Christmas in Philadelphia

Our dilemma for this winter ... should we go and celebrate Christmas with the family in Europe or with Ross and Rachel in Philadelphia? In the end the decision was not that difficult: Philly it would be - although with a little pain in our heart because we would have loved to see family and friends in Europe!

We took off on Wednesday the 17th of December - after a delay of 3 hours - at SFO, had an uneventful flight to PHL and took the train to downtown Philadelphia where Ross and Rachel picked us up and took us - via a slight detour by "the donkey" - to their home. Both Will and I were very happy to finally be able to visit them, a year almost after they came to see us in Ecuador!

The following days were not so pleasant for me: I had felt a blatter infection rearing its ugly head for a while now and there was no more escaping it ... But a friendly doctor, considerable doses of antibiotics, a lot of sleep, water & tlc got me up and smiling again in a couple of days.

Rachel and Ross introduced us to a bunch of their friends and colleagues (including a tour of Ross' lab), took us to a fun play / musical (Cherry Bomb: the Worst Act in Vaudeville for the Holidays), showed us some of Philly's prettiest sights and streets and dragged us to the Redding Terminal Market where we had our first pretzels (! And no, they're nothing like what you imagine them to be: small, hard and very salty, but the very opposite: freshly made, big, hearty, and slightly soft, to be eaten sweet - with sugar and cinnamon - or salty - with some kind of mustard or cheese dip; absolutely delicious!!!).

The other thing that Rachel introduced both Ross and me into was yoga! I took four beginners classes and really enjoyed the physical exercise, tried a headstand for the first time in about 20 years and - luckily - it wasn't all about new age witchcraft love and peace as I had feared it might be.

Before Christmas we had to go yummy-food-shopping. Gil (Ross' mum)'s Christmas present to Ross and Rachel was a cheque to go and buy Philly's best food, so we went to the farmers market to buy a duck, chestnuts, plenty of fruits and veggies, cheese and other delicacies ...

Christmas Eve was celebrated in the Moffat tradition with Chinese take away food, a visit to the donkey and midnight mass in a beautiful church with a great choir singing. The only deviation from this tradition - mainly instigated by Ross and secretly supported by me - was the opening of 1 Christmas present!

On Christmas Day, Will & I woke up to an abundance of presents brought by Santa (I still can't grasp which chimney he would have used to enter the place!). Subsequently, we could finally open those presents that had been tempting us under the little tree for about a week now! At 14.00 h, the four of us packed the duck and the rest of the food and walked over to John and Siobhan's house to celebrate Christmas with them and Bruce, one of Ross' colleagues. Needless to say we had a great dinner, followed by Siobhan's home made desserts and concluded the evening with the cute movie about a small robot Wall-E.

Our enjoyment of Philly culture further included:

• the eating of the traditional Philly cheese steak (tried the three varieties: Cheese Whiz, American cheese and Provolone!),
• admiring the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts (beautiful architecture!),
  
• a visit of the huge Philadelphia Museum of Art (amazing sunset that evening),
  
• the intriguing Mütter Museum or College of Physicians with its amazing collection of medical oddities, many of them on "strong water" and
  
• the Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

We spent our last evening in Philly in the company of Andre - who's birthday it was - and Clara having a great time playing cards and other games.

On the 31st, we had to get up painfully early and took a taxi to the airport where the plane had some delay in taking off due to a minor health related accident (one of our fellow passengers fainting ...). Will then went to work while I tried to defeat sleep by going food shopping with Andy & Steph. We had sushi for dinner and tried no stay awake as long as possible playing with Andy & Steph's Christmas present: a WII! A lot of fun, but to no avail ... We did not make it awake into the new year ...

We tried to make up for that the next day though by walking up Mount Davidson. Instead of the fireworks the previous night we were treated to a stunning view over Twin Peaks under a setting sun clouded in thick mist.

Some pictures ...

Early December

Caving

After our American caving career took off with the trip to the Lava Beds National Monument for Thanksgiving, Will and I went on another trip to a cute, little town surrounded by little lumps of gold and big trees: Volcano. Anyone interested in the trip report can check it out on the Spekul blog; it is written by John Tinsley who was our trip leader (yes, we have official trip leaders in the States!) that day. It was on the 6th of December which is "Sinterklaas" (to be translated by, but not to be confused with "Santa Claus") and one of the caves we visited that day was called - you'll never guess - Santa Claus ... because it happens to have a chimney! We also visited Mushroom Cave and Pearl Cave (very briefly) and had a nice dinner with the other guys @ Giannini's.

Oh and Will and I both got a GPS for Christmas, which arrived a bit earlier on the 5th of December so that we could already start experimenting with it on our Volcano trip ... ;-)

On the 12th (a Friday, so Will couldn't make it ...) Bruce and Pat (aka Pa & Ma Lava Beds) invited me to go sea cave mapping with them, Beej and Rich near the Cliff House and Sutro Baths in Northwestern San Francisco. The tide was extremely low that day, so a good opportunity to map some of the newly discovered sea caves the month before. We mapped one of them, but could not do the other one - baptised Brigadoon, alluding to the story/musical as well as to its sandy nature - due to the high level of sand. Winter storms should have taken the sands from the San Francisco shores to deposit it more to the South before bringing it back over the Summer, but a lack of storms this year (did anyone say something about climate change?) is filling up all the caves rather than freeing them.

The day after, we went to the SFBC Christmas party, which traditionally involves a pot luck dinner, gift exchange and auction and was not any different this time. Needless to say that we had a great meal involving turkey, ham, some great side dishes and home made beer. We had a lot of fun with the gift exchange game and collected loads of money for the grotto's bank account ... Will² graciously had us stay over at his place that night, gave us a tour of the Stanford campus the day after and introduced us to yummy dim sum.


The museum

The second week of December, I started working as a volunteer in the Hearst Museum for Anthropology and Archaeology. I had come across the museum website by chance and found out they were looking for volunteers, so I applied ... I'm working there three days a week now on three different collections. The museum has more than 3 million artefacts in store spread over four buildings and a lot of that material is still terra incognita ...

There's the North American Archaeological and Ethnographic Map Collection with old USGS (i.e. standard topographical maps from the US Geological Survey, with or without archaeological sites from previous surveys marked on them) and non-standard maps in it (i.e. maps that have been made for certain publications). Jonathan is in charge here and I (and other volunteers) help him with the cataloguing and making the inventory of the maps.

Natasha, who is Collections Manager for North America, needs assistance with the physical inventory of the California archaeological collections which means checking the object's name of record with the physical object, as well as verifying the storage location and archaeological site of the object. It's amazing to see how in geographically separated cultures like those of the Middle East and those of North America people came up with such similar tools!

One day a week, I'm also helping Paolo out. He's actually the only archaeologist working for the museum, the others are all anthropologists - although Natasha has worked as an archaeologist for years. He's in charge of the Archaeological Collection which contains material from all over the world. I got to inventory lithic material from some of the famous French Palaeolithic sites and pottery and stone tools from North Africa, but they have stuff from all over the world that has - in the past - somehow ended up at the museum one or the other way ...

Besides this, I've also been to one of their other storage units where I've helped with the relocation of an amazing collection of audio tapes from the early 20th century containing interviews with native Americans in languages that are now extinct and the unpacking, dusting and relocation of an enormous anthropological collection of basketry from the Far East dating to the first half of the 20th century. A lot to do there!

Other stuff

Before going to Philadelphia, we had a Christmas party at home with the house mates. Andy & Steph got us a real Christmas tree, Hilary & Taylor had the decorations, cats and dogs were dressed up properly, Hilary and Steph as well, we had a yummy meal together and a funny gift exchange in which a home made monster was bestowed upon us!

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