life Lessons, cultural musings, travel essay

by Jules Older

When you live in a place, after a while, you lose your fresh eyes.

It doesn't mean you're dumb or insensitive or unaware of your surroundings. Unless you work hard to correct it, sure as fog, sooner or later you're gonna misplace your awareness of what you see and smell, hear and taste on your way to work or walking home from school or going out for the Sunday paper.

Sometimes it’s actually a relief. As one travel-writer friend sighed about her blissful oblivion to her hometown surroundings, “Ah, the luxury of not seeing!”

Hidden Encounters With Saudi Women

Patricia McGregor
cultural musings

by Patricia McGregor

Even in our black abayas and scarves it’s obvious that we’re foreigners. Saudi women rarely venture on to the streets. This is a man’s world. I know the women are somewhere and I’m determined to make contact.

photo by Dave G. HouserWe travel in a full- size tour bus; an escort of police cars, with flashing lights, and secret security men, with big guns, drive ahead of and behind us. No one can miss us.

This works to my advantage. Not being allowed to drive, women stare out of their car windows. We make eye contact.

As my face isn’t covered, it’s easy for them to see my smile. All I can see are their eyes smiling back at me. Some women even return my subtle wave. One lifts up the corner of her veil to get a better look.

Thank goodness for malls and washrooms. It’s there that I get my chance. Curious about me, the women initiate conversations as they touch up their makeup. Why I am here, school, their great shoes, my beaded abaya, Canada. We laugh. I have a brief encounter with woman after woman. As a new grandmother, I admire their babies and show pictures of Claire. We smile and a bond forms in spite of the language barrier.

Dead And Dragged Out On The Throughway: Is this really a better way to go than by air?

Sallie Bingham
Life Lessons, cultural musings, travel essay, travel writing

by Sallie Bingham

Santa Fe to Tucson in a one-day mad dash

Jack the Pup is riding shotgun on the roommate’s lap as we head west on I-40 at nine AM, planning to reach my sister’s house in Tucson in time for dinner. The first miles across the desert, numbingly familiar by now, yield as this time we’d planned a back roads excursion south, just across the Arizona border. The map shows one of those intriguing dotted lines, a scenic highway, just what we need after hours of rumbling 18-wheelers…

To ready ourselves for adventure, we stop in Gallup at what is now our favorite eatery: Earl’s Family Restaurant. Here in Navajo Country Earl’s is shopping center, family reunion, and good staple New Mexico food: guacamole, burritos and so forth. Outside, Navajo craftspeople jam the sidewalk with their tables; inside, they patrol the aisles, silently holding out pins, bracelets, necklaces, and, in a departure from the usual, a pair of weird lamps, the ceramic bases coated with sand and then painted with iconic motifs. I’m charmed, I must buy at twenty dollars each, then wonder, too late, where in the world I’m going to put them….

Summer at Moon Palace

Bethany Ball
cultural musings, travel essay, travel writing

by Bethany Ball

Most people associate North Michigan with snow, ice and long difficult winters.  But for me, the area is associated with Moon Palace, the summer cottage of my parents' best friends, where we spent nearly every weekend of my childhood. We passed the four-hour Friday-night drive listening to music – show tunes, folk songs, and NPR– until I’d finally drop off to sleep.

To me, coming from the city, it was as remote as the moon itself. First and foremost there were no other children—most parents waiting until real summer when the pool opens—and I am an only child. I spent my days reading Frank Baum's Oz series, which I was obsessed with, or listening to Neil Diamond tapes on my Walkman. This tiny tape deck with black headphones was, to me, probably the greatest invention ever.

When the weather was warm, I would prowl around the dense virgin forests that surrounded the cottage;  I knew every inch of them. I dragged a large section of nailed-together two-by-fours  together into a thicket of bushes and ferns. This was my house. If it rained, I would hide under the overturned canoe that was dragged up from Moon Lake. Once underneath the canoe, I imagined I could live there, though the ground was icy, and I'd have to wear my winter snowmobile boots ( great big ugly boots that I wouldn't be caught dead in if I were in the city but which kept my feet warm and dry in the forest).  I caught frogs and named  them: Fred, Franny, Frank, and Fran. Even though it was summer, ice formed in the night and early morning, before the sun had time to melt it. I walked along the ice’s edge, my feet breaking through to the shallow water below, the snowmobile boots surprisingly effective at keeping my feet dry.

Boycott Mexico? No, boycott American stupidity

Boycott Mexico? No, boycott American stupidity

Eric Lucas
Current Events, cultural musings, travel, travel essay, travel writing

The market vendor handed me the sack of fresh-made potato chips she’d just hauled out of the fryer, and motioned that I should add a bit of salt and lime juice. I told her thanks in my serviceable Spanish (mil gracias, senora) and did as instructed. Then I gently lifted one chip from the sack and took an experimental bite. I’d never tasted made-on-the-spot potato chips until my wife and I wandered by this food cart in the market in Patzcuaro, Michoacan, Mexico.

It was the best potato chip ever.

Too bad that one potato chip had more mental acuity than some of our own countrymen. Don’t go to Mexico and spend your money, urge the Americans United to Halt Tourism in Mexico, on the novel theory that the way to discourage Mexican immigrants from coming here to earn money is for us to not go there and spend money.

Easter and Passover Different

Judith Fein
Life Lessons, cultural musings, holiday tradtions, travel essay, travel writing

by Judith Fein

I live in Santa Fe, the City Different.  It’s a town with a tap dancing rabbi, a stock broker who runs the community theatre, a real estate broker who moonlights by teaching cooking classes, legions of natives who protect the prairie dogs with their lives, a car that drives around with a suitcase on the roof to remind people that they have emotional baggage, tricked out lowriders, a Jewish mariachi, dead trees turned into sculptures of archangels, a judge who banged down his gavel and sentenced wrong-doers to bring a holiday turkey to court.

It should come as no surprise that this holiday season is replete with soul, spirit and a lot of quirk.

A few days ago, the Chabad rabbi, who is never seen in public without his black suit, black hat and pronounced beard, performed a little birthday party for the sun on the central Plaza.

'Within the Walls' of Elegance and Hospitality

Melissa Josue
cultural musings, travel essay, travel writing

by Melissa Josue

When I think of Filipino restaurants, I think of Sunday brunch after mass, the drive to the other side of Union City after what felt like a long hour on a church pew, and the joy I felt when my parents let my sister and I choose our favorite dishes from the steam table at our neighborhood Filipino restaurant.

I remember the fluorescent lights and tacky mirrored walls, the one-room family restaurant next to a liquor store and a crowded Asian supermarket with the special of the day hand-written on a piece of paper and taped to the wall. Behind the counter there was usually a woman speaking Tagalog who asked what I'd like to order. She got wide-eyed and incredulous after I explained to her in English that my parents spoke English at home and I only heard Tagalog when they fought. I felt a fleeting sense of shame before she handed me my turon (fried banana roll) wrapped in tin foil or kutsinta (brown rice cake) with a little tub of shredded coconut before I sat down on a vinyl covered chair and white veneer or Formica table.

A Year On The Ground: Riding the Rails

Sallie Bingham
Life Lessons, Rail Travel, cultural musings, travel essay, travel writing

by Sallie Bingham

Train travel is becoming, rapidly, as comfortable as an old shoe, and it takes the elegance of Union Station in Washington to remind me of the miracle of this way of moving along the ground.

But first, we stand for a long time in freezing drizzle in the Amtrak station in Richmond, modernized to dreariness, although the old photographs on the walls of the waiting room attest to the day when this was a major terminus. In those decades, eighty or more years ago, three train tracks crossed here, bearing engines and their massive loads, human and material, north, south and west. During the War, as my a historical Richmond grandmother called it, a major Union objective was to choke off these rail lines that were carrying supplies to the beleaguered Confederacy. All that is reduced to a shadow, now; only a few travelers wait to board when the train crawls in from Newport News.

The roommate and I are growing particular. The bedroom I reserved, which seemed so well appointed on the leg from Florida to Richmond, now promises to be horribly cramped. We try, at the ticket window in Union Station, to upgrade—in airline lingo—to a bedroom, which has actual beds and a bathroom, but the additional cost would be almost a thousand dollars, out of reach for nearly everyone traveling by rail. These bedrooms remain mostly empty, and it seems to me that Amtrak might reconsider what they are charging.

A Year On The Ground: Rail Riders

Sallie Bingham
Life Lessons, Rail Travel, cultural musings, travel essay, travel writing

by Sallie Bingham

In the diner car somewhere in Georgia, Keith, the kindly, amused and amusing steward, explains the exigencies of Amtrak, under funded, according to Jimmie, the sleeping car porter, since its inception.

“Did they get rid of your chefs?” I ask Keith, having heard on an earlier east-west trip that chef losing had been one of Amtrak’s attempts at economy.

“Not our chefs but our chef’s helpers, the ones who used to make salads, things like that, and wash dishes, the same time they got rid of china and glasses and linen table clothes. Now we just wash the wine glasses and the knives and forks and throw everything else away—a big waste,” he adds, before I can comment on the vast bags of non-recycled trash the new system must produce.

I commiserate before going back to the dinner menu.

“I recommend the steak,” the big, brightly colored and adorned woman next to me says with authority. The steak is amply promoted on the menu, its description outclassing the chicken, pasta and seafood, so I order it and it is delicious, as well as free. Our first class tickets entitle us to three meals a day.

My seatmate is traveling from Miami to her home in New Jersey. She speaks with a familiar accent. When the roommate who refuses to bow to political correctness asks her if she’s from Mexico, she replies with a flash of pride, “Cuba”.

A Room with a Tub

Susan Davidson
Life Lessons, cultural musings, travel essay, travel writing

by Susan Davidson

I still like to go back to England where I spent the first fifteen years of my life. Every visit reminds me of where I am from. London is not where I was born - Wolverhampton is - but I think of it as my home town and I think of myself not as an ex-pat but as a native who happens to live somewhere else. I love the city's vibe. There is always something new, creative and hip that co-exists with the historic and anachronistic. It's a great mix. There are, however, times -- such as the night I spent at Claridge's, the grande dame of posh hotels in London - when I can't decide whether life is better for a contemporary American or a Brit from another century.

While London certainly has its share of five-star hotels, few can claim as much old world charm as Claridge's, built in 1898. From the doorman's tip of a hat for the ladies to the Art Nouveau and Art Deco décor, the hotel is redolent of good manners and a gentler age. Concessions to the 21st century include permitting cell phones and cigars in the lobby where the walls are lined with black and white photographs of British royalty and ours -- Jackie Kennedy in evening gown and tiara. What caught my eye though was an elevator called the Ladies Lift located near a discreet, side entrance to the hotel.

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