A picture of me on the Auckland harbor. I went to New Zealand for my cousin's wedding & saw relatives. Then I traveled all over the South Island, to exotic locales such as Picton, Christchurch, Timaru, Dunedin and Invercargill. I'm half New Zealander on my dad's side, but hadn't been there for some fifteen years. It was great to be back. I got to look around the cities and walk a lot. I went shopping and got Maori jewelry for everyone. I got to do bone carving and make my own pendant out of bone. I saw a Maori cultural performance at the Auckland Museum. I spent Sukkot at the Christchurch Hebrew Congregation (such an incongruous name!). I went to the Cadbury factory in Dunedin. Unfortunately the picture of me next to the giant bunny didn't turn out! I spent Yom Kippur asleep because I had terrible jet lag after a million hours of subways and busses and flights and airports from Brooklyn to Auckland and then to Havelock North (near Hastings) where the cousins live.

I just found a website in French that explains the geneology of the Lys side of the family, who were apparently from France, but Protestant, and faced persecution from the Catholic majority, so they immigrated to England, and have since ended up in New Zealand and other places. My wandering family! My grandfather was born in India, where his father was the Anglican minister for the British population in or near Calcutta (i.e. they were not missionaries, but clergy for the British). After he served in the first World War, my grandfather, known as Max, took advantage of a British government opportunity to settle in New Zealand, where he became a sheep farmer. My dad likes to remind us that he was born on a farm.

Yesterday I finally made it to a meeting of the Armenian/Greek/Assyrian folkdance meetup group. I danced for three hours. It was great. I could recognize a lot of the steps from all my years of Israeli folkdance. There were steps like the depka, a Lebanese step, which probably was the basis of the debka step in Israeli folkdance. An oud player came at the end and we looked at a laptop file of a filmed music performance from the 80s with some amazing Middle Eastern / Armenian music. I really want to learn to play the oud (a many stringed Arabic / Turkish guitar type instrument). I saw someone in the film playing a G Clarinet, which made Middle Eastern music sort of sounds that I would never have associated with a Clarinet. Fascinating stuff. (I think I really overuse the word fascinating. Must find a better word or more variety of words).

The Israel Trip that the Synagogue is planning is driving me insane. Multiply a million details by 250 people or 60 families and you get a state of total chaos. I think I could be an events planner after this and find it relaxing! I've started making myself an ongoing to do list just so I can remember everything that needs to be done. I make myself take lunch breaks and get out of the building and I make myself go home on time.