NYC here we come: October 2012

Sitting at dinner tonight with Gilad Shalit was more moving than I had ever anticipated.
I knew that working with the BJ community would bring my way fantastic opportunities, just from having met the people I am working with. When dinner with Gilad Shalit was put on my schedule I was laissez faire, it's not about him I said to myself, he just stumbled into a situation, no big deal.

Now that all is done and dusted, tonight, sitting across the table from him, with friends from his unit around the room, during dinner, was a special thing.

Being a mother, I had to hug my kids a little tighter,
Being inquisitive made me question how in the world did he survive, and does he appreciate his food more today than before
And i dumbed the cynic in me when we sang together ״להיות עם חופשי בארצנו״ . Here is a man who truly knows what it means to free.

Shabbat Shalom xxx

Saturday a couple of weeks ago we went to visit a real gem in New York, the High Line park.
The High Line is an old elevated railway which was abandoned for many years and eventually, and extremely skillfully converted into a beautiful park.

One walks along the old train line, which has been decked, dotted with benches, works of art and planted up on either side, and one feels great.
You are very much in the city, you are surrounded by buildings, and yet it is all very serene and calm, very different to how you feel walking along an average NewYork street. It's almost as if you are invisible to the city, you see it but it can't touch you. You are there, but separate from it. It's a liminal space, a time out of time, a space out of place.

Living in this new city as I have written before, is constent work. In order to contain it and make sense of it, we are constantly zooming in & zooming out, moving from micro to macro and vice versa, existential questions (what the f@#%¥k are we doing here), alongside daily minutia (what lunch should I send with the kids to school). I believe that it's these transitions that allow us to enjoy our experience. Looking from the outside, and at the same time live the daily life from the inside. There was something about the walk along the Highline which made me feel this much more.

Here are some pictures from the day.

View from the Highline onto 14th street, walking abvoe the city

The kids, note the road below

amazing architecture

Crazy windows

Zoom in

Walking above the city

Zoom in

And then we ran into a really interesting character. David is an artist who was very active in making posters for the occupy wallstreet campaign. He sits in his box while promting thinking outside the box, and invites anyone who walks buy to paint an iTOMB, which is a small piece of cardboard 3' x 3'. The kids had a great time and if you look on his blog he has a slideshow of all the iTOMBS painted with the name of painter and Date they were painted. Lookout for Nomi & Tomers from Sep. 22nd.