It’s my last night in the US, and it has been quite a trip ♥. My travel journal skills are way on the other side of rusted, so let me bullet point experiences:

1. it’s so strange, the things I forget about America every time I’m gone. The way tipping works. Waiting until the full party arrives to be seated. Locks turning the wrong way around. Portion sizes. The way a New York City street smells. Having anything you could possibly want, right at your fingertips. BERRIES. I love it.

2. Friends/family from home: my friend A and her husband have the cutest, friendliest two-year-old; it was pretty darn fun to be woken by him at 6AM when I was staying on their couch in Jersey City. Don’t know how parents do it on a daily basis, but definitely fun as a guest, and I’m glad I could pay back their hospitality by at least an evening of babysitting.

Another friend from home recently moved to the Upper East Side, with an equally adorable 4 year old (+ a baby and a dog). She’s fairly overwhelmed, still, but it was nice getting to see her, and accidentally telling her son about Van Gogh’s ear while reading him a kid’s book about art (whoops), and getting excellent home made french toast.

I visited a third friend from home in Atlanta for a week, to spend time with her and meet her new – here’s our theme – baby, three weeks old. My friend had him on her own, and she’s just being amazing, and it’s just so clear how in love with him she is. He support system is essentially her mom, and right now that’s not going so well, and I really hope they manage to work things out in a good way soon, because she is going to need the help. But: she is healthy, baby is healthy. That’s a good enough start to the year for now. We mostly stayed inside all week, with a brief excursion to a corn maze & pumpkin patch (I carved pumpkins for the first time in my life and have the cuts to prove it \o/), Rosh Hashana dinner, and city hall, to apply for a passport for the brand new American citizen. My friend was deported to China from the US a few years ago; her mission to get her baby as many documents proving he belongs is very, very deliberate.

I met a fourth friend from home who’s visiting the US for the holidays; we had dinner and a play, followed by Marie’s Crisis for some musical theater singalongs; a most excellent evening.

Fifth meeting was with family: my uncle’s a commercial airline pilot, and apparently he had a flight to New York scheduled, and my aunt decided to join him about 2 hours before he left for the airport, which is, you know, something she can do so long as there’s room on the plane. We met up for dinner at Carmine’s (an institutions they were shocked I didn’t know, but whenever Israeli airline staff tell me about a “famous” place in NY, I can never tell if it’s legit well known, or just famous amongst the local airline staff community!) and walked around a bit, which was really nice.

And more family – my dad’s sister flies to New York every October, so I’m staying with her for my last two nights here. She’s staying in a beautiful apartment not far from Lincoln Center, with a 34th floor view that all of a sudden reminds you that oh hey, wait – Manhattan is an island, after all.

And today: it’s Yom Kippur so I had no work, and while there’s something ingrained from years in Israel that makes driving and doing things on Yom Kippur feel just wrong, I took a train up to Connecticut to try and search for foliage with a colleague from back home, who’s there for the holidays. It rained all day, so we had to adapt and went to the Peabody Museum in New Haven and then the Mark Twain house in Hartford, which was really cool; his house was ridiculously pretty, tbh. You can tell that leaves are on the cusp of turning – there are beginnings of yellows and oranges – but it’s not real foliage season yet, and I hope to someday be in the US at just the right timing to finally be able to see it.

3. Friends from here: ugh, having friends from round these parts is so amazing and I am forever grateful ♥.

I spent about a week and a half in total stay at newredshoes’s, who is SUCH A JOY to spend time with, I can’t even. Coming home to her at the end of each day and having a cup of ginger tea and hanging out with her and her dog, who is just as sweet as advertised, and talk about anything from fic to theater to work to, oh idk, Sasha Baron Cohen, is highly recommended. I am very much looking forward to the day she can come to Tel Aviv and I can return the favor :) Also, magical things happen when I’m with her: a street festival will just pop up on her neighborhood on the day I arrive, and then we’ll meet Chuck Schumer down the block and she’ll tell him to work on impeachment and then a few days later Things Will Start Happening, and then we’ll meet a friend of hers who used to work in comics and Gerard Way was his intern, and anyway, yes. Great times were had.

On the weekend, I won lottery tickets to Frozen, and spent an incredibly lovely afternoon with celli <3! We met at Grand Central and dipped into the NY Public Library, sat in Bryant Park with some snacks and caught up for a bit, and went to see the show, which I enjoyed far more than I thought I would.

A few days later I went to Macbeth at the Met with seekingferret. I’m still getting over the fact that the singers there don’t use any amplification and it’s all just this magical combination of skill and acoustics. We talked about Worldcon and AO3 (<3) and fic and some talmud and it was great to meet up.

This weekend, I got to spend time with thedeadparrot and merisunshine36, our first reunion since 2013 \\\o/// (That time when we tried to make TDP watch a hockey game and she did not care for it at all, and lo, how times have changed). merisunshine36 and I met at Javits Center and peoplewatched Comic Con peeps and costumes for a while – cosplayers are amazing, and also, I love the experience of seeing superheroes walking amongst regular people, especially those is realistic, full costumes. Like, seeing a good Spiderman cosplayer on the subway can really give you this thrill of what it might feel like to see a superhero IRL! Seeing a good Batman cosplayer really gives you that feeling of how awkward it is to see Batman, especially in the daylight, like, no wonder that dude slinks around in the dark with the ears on that mask.

ANYWAY. The three of us went for lunch, and then just wandered around downtown fairly aimlessly. We saw the Brooklyn Bridge, we strolled through Chelsea Market and ate fruits and berries on the highline, and then we met azephirin for dinner at Union Square. I left a bit early to go to Elsiefest at Central Park – a mistake I made once, and will now never have to repeat again – and the next day I met thedeadparrot in the afternoon and we went to a play, and a last breakfast the following morning after I crashed at her place. I’m so glad I got to meet up with them both and am eternally grateful that we’ve gotten the chance to see each other in the past few years.

Finally – yesterday we made it work and oliviacirce and I grabbed lunch together! It was short and sweet and many recs were exchanged, and I’m really glad we got to make that happen.

(Is this truly the end? I technically have one more afternoon here before leaving for the airport tomorrow evening, so like, if you’re in the area and have time to grab coffee or something, do let me know, I’ll be somewhere in the Midtown/Lincoln Center area for sure.)

4. Theater – how about I just make a separate post about that. How about someone just go ahead and ban me from Broadway. There was A Lot.

5. I should also make a separate rec post of all of the fics I’ve read during this trip (MCU, HP, Schitt’s Creek) because they have all been excellent. I will just say, to all the people I met, sorry for going on about Schitt’s Creek so much, and remember, unless you enjoy the first episode and are there for that kind of humor, just go ahead and skip to season 3 episode 8 and skim the show for all of the David and Patrick scenes, until someone posts a supercut of their scenes on youtube or something, because they are the cutest fucking thing on fucking television and also the fic about them is e x c e l l e n t.

7. Work: the reason I was able to fly out for three whole weeks is that work agreed that I could work from the NY offices, which are conveniently located by Times Sq. I love the US team, they are such a great group of people with seriously fascinating and honestly diverse backstories and also just really sweet people, and I had a great time with them. That said, my god, working for an Israeli company, with Israeli clients, with the Israeli timezone, from New York - *shudders*. If there’s one thing I’ll be glad to leave behind when I go back, it’s this work jetlag and constant feeling of stress, being barraged by emails and text messages at 6AM that need responses ASAP before the day/week are over in Israel. Blah.

8. I landed in the US the morning after our elections, and the whole first week was filled with daily online checkups of ‘do we have a government yet?’. This last week was filled with checkups of whether the US still has a government. Politics are all very all over the place. I’m still not clear on what’s going on back home, tbh. I am looking forward to Friday night news back home to start trying to figure out what the hell is going on; putting it aside for now.

...does it still count as bullet points if it’s a numbered list? Let me add a final bullet point then:

• Note to self: Yuletide nominations end today. DON’T FORGET TO NOMINATE BEFORE YOUR FLIGHT.