Milano, I'm back!

Well, here I am. In Milano, Italy. The city in which I grew up. The city in which every corner has a little memory. We came here, MM, MB, MG and me, together with my older sister and her two children for a long weekend. It was holiday in Tel Aviv so we decided to treat the kids to a little bit of Milanese life. My kids hadn’t been here for over two years, and neither had I.

Happy Mother's Day

On the tail of Mother's day, which some parts of the world celebrated this week, I have to tell you about an article I read in the New York Times (NYT) on May 6. (By the way. Mother's day in Israel has been renamed “family day”, in which the whole family is celebrated and not just the mother).


Written by NYT columnist Anand Giridharadas, the article, titled “New leaders find strength in diversity”, talks about an emergent breed of hybrid leaders – those who belong to “multiple worlds and who carry those worlds with them.”

By the way...

By the way...the gas masks arrived yesterday with a courier without a flaw. I didn't tip him. I put them in the basement, in our bomb shelter room. The children do not know of their arrival. Now I have to order one for my Mum.

By the way...MG decided finally to leave her dancing class. "I'm not that good Mummy," she said. When a dancing school manager called yesterday to ask why she left, MG politely told her on the phone she does not want to dance anymore. I explained to the manager, in a very civil tone, that MG doesn't want to contine dancing because she thinks she is not good enough. "Unfortunately, that's the message she got from you all along. So now she has decided to leave," I told the woman. "And what is a real pity is that she is leaving with the feeling that she is not a good dancer, which is a shame. Because she may not want to try out any other dancing class." The manager asked us to reconsider, saying they will help MG all they can so she can learn the steps. I said we'd think about it. But MG has moved on already. She doesn't look back.

Photo caption: Lot's wife looked back - Mount Sodom.
http://israelinsider.ning.com/photo/lots-wife-mount-sodom?context=popular

"A Brand New Life" - a heart-breaking South Korean movie about adoption

  

You come out of the movie “A Brand New Life” by French-Korean film maker Ounie Lecomte with the same feeling you get after you’ve read a great book – a haunting bitter-sweet warmth that stays with you for days.

This 2009 autobiographical movie, debuting in Tel Aviv this week, is about nine-year old Jinhee. The first scene depicts her sitting on a bike hugging her father’s back, going on a trip. We don’t get to see the father’s face. He rides her to a cake store, tells her to pick the best cake on sale, and then bikes to an orphanage run by Catholic nuns. He leaves Jinhee there, without an explanation and without a goodbye.