Rain as Israelis (Haifans to be specific)

Rain.  To say it rains a lot in Haifa (at least this year...) is the understatement of the century.  We have never experienced so much and such heavy rain in our lives.   Because of Israel's unique location, it's particular distance from the equator, the country experiences only winter rains (says Matt after his lecture at Haifa University on climate).  That means from spring (around Pesach) to early fall (around Sukkot), the country is dry dry dry.  Come the rainy season, Jews around the world begin to add prayers for rain into their daily benedictions.  This only really makes sense here in Israel, as most other places where there are Jews (which is actually most places) the rainy season and the prayer "schedule" don't quite line up.  Now, that we are in the midst of winter, we are seeing the work of our prayers full force.

The rain here in Haifa (I can't speak for the rest of the country, plus I'm sure it is different) is plentiful and strong.  We are not talking tropical rains where there are a few minutes of sun-showers and then beautiful skies.  We are also not talking your average thunderstorm.  What we have been experiencing here are "super-can't sleep through the night because of the loud noises and bright lights-can't go outside even with an umbrella-wait! that's not rain it's hail-thunderstorms". Your feet will get wet, even in rainboots (which apparently no Israelis own and look at my hunter green rubber rainboots like I have aliens on my feet), your umbrella will get eaten by the winds, and you will surely get drenched by the cars and buses driving by making tsunami sized waves from the puddles on the road.  I don't want to complain because this country desperately needs as much rain as she can get (droughts are bad), but at the same time, unless you really like being holed up in the house watching movies (actually that doesn't sound too bad...), it is not fun to venture out anywhere since you know you will then be wet and uncomfortable for the rest of the day.  

Some of you may think that Matt's studies - middle bronze age Canaanite religious and cult practices - are not so relevant to today's world.  That is, until you experience the wrath of Ba'al yourself.  Ba'al, the Canaanite storm-god, specializes in rain, thunder, agriculture and fertility.  In the Tanakh/Bible, (I Kings 18), the prophet Elijah summons 450 Ba'al prophets to the Carmel mountain (where Haifa is located) for a God vs. god duel.  After the failure of the Ba'al prophets to summon Ba'al to consume their offering, Elijah calls out God, fire shoots out of the sky, swallows up the offering and the winner is crowed (then Elijah slaughters all the Ba'al prophets).  Needless to say, there were those who once believed that the rains in the Carmel were the doings of Ba'al.  

During one of this winter's torrential downpours, we jumped into a cab to escape the weather.  The friendly cab driver welcomed us in and sympathized with us as we rung out our sopping wet clothes into his car.  As we began to drive, Matt turned to the driver and joked: "Wow, look at these rains.  Ba'al must be really pissed today!"  Not quite sure how to respond, the driver looked away and didn't say another word to Matt.  I later informed Matt the "Ba'al jokes" should be reserved for those who will have any clue about what he is insinuating... you have to know your audience.  

Stay dry out there, Shabbat Shalom and have a great weekend,

Stef and Matt

Hiking Haifa and Roaming Tel Aviv as Israelis

This weeks update comes to you by way of pictures.  The week of Chanukah brought us on a number of mini-adventures.  The first was a hike down the Carmel mountain.  One of the great things about Haifa is that the city is built on a mountain and at certain points you can just walk of the edge of the city and find yourself in a luscious green valley...   

with some remnants of the city still to be found.  

We swung on swings...

discovered some ruins...   

and found a horse in a stone stable...  

all without leaving the city limits of Haifa.  

Our second adventure took us to the streets of Tel Aviv.  The morning began with some sun-showers and a stunning rainbow. 

After breakfast with one friend and lunch immediately after with another, we walked through the city back to train station.  On the way we found ourselves in the "mannequin district"... 

To be honest, I never really had such an appreciation for Tel Aviv in the past.  However, through the guidance of a number of Tel Avivian friends, I am beginning to find the beauty in the small interesting things you can only find in this city.  

"modesty"

"MAIL"

"enough Holocaust denial"

The day in Tel Aviv ended with a train ride to the airport to meet my (Stef's) mom who arrived for a three week visit.  We're looking forward to some more fun adventures while she's here!

HAPPY CHANUKAH!!!

Being American as Israelis

In response to last week's email, many people asked for a "turducken" photo.  Unfortunately, since we were not part of the actual tri-bird assembly team, we have no pictures.  However, here is a picture of our Thanksgiving contribution: a turkey challah.  

Being an immigrant is a funny thing.  Much of daily life becomes an attempt at integrating your old self (read: American) with your new environment (Israeli).  Never in all our years living in the US did we attend four, yes four, full Thanksgiving meals like we did this year. In a way it seems like an overcompensation.  On the other hand, it is a perfect example of our fellow olim (immigrants) trying to preserve an aspect of their/our identity, even if the majority of our T-day meals did not take place on actual T-day (or with only Americans).  

While searching for a bus stop the other day to take a bus I had never taken before, I wandered into Wadi Nisnas, an Arab Christian-Muslim neighborhood.  Suddenly, for the first time this season, I saw Christmas!  Little Santa costumes, Christmas trees and ornaments.  Candy canes, stockings and lights.  The American in me got all excited and I took a few pictures. Then it dawned on me, I would have never taken pictures of random Christmas decorations at a store in the States.  But now that we live in Israel, Christmas does not exist in the majority of the places we go and (for whatever this might mean) Christmas is conflated with American in my emotional memory.

This week also brought me to another place in Israel that feels like America (or anywhere in the world, for that matter), IKEA.  A family friend picked me up at the train station in Netanya and we headed over to Ikea.  The store here looks exactly like every Ikea store in the world, and walking through the store, you could imagine you were somewhere else.  That is, until you notice that all the signs are in Hebrew, the prices are in shekel and the food in the cafeteria is kosher.  The purpose of the trip was to buy some cabinets for the kitchen and some other odds and ends around the house.  The trip was successful, all intended purchases were made and I also left with a bamboo plant, the same exact bamboo plant, in the same exact vase, that we bought at the Ikea in Chicago (which was graciously adopted by a friend when we moved).  In its own way, Ikea has made the world a much smaller place.  

Maybe the most poignant moment of our American/Israeli integration happened this morning, at breakfast.  Friday mornings in Israel are (sort of) like Sunday mornings in America.  No work, sleep in late, make a fun breakfast... so, on this morning's menu: left-over challah french toast.  Everything about our french toast was as it should be, except that we realized we had no maple syrup.  We looked through our pantry to see what we could use as a substitute and we found it: silan (date honey), a middle-eastern staple.  As we dipped our french toast in the silan, we reflected to ourselves: as Israeli as we might become, we'll always be Americans too (but don't worry, my mom is bringing us real maple syrup was when she comes to visit next week).  

Chaunkah is almost here (first candle, Saturday night) and this week in my Ulpan class I got to give a presentation about the holiday.  I taught a short section of Talmud about lighting candles, a lesson I used to teach my students in Chicago.  When the presentation ended, my teacher told me: "wow, that was great! You should be a teacher."  I told her: "I am a teacher."  Made me miss my colleagues and students at CJHS.

Wishing you all a Shabbat Shalom, Happy Chanukah and a great weekend, 

Stef and Matt

Getting Used to Hard Floors as Israelis

I briefly mentioned in a previous email that one of the most frustrating aspects of our new apartment is the floor. Allow me to elaborate...

For those who haven't lived in Israel I will first explain Israeli "floor culture."  Nearly all flooring in Israel is tile.  Hardwood floors are few are far between and wall-to-wall carpeting just doesn't exist.  So, tile it is... but it's not that simple.  See, there are all different types of tile and if you ask any one who has remodeled their home here, they will tell you that the choices for tiles are endless.  Tile can vary by color, material and size.  You live and learn. Generally, as the trend seems to go, the more "updated" your floor, the larger your tiles.  You can often tell how recently a floor was redone based on the size of the tile.  Some of the newer tiles we've seen are just insanely huge - you really would never imagine tile could be this large.  Also, everyone here seems to know the size of their tiles offhand and therefore uses them as a measuring tool.  When we told some Israeli friends that we bought a tape measure to try and figure out how big certain spaces in the apartment were, they responded by saying: "why didn't you just count how many tiles it was?" 

The tile in our apartment is medium sized, beige and, whatever the material is, is ridiculously hard.  The kind of hard where everything that falls... breaks.  And by breaks, I mean shatters... into tiny sliver sized shards of glass that get stuck in your toe and you don't even realize it's there because it's so small until you try putting on a shoe and the glass sliver pushes into your skin and feels like someone is sticking a hot needle into your foot.  And it's not just glass that breaks, plastic breaks too (although notable not in the same dramatic way).  Since moving in here I (Stef) have broken quite a few things, but tied for first place are the glass grape juice bottle and the glass apple juice bottle, both of which involved tiny STICKY pieces of glass that covered the entire kitchen floor.  We are still finding remnants of these breaks - you might want to keep your shoes on when you come visit us. 

Ooopps!  Matt just broke a drinking glass... add it to the casualty list.

Which leads me to cleaning floors in Israel.  In addition to cleaning up the aforementioned glass shards, I am constantly cleaning our floor.  I don't know what it is about the tile we have here, but every spec of dirt is obnoxiously visible - every pebble, hair and fleck of dust.  Nothing is camouflaged into the wood grain or carpet texture, it just sits there looking dirty, which means I am constantly sweeping and squeegeeing.  Squeegeeing, or "sponga" as it's called, is the preferred Israeli way to clean floors.  From my experience, it can look one of a few ways.  The first way is to pour a bucket of soapy water directly on the floor and then use your squeegee to push the water around, eventually making it into a drain hole in the floor.  Alternatively you can try to mop up the soapy water with a "smartoot" (a floor rag) which you drape over your squeegee.  Or, the way we find most convenient, you dip your "smartoot" in soapy water, drape it around your squeegee, essentially making a homemade swiffer, and move it around until you think the floor looks clean enough.  We are happy to take other floor cleaning suggestions from any Israelis who might be reading this.  Leave it to say that I spend a significant amount of my time cleaning the floor (add it to the list of things to do when you don't have a tv).  

Thank you for all for listening to my rant.  As you probably understand by now, nothing really exciting happened this week.  We will be spending this Shabbat in our neighborhood and will attend a belated Thanksgiving dinner that involves "turducken". (If you don't know what that is, Google it).  Needless to say, we are very excited!

Shabbat Shalom and have a great weekend,

Stef and Matt

Thanksgiving as Israelis

Despite not being in America, Thanksgiving is a very popular holiday in certain (limited) circles in Israel.  And by that, I mean, American ex-pats generally still celebrate Thanksgiving, but not necessarily the way it would be done in the US of A.   One usually has all the traditional foods, but it doesn't necessarily have to be on Thursday.  In fact, this Thursday night, we went our for Sushi.  

Despite this, we still had THREE full Thanksgiving meals.  Thursday around lunchtime we stopped by Pardes, the school in Jerusalem where we met, and we were invited to join their Thanksgiving themed community lunch (although without Turkey since it is a dairy-only institution).  Friday night we attended a traditional and delicious Thanksgiving/Shabbat dinner hosted by my "sister"/good friend and her husband in Jerusalem.  Making Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday becomes challenging in Israel since we don't get that day off of work or school, so Friday night combo T-day/Shabbat dinner becomes the more logical option.  Then, for Shabbat lunch we were invited to one of our former Pardes teachers.  He described Friday night dinner at his house with his kids as "survivor" (like the tv show), so he tends not to invite guests for dinner.  Instead, they decided to host their Thanksgiving meal Saturday at lunch time.  After our third full Thanksgiving dinner - we are thoroughly stuffed.  

Besides being thankful for good friends and good food, we are also extremely thankful for the cease fire that went into effect just before our American holiday. The last few days have showed a relative peace and quiet in the country and we hope to see no more rockets flying into Israel from Gaza, amen.

Last, but not least, the big news from here is that I (Stef) got a job!  Don't get too excited, it's just part time, which means the job search continues, but I've been told that having multiple part time jobs is super Israeli.  This is epitomized by a joke I recently heard: Why does the Israeli have 3 jobs?  Because he couldn't find a fourth!  The job will be running logistics and education for a program called "Career Israel," that brings American college-age participants to Israel for internships in a variety of fields.  Until now, the program existed only in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.  My job will be to run a new branch of the program here in Haifa.  We are very excited about this opportunity as well as other coming our way.  

Wishing you all a happy post-Thanksgiving and a great weekend,

Stef and Matt

Furnished Apartment as Israelis

I intended to write a light-hearted email this week about my silly frustrations in our Israeli apartment, where the floor is so hard everything breaks and every piece of dirt can be seen and how I'm getting better at squeegeeing... 

Sadly, no one is feeling particularly light-hearted here in Israel right now.  With rockets, in the hundreds, being fired into southern Israel from Gaza and increasing Israeli military action in response, we see and feel the country entering war-time mode.  Mostly we don't feel any of the tension up here in Haifa, but we do feel the indirect effects.  One of our new friends, who was supposed to be joining us for Shababt lunch this weekend, got called up for reserve duty, along with 30,000 other Israelis.  We will be thinking about him and all our friends in the south a lot this weekend.

In war-time-related news, we also picked up our gas masks this past week.  As Israeli citizens, the government gives us our very own gas masks in case of chemical attack.  Here is a picture of Matt showing off our new acquisitions and feeling quite Israeli.

 On a happier note, we will be hosting our first meals this Shabbat and hosting an overnight Shabbat guest.  It is nice to finally be on the giving side and not just the receiving side of people's hospitality.  We (read:I) did a lot of cooking and are really happy to show off our new digs to our new friends.  Here are some pics of the place all decked out, including our house-guest (check out the old pics of the empty apartment for the full effect).

We wish a safe and happy weekend to all,
Stef and Matt

Halloween As Israelis

Just kidding!  There is no Halloween in this country.  But we did enjoy seeing all our friends (and friends' children in costumes on the Facebook).  

Yesterday afternoon Matt and I looked at each other and agreed: "we have nothing to write about this week."  We are both in pretty regular routines these days - Matt at the university, Stef at Ulpan.  We are continuing to arrange the house, finding places for all our things and even doing a little decorating.

The biggest news item in Israel right now, taking up page after page in the daily newspapers, is Sandy (as I'm sure is true for much of the world, and we send our thoughts and prayers to those of our friends reading this from the east coast).  The second biggest item is the American elections, followed at a distant third by the Israeli elections which are coming up in a few months.  I know this because, now that I'm in Ulpan, I read the Israeli paper every morning in class.  Often the hardest thing to read in Hebrew are the words that are transliterated from the English.  For the most part, Hebrew is an extremely phonetic language, not like English with silent K's and P's (knife?  pneumonia? come on...)  The tricky part of Hebrew, however, is the lack of written vowels, which means if you are not already familiar with the word or its structure - there is a lot of guessing that happens.  Which leads us to the "Hebrew" word of the week: "פראנקנסטורם".  Which for those who don't read Hebrew is "Frankenstorm".  When this word appeared in the headline of yesterday's paper, it took my teacher a good three or four attempts at pronunciation until finally a few of us Americans in the class stepped in to help her out.  It then took another few minutes to explain what the word meant.  It seems to me that some things are better left untranslated...

For the first time since we made aliyah, we are eating Shabbat dinner at home.  A full two months of citizenship and we've somehow managed to meet enough people that we've  been invited out to every single Shabbat meal until now.  We are actually very excited about our quiet Shabbat and are eagerly anticipating the first chicken cooked in our new kitchen.

Shabbat Shalom and have a great weekend,

Stef and Matt