FrugalMoon

Now you see it, now you don't

We've spent the last couple of days in Tongyeung, on Korea's southeast coast. It's definitely the most pleasant city that we have visited thus far, and it is within quick ferry access to several dozen small islands, one of which we visited yesterday. We also took a cable car to the top of a mountain where we had a spectacular view of the city (that is, at least when the fog cleared up for a few minutes). But more on Tongyeung and some pictures once we have access to a computer.

The specialty here is octopus -- in particular, spicy cold octopus served with a side of radish, and seaweed rolls filled with rice, all eaten with a toothpick. For $8 for 2 people, not a bad deal. Still, after eating octopus four times over the last two days, we are ready for something different. In a few hours, off to Jeju, Korea's largest island.

Now you see it....now you don't.

Let's go shopping

For the last few days we have been eating nothing but Korean food. Now, not that there's anything wrong with that, but we both though that we could use some home cooking. Benny, geekily toting his iPad around the local supermarket, took some pictures of what we found.

In our travels, we often like wandering through local supermarket aisles, even when we're not planning on buying anything, as it provides another different, and unique, perspective on the local culture. What you'll find below are pictures of the ubiquitous (and enormous) daikon radish; kimchi; some sort of multicolored sausages (as Anthony Bourdain likes to remind us, every culture has its own variation of meat in tube form); frozen octopus; and, from what we can gather, dinosaur bones.

Tomorrow, we take a morning bus to Tongyeung, a coastal town that is supposed to be quite nice.

A morning in Gyeongju

We are trying to do this from Benny's iPad, so apologies in advance if the formatting or spelling is off.

After a few days in Seoul, which, to be honest, we both found a bit overwhelming, we took a high speed train to Gyeongju, a smaller city in the southeast corner of South Korea that has one of the largest clusters of historical sites in the country. Overall, though it is still quite hot and muggy, the weather is much more pleasant. Our first evening here we visited a park filled with large hill mounds which are tombs from the Silla period. These mounds can be found all around the city's parks, which makes for an interesting landscape. Yesterday we spent the day touring a Buddhist temple sight from around 750AD, which was quite spectacular (we will post pics soon). Then we visited a small contemporary art museum that had some interesting and funny art by young Korean artists. Today we will visit some more of the ancient sites around town.

Although we haven't added any pictures to our albums, here are some from our guesthouse, Sa Rang Chae (www.kjstay.com). The buildings are clustered around a small courtyard, and are over 100 years old. The rooms are simple, with sleeping mats instead of western-style mattresses.

Why not South Korea?

Good morning from Seoul!  We arrived here a couple of days ago, but getting over the jet lag has been a bit of an uphill battle, as has the humidity, which is unlike either of us has ever experienced.

More than a few people, both back home and here, have asked us why we decided to come to South Korea, as opposed to other, supposedly more popular destinations for American travelers such as Thailand or China.  American tourists are not a common sight in these parts, and our sense is that we'll see fewer and fewer Americans the further we get from Seoul.

For those of you that have read our blog before, you'll know that one thing that gets us excited -- really excited -- is good food, and we both love Korean food.  So yeah, that was a major factor in our decision.  Using our interest in Korean food as a springboard for our research, we found that not only is there a lot to see in Korea, but the price is right: our lunch yesterday came out to less than $6 between the two of us for rice sticks (a chewy, thick noodle) in spicy sauce, tempura-style fried seafood, and fish cake soup.  Delicious.

The first thing that has struck us about this city is its sheer size.  It rivals Tokyo in terms of its magnitude (although it feels much more spread out).  The subway system is like that of London, and the trains themselves appear to us to be at least twice as long as New York's (which, in turn, have always seemed to us to be be much longer than back in Boston).  Second, as alluded to earlier, it is hot and humid, so any sightseeing involves numerous stops for iced coffee and air conditioning.

Instead of a few longer blog posts, we're going to try and put up more shorter entries.  In the meantime, here are some photos from our first couple of days (our apologies if some of the pictures are sideways -- we're having a bit of trouble on this Korean computer).

Connecting with family: past & current, far & wide

Has it been that long?  Apparently.  So here goes something -- a random smattering of some of what we've been up to since we last wrote.  We've posted some new albums for you to peruse, as well (Barbados, FASPE: Germany & Poland, and Road Trip).

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Benny wrote this entry back in November, and is only getting to posting it now, so we'll spare adding anything else for now.  We just got back from a trip to Portugal and Spain, and you can see the pictures from that trip here.

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This past summer, Benny went to Germany and Poland on a program called the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE).  FASPE is intended to give students in professional disciplines, including law and medicine, an opportunity to reflect on their ethical obligations through the historical lens of the Holocaust.  The law program that Benny participated in had 15 fellows from diverse backgrounds, and from law schools across the country.

View FASPE in a larger map

After a brief orientation in New York, we (the FASPE fellows, sans Alison) traveled to Berlin.  There, we learned primarily about the bureaucratic structures that allowed Nazi Germany and its leaders to conceive of, and ultimately implement, the Final Solution.  Given our orientation as law students, we focused largely on the underlying political and philosophical theories that allowed Nazi ideology to flourish, and on the bureaucrats -- many of them lawyers -- that played a central role in the helping the machinery of death to move inexorably forward.

Despite the personally challenging nature of the material, Berlin is an amazing city, full of energy, amazing sites, and quite surprisingly, excellent food.  We were also there during the World Cup, and were able to watch Germany playing Ghana from a traditional outdoor beer garden.

After Berlin, we went to Oświęcim, Poland (the town that we know as Auschwitz).  We spent a few days there, both touring the camps (which lie on the outskirts of town), and spending time in seminars.  Visiting the camps themselves -- Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II (commonly referred to as Birkenau) -- was an emotionally challenging experience.  Auschwitz I was, a former Polish army barracks, not as difficult as Birkenau.  While the former was well-manicured, with handsome architecture and built to a human scale, the latter was the exact opposite: expansive, industrial, and bleak.

Stepping through Birkenau's gates, and into a landscape marked by hundreds of brick chimneys, the only remnants of hundreds of wooden barracks that have since decayed, it is immediately clear that the place was designed for death.  For most of the FASPE fellows and staff, this was, I think, the most emotionally difficult part of our trip.  No matter how much you have read about the Holocaust, no matter how many movies you have seen, nothing quite compares -- for better or worse -- to confronting Birkenau's gas chambers and ovens.  Though they now lay in ruins, destroyed by the retreating Nazis, experiencing the physicality of the crematoria reminded me that the Holocaust was, at its core, a human tragedy, perpetuated by men and women who, designed them, laid their foundations, and constructed and set into action its machinery.

The starkness of Auschwitz and its surrounding landscape was lifted once we arrived in Krakow, our last stop as part of the two-week FASPE program.  Krakow, it has been noted by many, is like a small version of Prague, and I think that this is a fair characterization.  It has a stunning, immaculate square, bounded by cafes and restaurants on all sides.  It's narrow streets are filled with immaculately restored buildings that belie Krakow's recent tumultuous history.  Before World War II and the Holocaust, Krakow was a center of Jewish life.  Although those events decimated its Jewish population, Judiasm has experienced a resurgence in this corner of Poland.  While we spent our time in Krakow, as during the rest of the FASPE program, in seminars and tours, we were also there during the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, which was much larger than I had anticipated.

FASPE, as I noted in the blog entry I wrote for Northeastern, raised as many questions for me as it did answers.  Primary among these is to whom, as attorneys (or future attorneys), we owe our loyalties.

I ended up extending my staying in Poland to I could visit my grandmother's hometown of Dąbrowa Górnicza.  Referred to simply as Dąbrowa, as the place of my mother's mother birth and childhood, lies closer to Oświęcim than it does to Krakow.  I went there with a couple of local tours guides who, although they are not Jewish, have taken an abiding interest in preserving the legacy of the Jewish community there.  I had scant information about my grandmother's family, although I did have an address.  The house pictured here is the building that she likely grew up in.  However, because the building is an apartment complex, I was unable to figure out exactly where she grew up.

All in all, the town was much nicer than I had anticipated.  Many of us, perhaps unfairly, have preconceptions of what small Polish cities will be like.  Lying in Poland's industrial heartland, I expected Dąbrowa to be run down amalgamation of post-Communist apartment blocks and abandoned factories.  Much to my surprise, it was quite attractive and pleasant.  The main shopping street had plenty of shops and restaurants and active street life, and although some of the concrete apartment blocks looked tired and worn, they were few and far between.  What I will remember most from this part of the trip, though, was the overwhelming hospitality of both my tour guides, as well as the family that hosted me.

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We also took a road trip to Chicago in August, stopping in Canada (Ottawa, Toronto, Niagara Falls) and Michigan (Detroit, Ann Arbor) along the way, with a stops in Cleveland, The Bing (a.k.a. Binghamton) and Albany on the way back.  We'll skip providing a description of the trip for now, but in the meantime here are some pictures.

Floating Islands & Soaring Condors

 

From Cusco to Lake Titicaca
The trip to Cusco to Lake Titicaca is a pretty long haul, so instead of taking a regular intercity bus, we took the Inka Express, which made a couple of stops at sites along the way.  It was a good way to break up the trip, although considering that we were both dealing with stomach bugs, we probably would have been fine with a shorter trip, too.  The stops included the archaeological sites ofAndahuaylillas and Raqchi, and we´ll make sure to post some pictures.

Lake Titicaca & the Islands (Uros & Taquile)
Our base for seeing the lake was Puno, which is a large an somewhat unsightly city.  We managed to find a cheap but nice hotel next to the main drag, which had some nice restaurants and cafes, but overall the city ofPuno is not memorable.

The next day we got up early for a tour of the some of the islands.  The first stop was the floating Uros Islands, a truly unforgettable sight.  The islands are not in fact made out of land, but are built out of reeds and their roots.  Although the history is somewhat unclear, the islands were probably created by their inhabitants in order to escape the Incas and/or the Spanish.  While the population of the islands (which number approximately 30) used to be around 8,000, only about 2,500 inhabitants remain, with their main livelihood in fishing and tourism.  Because the islands are made out of reeds, and are merely floating on Lake Titicaca (although they are anchored to the lake floor), they are constantly decomposing, and need to constantly be rebuilt by the inhabitants.  At this point, given the relative poverty of the islands, the experience is quite touristy, but still definitely worthwhile.

After the Uros Islands, our tour continued to Taquile Island, which was far less interesting that Uros.  The island is significantly larger, and has an agricultural-based economy, but honestly, other than that, there was really nothing of note.

Arequipa
We took a four star bus from Puno to Arequipa.  It was basically like business class in an airplane in terms of the quality of the seats, and they showed two movies in English, which was fun. It was a five hour ride on curving  mountain roads.  We arrived late that night in Arequipa to find that the hostel we had reserved did not match it´s description onHostelWorld .  Basically it was a filthy, noisy place.  So, we took our luggage and walked up the street to find a really nice little hotel that was only $10 more per night, Hostal Solar. We have a cute little room with a balcony, and cable TV, so we can watch BBC World to our heart´s content. 

In total we´ll have spent six nights in Arequipa.  After moving around for a week and a half spending one night here and one night there, we decided it would be nice to settle in and relax in the beautiful city of Arequipa--and beautiful it is!  In the center most of the buildings are constructed out of a white volcanic stone with intricate carvings, arched doorways and vaulted ceilings.  There is excellent food in this city, which we of course have been enjoying everyday.  Our favorite is the little Turkish place that serves excellentdoner kabobs and a local sandwich place that we had to wait in line for to get a table. 

We also visited a couple very interesting museums while we´ve been here.  We went to the Museo Santuarios Andinos, which holds Incan artifacts, mostly those buried with the victims of sacrifices, and the museum holds a famous mummy.  The mummy is called Juanita, and she was a  12 or 13 year old girl who was sacrificed by the Incas to a local volcano.  The body was found recently, and had been frozen so was in nearly perfect condition.  Scientists have been able to determine all sorts of information from her body--for instance the fact that her stomach was empty except for the strong corn-based alcoholic drink she had had before her death, that she had good nutrition during her life, and that she had died by a single blow to her head.  We also visited a small contemporary art museum.  It had some really great paintings, and also some old photographs of Arequipa in what appeared to be the 1920s or 1930s based on the cars and dress.  We also visited theMonasterio de Santa Catalina, which is a convent that is a small city unto itself with a hundred houses and 60 streets.  According to our guidebook, as many as 175 nuns lived there during the 17th and 18th centuries.  Nuns still live in a portion of it today. 

Colca Canyon and Beyond
From Arequipa we took an overnight guided trip to the Colca Canyon. Some say the canyon is deeper than the grand canyon, and that it is the biggest canyon in the world, although to be honest it did not look that way to us.  Perhaps it is because it is measured from the top of the mountains, and visitors cross the road from somewhere midway down the canyon.  According to our guidebook the canyon is 3,400 meters deep, double that of the grand canyon.  It is truly spectacular.  Perhaps the most amazing sight were the thousands of stone terraces which were built in 800 B.C. and used for farming.  The terracing system, built on the canvas walls was irrigated by thesnowmelt from the nearby volcanoes. 

The drive to Colca Canyon took us only about 150 km outside of Arequipa, but the trip took nearly four hours because of the poor quality of the bumpy roads. The drive took us through a nature reserve, which protected the vicunas (like Llamas but smaller and with finer fur.  The Fur of vicunas is very expensive--for instance, our guide told us a scarf could cost well over $200!).  For a period vicunas were endangered, but now that this land has been set aside for them their numbers are rising again.  It was very interesting to see them grazing and running through the hillsides.  They are graceful, cute animals.  Our first night in the canyon area, we stayed in the largest town there, and had dinner with our tour group and many other tour groups.  A local band played--who were really great--and we saw some traditional dancers. 

The next morning we got up very early and drove two hours into the canyon in order to see the famous condors flying.  Every morning the condors start at the top of the canyon and cruise on currents of air, floating through the skies.  We must have seen about fifteen of the amazing birds.  Like vultures, the condors are scavengers.  Their wingspan is nearly 9 feet across.  From our lookout we could see them fly over our heads and then descend deep into the canyon.  We stayed for about an hour just watching the birds fly around.  Then it was back to Arequipa for another two nights. 

Next we go to Lima for two nights, and we are looking forward to trying some of the world class cuisine there--especially the ceviche!  On Saturday we arrive back in Boston and get back to the grind.  Benny will be starting an internship this summer at Greater Boston Legal Services.  Alison will begin studying hard for her first comprehensive exam--please send motivational vibes her way because she needs it!

Journey through Peru´s Sacred Valley

Cusco:

We arrived in Cusco on Monday, early in the a.m.  We spent two days in Cusco, but the experience is a bit of a blur.  Cusco is at an altitude of over 11,000 ft., and this is not an easy adjustment having come from sea level.  We found that we were very tired and a little disoriented as we adjusted to it, though we still found time to explore this lovely city.

 

We wandered around the narrow, dirty cobblestone streets, up and down the hills.  We also visited the Incan fortress outside the city center.  At the center of Cusco is a piazza with many cafes where you can drink coffee or the traditional coca tea from a balcony overlooking the square.  From there you could observe many tourists being solicited by local vendors selling hand knitted hats, gloves, and finger puppets, paintings, and banana cake.  One of the most amazing sights that we observed in Cusco and other places are the local women who wear traditional clothing, consisting of knee length puffy skirts, woven shawls tied around their back in which they carried all sorts of things (babies, food, and goods to sell), and wide brimmed hats. 

 

And, of course, we found plenty of time to enjoy the local cuisine.  Highlights include the coca tea, which is the leaves of cocaine steeped in hot water, and best enjoyed with a lot of sugar. Supposedly the tea helps people adjust to the altitude, but I´m not sure we noticed an impact of any kind.  We also found an amazing juice place, which had shelves filled with fresh fruits--papayas that were the size of pumpkins, green skinned oranges, and dark colored pineapples.  Ali tried the watermelon juice and Benny had a mixture of cactus fruit and melon, and both were fantastic. 

 

Train to Maccu Picchu and Aquas Callientes :

On Friday we woke at 5:30 a.m. to catch our taxi to the train station in a neighboring town.  We then took the train to Aquas Callientes (yes, a town called Hot Water), which is at the base of Maccu Picchu.  The train was very nice, and owned by the Orient Express company.  During the three hour ride we descended in altitude over 5,000 feet.  From the train as we near Aquas Callientes we can see masses of the porters who carry supplies for the trekkers on the Inca trail.  Some of the porters carried packs that were nearly as big as them, and they have to carry them miles and miles up and down mountains.  Aquas Callientes is a touristy, but fun city.  The setting is gorgeous.  We are surrounded by lush mountains--much more tropical than Cusco-- and a river rushes through the center of town.  Everything in Aquas Callientes is overpriced, and we worry that Maccu Picchu will be ruined by the tourism, but in the end we are not disappointed.  The cost of entrance to Maccu Picchu is steep, so we decide to wait to go until the next morning so we can enjoy a full day there. 

 

We spend Friday wandering around Aquas Callientes.  For some reason there seemed to be more children than adults living in the town.  During our lunch we sat outside and must have seen thirty or more adorable children playing all around us.  Kids as young as two or three seemed to be playing on the streets, often without parents nearby.  It seemed that children ran the city.  

 

Maccu Picchu:

We board the bus at 7a.m. to make our way up the winding mountain road to Maccu Picchu. 

We wind higher and higher, the road right along the cliffside, and suddenly we can see the ruins emerge.  They sweep across the top side of the mountain and are spectacular.  Before exploring the ruins of Maccu Picchu itself we decide to go as quickly as we can toward the entrance of Huayna Picchu, which is another temple and agricultural site of the Incas, which is on a neighboring mountain, the peak of which is much higher than Maccu Picchu, and overlooks the ruins of Maccu Picchu.  They only allow 200 people to hike up each morning, and we got in line just in time--we were numbers 194 and 195!  They are very strict about the limits, which seems to help keep the path in impeccable shape.  Before hiking up we have to sign in, and as we hiked up the steep path along a cliff-side, we wondered if it is to ensure that everyone returns safely.  The hike up Huayna Picchu feels nearly vertical--you climb up a path of steep large stairs for nearly an hour before reaching the top.  The view is both spectacular and terrifying at the same time. We can see the neighboring mountains and valley and all of the ruins of Maccu Picchu. 

 

It took us over two hours to go up and down the Huayna Picchu hike, and by the end our legs feel like wet noodles.  It would be a challenging hike to do anywhere, but given that it is in high altitude makes it much more challenging.  We took a quick break after the hike, and then headed back into Maccu Picchu to wander around the ruins there.  You can climb all around them, inside structures, across terraces that once held the crops, and peer out windows that overlook the mountains and valley.  Llamas (which are actually pronounced yamas for all you Ramona Quimby fans out there who can recall this reference) grazed on grass in the ruins.  We spent a couple hours walking around Maccu Picchu, and finally boarded the bus back to Aquas Callientes, exhausted, sweaty, but feeling like the experience totally lived up to, even exceeded our expectations.  Pictures truly cannot do it justice, though we tried to capture the beauty. 

Sacred Valley:

After Maccu Picchu we took the train to Ollantatambo, a small village in the Sacred Valley area.  It was a lovely town, which held more Incan ruins, smaller in scale than Maccu Picchu, but still very interesting to explore.  The town also had a great town square, and we had lunch there at a local Chifa place--Peruvian-Chinese food.  Actually it was very similar to Chinese food in the U.S., but perhaps a little less greasy. 

 

The next day we took a taxi to visit Moray.  Moray is an Incan site of agricultural experimentation.  Basically it is a set of ringed plateaus that move lower and lower down into a mountain, and each rung supposedly had a different microclimate.  As we hiked into the center, we could definitely feel that the air became much warmer.  Then we went to visit the salt mines.  The Incans had developed a system to dehydrate salt water to obtain salt that was used to preserve food. 

 

Next we went to the town of Pisac.  We were tired after our long day of sightseeing, so made it an early night...The next morning, though, we got up early to wander around the huge Sunday market.  The market held people selling produce, meat, cooked foods, and all sorts of crafts, mostly things woven out of Alpacca wool, which is extremely soft.  From there we took a local bus back to Cusco, a 1 hour ride for less than $1!  Tonight we stay in Cusco, and then tomorrow we are taking a bus to Puno, the town on Lake Titticacca.  It is an eight hour tour bus trip that makes a number of stops at various sights...that´s it for now...We´ll try to blog again soon.

We're Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack

It has been a really long year, so for those of you who actually remember that this little corner of cyberspace still exists, welcome back.  Ali just finished up her second year of social work school at Boston College, and Benny wrapped up his dreaded 1L year at Northeastern University School of Law.  As we write this, we're  gearing up for a 3 week trip to Peru.  We leave tomorrow night, and get into Cusco early the next morning.  We'll try to update a few times from the road, so feel free to check back (or better yet, just subscribe through the feed in the upper left hand corner).  We'll also keep an up-to-date map on the right.  Enjoy!

Photographs -- recovered

We were able to recover most of pictures from our Israel trip, and have posted them in this album -- enjoy.  Yes, we know that some of the pictures are sideways -- we'll fix that soon.

 

Summer 2008

As has been the case since we got back from our travels over a year ago, we have not been great at updating our blog.  Next week, Benny is beginning his first year of law school at Northeastern, and Ali will be returning to BC to continue her graduate studies in social work.

We have spent most of the summer in Boston, but back in the spring we took an amazing two and a half week trip to Israel with Benny’s parents, who are both from Tel Aviv and immigrated to the United States in 1970.

Israel was truly a special trip for us and Benny’s family.  Much of Benny’s family still lives in Israel, and this trip was an opportunity for us to visit many of them, see where his parents grew up, and visit many of the sites across the country. It was Alison’s first trip there, and the first time in a long time that the Meshoulams had taken the time to tour the country.

Upon first arriving in Tel Aviv we hopped on the train and headed to Tivon. Tivon is a suburb of Haifa, where we stayed with Benny’s aunt and uncle (the same aunt and uncle who we visited in Paris at the end of our FrugalMoon). From there we did day trips to Haifa where we saw the Bahai gardens and to Akko, which is famous for its historic Old City.  We also went to Nazareth, a largely Arab town which is was supposedly the childhood home of Jesus, and to Rosh Hanikrah, in the far north on the border with Lebanon, which provides spectacular views of the Mediterranean.  Evenings were spent back in Tivon, where we had an opportunity to meet many of Uri's cousins who happened to be in town, including cousins who now live in London.

After Haifa, we headed to the Galilee, in northern Israel, which provides some of the greenest landscapes in the country.  We spent an afternoon in the picturesque village of Rosh Pinah, and also visited Agamon Hahulah, a wetlands wildlife reserve with beautiful birds and other animal life, including wild donkeys.  We hiked alongside the Dan River (a major tributary to the Jordan River) at the Dan Nature Preserve, and also visited Tzfat, a hilltop town that generates much of its tourism from the its connections with kabbalah.

Next, we went for the Dead Sea, which for Alison was a  highlight of the trip. Floating in the water there is unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before. It feels like your entire body is made of buoys, and every time you try to force a limb under the water it pops back toward the surface.  Near the Dead Sea, we also visited the Ein Gedi Nature Preserve, which contains an amazing amount of wildlife in the midst of the dry, harsh desert.  After the Dead Sea we visited Metzada, which was a site of a major Jewish resistance during Roman times, and Mitzpeh Ramon, a giant canyon in the Negev, which is the desert which covers approximately the southern third of Israel.  From there, we visited Sdeh Boker, the desert home of Ben Gurion, who was the first Prime Minister of the State of Israel.

Then we headed to Jerusalem to stay with Daniel, Alison's friend from college. On the first evening, Daniel prepared a delicious shabbat dinner and we talked with him and his friend until late in the evening. We spent the next two days wandering around in the old city visiting the Wailing Wall, the Dome of the Rock, and many famous and beautiful churches, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which stands on the site where, according to the New Testament, Jesus was crucified. One of the most memorable moments was sitting in an old church that had tall Gothic ceilings, and listening to a trio of singers come in and sing a hymn to test out the amazing acoustics of the space.  We also took a trip to the Israel museum which had a great display of modern Israeli art, and in the evenings we hung out with Daniel.

We finished our travels in Israel with five days in Tel Aviv.  Several weeks ago, the New York Times travel section ran an article on Tel Aviv which does an excellent job of describing both the energy and contradictions of Tel Aviv, and modern Israel more broadly.  Tel Aviv is beautifully situated on the Mediterranean, and it is extraordinarily vibrant, with endless strips of cafes, restaurants, and shops. Every nook and cranny has an outdoor cafe where people sit with friends until the early morning hours. While we were there we spent a lot of time with friends and family. We also explored the city from top to bottom, spent one day at the beach, took another day to explore the fantastic contemporary art museum there, and, of course, continued to enjoy the delicious Israeli food.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, we spend a lot of time sharing stories of the amazing foods we’ve eaten around the world. Israeli food was fantastic. Every meal started off with several small dishes of fresh, flavorful, excellently prepared salads.  The hummus is so smooth and rich it’s really unlike anything you can find in the U.S., and the tahina just seems to melt in your mouth. And of course we managed to find some unbelievable ice cream, where they had flavors like halva (which is a sweet sesame based dessert) and chocolate orange.

Unfortunately we don't have any pictures to post yet from Israel, as Benny accidentally erased all of them off of his computer (whoops!)  As soon as we have a chance we will get some from Benny's parents and post them here.

Home sweet home
In other exciting news, we bought a condo at the end of June. For those of you who know Cambridge, the condo is right near Fresh Pond about a mile and a half from Harvard Square and less than half a mile from Huron Village.  We really loved the place from our first viewing and are excited to now call it home. 

Since we closed on the place, it has been a whirlwind of activity—packing up our old place and fixing up the new place. A few weeks ago we spent a weekend with and Alison’s mom painting the entire place and removing the old wall to wall carpeting that was in two of the bedrooms. We also had some help from friends. A huge thank you to Donna, Patricia, Rachel, Carrie, and Jessica! It was pretty crazy how intensively we worked through that weekend, but it was well worth it.