Bologna's Synagogue - Hard to Find, Well-protected

The experience of finding the synagogue in Bologna, in the dark, on Shabbat, was one that we hadn't met yet. It was the Comunita Ebraica di Bologna. Difficult to find in the evening, it was a surprise to be asked questions to get in, told to leave the backpack in the anti-room, and see armed guards out front and in the back of the building. Once inside there was a pleasant and small group of people studying Torah and celebrating the Sabbath. We went on another day and walked by in the light of
day. The guards were still there and the only sign that this building was a synagogue was a Star of David viewable at the back of the building, in the alley, and Hebrew at the front door threshold.

Note the Star of David on the peach-colored building

Israel Museum in Jerusalem

Start your trip to Israel off with a long visit to the Israel Museum. This is advice we did not take from the Lonely Plant guide and should have. We've been here almost two weeks. Dear traveler: go to this museum first. It is fantastic! We barely scratched the surface of all the offerings but here you will set the historical context of all that has gone on in the land of Israel .

We saw the King Herod exhibit, a recommendation from our rabbi back home, and it was incredible. What this person accomplished in his short time as king, rebuilding the Temple (the 2nd Temple), Caesarea, Masada, Herodonia, Jericho, is mind-boggling and sets up all that one sees within Israel.

Suriname

The life-cycle of a Jew section was also quite interesting, from birth to marriage to death and all the ritual involved from around the world, the Diaspora is diverse! Makes me want to go to the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv.

Cochin India

There are several relocated and rebuilt (or maybe reproduced) synagogues from around the world. One from Suriname looks a lot like the synagogue in Barbados with a sand floor and wooden Torah arc. Cochin India allowed women to learn Hebrew and the walls were colorfully painted. Eastern Europe representation was only photographs. In a black room. It was quite moving. But pictures are all that remain and what was interesting for me to see were that the synagogues looked like log cabin chalets...and they were all destroyed.

There was a Dead Sea Scroll exhibit and a full scale model of the Second Temple.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre

After the Israel Museum we were hungry and we went in search of more falafel on our way to see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. We saw pilgrims kissing stone blocks and praying along the way of the Stations of the Cross. We saw a small group of American women making a video along the Stations of the Cross for the folks back home. It seemed odd that such a holy place is wedged into such a small area in crowded Old Jerusalem.

In shopping in Old Jerusalem, we found more Hebrew pants, some for daughter and some for son. A great and tremendously full day.

Coming Home - Making a New Normal

I've been back in Poughkeepsie, New York, for a month. Hard to believe. There’s still stuff to unpack from our year in Barbados.

Yesterday I received an email from a friend/ colleague/ mentor and in it she said "How're things back in New York? Transitioning back to the old normal can be difficult (so we make new normals)."

This resonated with me and moved me to write as this weekend (starting Friday evening) was Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement – and the start of the Jewish New Year. At the Saturday morning service I sat and listened to the rabbi’s sermon. He started by talking about the idea of resurrection, a foreign concept in Reformed Judaism, but something that was part of early Judaism and still believed by Orthodox Jews. In discussing resurrection, the rabbi said that he felt that one's dying and returning could be looked at more of a metaphor. He thought of it more to mean rebirth, or in my mind renewal, that we may or may not come back from the dead. Who knows? Who among us has seen Moses or Abraham Lincoln? (Though some have claimed to have seen Elvis.) Rabbi said that when we feel we have hit a road block or come to the end of a long road or when we feel the most lost, there will be something that turns it around, we're shown a new road, a new door opens, there's a clearing in the forest. So rather than the literal interpretation of resurrection, he gave us something akin to resurrecting a life, a new beginning a new normal.

Barbados, for me was a glorious journey that fulfilled me beyond measure. After a long spate of personal and professional trials, I was presented with Barbados where my family and I flourished. How could I go back to New York after such an amazing year abroad? They say you can never go back. But it is just not true. Sometimes, you have to go back. And who could not wish to return to the beauty that is found within the Hudson Valley in autumn? The weather is now turning cool and crisp, the leaves are just beginning to change. I love this season. My house is spacious and welcoming. I see neighbors on the street who stop and ask how my year was. They missed me. They missed my family. I am home. You can go back.

For the first time in my life, I do not have a clear plan. Since I was a teenager, I’ve known, career-wise, what I was going to do. I came back home to New York following a terrific Fulbright experience without a paying job, but I am more clear-eyed than ever. I am taking a sabbatical. I am resting. I am excited about the present moment picking my kids up from school, moving back into our house, supporting my partner as she goes back to work, and planting my feet back into my Poughkeepsie community. This is my new normal, a new beginning. What the future holds is still to be determined.

To a sweet, happy, good new year, L’shana Tova!

Photo of the Hudson Valley is from Flickr Creative Commons taken by b.reynolds.

Nidhe Israel Synagogue

We visited the oldest synagogue in the western hemisphere, Nidhe Israel, recently. The building is a beautiful light pink color on the outside and on the inside, lovingly restored. It is a two-story square building with only one Jewish-identifiable symbol, a Star of David in a stained-glass window. It was first built in 1654. What I have to say about the synagogue cannot compete with a recent article in Reform Judaism called Diaspora: Miracle in Barbados. There was also an in-depth blog post that I found prior to coming to Barbados, researching what we might find in our new yet temporary home. It was written in 2008 by Drew Kaplan.

While visiting, we met the shamas, Emerson, who gave us a friendly and detailed tour of the synagogue. The museum was closed so we will definitely go back some time in the future. The adjacent cemetery had an odd arrangement of above-ground graves and some propped-up headstones; it's pretty clear that many of the graves were not in their original position and during an earlier renovation these sites were disrupted and not put back with the best of care. Also, there is a renovation currently going on of a mikveh, discovered in 2007, which will probably not be used for its original purpose, once it is opened. The mikveh dates to the 1700's.

The picture of all of us above is outside of the entrance to the upper gallery. The entrance to the upstairs is in the back of the building.

Services are not held here year-round but will begin in the winter, tourist season. Congregation Shaare Tzedek will meet in Nidhe Israel Synagogue from about December to February.

The video and the photographs are mine and can be found on YouTube and Flickr.

Good and Full Day

Today was a pretty great day. I had a very nice morning getting some minor things cleared out of my to-do pile and then met the CERMES technology support person, Dale. Why should that be so terrific? He came by my office to familiarize me with the UWI and CERMES system and see what I might need, technologically speaking. There was a nice matter-of-fact calm about Dale. What was interesting to me, as someone coming from the IT sector in higher ed, is that he is a dedicated staff member for the CERMES program. He doesn't need to be the expert on a variety of software packages or the campus Learning Management System. He supports the use the desktop machines, the computer labs, the projection (from what I can tell), and the campus (or CERMES) server access. It was great working with him. He’s going to load ArcGIS on my desktop machine, plus the extensions I need. I don’t have to do it. Just today, prior to meeting this technology support specialist, I tweeted something not too kind about IT professionals, after reading an article on IT staff and “the way they are.” I have to be a little kinder about the IT support folks.

By the way, I did NOT take any of these photographs. The hawksbill turtle (first photo) is from the Bienvenidos a Bajatortuga site . The leatherback turtle (below) is from Gabriel Malor's blog.

In the middle of being shown the technology facilities at CERMES, a professor came out of a lecture room and said to me and Dale, “there’s a talk on turtle in there. Do you want to learn about marine turtles?” Why yes, I’d love to learn about marine turtles, especially in Barbados. I sat in on a fantastic guest lecture from someone from the Barbados Sea Turtle Project. I learned all about hawksbill turtles (above, in water), green turtles, and leatherbacks (the one in the sand), who seem to be nesting in Barbados right now. I know a bit about leatherbacks from our time in Trinidad. All of these amazing sea turtles are engendered in some classification or another. I hope to be able to participate in a field trip with this same lecturer and the students in the class when they go out to monitor turtle nesting in the near future.

I had to sneak out of the turtle discussion to meet with my new colleague Kim for a planned meeting to discuss her Grenadine MarSIS data. Kim is a PhD candidate at CERMES who is heading up the Grenadine MarSIS project which is a “multi-knowledge Participatory GIS (PGIS) which integrates a range of transboundary information on marine resources, biodiversity and ecosystems of the Grenada Bank together with the social and economic aspects of marine resource use patterns and corresponding activity profiles of its users.” It’s an amazing geospatial, space-use analysis project that I will go into more discussion about over the coming months. I’m working on the Google Earth and web mapping integration of Kim’s collected data. Kim’s blogged during her recent, and final, reach vessel outing, which you should check out.

Scooting out of the meeting with Kim to make another meeting, this time with the Chargé d'Affaires ad interim at the U.S. Embassy to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean. I met Dr. Brent Hardt, we chatted about the Fulbright and what I will be working on, he met my family, we shook hands and took a picture, not with my camera. It was brief and yet, very exciting to be taken so seriously. I also got to meet the person at the Embassy, Juanita, who has been helping me all along the way, after I found out I received the Fulbright award. Juanita’s assistance prior to coming to Barbados was invaluable and helped make the transition very smooth. Oh, one more thing that my family and I got to experience at the Embassy, a security briefing. It got us a little nervous, though it is always wise to stay alert and be sensible. Afterwards, I felt protected. No pictures from my own camera, though. Drat. The photo is of the US Embassy in Barbados and is grabbed from the Embassy's web site. I couldn't take my own photo.

Finally, we ended our evening with a shabbat service at the Shaare Tzedek synagogue. There are about sixteen Jewish families who are members of this congregation (the only Jewish congregation on Barbados, I believe) and for the next 11 months, ours is family number 17. Services were held in a home made into a sanctuary found in a neighborhood. It was lovely. The photo below is from this Jewish Virtual Library site.

Shopping and Eating in Chengdu

We awoke to a 5:00am wake-up call and then gathered as a group by 5:30am. A tour bus took us to the Beijing airport. I couldn’t get any readings (fixes) from the GPS for most of the day. (See the success story at Starbucks below.) Geography Professor mentioned casually that I could get into trouble for ‘measuring things,’ so I’d like to not draw attention to myself. I’m carrying around a tablet PC with a GPS receiver sticking out one end and attached by a long cord. It looks kind of silly. I look like a dork, but when I have the locations of where I am, I and I think others will be happy for this small sacrifice.

We flew out of Beijing to Chengdu on an airline that I do not know. It was a great flight and the Beijing terminal was very modern, not at all like the terminal I flew into in 1996. And it wasn’t the international terminal all set for the Olympics that I flew into the other evening.

Our Tour Guide for the Sichuan Province part of the trip met us at the airport and we boarded a bus. She gave us an introductory talk about what we would be doing in Chengdu. She mentioned that when she was waiting for us at the baggage claim she noticed that many of the Chinese people there remarked at how happy they were to see our (American) group coming in so soon after the May 12 earthquake. They thought of it as a vote of confidence and support. Tour Guide also told this funny story about what she felt when the earthquake occurred (it didn’t hit Chengdu hard at all where we saw no earthquake evidence). She said that when the earthquake happened she thought ‘some naughty boys were playing the firecrackers in the house,’ and she was going to get up in the morning and go and tell them to stop it.

Once in Chengdu we stopped to have lunch. It was delicious and very spicy hot. Apparently, the Sichuan style of cooking is to use a lot of known, local, simple ingredients and make something really yummy and special. That was what we had. A variety of small dishes came out, for each of us to sample, and they were so good. It was a little like having tapas. Another humorous thing that Tour Guide said was that in Sichuan Province, with all the spicy food, the women are thought of as ‘spicy girls.’ I think she thought of herself as a spicy girl, herself.

Fed and happy, we went to the Wide and Narrow Alley shopping area. This is on Jinli Street. As I said I could not get a reading of where we were, but it was a new area opened up for shopping and strolling. Some homes are there in the ‘alleys’ and some of the former homes are made into shops. One notable building is a ‘church’ built by French people in the 1830s but all the windows had Star of Davids and it was an obvious synagogue. It will soon be a restaurant. Since this area is relatively new there was information on the Wide and Narrow Alley on Google Earth. But perhaps when I get more time I’ll investigate this street and its significance.

Then we went to the Dufu Thatched Cottage Museum. This is well-known and in Google Earth. Dufu was a Chinese poet who lived in the 700s. He is comparable to Shakespeare and highly revered. This thatched cottage is a place he wrote only briefly in his life. The grounds were beautiful. It seems as though Dufu’s works are co-opted throughout the ages and he the current party can find communist leanings in his writing from over a thousand years ago. Certainly.

Latitude 30.647627, Longitude 104.047428

Hopefully this is the last of these shopping jaunts, for next we went to another shopping spot on Qintai Road. I just rested at Starbucks and DID get a GPS location. Probably because I could sit still for awhile in order to get a fix on the satellites. (See Google Earth link for the days adventure spots). Anyway, this was another ‘alley’ for shopping. There will be plenty of shopping opportunities along the way, to be sure. Oh, and though this was Starbucks, the coffee was divine. Much more flavorful than the American brew.

Latitude 30.646595, Longitude 104.043257

Then we walked two blocks to get on the bus to drive one block to another eating establishment. None of us were hungry but when you put terrific and beautiful food in front of me, I can’t help myself. I wouldn’t want to be rude. Again, the food was spicy yummy.

Latitude 30.670017, Longitude 104.076658

We checked in to the Tianfu Sunshine Hotel. The hotel seems nicer than our first hotel, which was great. More on the hotel later with my TripAdvisor review.

Here's where we went in Chengdu, viewed in Google Earth.