More of
01 January Sunday DAY
37 of trip
Back in DC. Great
start to the year! Kids went out for New Year’s Eve and we babysit and got to
bed by 10pm. Our kind of night actually. Yesterday we left our hotel Clarion in
New Castle Delaware and made it home pretty quickly, not much traffic on the road.
We started by taking a secondary road, which was nice, you actually see the
country that way, but by Baltimore we took the interstate home.
We took Liam to the
local park. It was a nice relaxed time. I had an interesting conversation with
another dad watching his kid. He was from Brazil working in the Brazilian
consulate. He’s also been posted in Guatemala City, where he was paid for trips
home because of the danger. This is the 2nd person we’ve randomly
chatted to employed at a consulate. The other one was a woman as we were
boarding Best Bus from NYC to DC. She was working in the Spanish consulate.
Coincidentally, the Cambodian consulate is 2 blocks from where we are living
with Chris and Jess.
Church time, Chris
again preaching an amazing sermon on the disconnect with who we really are, and
how we act. Lots of things to think about here. Terrell and I went for a walk
through the local area, gorgeous little row houses, close to Georgetown.
Sweet potato and spinach mash for all. Again, as I have waffled on about in previous blogs – let me do the cooking then I know we will be having a low-carb meal.
02 January Monday DAY 38 of trip
Today was Chris’ day off, so he
took us to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Really great.
I’m not such a museum person, but this is so well done and interesting , even
to the museum-semi-literate such as me.
Lovely morning, and
then lunch (pulled chicken for me) in the cafeteria.
Large salad for me.
03 January Tuesday DAY 39 of trip
Purchased slide projector for $50. We had looked on Craig’s List for a projector that would hold my father’s carousel slide trays – there were 18 of them with up to 140 slides in each, and found one for sale 45 minutes away in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Gaithersburg is located to the northwest of Washington, D.C., and is considered a suburb and a primary city within the Washington–Arlington–Alexandria, DC–VA–MD–WV Metropolitan Statistical Area.
A bit of a well-to-do space with large stately looking homes. Stepping into another person’s space is interesting; culture-evolution at play. This dude who was 75 said he had found the secret to success in life when he was 53; he retired and his wife kept working. This sounded quite sound to me and I took a quick look at my wife only to realise we just sort of retired a few months ago with me pushing 70 and she barely at the start of her youthful 60s. Retirement seems to have been good for him. A nice home, grand piano, well decorated for the Christmas holiday, through his kitchen I could see a pond and nature. I could live here. The slide projector was a Kodak that my father’s carousels fitted in.
Outside of the little rich-man’s-cove we found a bit of a shopping centre with our favourite shops, a Staples, an Aldi grocery store, and a Dunkin Donut where Narda found two donuts to her liking and I had coffee to go with my home-made organic low-carb cookie. (he’s such a try-hard!)
We started looking at slides soon after getting back home.
Made spinach soufflé dinner for us all. Baby Liam likes my cooking and has never complained about a meal.
04 January Wednesday DAY
40 of trip
Finished blog about New York and visits and posted at https://neuage.me/2017/01/05/snow-country/
To post office mailed book about my brother to Kathy. I discuss this book in the previous blog.
Groceries - made sweet potato and pumpkin soup for dinner
Forgot Sacha’s birthday – which was today but yesterday in Australia. {I was a single parent for about 20 years. I never forgot Sacha’s birthday in thirty-four years. My feeble excuse is that the 4th of January in Australia is the third of January in DC. Sorry Sacha. I will buy you that pony I promised you as a child next time}
05 January Thursday DAY
41 of trip
Up at 8 am out the door at noon
Counted our money and started looking at trips for 2017-2018, main idea is to get a house-swap before August or after August with a boat trip around 1 – 15 August anywhere in the world. As I will turn 70 August 10th I want to be at sea which will be some sort of symbolic representation of my life.
Back to the museums by
bus which was fun. Had an interesting chat with a passenger about the state of
the nation…couldn’t really figure out if she was pro or anti the president
elect, whom I can no longer name (we have decided to ignore him from now on,
it’s too stressful to even think about this maniac). She was keen to know about
education in Australia, but pretty supportive of Australia’s tight borders.
Hmmm.
The Museum of Natural
History was simply amazing. We watched a film on creatures in the deep ocean,
which we really enjoyed. Then we checked out the Origins of Humans display
which was so interesting, especially knowing that Jess is involved with the
research in this area. We should be riding buses more, you really get to
experience things differently.
Hmm, stuck in the back
with oma
We are fascinated about our origins. I am more interested in cultural evolution than physical. No one has shown for sure how we got to where we are physically. Millions of years, thousands of years, trillions of stars and planets; perhaps even millions of universes. Too much to grasp for me and it does not really matter. I have this body and all I can do is shove in what I believe will be good to keep it going. I drink my smoothies, eat my low-carb crap, I have been a vegetarian for lots of decades for better or not, I exercise, and bop around with mostly happy thoughts. I was born white with whatever DNA stuff one has. I could have been born something else but I wasn’t. What I find fascinating is cultural evolution. How did I get these beliefs, how did society get this way, how have certain people re-invented slavery for thousands of years (now it is working for minimum wages for some)? How do religions get made up and people are controlled this way to be pawns of wealthy intuitions? How does society get shaped by fake news? Inventions? Events?
Narda of course, had to point out that one exhibit tried to claim that eating meat was important for the development of the brain and the increase of intelligence. Really? I know lots of idiots who eat meat and only cool people who are vegetarian. What more proof do we need?
Being sucked into having my face morphed into what I would
have looked like 50,000 years ago (it was free) I had myself transformed. I
didn’t care about the extra grey hair but whether today or 50,000 years ago
would I have thought the same? Probably not, they didn’t have social media to
influence us.
Made dinner for all: sweet potato chips, soup from last night, meat for them, mushrooms and salad for me.
06 January Friday DAY
42 of trip
Finished looking and separating slides of father. What to do with thousands of old slides? We took a few out of each carousel and I am taking a photo of the ones I am keeping to have a digital copy and maybe printing some. The difficulty in tossing away the past is that the past then disappears. Thus my argument against de-clutter courses and their silly ideas. The few I was dragged to (kicking and screaming – at least inside of myself) annoyed me. I have a shed back in Australia full of my crap (the shed is small only 20 foot by 40 foot) and of course our house too, but here is my problem with de-cluttering. For example, my father’s slides. When they find their way to the local land-fill here in DC for the next brothel or whatever they build on top of land-fill the memories are gone too. I no doubt am the last one with images of my father from the early 1900s and the stories associated with them. Well Narda knows some of the stories too. My father who was cactus at 102 years-old told her stories when he was in his late 90s when we hung out with him in upstate New York (2002 – 2010). He was born in 1905 and his teenage years were filled with the wonders of the first car, the first telephone, World War 1, World War next, and all the stuff of the early twentieth century that we know little of. We barely remember when there was no internet or evil GPS that get their jollies by getting us lost all over the States then laughing deep in cyberspace about how disorientated we are. By destroying images of the past the past no longer exists except on some level of consciousness that at least I am not evolved enough to replay again after I am dead.
A lot of the slides were of travels my parents did. I grew up doing road-trips. Every summer we were off exploring and camping in national parks for a few weeks then I got shipped off to Bible Camp for the rest of the summer, every summer. I did like the travel though. In later life after I left home my parents travelled even more (I left home about age sixteen, just to avoid being shipped off to Bible Camp anymore as it was affecting the structure of my adolescent brain development in a crazy way causing me to spend years in alternative therapy of my own 60’s-70s choosing to erase those harmful summers). My parent’s slides show their trips through Canada, the Western USA, Alaska – all while in their 70s. Alaska is a long drive from New York and my father took a lot of pictures. My father even came to Australia in 1992 when he was 87. Narda and I looked at the many photos of that trip when my father, my two sons, and I drove half way around Australia in a campervan (RV) for a month.
What Narda and I got out of these slides that we have spent many hours going through instead of making new memories tromping around DC this week was that we are quite keen now to go to Alaska. It might be our next trip to the States; maybe late 2017 or mid-2018. We do plan ahead. We planned this current little four-month trip a couple of years ago. 2017 is already quite full with travel and some creative projects I hope to dabble in back in Australia. 2018 we are planning our trip for three-months to India, January – March.
Looking at many photos – and taking photos of the slides which does not give a good quality but does provide an essence of what is being captured we could see the slant I was raised with. Some photos are quite good and we will print from the slide to get better quality. But to give an example to my ranting above; according to my sister we could be one-eighth Indian but even without that knowledge I find the nature of this slide racist. That the lives of white settlers are emphasized over Indian lives. My father has taken a lot of slides of plaques that provide us with this sort of narrative.
Nevertheless, we completed our project and have put the slide projector back up on Craig’s List, got $40 back, and we are thankful for having this opportunity to have a sticky-beak into my parent’s lives. It does explain a part of my reason for a love of travel – the other reason is that I am always trying to escape the moment before. Narda has always had a love of travel; even before her parents migrated to Australia from the Netherlands, she has a story of when she was three taking her two-year old neighbour down the street heading to the train station to see her grandmother and they apparently got a few blocks before being found by anxious parents. It sums up our life.
I don’t want to trivialize my
father’s slide collection but I sort of was aware that there were a lot more
photos of my brother than of me. There were more pictures of churches than me.
There are more marijuana shops in Oregon (more than 400 and multiplying daily)
than Starbucks and McDonald's. So what? I am still alive and my brother and my
father aren’t. I don’t need to see slides to know I exist.
Friday
night was lovely. We met with Trish and Allan, and wonderful reconnection with
a dear friend from Dalian days. Trish and Allan live in a lovely house, on a ½ acre
in Fairfax county. Allan cooked up a delicious New Orleans style dinner and
lively conversation was had by all!
Though the
GPS said it was about 40 minutes down the road, we decided to leave at lunch
time and explore the area. We checked out a few shopping malls (had not done
that for a while). The first one, Landmark Mall, in Alexandria,
Virginia was completely derelict. Only a large Macy’s and Sears where there, the rest was boarded up.
Weird. The second one, Tysons Corner Centre in McLean, Virginia was fabulous. Book
shop, nice café with tomato soup, a train station and a movie theatre. A
perfect mall!
We realised when we got home that night that
we had been running the car on empty for too many miles. Given the extreme
cold, this could have been not-so-nice.
07 January Saturday DAY 43 of trip
Finally got a bit of snow. I want two feet of the stuff. We had a fair amount when we were driving around last week in New York – see last blog, but not like what we used to get when we lived in upstate New York (2002 – 2010). We did get about an inch and a half, enough to cover some of winter’s brown but never enough.
Narda went with Liam and Chris to
Ikea to buy furniture. I stayed home and had a bit of a play in Photoshop and
catching up on a writing project I have had little time to do these past six
weeks, no doubt something to do with travelling and not enough down time. Took
some photos of Liam’s toys in the snow for some future picture work. See http://tinyurl.com/hjt7lrf
When Chris, Narda, and Liam got back we bundled up and headed out to the snowfields – well actually down the street for a block to wade through the one and a half-inch snow.
Looked at P&O cruises out of Sydney instead of flying to some far-flung-foreign destination and there is one during my birthday time so we may do that one. Anyone having any recommendations for a cruise let us know. If nothing else at least I will know that someone read this blog.
Made eggs with Liam in the evening
08 January Sunday
DAY 44 of trip
-9C off to Safeway for groceries -
Took Chris and Jessica to Slims for lunch. We have had been to Slims
before over there on the corner of Upshur and Georgia
Avenue. There is a limited menu but worth the effort. I tend to go for the eggs
and grits and the others like meat pulled off animals. The wait time of almost
an hour on a cold day was a bit budget though once settled into our booth we
are all content.
We took a bus to the White House - then to Smithsonian National
Museum of African American History & Culture.
We froze waiting for the bloody bus and thawed by the time we got
to the White House. Of course, we being lowly citizen could not get anywhere
near the place.
I, who sometimes lobby hard and get my way, ‘suggested’ that we
climb to the top of the hill where they have that Washington Monument monument.
Narda could not believe it. We had walked all around
the White House looking where we could get at least one photo. We were shooed
away from each street nearby and we were thinking we were getting frost bite.
When we lived in China, way up north, even when we went to the Harbin Ice
Festival we were OK but we were dressed for it. The warmest for today was -6, I
think that is 18 Fahrenheit, add a bit of strong wind to cut through our
clothes and we were almost ice cubes.
But as a loving wife who ‘understands my photographic needs’; “but
honey the pictures will be fantastic look how blue the sky is…” or some such
rant, side by side, wind picking up, temperature dropping we managed to finally
get to the top of the hill to the entrance. I pointed out from the start that
there appeared to be very few people going up to the monument, no doubt because
it was so cold and we would not have to wait in line and I could guarantee that
it would be warmer inside and of course going up the elevator to the top for
our spectacular pictures would be warm and we would not have to wait in line.
We dragged ourselves to the entrance door,
Oops…
Well how was I supposed to know that?
Narda said we were going into the first
open building we got to. I was in a bit of the bad-books and could not offer
any suggestions such as perhaps going to another monument.
Barely able to get into the door because we were so frozen the
first person said “you cannot get in without a ticket”. Narda
said we need to just come inside the door to get warm and a kind lady at the
check-in thingy said that she had two extra tickets and we could go in. We were
so grateful. The first thing we did after the toilets was to go to the ‘Sweet
House Café’ – talk about pricy – we each had a small cup of coffee and a small
sweet (I was so cold I thought stuff the low-carb nonsense I need sugar to get
my blood moving and got a fudge thingy) for $17.05. Now I know how they funded
this new building. Because the National Museum of African American History and Culture, is the newest Smithsonian museum there apparently are heaps
of folks who want to get in so one needs to get a ticket. Tickets are free but
they allocate a date so the place is not over crowded. Perhaps because it was
cold or maybe fewer people go here on Sundays it was not too full.
For
us white people this is a real eye opener. We were both amazed and the hour we
spent there was far from enough. I guess what struck us both is how our current
society, the Western World, is built on top of slavery. Beginning in the
fifteenth century and until recent times and in some places of the world even
now, it is the slaves who create the wealth of a country. The United States was
not built by hardworking individuals but by slaves who worked for a minority of
white men.
I
remember a segregated south. When my father would take us on trips through the
south in the 1960s there would be segregated toilets and areas in restaurants.
I don’t think I even saw a black person, except if we were travelling (there
surely were none in the area of upstate New York I grew up in) until I left
home at age 16-17.
And where was the church or any other religion for those five-hundred years? Well they were making money too off slavery. I shouldn’t go into all this but suffice it to say that the National Museum of African American History and Culture is well worth the visit. Not just a place to defrost in.
Walked heaps took a bus to Chris’ church got there only half
frozen.
Made zucchini spaghetti for dinner.
09 January Monday DAY 45 of trip
Home Narda working on Chris’ Ikea furniture. Chris has collected non-collectables from Ikea – you know those flat boxes that just need a nail and a screw to make them become 3-D? Narda and Chris worked all day on those cupboards and drawers and still were not done. I was as supportive as I could be – I stayed out of the way, and spent the day on this laptop. Due to luggage constraints we only brought one computer on this trip which means sharing and with my usual work-load averaging eight-hours a day on this thing I have not had too many straight forward shots of non-physical contact to exercise my digital-self. We also bought only one phone card when we got here – imagine sharing a phone with someone, but we have and it is good. We just get lost together now.
Made spaghetti squash for din din. We have not found this in Australia and it was a favourite when we lived in New Jersey and New York. Liam loved it. Actually, little Liam has liked everything I have made, even tofu, to the wonderment of the eye-rolling folks at the other end of the table. I am sure Liam would be a happy little vegetarian alongside of me given the chance.
10 January Tuesday DAY 46 of trip
Took a bus back to the Museum of Natural History. WE were just in time to see the Imax film, narrated by Robert Redford, on America’s National Parks. A really beautiful film, worth seeing. Some amazing sights. I scribbled notes for future travel. Then we checked out the Insect Zoo where I got to cuddle some critters!!! We bussed/trained it back home; stopping half way for another Panera tomato soul lunch; the best! The it was our turn to pick up Liam from day care. He was happy to come home with us, though he did ask where daddy was. We stopped on the way home to pick up some groceries. Liam, while we waited at the checkout, was able to communicate to the old black guy riding a red scooter, also in line; that he would like one of those too!
Here are the homeless
in a wealthy city where rents are sky high. I walk by, give them a couple of
dollars to salve my conscience…..and feel BAD, just bad. Easy to say, why isn’t
the government doing something, but much harder to actually get off my own
bottom and do something myself.
AND THAT IS ALL FOR THIS BLOG. Thanks for reading. We have five more days in DC then to Utrecht, The Netherlands via Helsinki for a month. No doubt we will have stuff to say in a bit too. Today, Narda is still working on assembling the Ikea stuff and I am having a bit more time on this laptop then we are off to some museum though we will have decided which one when we feel we have been on the bus long enough and say “let’s get off here”.
