If you've read Margalit's coverage of Ra'anana history you probably know just about all there is to know, but I do a have a few more details to add... I was lucky because I volunteered to chapperone the class on their field trip around Ra'anana. They told me to arrive at 8:00 with Margalit, which I did, only to be told by the teacher to come back in half and hour. That was just fine, because I ran to the little mini-market on our street and did a little shopping. In 30 minutes I was back at school. (If you can't tell, I am really enjoying living on the same street as a mini-market and the kids school. It is very convenient). The teacher then told me the plan for the day -- a presentation at Yad Libanim, a walk to city hall, and then more presentations and activities at the Bar-Tov school. I would be back by 1:00pm. Woah! I thought I'd signed up for a couple hours, not half a day.We set off on the trip, and Margalit is very lucky (and me too as chaperone) because her class only has 23 kids, and on Wednesday's three kids are always absent. So we had a nice small class of 20 kids. It makes it a little easier to keep them all together. I was asked to bring up the rear, another parent was the middle, and Tsipi was leading the way. Well, you can imagine, there was one kid who put on his socks the wrong way and so was limping the 5 blocks to Yad Libanim, shoes untied, sweetshirt falling on the ground constantly. I did my best to help him along, and hold his stuff, and keep him together with the class. You can't tell a 4th grader anything, and he would have nothing of actually stopping to fix his socks. It was cute.
Yad Libanim has a great little history museum, with statues of the original immigrants from New York, small models of some of the buildings (like city hall that was build in the 30s), diaramas, and many pictures of things that are recognizable around town. It is a great little museum and it does an excellent job showing the history of how Ra'anana was started and developed. We learned some neat things, like that fact that none of the streets running into Ahuza (the main drag) cross. They are all T intersections. Apparently this was designed to slow the traffic.
I'll have to cut short now, but all in all the field trip was a lot of fun, and I certainly enjoyed getting a guided tour and explanations at the museums. I had my camera so I tried to take a bunch of pictures, and then the kids all wanted their pictures taken too.
