Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Transit Woes
Anastasia met for lunch with French Canadian pal Cristina Silveiro from United Nations French Radio. Cristina took a stack of EH postcards to pass out to her coworkers at the UN Secretariat building.
Lori Ann Krushefski, marketing director at New York public radio station WNYC, hosted us at a book club meeting at the Bryn Mawr Club of Northern New Jersey in the leafy town of Montclair. Lori Ann provided a sumptuous buffet of Lebanese food as we talked with 10 alumnae including Mimi Fogel, who has visited Turkey three times; Kathleen Milligan, who provided the music for the evening and whose family spent 5 years in Istanbul working for the General Electric corporation; and Marlies Drahouzal who likened Turkish family and friend networks with the one she enjoys in her own heavily Italian Northern NJ hometown. Surprise guest of the evening was Divya Srivastav, a long-lost classmate of Anastasia’s – they hadn’t seen each other in 15 years! Russian major Linda Henigin told us she lived in Moscow for several years and had the sense that Turkey was an impenetrable land, as if under a veil. She said: “Now reading Expat Harem I realize I could go there, and in fact want to go there! The writing is so vivid, the country so welcoming.”
Taking the NJ Transit train back to Manhattan from Montclair, we were lucky to be delayed only two hours on our return to the city – due to a massive power outage many train commuters along the Eastern Seaboard were stranded many, many hours on the trains the next day since Amtrak and NJ Transit locomotives were trapped in the tunnels around the island of Manhattan!
Anastasia met for lunch with French Canadian pal Cristina Silveiro from United Nations French Radio. Cristina took a stack of EH postcards to pass out to her coworkers at the UN Secretariat building.
Lori Ann Krushefski, marketing director at New York public radio station WNYC, hosted us at a book club meeting at the Bryn Mawr Club of Northern New Jersey in the leafy town of Montclair. Lori Ann provided a sumptuous buffet of Lebanese food as we talked with 10 alumnae including Mimi Fogel, who has visited Turkey three times; Kathleen Milligan, who provided the music for the evening and whose family spent 5 years in Istanbul working for the General Electric corporation; and Marlies Drahouzal who likened Turkish family and friend networks with the one she enjoys in her own heavily Italian Northern NJ hometown. Surprise guest of the evening was Divya Srivastav, a long-lost classmate of Anastasia’s – they hadn’t seen each other in 15 years! Russian major Linda Henigin told us she lived in Moscow for several years and had the sense that Turkey was an impenetrable land, as if under a veil. She said: “Now reading Expat Harem I realize I could go there, and in fact want to go there! The writing is so vivid, the country so welcoming.”
Taking the NJ Transit train back to Manhattan from Montclair, we were lucky to be delayed only two hours on our return to the city – due to a massive power outage many train commuters along the Eastern Seaboard were stranded many, many hours on the trains the next day since Amtrak and NJ Transit locomotives were trapped in the tunnels around the island of Manhattan!
