Grandma Joyce's suggestion to see the Henry Ford museum was echoed by Kathy and Steve. We decided to make that the activity for our only full day: Wednesday. I woke up early and took a practice GRE test, while Ashley updated you with everything we had done so far. We then went for our run, we're training for a half-marathon in San Francisco on November 7th. We got out later than we had hoped, but ended spending about four hours at the museum and accompanying Greenfield Village.
Greenfield Village is part historical building collection, part living museum. So I was very familiar. We saw Thomas Edison's workshop, and house; Noah Webster's house; the Firestone family house; glass blowers; tin smiths; printers; etc. There was a plaque that said that Henry Ford thought the important part of history is the technology that shaped people's lives, not the politics and wars that are so often covered. That is what he tried to preserve with the village.
I found the museum to be incredible. It was mostly about cars, but had significant exhibits on airplanes, electricity generation, farm equipment and even furniture. The museum tells the story of the American Automobile, not as badly as I would have expected, but not as well as I had hoped. For instance, they have a Honda that was among the first foreign cars to be made in the US, but they also say that part of the reason for sagging sales of the big 3 was something like 'consumer displeasure with bad quality.' The implication seemed to be that there was a problem with the consumer's demand, not the car's quality.
Electric cars or hybrid cars were totally missing, but there was a model and exhibit of a Hydrogen-powered car. Its the car of the future, and always will be.
Other highlights include sitting in an original model-T (that museum guests put together every morning), sitting in the bus where Rosa Parks refused to stand, touring a Dymaxion house, and making paper airplanes.
After the museum, we went to east Dearborn, an area with a high Muslim population, and delicious food. We went to Al Ameer, and would highly recommend it. We asked our waiter what vegetarian things we should order. We ended up with falafel and two large rice and vegetable dishes. The Moujadara was especially good. Its fried rice with lentils, topped with crispy-caramelized onions. Although I've had onions, rice, and lentils innumerable times, this dish seemed especially unique.
More important than the food itself was seeing a thriving community of people that are so often vilified in the media, and feared by the public. While sitting in the restaurant, one could only laugh at those balking at the ground zero mosque, while pitying their narrow world-view.
We wrapped up the day by visiting the house my grandma was living in when she met my grandfather. It reminded a lot of the house I lived in on east 18th st. in Brooklyn until I was 7.
From Detroit it was on to Ann Arbor (much closer that Ashley or I thought, even looking at the map several times), for Tali and the GREs.
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