Day: July 4, 2009

3 July. Five pictures from my Washington DC trip.

Not many pictures today, as the majority of the day was spent traveling to Silver Spring to visit my Aunt Merle, who lives in a retirement community there. I had left my Zipcar card at home (drat) and so could not reserve one to drive and see her, so I depended on the Metro to get me there. It did, much to my amazement, though it was a bit more than a 90 minute journey each way. This is the road leading to the retirement community. While there, I neglected to take a picture with Aunt Merle. (double drat)
One of the houses on the way back. I liked the decorative wood in this carport.

Sara lives in this tall building. The one in the middle of the picture, not the one closest to me. By the time I got home, it had started to rain, a bit. In the afternoon, I hung around and helped (a little) while Sara prepared for our 4th of July picnic.

In the evening Sara, Shawn and I went to the very fancy and delicious Restaurant Eve, where Sara’s sister works. I had a delightful dinner including a poached duck egg with prosciutto and croutons as well as bouillabaisse for my entree. My dessert was quite fabulous, being a house made “Butterfinger” which was about 400 times more delicious than any Butterfinger I’ve eaten (and about twenty times more expensive.)

If you squint you can see Sara and I in the restaurant. We opted for the stealthy, no flash picture.

3 July 2008. A picture from the Hungary/Romania trip.

Our day began with breakfast at the High School, and then we met the Bishop and got a tour of the school, as well as the Unitarian Church. Because Unitarianism came out of the Protestant reform movement, the churches, especially in this part of the world, tend to be very white and bright with little ornamentation. What they do have is beautiful, solid color embroidery decorating everything. Apparently, if you are familiar with the styles, you can identify the embroidery by region. The church in Kolosvar had red embroidery, the church in Okland used blue.

We also saw the stone where Francis David stood and preached a sermon that converted the entire town to Unitarianism. (There has since been some backsliding.) We also toured St. Michael’s church which is the large Catholic church in the main square.

Then: swimming. I was thrilled as it was very hot and sticky and I like nothing more than to be in the water on such a day. We took the bus to the pool which was huge–they had one big pool and two or three smaller ones. There was topless sunbathing (which everyone handled most maturely) but the thing that was the most interesting to me was that the pools had no filter. They were very large cement rectangles with no outlet for all the detritus that comes along with public pools. So while swimming I brushed against all sorts of things.

Post swimming we broke up into smaller groups. Dana and I found a post office, which was thrilling as I had been trying to mail my postcards for days, and then wandered down to look at the Orthodox church, where these two women were chatting. I wonder how old they are? They could, conceivably, be in their early 60s as old people there tend to look older than their age would suggest.