Category Archives: Travel

Junks I Collect No. 5: Bonsai Trees

My husband and I got married at the Meridian House, in Washington, D.C. This Neoclassical house was designed in 1920 by John Russell Pope, the architect also known for designing the Jefferson Memorial, the West Wing of the National Gallery, and the National Archives. It was built as a personal residence for Ambassador Irwin Boyle Laughlin and remained in his family until 1961 when it was sold to the American Council on Education and then to the Meridian House Foundation, which became Meridian International Center in 1992. It is now used to house the Center’s office as well as for event rentals.

I love the fact that my British husband and I got married at the home base of an “organization dedicated to promoting international understanding.” I love the Latin inscription over the front entrance to the house:  “Quo habitat felicitas nil intret mali” (Where happiness dwells, evil will not enter).

Front courtyard of Meridian House

But what I loved most about the property was the rear garden with its pebbled courtyard and allée of pleached linden trees that form a sort of natural outdoor cathedral.

Rear garden with pleached linden grove…My dad walked me down the aisle and then performed the ceremony!

In keeping with the tree theme, our wedding cake featured a tree on top of it (and underneath the tree – my dog, whom I’ve written about here).

We used little potted bonsai trees as combination seat markers and favors.

Potted Serissa seat markers around the base of the centerpiece

The day before the wedding I picked up dozens of  little Serissa trees from Merrifield Garden Center in Falls Church, Virginia. This is my favorite gardening center, and really – my favorite store period. I sat on the floor of my parents’ back porch for hours repotting the little bonsai starters into tiny little terra cotta pots tied with ribbon. My sister poked her head in, took one look at me and my dirt-smeared face and dirt-encrusted fingernails, and stated the perfectly obvious: “You’re insane.”

Since our wedding, I’ve had a sentimental fondness for Serissa trees and have tried and failed to grow them ever since. Wikipedia says they are “fussy”: “It responds adversely…if over-watered, under-watered, if it’s too cold, too hot, or even just moved to a different location.” Oh, how I can relate to this plant! I have come to terms with the fact that I’m incapable of keeping my Serissa trees alive, so whenever I get the chance, I replenish my stock at Merrifield Garden Center, the only place I’ve ever found them as starter bonsai plants. I know they’ll die, as all my others have, but I think of them as cheaper and slightly longer-lasting than cut flowers, which I never buy. (The words “false economy” are ringing in my ears as I type).

These Serissas were about $10 each. You can usually find even smaller ones for about $3. I pot them up in bonsai pots (also from Merrifield Garden Center) and cover the soil with moss. The garden center also sells tiny little sculptures that you can add to your plants. I usually just add a little seashell or something of that sort.

I placed an ammonite fossil at the base of this one:

Believe me, I’m not blind to the sad irony that this symbol of our love is constantly dying due to my mismanagement. But I console myself with the thought that persistence (even in the face of repeated failures) counts for something. In fact, the ability to acknowledge and accept our failings, as well as a healthy dose of (often black) humor, has helped us to hold it together for almost sixteen years now. Just this morning my husband started referring to himself as “my better half.” He caught himself and said, “Actually, I’m more like your ‘tolerable eighth,’ maybe even sometimes your ‘intolerable sixteenth’.” Finally, he hastened to very generously reassure me that I was his “magnificent 7/8ths”!

Enhanced by Zemanta

Silver Diner

Just a few photos of the kids at their new favorite restaurant…

We must have heard “Lion Sleeps Tonight” at least seven times…

Chihuly

Dale Chihuly (b. 1941) is an American artist whose medium is glass. I first encountered his work in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where I saw this spectacular 30 foot high chandelier hanging from the ceiling in the main entrance:

After studying interior design at the University of Washington and art at the University of Wisconsin and the Rhode Island School of Design, Chihuly received a Fulbright Fellowship to study glass blowing in Venice. Upon his return to the States, he helped found the Pilchuk Glass School in Washington State.

After a car accident caused him to become blind in one eye and a bodysurfing injury left him unable to hold a glass blowing pipe, he began working collaboratively with a team of artists who help him create the elaborate installations for which he is known.

We went to see the Chihuly exhibit,  which is in its final week at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia.

“Fiori and Float Boats” features two wooden rowboats filled with glass, beautifully displayed on a reflective black surface.

Garden-inspired shapes
Float-inspired shapes

The stunning Persian Ceiling is lit from above. The glass elements rest on a flat glass pane:

And another view:

In this series, Chihuly’s mission was to use as many colors as possible:

And finally:  “Laguna Torcello,” Chihuly’s “homage to Venice.” This is one in a series of “Mille Fiori” (thousand flowers) glass garden installations, and the largest platform installation he’s ever assembled:

Check out the Chihuly app for the iPhone, which allows you to have the experience of “blowing glass”:

Enhanced by Zemanta

H Mart, a photo essay

Animal:

Vegetable:

Mineral:

Tofu aisle:

Kimchi aisle:

Banchan aisle:

Tomorrow: why I almost got kicked out of the store and how my mother saved me from that ignominy!

The Torpedo Factory with my Friendy Wendy

Wendy!

Wendy!

Wendy and I have been friends for (gulp!) 30 years. We became friends in high school, but became even closer after we graduated. This is somewhat surprising, because if you were to create a Venn diagram of our friendship, there would be very little that would go into that part in the middle where the two circles overlap.

For example, Wendy loves the outdoors and hiking. I love the indoors and sitting on my couch. Once I ventured one little toe into her side of the Venn diagram when I went for a walk with her in Great Falls Park. Anyone who knows me will understand what a huge stretch that was for me. And how much I’d really have to like someone to go into the woods with them without being blindfolded and having a gun pointed to the back of my head.

It was a boiling hot summer day. Wendy wore what normal people wear to go hiking in the high heat of a Virginia summer. Petrified of ticks, I showed up wearing jeans with socks pulled up over the hems, a long sleeve shirt, my hair pulled back so tightly into a ponytail that I looked like I just had an aggressive facelift, and a baseball hat. It took every ounce of self-control I could muster not to take a baseball bat with which to ward off errant bears and rattlesnakes. It is to her credit and a testament to her good nature that she did not start cackling in my face when she saw me, but merely gently questioned my choice of apparel with a slight grin tugging at the corner of her mouth. It’s also to her credit and a testament to her good nature that since then, she’s never asked me to go hiking again. Instead, over the many years of our friendship we’ve seen a lot of movies together, visited art galleries, and spent hours and hours talking…

Wendy is a kindergarten teacher, which puts her right up on a pedestal with the other two categories of people I revere: nurses and social workers. She teaches in a school with a population predominantly made up of recent immigrants. In my book, that puts her on an extra little shelf right at the top of that pedestal. She does so much for others every single day that I can’t write about, because it would embarrass her. Suffice it to say, I think the world of her.

Over the weekend we took my kids to The Torpedo Factory:

The Torpedo Factory is located right on the waterfront in Old Town Alexandria. It used to be – (surprisingly enough!) – a torpedo factory from 1918-1923. After that it served as a munitions storage facility. In 1975 it was transformed into an art center with three levels of open studios and galleries. There’s something quite delightful about a factory for producing weapons evolving into a space where art is created instead.

You can wander through the studios and watch artists at work. They’re usually very happy to answer questions or talk about their art. Every inch of the interior is devoted to art. There is a papier mâché pachyderm perched on a ledge, friezes decorating the outside of the curved stairwell, and under the staircase in one of the treads is a lighted ledge which houses an array of miniature sculptures.

If you’re feeling inspired, you can sign up for one of many Art League classes. Finally, you can cap off a lovely art-filled afternoon with a bite to eat at the Bread & Chocolate café.

My kids got a little too jacked up on bread and chocolate and were overly boisterous on the way back to Arlington. Wendy and I were right in the middle of a serious conversation when I finally snapped and pulled the car over to squawk at the kids in a completely undignified manner. If I had witnessed this fit of apoplexy, I’m sure I would have snickered. But remember, Wendy is a kind person. She politely pretended that it was perfectly normal to threaten your kids that they would have to hoof it back to Arlington if you so much as heard another peep from them. As soon as I was done snarling at them and had pulled back onto the road, she picked up the thread of our conversation as if nothing had even happened. That’s my Friendy Wendy.

Korean Food

When I was in high school I went with a group of Korean people to a retreat center located on a remote mountain near the border between Virginia and West Virginia. Down-home American meals were served three times a day. Every day the Koreans would politely choke down their meatloaf, fried chicken, or sloppy joes without complaint. But every night, as soon as the cooking staff had all gone home, they would go out into the courtyard with their chopsticks, hunch over jars of kimchi they’d packed in their suitcases, and eat to their heart’s content by the light of the moon. From behind you might think they were freebasing crack cocaine.

American people like to try different cuisines when they eat out: Chinese, Mexican, Italian, Indian…When Korean people go out to eat, they almost always go to a Korean restaurant. My parents’ favorite Korean restaurant is Yechon in Annandale, Virginia. It’s open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all 365 days of the year. The tables are equipped with little call buttons, and the hardest-working waitstaff in all the Western Hemisphere hustle and bustle in their hanboks (traditional Korean dresses) to serve the many diners in the always crowded restaurant.

If you go to Yechon, check out Breeze Bakery Café. It’s owned by the same people and is right next door. I’m not crazy about Korean desserts. I personally don’t think sweetened red bean paste should ever be a dessert ingredient, but Breeze is irresistible. There’s a huge assortment of Korean cakes that you can sample, as well as more Western-style desserts. They have seating on two levels and in warmer weather, the upper level gives out onto a balcony. My kids love the gelato. I like the green tea bubble tea.

Over the holidays we ate here and at several other Korean restaurants with my extended family.

Cousins
Me and my dad
The girls. My cousin and sister are giving Tatiana hair extensions.
The boys
My mom and her sister
“Let’s fix our hair, too!”

There was love:

IMG_1856

There was laughter. (Nicholas was called upon to judge whose pet was cutest):

There was kimchi:

IMG_1859And there was…squirrel food acorn jello!

IMG_1858

Other favorite Korean restaurants to try in the Northern Virginia area:

Choong Hwa Won in Annandale.

We go here for the jajangmyun (see below) – these are noodles drenched in black soybean sauce. I swear it tastes better than it sounds! In Korea, ordering jajangmyun for delivery is like ordering pizza for delivery in the U.S.

IMG_1049
Han Sung Oak in Falls Church

HeeBeen in Alexandria and Arlington (buffet)

Korshi in Centreville (buffet)

Woo Lae Oak in Vienna (Tyson’s Corner)

Do you have a favorite Korean restaurant near you?

Enhanced by Zemanta

Colonial Williamsburg, Pt. 2

Miss Janice was our wonderful tour guide in Colonial Williamsburg. She was one tough cookie. Kids who idly scuffled pebbles while she spoke immediately froze in their tracks when she would shoot them a warning look. She asked a child a question and when he said, “What?” she looked at him incredulously and corrected him with a: “PARDON me?!” When a child mentioned the word “slaves” she said, “All people are born free, but they can become enslaved by unjust institutions and laws that permit that kind of thing to happen, so we call them enslaved people rather than slaves.” She talked about these enslaved people coming to the colonies “empty-handed,” but not “empty-headed.” At the conclusion of our tour, she lined us up and led us in a call and response work song, in her rich, beautiful voice. I would have taken pictures, but I was afraid she might rap me across the knuckles. Here are some other pictures from the day.

A wonderful day

My best friend and her family came to visit us today!

I wrote earlier that meeting Janel was a “crossroads” moment when life took a turn for the better. She and I met when we were both graduate students, and I was at one of the lowest points in my life. I was sad, lonely, and living in a roach and rat infested welfare hotel that Columbia University had bought to gradually convert into graduate student housing. When Janel and I became friends, everything changed. We sublet a beautiful pre-war one bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive from a classmate who was spending the year in the Czech Republic. We would stay up all night yakking and chortling into the early hours of the morning. We would throw parties for any occasion or for no occasion at all. We started a singing group together. Among the people whom we auditioned and accepted into the group were…

…our future husbands!

Janel and I now each have two boys and a girl. They call us “Auntie Adrienne” and “Auntie Janel.” When my sisters and I envision our old age, we always assume that my “beloved Janel” (as my sisters like to refer to her) will be sitting in a rocking chair right next to ours. Her friendship has made the best times in my life more joyful, and has sustained me in the worst times of my life. It’s always a beautiful day when I get to see my friend, but today two out of my three kids had the day off from school, I had taken the day off from work to be with them, the sun was shining, and…

We started the day with a walk along the Saunders-Monticello Trail, an easy 2 mile stretch along the south side of the Thomas Jefferson Parkway, which begins at the base of Monticello.

We didn’t get too far, because the kids found a little pond and spent a good 20 minutes skipping stones.

It gave us more time to catch up!

We drove up the mountain to the Thomas Jefferson Visitor’s Center at Monticello to have an al fresco lunch at the cafe there, before going back down the road just a little ways to find the entrance to the road leading up to Carter Mountain Orchard. We picked far too many Pink Ladies and ate some sinfully scrumptious apple cider donuts. The views up there are stunning. All day I kept thinking how lucky I was to live in beautiful Charlottesville.

Janel asked my daughter to put the apple she had just picked into the bag “in a dramatic way” for a picture. She readily complied. (Look at how that little silly’s hand is emoting in the second photo)!

We posed for our own picture…

…and then went to pick up Nicholas at his school. While we were waiting for him, the kids played on the swings,

and then our youngest four played an epic two on two soccer game on a full-size field. My daughter was literally weeping with exhaustion by the end of it.

We drove our matching minivans (!) to Peter Chang’s for dinner.

Finally, we said our goodbyes, made plans to see each other again soon, and headed back to our own homes with so many happy new memories. Here are three that I’m going to store up to remember on days that are less wonderful than this one: 1) the feeling of the warm sun on our backs as we stood between the rows of apple trees waiting for the children to come fill our open bags, 2) how we laughed and laughed as we watched the kids playing their two-on-two soccer game with funny strategies like perfectly executed throw-ins (to themselves!), and 3) our little daughters chatting comfortably and companiably with each other at the other end of the dinner table.

It was “wonderful, wonderful, most wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful and after that, out of all whooping!”*

*From Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Act III, Scene 2

Helping Hands & Dokte Ray

Imagine an orphan growing up in Haiti: the poorest country in the Western hemisphere whose dark past includes genocide, slavery, environmental devastation, political violence and upheaval. Imagine a child losing her parents to the catastrophic earthquake in January 2010, which killed 300,000 people and  left 1,000,000 homeless. What could an orphan growing up under these circumstances possibly expect to achieve in life?

The Robert Ford Haitian Orphanage and School Foundation sponsors its children to go to college. They are becoming lawyers, agronomists, economists, bank managers…These children, growing up in the most challenging of circumstances, are “rich in spirit and hope” and they are making a difference in the world!

This past Friday the Helping Hands service group I co-lead celebrated the successful conclusion of our “Make a Difference Day” project to collect clothes and money for the Robert Ford Haitian Orphanage and School Foundation, with a visit from its founder, Dr. Raymond Ford. We presented Dr. Ford with the eight boxes of clothing for the children of the orphanage and school that were donated by our own elementary school. Dr. Ford told us that these clothes are very much needed and appreciated, as there are no stores anywhere nearby to buy clothing, even if there were the money to do so.

(Hang on! Did somebody mention money?) We also presented Dr. Ford with a check for over $1236.00!!!

About 800 of these dollars came in the form of pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters – the spare change our children brought back in the little baggies we distributed to everyone in our school at the beginning of our project. These pennies and dimes dug out from underneath sofa cushions and gathered from minivan crevices add up to something incredible and transformative! We had hoped to raise $800 by the end of the year: enough to support one orphan for an entire year. In just a couple months, we were able to raise enough to do so much more. According to Dr. Ford, one teacher’s salary, for example, is $100/a month. The money we donated could be used to pay a year’s salary for a teacher, who will make a difference in the lives of 40 to 50 children during that year.

The Robert Ford Haitian Orphanage and School Foundation was the vision of the community elders of Grison-Garde. In fact, the website gives top billing to the community in its description: “A Cooperative Project of the Grison-Garde Community and the Robert Ford Haitian Orphanage and School Foundation.” Dr. Ford had been visiting Grison-Garde on medical missions for years when a group of village elders approached him with their dream of creating an orphanage and school. Dr Ford’s father, Dr. Robert Ford, provided the seed money for the project. Today there is a clinic, an orphanage, a school and an “elderly village,” where older “orphans” are housed and cared for. Wells have been dug to provide potable water. A solar panel electrical system has been installed. In an area where unemployment is at over 75%, these projects have provided vital work for the people of Grison-Garde, who are the cooks, the teachers, the caretakers, the carpenters, and the construction workers.

Our Helping Hands kids had all kinds of questions for Dr. Ford. One of them raised his hand and asked tentatively, “I hope this isn’t too personal, but: how old are you?!”. The answer? 72. What a role model for our kids to have! To them, this is what a superhero looks like:

After all the questions were answered, the kids crowded around to get his autograph.

Dr. Ford has given our kids a gift of incalculable value in teaching them that they too have the power to make a difference in this world.

There is still much work to be done. More wells need to be drilled. The children and elderly need to be fed. “Dokte Ray” reported to us that he had just gotten back from one of his many trips to Haiti, where he and a team of 20+ volunteer doctors, nurses, and other support personnel spent a week treating many, many sick and malnourished children.

Would you like to be a part of this story? 100% of all donations to the Robert Ford Haitian Orphanage and School Foundation go directly to the Haitians. NO salaries or expenses are paid to Dr. Ford or any volunteers, who pay their own way to Haiti to provide medical care. All donations are tax deductible, and you will receive a letter for tax purposes. That’s a lot of bang for your buck!

Enhanced by Zemanta