Pointless trip - Har Masor

Last Saturday Dima and I decided to go on another trip down to the desert. We wanted to go hiking and found a perfect spot, even though it was far away, it was scenic, adventurous and with enough climbing and crawling thrown in to make it fun and worth our time to make the drive down.


The trip took us over 3 hours, about 30 minutes of which were spent driving 6 miles down a treacherous dirt road in a car that was never meant to go off of a paved highway.


The most ridiculous part came when we arrived at our destination, which by the way looked very promising and beautiful, and saw about 20 men sitting around at the base of the trail. Now I am not sure what they were doing there, some looked like they were smoking hookahs others… god knows… All I know is that there was over 20 of them, they were either Arab or Beduin, and that I was full-on freaked out. I realize that most likely these were very nice friendly people however, neither Dima or I had any idea what we were dealing with, and there would be very little chance we could communicate given our knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic and their knowledge of English or Russian. So without ever stepping out of the car we turned around and drove back.


3 HOURS of driving through the desert were pretty much completely wasted. And there was no time for us to go to a different place since it was already pretty late in the day. So we ended up randomly pulling off the dirt road as we were driving back and just running around and checking out our surroundings. One thing I did not mention is that the dirt road that leads to this hiking trail goes through a training zone for the Israeli Army, to be specific its where they do their target practice for rockets and whatever else. So it was fun checking out the left-over’s of the rockets, or the targets, or whatever else we found. In general it was pretty cool running around a real life desert. But of course it would have been nice to have done the hike we came to do (and the view from the top was supposed to be amazing).

You can see pics form the trip in the below link:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=161957&id=661621936&l=f2e6a5f690

The rest of our weekend was very similar to the experience described above. On Friday we tried to go to the new IKEA in Rishon, it’s the second one in Israel, the one in Netania has been there for 2 years. It was a mad house, with a line for cars to get in and another one for people to get in after they have stood in the line for the cars. We drove around and drove back home. Mind you this was after we spent good 45 min driving around looking for it.


After we went on our trip to the desert we decided to try to go to IKEA again. This time it was even worse!!! The line was all the way from the highway. We drove away then too. I don’t understand why the insane lines, its not like IKEA is completely new to the country, its been here for years, it’s just a new location. Ehh whatever we went to the other location that’s farther way, and I hope will not have to go back to for a long long time :)

Trip to Me'arat Keshet (Arch) & Akko City

This past weekend after having explored a bit of the desert prior weekend, Dima and I decided to move on to greener pastures. Which in Israel can only mean one thing - we went north.

It’s amazing how tiny this country is. We drove about 20 minutes out east and spent the rest of the way going north along the West Bank border. The separation barrier wall, the one that stirred up all that controversy in 2006 when it was started, ran along the highway we were on at some points, so I actually saw it, its sad that is has to be there. At one point the distance between the border and the coast is about a 10min car ride. Anyway that was a tangent, back to our trip.

The place we went to was right below the border with Lebanon, I would say we were 5 minutes away from Lebanon. Too bad we could not go there, would be cool to check out Beirut. The entire trip from Tel Aviv took us about 1.5 hours.

So Me'arat Keshet is an old cave that has caved in (for a lack of a better word :), up in the mountains. Its very scenic and a great hiking area. Side-note the entire area looked a lot like Milos, a Greek island we went to last summer/fall. We climbed around there for a while and then drove a little southward to a city called Akko.

It’s a very old city that has been continuously populated since 16 BC, can you believe that?? It’s over 3600 years old. The old city that still stands there now was built by the crusaders and others (at least that is what I understood). It seems the crusaders were responsible for the tunnels and a citadel (which was used by the British mandate as a prison). From my understanding some of the construction there dates back to 12th century. Its fascinating to see people still living there.

Well that’s that for the trip. We are now itching closer to finishing up project "Make this place a home". You know a lot of it is just cleaning up, furnishing, fully unpacking everything and stocking up on food.

Here is a link to the Facebook album from this trip:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=160117&id=661621936&l=8e34da512f

Retraction to my first post!

I have a retraction - people in Israel do have dryers! My statement was based on 2 specific observations:


1 - Last summer I spent a week in Israel staying with Dima in his shack. I spent a good deal of time doing his laundry during that week of precious vacation time, and all I had at my disposal was a washer, no dryer in sight.
2 - When walking around checking out Israel I noticed that many windows and balconies have cloths-lines with stuff drying on them.


For whatever reason it did not occur to me that the living conditions in a shack (in a small town) and random observations (I air dried some of my cloths in the States because the dryer would ruin them) might only reflect a part of the whole story.

Well... upon further investigation, i.e. asking 1 person, I found out that some people do, in fact, own dryers. I am not going to estimate the percentage here, however this is a wonderful discovery.

I no longer have to feel guilty and spoiled about desperately wanting to buy a dryer! Which I will do as soon as possible for the following reasons:
1 - When your towels air dry, they come out feeling like dry, crinkly, cardboardy hay, instead of the fluffy, wonderful blankets of warm comfort you want to wrap around yourself after a nice hot shower.
2 - Air drying takes way too long.
3 - Also I have been told that cloths need to be ironed after air drying since they automatically come out wrinkled?!?!


Now I don’t know about this yet since I was only able to do one wash (of towels) before the water pipe connector thingy broke and I was left yet again without a functioning washing machine.

I might have to come back to the States to do my laundry like a dirty collage kid coming home for a break.

New Year/Country New Me

Hello everybody,

Have not posted in a  while, have been trying to get the internet connection situation in check... still working on that. However while its still working i am going to put up a quick new post. Its going to be a bummer if it breaks right in the middle of me writing this.

So the pic you see above is from the very first dinner I "cooked" in Israel, which took place earlier this week. You see the thing is that our stove is out of gas and to get the gas hooked up is a big hoopla that I am not going to go into here but to say the least we have had to go out a lot to eat which, if you know me, was great news.

Ok on to more important things. It was my B-day couple of days ago and to celebrate all the new things in my life I decided to make a little change in my appearance. It somehow got in to my head that I must go blond, however all the hairdressers that I approached with this told me that its a horrible idea. They did it in a nice, straight forward Israeli way that made me feel stupid but grateful. In the end I settled for some highlights and a nice chop to the length.

All in all... I am starting to get sick of new me....nehh.... just kidding, its all good :)

Day Trip - Shivta Park

Today we decided to take a day trip in order to break up the monotony of working on the apartment.

Tel Aviv is smack in the center of the country and we decided to go down south to the desert. While it seemed that we were in a completely different hemisphere, we actually just went about 1.5 hrs south. For perspective - we were almost half way to Elat, which is the very tip (border) of the country on the south. There are many hiking and sight-seeing trips one can take around this tiny country; the one we settled on today was a trip to Shivta National Park. It’s an ancient city, which was settled in 1st century B.C. by the Romans, and abandoned in 9th century B.C.; it’s an archeological site now, its nice ruins to walk around in for a while :).

The interesting thing that happened on the way was: it actually rained as we were driving in the desert... I thought that was really cool.

Also its been raining for about 3 days here, which is considered the best thing ever since it rains so rarely, with Israel being situated mostly in the desert and all. So everyone is super excited. So as we were driving and getting close to the site, we saw a bunch of cars puling over on the side of a bridge and people getting out and taking picks. We of course did the same. It turns out people were taking picks of the water that had gathered in a stream below. It was pretty un-climactic, however I guess when you consider where we were it becomes kind of cool. But funny still so we took a pick as well :)

Here is the link to the entire album from that trip:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=159450&id=661621936&l=58b3a158ce

Week in, none the wiser

Hello,

My new update:

I have signed up for school which does not start till April, which means that for the next month I will largely be a bum, not sure how I feel about that: Guilty I guess, bored a little - in anticipation of being bored. I have grand plans to look for something exciting to do but who knows what the reality will be.

We have managed to paint another room, now we just have the small spaces left to paint (kitchen, hallways etc). Ohh and of course we have to fix all the mistakes we have made and the doors which are in terrible shape. All in all still a lot to do. The big question is will our landlord approve? We did not ask him before doing all this stuff so i hope he does not flip. At the moment I am choosing not to think about it.

Now on to the exiting developments: we have purchased a TV and a washing machine. The way it works here is that if you want a fridge, stove, or a washing machine (no one has dryers, you dry your stuff the old fashioned way: air-dry) you have to bring them with you from apartment to apartment (even if you are renting), nothing comes with the home/rental. So for the first time in my life I purchased a washing machine, which was a very interesting experience. Besides the fact that you have to bargain for the price of everything, which gets really annoying when you are not used to it, people try to swindle you left and right. For example you can purchase one thing and then something completely different will get delivered, or they will outright lie, at least that is what we think happened to us. Now we are not 100% on this but we are pretty sure that when we were promised a full HD TV, what we were actually given was an old crappy model that was not even HD Ready. At this point we went to a chain and bought there, a bit more expensive but a piece of mind.. or so we hope :)

Another reason I love America: Everything is HUGE, you may not realize this now but comparatively speaking.. huge. I was in shock when I was looking at these washing machines. From the outside they look normal but then you look inside to where the cloths go they are teeny-tiny. My aunt tried to reassure me that I was crazy and that she used a 5 kilo machine (that's how much fits inside per wash, about 10 lbs) her whole life, with a family of 5 (including 2 growing boys), and since I only have to wash for 2 I should be fine with a 3 kilo (6 lbs) machine. My response to this was: Listen lady I am sure that it was great, but when you are used to a machine that fits the entire apartment inside, going to a 3 kilo machine... well... you might as well just wash it all by hand.

We proceeded to purchase the largest machine option they had which was 7 kilos (about 15 lbs). Just for comparison; now I cant be sure since I never bought a machine before but a normal machine in the States probably fits about 30 lbs.

My next adventure is getting a cell-phone plan which I started today and plan to complete tomorrow. I will let you know how it goes but should be fun since this too is a bargaining exercise.

After living here for a while I think I will be able to go back to the states and become a negotiator :)

First Impressions

Hello everyone,

Ok let me tell you a little bit about my first few days here (let's see today is the 5th).

Came in early in morning of the 17th Wednesday - the processing for immigrants (there was a total of 61 of us on the flight) at the airport was quite short and fast, which was surprising since I thought it was going to take forever. The only snag was that they lost our pictures so we were the last to be called after everyone else was escorted out, (this reminded me a bit of when we immigrated to US and they lost/misplaced our documents and it was a big pain in the butt that lasted 3 days, except that sucked much much more), and they had to take pics on the spot which means I look super tired in our official documents, as we just came off of a 10hr flight. Anywho then we promptly came home and passed out pretty much right away.

Thank god Dima already rented us an apartment in the middle of Tel Aviv - by Israeli or more specifically Tel Aviv standards ( Tel Aviv is the NYC of Israel with real estate prices to match) its pretty nice, by US standards.... its ok :). The hood is nice though.

So we slept on and off the entire day and night and managed somehow to wake up at 11am the next day - jet lag is a PAIN.

Thursday the 18th - so now I was able to take full stock of our living arrangement and decided that something needed to be done... and this is how our little renovation project came about. By the way having to shower while holding the shower head is a big pain in the ass, just an FYI, unless you have experienced it, in which case you know.

As i am reading this I am beginning to realize how spoiled I am ..... man.. I love America!

So now along with having to buy everything for the apt (although Dima already got a couch and a bed, and some kitchen stuff) we also needed a whole lot of paint and all the other supplies. By the way our outlets suck which means that until they get fixed charging my computer is a problem which is why I have not been on line much, along with being quite busy.

Ok so that's pretty much all that we had time to do on Thursday. Ohh and I started getting sick pretty much the minute we landed so by Thursday I was feeling pretty ill; coughing, stuffed up, head throbbing.

Friday the 19th - painted the entire day and since some of the walls were in pretty bad shape it turned out to be a bigger project than expected. And of course whatever it is that I had, got pretty bad, and I felt like dying - even had a fever and chills ( i don't remember the last time I had a fever). Anywho, this is all we did the entire day, with me taking napping breaks :). The day ended with 2 rooms painted and us dirty and exhausted.

Saturday the 20th - we rested a bit and finally got to walk around and relax and even went to the beach, its been unseasonably warm here, like 80 everyday, its pretty crazy coming from sub zero temperatures! Then we did a bunch of shopping for the apt and finished off the 2 rooms we started before.

An interesting thing here is that: Saturday night here, is like Sun night in the States (the 2 days off are Friday and Saturday) so you would think that on Saturday night, before the work week, people would want to stay home and chill but its actually the biggest shopping time of the week, stores stay open super late and EVERYONE goes shopping for everything (IKEA was like a mad house..literally, we had to stand in line to get in), also most stores don't even open till about 7pm, after shabbat. Its pretty much the opposite of the States, where everything shuts down early on Sunday. While this makes sense its still weird to see, at least to me.

Ok thats all I have, its really boring I know, but its whats happening.

Sunday 21th - We are going to continue to make this place more livable for a while still... the plan for tonight is to paint yet another room... But in the end it will be worth it to have a place to want to come home to. Today i am going to go to school to find out when the Hebrew classes start... soo not looking forward to it, but it will be nice to not feel like a mute idiot anymore, which I do pretty much all the time when I am out of the house. Even though most people speak at least a bit of English or Russian, I feel bad asking them to switch. Menus are a whole other issue; when there is no English menu which is happening more than i thought it would.

Ohh and I feel much much better now, I think this cold or whatever is pretty much over (hope Dima does not get it).

Thats it for now.