by Marlene Berlin One of my daily jaunts in Rock Creek Park last week was a delightful hike along Valley Trail north of Military Road. It began to rain, which for me is a happy occurrence. I enjoyed the activity and the surroundings but my head was also full of thoughts, mostly of the parks […]
Forest Hills Travels: Jews are flocking to Portugal, and not for the first time
by Marlene Berlin When my husband Jim and I decided to visit Portugal this summer, we didn’t know we would join large numbers of tourists vacationing there. We also learned later that many of the people flocking to Portugal are planning to stay. Thousands of Jews are applying for Portuguese citizenship, centuries after their ancestors […]
Dispatches from Riyadh: To market, to market for camels and dates
Laurie Sieminski is a neighbor and master quilter who is spending four years in Riyadh with her husband Adam while he serves as president of the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center (referred to as KAPSARC in her writings). She’s been sending dispatches to her friends in Forest Hills and has given us permission […]
Meet Your Neighbors update – from Riyadh: “Life Here Comes With a Warning”
On July 16th, the high in DC reached 98 degrees and what may have been the hottest temperature we’ll see all summer. In Saudi Arabia, that would have been seen as a cooling trend. Laurie Sieminski is in Riyadh with her husband Adam, who accepted a four-year stint as president of the King Abdullah Petroleum […]
Neighbors Recommend: Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge
David Cohen, a reader and frequent contributor, writes: “In honor of the New Year, permit me to recommend a day trip to the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Cambridge, Maryland, less than a two-hour drive from us.” Cohen took these photos on December 27, 2015, from the five-mile wildlife drive: Blackwater, a waterfowl sanctuary, looks […]
Forest Hills resident’s photo chosen for national Parkinson’s awareness calendar
Fantastic news about a Forest Hills Connection contributor and neighbor: Forest Hills resident Pat Davies is getting creative in the fight against Parkinson’s disease. A photograph she took of women in Sapa, in the north of Vietnam, has been selected to appear in the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation’s (PDF) 2015 Creativity and Parkinson’s Calendar, and is […]
Where we go: Biking in Bali
I cannot keep up with Jan and Jack Buresh’s travel schedule. When we caught up with each other at a neighbor’s party, they told me they had gone back to Bali. Of course, I could not resist tapping Jack for a story – and a taste of sun, warmth and the exotic. – Marlene Berlin […]
Memories of Prague, 1986
by Margery Elfin It was summer 1986 and we had decided to go to Eastern Europe. The Cold War was mostly over, although it would be three more years before the Berlin Wall would come down. We were interested in seeing what was going on in what was then called Czechoslovakia, a country emerging from […]
My schmatte: Lost and found in Prague this summer
by Marlene Berlin Somewhere between the Prague airport and our lodgings on the edge of Old Town, I lost my light gray jacket, my schmatte. That’s a Yiddish term for a well-worn and loved piece of clothing. I must have been distracted by the discussion with our taxi driver about the movie Amadeus and the […]
What I did this summer: Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean Sea
by David Jonas Bardin Tel Aviv is a Mediterranean city which my wife Livia and I rarely visited when we lived in Jerusalem 40 years ago, and only briefly since then, in the course of multi-venue tours. We remedied that in August, when we spent a week’s vacation there, staying a block away from Tel […]