Thursday, September 22, 2011

New Orleans

We had a wonderful ride to New Orleans. Our train attendant was Marcie. She is 76 years old and very spry, with a great sense of humor. She said she plans to keep working for several more years. She is from New Orleans and gave us some suggestions on places to visit while we were there.

We stayed at the Roosevelt Hotel which was beyond words. They lobby was gorgeous with gold everywhere. There were old paintings, a grand piano, a long hallway that just shouted elegance and money. I'm not sure what it costs to stay there, but WOW! I was in shock the minute walked it. It just screamed money.

The concierge had been to Alaska and said that if there was anything we needed to let him know. He even said that he could probably even find us Muktuk if we wanted it. That made me laugh.

Our room was huge! The bed was very comfortable. The room had a hinge window with drapes out of "Gone With the Wind." There were chocolates on our pillows, along with the next days weather forecast. There were bottles of water on the dresser and a walk in closet with robes and slippers. The bathroom was gigantic with a huge vanity, the size of my bathroom in length. I could have fit more than two of my bathrooms at home in the bathroom in our room. I was in awe. It was like a honeymoon suite. There was even a sitting area in the hallway near the elevators. I felt like royalty. We were just a couple of blocks off the French Quarter.

After we freshened up we went for a walk in the French Quarter and stopped for some grilled shrimp and onion rings at Felix's. The food was really good for little hole in the wall. We walked down Bourbon Street. There was loud music, half naked girls, and a variety of people. At one point there were half-naked girls on a balcony and two women on the street flashed their boobs at them. The girls on the balcony threw down beads for the girls. I whipped around, beat red. I was totally embarrassed. Tom said that was how you collect beads on Bourbon Street. I was shocked and not sure how to react. I told Tom that if I wanted beads I would just buy them.

We continued our walk, during which Tom got several eyes full, as half-naked girls shook their booties to entice men into their establishments. We stopped for a drink. I decided since we were in New Orleans I should try a Hurricane, it tasted like overly sweet Hawaiian Punch, definitely not my cup of tea.

We were stopped for being too serious and had to pay a fine to help the homeless. I got a hat in return, as well as two stickers. One for Tom said he was "Too Far From Puking" and mine said something about not smiling. THe guy who stopped is a teacher and he said teachers volunteer to collect money for the homeless shelters. He kept referring to me as Tom's daughter. It was an interesting experience, though a little too crazy for me. I'm sure it is worse during Carnival. After that we returned to the hotel to get some sleep.

The next morning we walked down Canal Street to Decatur to Cafe Du Monde for beignets. There were deliciously deadly, fried and buried under a mound of powdered sugar. An order is three and we split it. Tom had a cup of coffee with chicory. He said it was really good.


I bought postcards and Tom took a picture of me wearing a mask like they wear during Mardi Gras. The owner of the store has been to Alaska and we talked about the weather differences.I said I was dying in the humidity and she told me to think of it as a sauna that I did not have to pay for. It was clearing all the chemicals out of my skin as I sweated and to think what beautiful skin I would have as a result. I thought she had a great point. Every time I felt overwhelmed buy the heat and humidity, I told myself I am in a sauna and my skin will look beautiful when I leave.


We walked over to the river, the Mighty Mississippi. It is a bug muddy river. The water is very dark and you can not see down into it, but it reflects the sunlight beautifully.

We found a store called "Aunt Sally's" which I loved as I have an Aunt Sally. I bought postcards and candy. They had the best pralines. I bought three different kinds. We also went to an artist co-op called "Dutch Alley." I bought a beautiful silk scarf and a hat. I also bought several cards by an artist we met. She is an excellent artist. We ate at a place she recommended. It was very good.

We walked in the rain to catch the trolley along the river walk, but it was not running, so we ended up walking a lot further. Along the way we stopped and took pictures of the immigration statue and the Holocaust Memorial. One side has the star of David and the other has a Menorah. We took a break at the iMax theater and checked out their gift store and the aquarium next door. From there we walked to Harrah's for a hot drink and waited out a major down pour that hit. A couple came in drenched while we were waiting for the rain to stop. I was very glad we decided we wanted something to drink instead of continuing our walk since it started pouring so hard.

We caught the St. Charles Trolley. It is the oldest street car in New Orleans. We had a fun time on the ride and took tons of pictures while riding, including Loyola College, a trolley historical sign and other historical signs. We met some interesting people on the trolley, including a family from Australia. We rode to the end of the line and got off while they flipped the seats in the other direction and then we got back in and rode back to where we started.

We had dinner at Pat O'Brien's down on Bourbon Street. Tom took a picture of one of the dancers/hookers who was half naked. She yelled at him "No pictures!"

Tom told her that if she did not want her picture taken she shouldn't be out in the street dressed like that. Tom sent the picture to Bryce who texted back "Where are you?"

Tom responded "Bourbon Street, New Orleans."

Bryce texted back, "Wow!"

We continued our walk to dinner. I had shrimp creole and Tom had shrimp remoulade with fried grits. Both were very good. We shared a half of a piece of heavenly pecan pie for dessert. I took the rest back to the hotel to eat later.

After dinner we walked around Bourbon Street for a while and then headed back to our hotel to pack.

The next morning we had breakfast at Mother's which is in an old red brick building with bare brick walls. When you walked in the door you picked up the menu, walked to the register to order, pay, and get your drinks. Water is self-serve. They bring your food to your table when it is ready. The food was excellent, homemade biscuits and homemade jam. They served you a ton of food. They have a wall of Medal of Honor recipients and police and firemen. It is a pretty cool place. They had some water damage with Katrina, but was salvaged and for a period of time the employees lived in FEMA trailers outside while fixing up the place.

Grits are interesting, they have no real flavor. They need butter, sugar, cheese, or something to have any flavor. The fried grits Tom had were really good. They cook them until they are really thick, layer them in a pan to dry, then cut them into wedges and fry them lightly on each side in a little oil and serve with shrimp in a remoulade like sauce.

We had a nice walk back to our hotel where we relaxed for a while before heading to the train station for our ride to Memphis.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

The Holocaust Museum

If you are ever in Washington DC and can only visit one museum, then I highly recommend the Holocaust Museum. It is dark, and yes, depressing, but it is also very well done and enlightening. It tells the story of a horrific time in history in a way that makes you see the bright side as well. The hope, the love, the belief in a better life that helped to hold many people together in a time that is beyond words for the horror that they endured.

To quote a sign I saw at the museum: "The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored, persecution, and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators." (Quoted from http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005143)

The Holocaust Museum looks like any other building on the outside, if you ignore the signs. It does not stand out as a blot on the history of the world, but once inside and having ridden the elevator up to where the exhibit starts, you see a black wall with black letters, the lighting is subdued. Even the children who walked through seemed to know this was not a place to run and play, but a place to be reverent and respectful. There was an unsettled quiet in the air as if people's emotions were floating around, including those of the dead. It was unsettling and yet at the same time fascinating to be able to look into the past and pray that we learn from it, that we do not ever repeat the horrors of this past.


One thing that was really nice was that being that Tom is a retired military we did not have to get tickets in advance. We were given immediate entry passes. When you first go in to get on the elevators there is rack with booklets which tell about some one who suffered through the Holocaust. Each person is encouraged to pick up a booklet and to check at the end of the exhibit on the computer to find out more about what happened to them. By luck of the draw I picked a woman and Tom picked a man. My woman died while hiding from the Nazis. She and her husband and two children were hiding in a stream for several days and her husband said that at one point she was there and then she was not. He is not sure if the Nazi's got her or if she drowned and floated off down the river. Can you imagine spending several days standing in a river hiding from the Nazi's? Imagine how cold and shriveled you would be, no food, unable to get dry and warm. To me that is torture, and it does not even begin to compare to the actual torture that the Nazi's inflicted on the Jews.

We saw videos of American, and British soldiers getting to the camps, rescuing the survivors. They came to Ohrduf Concentration Camp in Central Germany in April 1945. We saw video of Dachau Concentration Camp's liberation.

"The things we was beggar description...The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were...overpowering..." General Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 15, 1945.

It was inhuman how they were treated. It is ridiculous that people can deny that the Holocaust happened when there is so much evidence the it did happen.

Walking through the exhibit were saw actual uniforms that were worn by the prisoners in the concentration camps.They were tattered and stained. These people were robbed of their lives and their homes. They were treated like animals, not as human beings.

We watched a video on the "Nazi Rise to Power" which showed the German Mark being used as wall paper in 1921 because it was worthless. The video showed work by Kathe Kollwitz a German Artist, protestations stating "Death to Marxism" and discussed Hitler's stint in jail, during which time he wrote"Mein Kampf" which means "My Struggle." Hitler blamed the depression on the Communists, the Jews, and the Versailles Treaty. By 1933 Hitler was the master of Germany.

The Jewish people had lived in Europe over 2,000 by 1933. Heinrich Heine wrote, "Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." He was a Jewish poet and he wrote this when he books were being burned that were written by many authors, both Jewish and non-Jewish, before Hitler came into power.

One reason many people survived is because no matter what Hitler and the Nazi's did they could not stop them from thinking or take away their imaginations. Many who survived, did so because of their ability to picture things as different than they were.

Operation T4 was the Nazi code name for the systematic killing of the handicapped by using them for medical experiments. Hitler considered the handicapped to be inferior. A person who is handicapped is not inferior, look at Stephen Hawkings. Does it matter that he is in wheel chair? Not when you consider what all he has done for science.

Walking through the exhibit we saw a display of shoes from those who were gassed. The Nazi's kept them as if they were something to be proud of. The poem by this part of the exhibit began with the following words: "We are the shoes, we are the last witness..." by Moses Schulstein, a Yiddish poet. It was so sad to see all those shoes, a silent reminder of the six million Jews who were killed. There was also a picture of the hair piles from the concentration camp. The hair was used to stuff things, like pillows and beds.

The exhibit contains a train car and tracks from Treblinka. The car was actually used to transport Jews to the camps. Stacked near the trains were pile of luggage from Auschwitz. Suitcases in which they had packed their most precious belongs and clothing thinking they were were going to work camps, or simply being relocated, they had no idea they were going to their deaths. There were beds from the barracks at Auschwitz and Baden-Wooden. The beds were slats of wood where five or six people were huddled together for warmth and comfort. There was not mattress to soften the wood, and most did not even have a blanket for warmth. There were iron cast models of the ovens, and a table from a camp, with a hole for the blood to drain, where they had laid out the dead to pull out their gold crowns. There was also a diorama showing people lined up to enter the "showers," as they are gassed and transported to the ovens, and pile of bones.

More horrifying than this were the videos showing the pictures the Nazis took during their medical experiments, that included putting them in pressure chambers to test the effects and submersing them in freezing cold water until they froze to death. It was horrible to watch this form of torture. Hitler and the people who followed him and did his will were monsters. They were all sick, insane, people who needed to be locked away. What they did to the six million Jews, gypsies, handicapped, and others is a crime against humanity. What is even sadder is that many people let this happen, they did not believe what was happening and so did nothing.

There was poem by a Lutheran minister, Martin Niemolher, that says, "First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me." This poem is so true as many people turn their heads and ignore what is happening around them because it does not directly affect them. We all need to be aware of what is going on around us and to pay it forward, help others, and be there for our fellow man. If we do nothing history could repeat itself and we could end up with another Holocaust or something similar.

There were survivor stories on audios. They told of children being gassed when they arrived at the camps, as well as pregnant women. At the end the videos of survivors and liberators told their stories. On particular one stood out to me. It was a woman who told of an American soldier when he found her with a group of women in a barn after they had been marched there by the Germans. When she saw the soldiers she told the first one "I must tell you I am Jewish." The soldier responded, "So am I." She said at that moment she felt liberated. She also talked about a friend who died just before they were liberated. She said they had made a bet three years earlier. She said she would be liberated, her friend said they would not. She told her friend when they were liberated she had to get her strawberries and cream. This woman said she survived because her father told her to wear her ski boots. She said they protected her feet on the long, cold, death march. She said her boots protected her feed from freezing. Her feet did not freeze, like many others feet did. She said people' feet froze and their toes fell off.

Elie Wiesel said, "For the dead and the living must remember." We must never forget the horror of the Holocaust, or we are doomed to repeat it." I pray that we have learned from this experience and that it is never repeated. If we learn no other lesson in life, this lesson is the one should learn.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Other Thoughts on D.C.

We did not tour the Newseum, but I did like the fact that the quote "Congress shall make no laws..." about the right to print newspapers was on the outside of the building. Every morning they display the front page from a major newspaper from each state, so we were able to stop and peruse the front page of the Anchorage Daily News to see what the newspaper thought was the big news of the day.

The capital city in Maryland is divided into four quadrants: northwest, southwest, north east, and southeast. The city proper meaning the area in which all the government and historical areas of interest are in a diamond shaped layout. I know pure trivia, but interesting to me, must be the history teacher in me. :)

There is a statue of Albert Gallatin who served under President Jefferson and cleaned up a fourteen million dollar deficit, plus added some surplus to our national treasury. Where is he when we need him. Can we bring back a reincarnation of him so he can clear up our national deficit today? We certainly need someone like him.

The third oldest building in D.C. is the treasury building, It took three years to build. THe second is the capital and the White House is the oldest. Government and money, seem to be the rule of the day even back then. I do love the architecture of the old buildings and the columns that seem to be everywhere. I would have loved to have lived at Tara in the movie 'Gone With the Wind" only with air conditioning, please.

Speaking of the White House, it was opened in 1800 and every president except our first, George Washington, has lived in it. George Washington oversaw the construction. He died in 1799.

We did not tour the White House but man would I hate to have to clean the place. It has one hundred thirty-two rooms, twenty-eight fireplaces, three elevators, thirty-five bathrooms, a forty-six seat theater, and a bowling alley. It is 5,500 square feet in area with five floors and an attic. That is a lot of cleaning. The president and his family live in the back of the house, but there is no back door. There are about six entrances, but not one is called the back door because the president cannot bring anyone in the backdoor without insulting them.

We also went out near the Arlington National Cemetery and saw the oldest section, number 27. Two presidents are buried in Arlington, John F. Kennedy and WIlliam Howard Taft and his wife. Taft weighed over three hundred pounds. As we drove by the cemetery I was thinking of all the lost souls buried there. All those who fought for our country and our freedom. Many people do not stop and think about the fact that freedom is not free. It is paid for with the lives of every person who has died fighting to keep our country free, fighting for our rights to stand up and protest, or burn the flag, or to march in honor of anything we believe in. We have the right of free speech and religion because of those who died to defend our right to it. There is a poem that was written by a high school student, Kelly Strong, in 1981 as a tribute to his father, a marine who served in Vietnam.

"FREEDOM IS NOT FREE

I watched the flag pass by one day,
It fluttered in the breeze;
A young Marine saluted it,
And then he stood at ease.

I looked at him in uniform,
So young, so tall, so proud;
With hair cut square and eyes alert,
He'd stand out in any crowd.

I thought... how many men like him
Had fallen through the years?
How many died on foreign soil?
How many mothers' tears?

How many pilots' planes shot down
How many died at sea
How many foxholes were soldiers' graves
No, Freedom is not Free.

I heard the sound of Taps one night,
When everything was still;
I listened to the bugler play,
And felt a sudden chill;

I wondered just how many times
That Taps had meant "Amen"
When a flag had draped a coffin
Of a brother or a friend;

I thought of all the children,
Of the mothers and the wives,
Of fathers, sons and husbands.
With interrupted lives.

I thought about a graveyard
At the bottom of the sea,
Of unmarked graves in Arlington.
No. Freedom is not Free!

©Copyright 1981 by Kelly Strong
http://iwvpa.net/strongk/

I love this poem. It expresses what we all need to learn, freedom is not free it is paid for with the blood of our forefathers, our brothers, and sisters, friends, and enemies who have fought for our right to make the choices we do, even those that are dangerous and immoral.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?

     I will never forget September 11, 2001.  I was getting ready for work when the phone rang and I ran to answer it, wondering who was calling at about6:30 in the morning, Alaska time.  It was my oldest son calling to yell in my ear that we were under attack and to turn on the television. I was confused, but went down stairs to turn on the television.  It was shortly after that I watched the plane fly into the second tower and I was in shock.  Bryce was with me and wanted to know why we were under attack.
     I remember calling my neighbor and yelling at her as she was half asleep, telling her to get up and turn on her television. She was like "What, what, what time is it?" 
     I told her to wake up and turn on her television. We were under attack.  She finally got it and got up to turn on her television.  She called me later in shock.
      It was an emotionally harrowing day.  I remember calling my mother and talking to my students about it.  It was very rough day. 
      I have a friend who thought she watched her father die on national television.  He worked in the towers and she did not know until late in the day if he was alive or not. She was honest with her students and they were very understanding of all she had gone through because of their own fear. 
     When I talked to my husband later in the day he said that at first he thought it was a joke because of the DJs on the radio station he was listening to. The DH's were known as jokers.  He changed the radio station and got the same news so realized it was for real and told my son to call me.
     I thought at one point it was the end of the world.  I had been reading "The Left Behind" books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and in the first book they talk about people disappearing and planes falling from the sky. When I saw the plane fall and crash into the second tower I thought I had been left behind.
      I will never forget this date. It is one like December 7th, that "will live in infamy" to take words from FDR.

It Is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to Pay Off Your College Loan

  There is a key point that the leftist are totally missing in their, asinine argument, saying that the government should pay off student lo...