Sunny but really windy

And so is the weather here in Aberystwyth, Wales.

Tomorrow I go to York for the weekend.  There was nowhere to stay in Manchester or Liverpool.  I might go during the week. I might not.  I might go to Leeds or do something else.  I HAVE NO IDEA.  I will be back in London on Friday, this much I know.  Not yet sure what I will do Friday as I have two good options.

Anyway, PHOTOS!

1. I am very little next to a pyramid stone
2. It took a long time but I managed to read an entire children's book in Hebrew.
3. Best advert ever!  Munich, Germany
4. The lion facing me is facing the government and it's mouth is open because you should be able to speak against your government.  The lion facing the horrible yellow church has a closed mouth, since you shouldn't be allowed to speak out against God.  This is where Hitler gave a lot of speeches in his rise to power.  This is the most ironic thing I saw in Munich.
5. I went to Dachau Concentration Camp and entered the same as everyone else.
6. Perhaps the most vivid memorial I've seen to date.  Also perhaps the only respectfully quiet school group I encountered.
7. I visited Hermione's home in the Cotswolds.  This is legitimately where the people of Kingham shop.  There are wicker baskets.

Deathtrap., Tribes, and a rediscovered desire

Hanisha says that more languages a person speaks, the more perceptive they generally are, since they know how to see something through many lenses.  She didn't make this up.  She is working on her psychoanalysis masters and she was telling me something she has learned. 

When I saw online the play TRIBES playing at The Royal Court Theatre, I knew she was the person to take.  We snagged some of the last seats in today's house, the last performance with seats before I leave London (tomorrow) for the beautiful north.  I hope its beautiful.

This is the video that made me drop all plans to buy tickets to a Saturday matinee:
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The play was amazing.  I cried and I laughed and I felt energized.  Not just becuase my own issues right now with people are so insignificant compared to what they were going through, but because for me good theatre is a cure-all.  Seriously.  (So why am I not cured?)  And my desire all through high school to take sign language was reawakened.  Why didn't I?  Well, I chose Stained Glass over it.  The only way to take an outside class at Franklin was to replace your sixth period.  And that was the one class I wouldn't give up.  Then it was STC-2.  Then it was theatre at Poly.  Then then then.  When Sylvia says that the community is so small because the only ones who know sign language are deaf people, I thought of my mom (hi mom!) and her speaking in sign to tourists in Israel.  And I thought about the actors playing Billy and Sylvia.  And about mom working with the Chicago Theatre for the Deaf as an interpreter and I realized that while I'm most recently on the path to Hebrew, have the best basis and career-driven reasons for  learning Spanish, I still really want to learn sign language.



Gabe is in England and she and I went to see DEATHTRAP. on Thursday.  I wrote it down to see because I love Jonathon Groff and it got good reviews.  The play was AY-MAZING.  One of the best I have seen in a while.  We got day seats, at a still massively pricey 27 quid, and therefore sat in the front row.  My GOD does Jonathon Groff spit so much.  Acting with him must be kinda hard when saliva and snot (he was crying) can be seen flying off his face by the front (probably few) rows.  Especially when one must kiss him after that.  And I would still totally do it.  (So hot.  So gay.)  The play is...well, hard to talk about because it is a murder mystery.  It's by Ira Levin, so a win so far.  A playwright of murder mystery fame hasn't had a hit in 18 years.  He lives with his nervous wife in New England and sometimes teaches seminars.  One of his students sends him a play he has written called DEATHTRAP.  A five character murder mystery in two acts.  It's brilliant and the boy has no idea.  No one else has read it and no one even knows he has been working on it.  It's a surefire hit, but would Sidney really kill for a hit?  His wife isn't so sure she knows him anymore.  And the boy, Cliff, could be walking into a terrible deathtrap, carrying his only copy of the play.  This we all know.  After that, it gets twisted and awesome, and like all good mysteries, nothing is as it seems.  It's funny and brilliantly acted and truly is full of many twists and turns and I will admit to screaming at one point (cause if I don't, Gabe will say it anyway).  It was superb!  I was geeking out over it all day yesterday.  I was having normal conversations and yet in my head, it was all I was thinking about.  I really envy people like Groff (like Amy Adams) who can play wide-eyed wonder completely convincingly.  It is a skill I do not posses.

It's one of those plays that comments on itself cleverly a lot.  Because the play and the play in the play are called DEATHTRAP. whenever its brilliance is mentioned, it is obviously about what we are watching at the same time.  The two other characters are in the form of the lawyer/friend of Sidney's and the psychic living next door from a foreign country. 

So two amazing shows this week.  And the amazing keeps coming because tomorrow I leave for about 1.5 weeks of travel up northish.  Tomorrow I will spend the day at Hermione's family home in the Cotswolds then go to Bath.  Gabe meets me in Bath on Monday for the day then I go to Aberyswyth, Wales to hang with Ashura.  Then Liverpool and Manchester and York happen before coming back to London for my final weekend.  And this week my feeling of displacement in London has left me feeling kind of like shit.  Which has the plus side for all my friends (hi Melaissa) and family (hi mom) that I actually am starting to want to come home.  Not fully, obviously, but it's there.  I think I will be glad for the "normalcy" and security of it.  Whatever that means. 

Fawkes

BONFIRE NIGHT!!!!

And it's raining.

Went to Camden today and made a greatbaddecision.  It's adorable and I love it.  I want to wear it!  But not tonight.  It'll probably be too cold.

munchin'

 I fell in love with Munich.  It was a wonderful place.  I really like Bavarian culture and they even managed some good vegetarian food.

I still don't know if I have stuff to deal with about my visit to Dachau Concentration Camp.  Maybe it just does get easier as I see more of them.  Maybe it's because I'm older.  Maybe it's because there were swarms of school groups full of disrespectful children singing and yelling.  I just wanted some quiet to really take in the site.  And maybe it was that after Auschwitz, Dachau, for all its terror and for setting the pace for all camps, doesn't come close, as an informative museum.  Either way the horror of the place was bearable and digestable, which I was unprepared for.

Halloween was disappointing but fun.  I'm excited for my week of travel beginning next weekend.  

I have a long list of plays to see before I leave and no money to even take the tube to see them, let alone buy tickets.  I have to give up on seeing Michael Gambon in Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape because the cheapest seats are £27.50 and there is not student discount.  LAME.

life force

i had a great time in israel, but i am going to love munich i can tell.

the air is crisp, cold (4 degrees C), and fresh.  i feel relaxed.

No big deal

Serenity (not the valley or the ship)

After the constant verbal male harrassment and pollution of the otherwise lovely Cairo, staying with my cousin Tami and her family on Moshava Kinneret in the Galilee is such a nice wind down.  Cairo was great, but I was so dirty and sweaty and always lost.  I stayed with a great guy in CSing that Courtney Robinson connected me to.  I saw Sufi dancing and pyramids and the synagogue Rabbi Ben Ezra rebuilt.

I then weathered a terrible 19 hours of travel.  A 10 pm night bus out of Cairo was not a treat.  I was the only single female traveler on it.  And while people left me alone, I got a lot of looks.  Deciding to actually sleep on it, I took a sleeping pill, which helped, but left me disoriented at all stops.  It was only once I was safely in Tami's car in Haifa and I told her did I realize that taking a sleeping pill in that situation was probably not a real smart thing to do, safety wise.  I arrived in Taba at 5:30 am and walked to the border and crossed into Israel by 615.  Took a cab to the bus station in Eilat (that ride was more expensive by 5 shekels each time I took it) and sat until 8 am for the bus to Tel Aviv.  That bus got in at 1 pm.  I sat until the 1:30 bus to Haifa.  Arrived at 2:45 pm and waited until 3:30 for Tami to pick me up near some tech center.  Then we drove to her house on the Moshava.  At 5:30 I finally sat down in her house and ate some homemade food.  

Then we went to a ceremony run by the moshava's children for Rabin rememberence day.  Didn't understand a word.  Then a lovely dinner and bed.  Today I woke at 10 am, tried to make breakfast and get online.  Neither worked.  Very confused went back to bed.  Apparently the power went out around 9 am.  Slept until 2 pm when I was woken for lunch then read a bit and went to the lake to swim.  Then dinner and a nice talk with Tami and Amit. 

Tomorrow, however, Lior's father is leaving Tiberias at 930 am from his sisters, which saves me a ride but ruins my sleeping in plans.  So I'm getting up at 7 am and going for a morning kayak and swim in the lake with Amit, then catching a bus to Tiberias, where Lior's dad will pick me up.  I'll be in Tel Aviv by 11:30 am.  On Friday midday I switch to Uri and Ella's, where I will stay until I leave Israel on Monday.

Honestly, my family is so wonderful and so are my friends.  I miss Adel, his cat, and Christina, who made Cairo so wonderful.  But I also love being with family.  I know that some day I will go to Egypt again and see other parts (especially Sinai), and of course I will come back to Israel.  So for the first time since getting to Israel, I'm okay with the idea of leaving.  Something to do with the Kinneret...and overwhelming sense of peace and, yes, serenity.

I did this thing

where i got kinda spontaneous.  anyway i'm in cairo, egypt.  i saw the sufi dancing show and then the pyramids of giza.  guess which i was more in awe of?  

i go back to israel on the night bus tomorrow (monday) and arrive at the taba border somewhere around 4 or 5 am.  some  night bus, huh?  where do i go then?  no idea.  gotta call tami and see if her and ahmit are at home or in eilat.  if home, to the kinneret, i hope.  otherwise....uh....tel aviv i guess.  no idea.

Fwd: picspam

1. Amsterdam.

2. A quote by Janathon Saffron Fower in the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam.  How accurate.

3. Rhine River Valley, Germany

4. Lock bridge, Koln, Germany

5. Yup, I am a child.

6. I fell asleep on the curb across fromt his synagogue in 2004.  Prague.

7. What a tourist! 

8. Going for a dip in the Dead Sea.

9. Bird watching in the Hulah Valley

10. Ba'hai Gardens, Haifa, Israel

11. The same.

Ani lo mevinah Ivrit.

And I don't understand Russian either.  But thanks for assuming I did.

 

I'm in Israel now, have been for almost 2 weeks.  We spent a few days in Tel Aviv, met my dad's cousin Uri and his wife and kids (Ella, Ron and Hadar, respectively) and then went to Jerusalem.  After that we went to visit family friends Raz and his family down on Moshav V'at Kikar, I think.  A Moshav is a place where the community works and farms together like a Kibbutz, but people have private property and such.  Their moshav is by the Dead Sea and they grow dates.  Really really good dates.  Their tiny daughter is adorable, but after 5 minutes in a car with her I was ready to throw her out the window.  This is why I am not having children.  Ever.

 

After the moshav we picked Evan up in Tel Aviv (he chose to stay with Uri) and went to Haifa.  We stayed in an empty apartment that mom and dad's friend owns with her siblings since their mother's death.  But no one had been there in a LOOOONNNG time.  How do we know?  We found a bird skeleton on the couch.  No feathers, no organs, no skin anymore.  Just the skeleton.  It looked really cool, but I felt bad for it.  From that apartment, we went to Safed, Moshav Kinneret (where dad's other cousin Tami lives with her family who is awesome), and some other town or two.  Tami and her husband are marine biologists and they invented a sunscreen that neautralises jelly fish stings.  Totally safe swimming. 

 

Now we are back in Tel Aviv.  On Monday my parents and brother leave Israel.  I will take a bus to Jerusalem to see Rachel Marder (who I ran into at Simchat Torah services at some synangogue), Mari, and MichelleAran, both of whom are at the University of Jerusalem for the year.  Then I will go to Eilat and snuba diving I hope at the reef Mark told me is amazing near the Princess Hotel.  From Eilat I am going to Cairo, Eygpt to see pyramids and stay with a friend of Courtney Robinson's.  From there back to Haifa to spend a day with Haley Panneton, who has started her year of university there.  Hopefully another day at Moshav Kinneret (the lake is probably my favortie place to be in in Israel) and a night at the cousins'.  Then back to tel Aviv for my last 4 or 5 days to stay with Lior half the time and Uri half the time. 

 

The 25th I go to Munich, hopefully not all the way to Prague (gonna try to not get on my connecting flight).  I fly back to London on October 29th at 7 am (gross).  If I have the time in Munich, I am going to go to the Dachu Concentration Camp. 

 

I will be back in London for Halloween, although lord knows where I am going to stay.  I've got 3.5 weeks in the UK.  I'm hoping to visit Wales (yay, AshKitty!), Manchester, Liverpool, York, Bath, and maybe Brighton or the Costwalds to visit Hermione's family homestead.  I fly back to California on November 22nd and plan to spend the following month in a complete depression (save seeing Natalie) of having to live in Elk Grove and not Israel or London. 

 

Man, when I put it like that, my trip is practically over.  (It's moments like this I have to remind the depression to wait until I get home.)

 

And in really important news, I am now the owner of bright pink (yes, Meredith, pink) jeans that Lior didn't want.  Hehe.  I love them.