I’m going to Israel!

It’s official, I leave for Israel next week!  I’m bringing my awesome camera and a couple of empty memory cards and I’m going to take TONS of pictures.  The last time I was in Israel, people were still having trouble starting the year with a 2, I was planning to never take French again, and I was in junior high (before Alan B. Shepard Jr Junior High School became a middle school).  How times have changed…

The group I’m going with is Israel Outdoors, a company that organizes free Birthright Israel trips for Jewish kids ages 18-26.  I have a friend who’s already gone on their trip and had a great time.  I’m nervous about meeting the 25 or so people who are on my trip, thought I feel like we won’t be strangers for very long.  I also don’t feel like I did a lot of preparation for this trip, beyond making sure I’m signed up and have all the necessary documentation for it.  But I do so much travel, I feel like packing won’t take that long…

Well, hopefully one of these days I can put up some pictures from my first trip to Israel (how’s the scanning going, Mom?), but until then, here are a couple of pictures from my trip 12 years ago (wow, how time flies).  First, me and my friend at the meeting point before our long flight (I’m on the right):

And me and a few friends while we were there (that’s me on the right again):

Well, see you all in a few weeks!  I’ll try to post a few pictures when I get back.  Yallah! (Let’s go!)

From the Internet: Starting a Food Truck

I’ve written before about food trucks, namely my favorites in Philly and DC. I haven’t yet written about my favorite Philly cupcake truck, Buttercream Philly, but what I know about the woman who runs it is she used to be a lawyer who got tired of her day job and quit to open up her truck. As someone who has known her fair share of lawyers, I could probably understand the impulse to wave goodbye to a corporate law job (aka Big Law). So, this article about starting a food truck caught my eye. (The author, Aviva Shen, even mentioned Buttercream!)

It mostly talks about lawyers and others with similarly demanding jobs who switch professions. Although for every success story there’s probably 50 or more who didn’t make it, it is the American dream to make it big, even if you’re not coming from nothing. Or maybe it’s the new American dream, to make a living doing something you love? Either way, it’s hard to look at these success stories without wanting to give it a go. Even the boyfriend has toyed with the idea in the past of opening some sort of business, bubble tea in particular. Well, we’ll see what happens once I get a lucrative enough career…

Have you ever dreamt of changing your career mid-stream? If so, what would you do?

The National Mall, Washington DC

National Mall, 2005

The National Mall.  When some people hear the name, they think it’s a mall, like one you go shopping in for clothes and stuff.  Not so much…  It’s more like a giant grassy area that connects the Capitol, Washington Monument, and the Smithsonian.  So, it’s kind of awesome.

I have been lucky to have gone to the Mall on a number of occasions during my various trips to DC, starting with my first trip in 1995.  This collection of pictures, however, starts in 2005, when I went to visit my friend during my sophomore year of college.  The Mall is covers a rather large area, which makes it terrific for runs (my lap from E down 9th and around 12th and back is great!) and picnics and any other sort of gathering.  It’s very pretty at night as well, although I haven’t yet been able to adequately capture that beauty.

Well, without further ado, I present the National Mall!

Smithsonian Castle and Washington Monument, 2012

Smithsonian seen from the Mall, 2005

Dawn before the Inauguration, 2009

Me, the Mall, and the space shuttle Discovery (next, find Waldo!), 2012