From Ithaca to Summit

Another chapter of this travel blog commences!

Monday morning, after a brief final trip up McGraw Tower with Eli, Harry, Josefin, and Rachel, I packed up the last of my belongings still in 106 West Ave., loaded them into my family's car, and brought them back to 309 Salem Drive with the help of both of my parents.  Although my main task throughout Monday afternoon involved unpacking my bags and putting my clothes and books back in storage, I ended up cleaning out large portions of my room, especially my desk.  I realized that I needed to begin to remove the piles of detritus that have accumulated over the years as a result of my laziness in deciding what to do with so many of my possessions.  I ended up finding old postcards and caches of foreign currencies that I had forgotten, or had believed were lost.  I found three years' worth of High School student IDs, as well as the journal that I kept during the months that I lived in England at the end of 8th grade.  I never realized it before, but that journal was probably the earliest prototype of this blog.  I wrote essays about the places I had visited, and the about things that I did, so that I could practice writing, and would be able to remember them after the fact.  I found essays about the London Underground, the Tower of London, Kew Botanic Gardens, Shakespeare's Globe Theater, British cheeses (especially Wensleydale and Yarg), and more.  The essays were shorter than my blog entries, and written by a middle school version of JD (who still went almost universally as "Jonathan"), but still recognizably my own.

On Monday night, I had finished unpacking all of the things that I had brought home from college, and proceeded to pack up many of them again, in a smaller suitcase, in preparation for my trip to New York City.  For those of you who don't know, I'm spending this June studying at Drisha Institute, where I hope to familiarize myself with traditional Jewish texts, and to improve my Hebrew (and, if I'm lucky, my Aramaic).  I'm planning to stay in the dorms at CUNY Hunter, which do not open until June 10th, so I'll be staying with my friend Victor's family in Summit, New Jersey until then.  It will be a a moderately long commute to 37 West 65th Street by foot and train and then foot again, but I don't really have much of a choice.  I'm extremely grateful to Victor, his mother, and his brothers for being such good hosts, and not just letting me sleep in their house, but also chauffeuring me, spending time with me, allowing me to use the Wi-Fi necessary to write and publish this blog post, etc.

First, though, I needed to get to New Jersey.  That is why, on Tuesday afternoon, Eli Shaubi and I began the drive from Ithaca to Summit.  Eli, who lives in the Five Towns in Long Island, was willing to give me a ride on his own journey back to the tri-state area.  He even made a substantial detour in order to drive me right to Victor's front door, rather than simply dropping me off in New York City, and hoping that I could find my own way to Summit by train via Penn Station.  For those of you who know the two of us, I'll just say that we spoke about exactly the things that you would expect the two of us to discuss on a 4-5 hour road trip.  Sushi-making, the discovery of the Higgs Boson, Saint Augustine's Confessions, the advent of Judeo-Arabic, and problems in our respective theses that we'd like to correct were all topics of conversation.  We made it to Victor's house rather late at night, not until around 9pm, so Eli ended up sleeping at Victor's house, too, in the bed next to mine.

After seeing Eli off in the morning, I spent a fair amount of today, Wednesday, reading my copy of The Landmark Herodotus, finishing all of Book I.  The Landmark Herodotus is an exhaustively-annotated edition of the Greek historian's famous work; there's also a Landmark Thucydides (which I've read), a Landmark Xenophon's Hellenika (which I hope to read soon), and a Landmark Arrian (which I plan on reading sometime).  I highly recommend these editions to anyone interested in delving into Classical Greek history.  These editions give the reader extensive background information, confirmations and repudiations of the writers' claims, maps that help those unfamiliar with Mediterranean and Anatolian geography make sense of what is happening when and where, and relevant archaeological images.  I also spent time today trying to find a Judaica shop that sold copies of the Babylonian Talmud.  I was unsuccessful, although Victor did manage to find a mezuzah that he will need for his new apartment in Philadelphia, where he will be teaching high school chemistry and attending U Penn grad school next year.  I was specifically hoping to find a copy of Tractate Sanhedrin, which I will be studying at Drisha, as well as Tractate Makkot, which I hope to be studying with a friend during the coming months.

Victor and his mother also took me out to a kosher vegetarian restaurant near their house, where I got a rather good falafel with Israeli salad and Spanish eggplant salad.

I'm very excited for my orientation tomorrow.  My only two worries are that I will accidentally become lost on the way to class tomorrow and therefore be late, and that I won't have a chance to purchase a copy of Tractate Sanhedrin before I need to have one of my own.

Looking forward to class tomorrow, and (for a few of you) seeing you soon in NYC!

~JD


"If you think yourself an immortal and that you command an immortal army, no opinion of mine will mean anything to you.  But if you realize that you are human and command an army of human beings, consider first that there is a cycle in human affairs, and as it goes around it does not permit the same person to enjoy good fortune forever" (Herodotus, Histories, I.207.2).