SiMonica’s Voyage

Today is the day of Erik and Keeli’s wedding.  People are gathering and having a good time.  Anxiety is at an all-time high level, but it will all dissipate in a few hours.  Yesterday, was the rehearsal dinner, where we met some of Keeli and Erik’s friends and some of Keeli’s relatives.  Keeli’s mother was one of nine children, so Keeli has 55 cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews, in addition to her own two siblings.  We’re excited to meet them, but I am afraid that I will not remember everyone’s names. 

We arrived in Omaha on Monday evening.  On the way we had a layover in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Due to the fact that we had to wait for five hours until our next flight, we took the light rail from the airport to the center of town and walked along the banks of the Mississippi river.  Minneapolis used to be a huge flour milling town and until the 1920s.  Judging by the fact that we saw only a handful of people during our multi-hour walk, we judged that it was not such a booming metropolis today. 

For the first three days in Omaha, we stayed with Keeli’s parents and helped out with various projects for the wedding, such as assembling welcome bags for the out-of-town guests and assembling very fancy-looking wedding programs.  The goodie bags included a two magazines about Omaha, a map, three chocolate chip cookies, two bottles of water, three Halloween-sized candy bars, and a bag of popcorn.  All of this was very well received.  The programs were a huge arts and crafts project and I learned a lot of new terms such as “scoring,” “velour,” &c. 

On Wednesday we visited the famous Omaha Zoo, which was indeed spectacular.  Aside from having the second largest geodesic dome in the U.S. (the pride of the city), it also had a great tropics exhibit, and Monica was taken with the new gorilla exhibit.  Instead of the gorilla’s being in a cage, it’s the other way around.  The felines seemed to be either malnourished (not likely in Nebraska), or really hot, because most of them were inert. 

The rest of Monica’s close relatives arrived on Wednesday, and Keeli’s family had a big family dinner at their house.  On Thursday we went to visit Keeli’s paternal grandparents, Norma and Dick, in Elk Horn, Iowa.  Elk Horn has the largest rural Danish-American population in the US, and the only Danish-American Immigrant museum in the country.  Keeli’s grandparents were two of the founders of this museum, and we visited it after lunch with her grandparents.  Dick gave a tour of the place to everyone except for me (I am a slow museum visitor and couldn’t keep up with them), and was very knowledgeable about the subject.  He used to be the archivist at the museum.  I, on the other hand, got stuck at the exhibit that detailed the process of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.   Aside from a display of old ship tickets and health inspection forms filled out at Ellis Island, there was a binder of stories by immigrants about their journeys to America.  My favorite, if I may recount it here was of a 17-year old Danish woman who had a brother, Simon, who immigrated to Iowa.  Several years after Simon immigrated to the States, he came back to Denmark to pick up his sister and bring her to Iowa.  When they disembarked in Ellis Island, it turned out that she had a problem with her hip, that was a birth defect, and she was put in quarantine for three days until the doctors established that it wasn’t a contagious or debilitating disease.  In the meantime, her brother left her there and departed for Iowa.  When she was released on to American soil, not knowing any English, she somehow found her way to the train station and was able to purchase a train ticket to Iowa.  Four days later, she turns up in this town in Iowa, where supposedly her brother resides, and luckily she runs into an old lady who speaks Danish.  The young woman explains her situation and the old lady happens to know Simon.  They then proceed to the courthouse to put in a request to search for Simon, and when they arrive at the courthouse, they run into Simon and his friend, who are in the process of placing a search request for Simon’s sister.  Apparently, Simon realized that he should have waited for his sister in New York City.   Overall, it was a great museum and very professionally curated with a large number of unique artifacts.  For a town of 750 people, this is a phenomenal achievement. 

As an aside, Keeli said that whenever she or her brother or sister would come to visit her grandparents in this town, it would be mentioned in the town newspaper. 

That same evening, we went to Gorat’s Steakhouse which served some awesome steaks.  This is supposedly the place where Warren Buffet and Bill Gates go to dine when they meet up for their chats.  We prematurely celebrated Monica’s grandparents 60th wedding anniversary.

Yesterday, we visited the Durham Western Heritage Museum of Omaha, where Keeli and Erik are getting married.  It is an old train station built in the Art Deco style with very very tall ceilings, great stained glass, and old signs.  On the lower level they have old trains that you can walk inside of, and a large exhibit on how the west was settled and some models of typical Omaha homes from the early 20th century, old mud dwellings of the first settlers, and other stuff.  Walking through the old sleeper and lounge train cars I felt disappointed that passenger train travel is not popular or really feasible in the States these days.  There are so many functioning railroad tracks here and people prefer to travel in their own cars along boring interstate highways.  Maybe, some day, train travel will return through some serious lobbying.  I saw one photograph in the book at the museum gift shop of a protest in the early 1970s and one sign said, “Daddy, what are passenger trains?”

I’d say that we’re positively impressed by Omaha and are having an awesome time here.

On that note, I will adjourn to continue the festivities in honor of Erik and Keeli. 

Tomorrow we fly out to Omaha, Nebraska for my brother’s wedding.  We’re planning on making side-trips to Elkhorn, Iowa to visit with Keeli’s grandparents, to Lincoln and hopefully to the famous Omaha Zoo!

Last week we were in New York, catching up with former co-workers, friends and family.  It was not so strange to be back there as it still feels like we’re just traveling through.  (We think reality will kick in once we settle into an apartment in San Francisco, but that won’t be for another month, at least.)  So the adventures continue!  We reunited Ball with the couple that owns the craft store below our old apartment and sold us this lucky toy.

After this week in Nebraska, we’re heading back to Wenham to get ready for our cross-country trip!  We’re renting a 12″ box truck to haul us, and our stuff, to California.  We’re planning on driving through Buffalo (hopefully seeing Niagara Falls), South Bend, Indiana, Southern Minnesota, the Badlands and Black Hills Park in South Dakota (along with Mt. Rushmore), Wolf, Wyoming, Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons National Park, and then zoom through Nevada to California!  We head west on August 4 and if all goes well we’ll arrive at Simon’s family house in Cupertino, CA on August 12.  We’re driving mostly on route 90, so if anyone has any other suggestions for sites to see along the way, feel free to let us know.

We’re planning on edit our photos on smugmug down to a manageable “best of” gallery, and we’ll be putting up the photos that we took in New York and ones that we’ll take in the Great Plains, during the first week of August.  The Best of gallery has no planned completion date yet, but we’ll work on it.  Based on conversations we’ve been having with people since we’ve gotten back, we’re also planning on adding a Frequently Asked Questions page to this site.  Email us any questions you want us to answer about our trip and we’ll add them to this list.

Three-hundred and forty-seven days after departing from the United States, we have returned. The three flights that we had to take to get to Boston were long and arduous. The first flight of the journey, from Odessa to Kiev, was the most worrisome, as we flew on an old Soviet airplane (Yak-42D), and the pilot seemed to think that he was at the controls of a jet fighter. Maybe it’s the design of the aircraft, but every single turn could be clearly felt. The nine hour flight from Kiev to New York was only long, and the passport control went smoothly after having to fight off a ballsy line-jumping Ukrainian woman in a pink sports suit. The last flight was unfortunately prolonged by two hours since we got stuck waiting for our turn for take-off in a queue of 35 airplanes.

Now we’re in Wenham, Massachusetts, Monica’s hometown. Monica was very excited today when she rediscovered a suitcase of her clothes that we had to leave behind. It was like getting a whole new wardrobe without having to go shopping for it.

The last few days in Tallinn were rather uneventfull, and poor Monica had to see more sights from my childhood. We did have a nice walk through the old town while it was sunny, and it turned out that there are a fair number of tourists visiting the city these days.

We arrived in Kiev and after a short nap, we finally left our hostel and ate at a place called “Drova” (trans: firewood). The food was cafeteria style, but quite good. Then we started walking toward the Maidan, the central walking area, which is close to Independence Square where the Orange Revolution demonstrations happened. On the way to the Maidan, the streets were deserted, despite it being the night before a four day weekend. As it turned out, all the people were drinking beer on the Maidan, a national passtime in all the former soviet countries, including Russia. Sometimes, you spot the occassional drunk, but not that much. People are walking around with open bottles of beer at any time of the day. The Maidan was lively as was the main thoroughfare, Khreshyatik Street. The next day was spent walking around the city, taking in the river Dnipro, the giant statue of a woman holding up a sword and shield with the Soviet coat of arms, to commemorate the Great Patriotic War, and then the Podil area of town, where some famous writers and artists lived in the past.

Kiev felt like a capital city and was clean. The streets were well paved and lit up at night. In general, we liked it, and could have spent one more day there. However, we were on a tight schedule, and boarded a night train to Khar’kov (Khar’kiv in Ukrainian), the city where my father and his relatives used to live. Now there is only one relative who lives there permanently, and it is my 2nd cousin. We stayed with her at her spacious apartment close to the center of the city. Her mother was visiting from Germany and showed us around the city, noting the places where my father and his parents lived, as well as some others. I have to say that some of the locations are not too shabby, though the apartments were supposedly quite cramped. On the last day in Khar’kov, we went to the biggest outdoor market in Eastern Europe. You could buy everything to build a home there, including delicious tomatoes and raspberries.

Last night we took our final train of our international journey to Odessa, the birthplace of my maternal grandparents. We were greeted by a horde of grandmothers who donned little pinned signs on their chests advertising seaside dachas for rent. We avoided them and found an elderly gentleman who rented us a spacious apartment in the center of the city, (on Bazarnaya and Ekaterinskaya streets, for those who are interested). It only cost us $16 per night. We spent this first day walking around various synagogues, Jewish community centers, and city archives, trying to track down some information about my long-lost relatives. It was a Soviet process, if you can imagine it. We might have some results tomorrow.

This is likely our last post before our return to the States on July 5th. We feel ready to come back, though it will be surprising!:))