Things that are different, Part II

Ah, the blissful release of sleep! Some days, I sleep soooo soundly, it's amazing. It's probably all the exercised forced on us throughout the day and the autoclave heat that roasts our minds. But it's weekend! Naomi has started with some sort of competition with the sun to see who can rise earlier. Naomi is winning, to my dismay. I wake up to find her doing situps, fine dining, tearing down a motorcycle engine, or other things typically saved for midday or beyond. I can barely keep my eyes open. Off-putting is the perfect description.

Tel Aviv has created these little places where you can do workouts along the beach, similar to both Korea as described by Julie and the State Gym's old wooden things I always thought were boring play equipment. I've been trying to exercise for the last year or two, so I was very disappointed to discover I can only do three pull-ups in a row verses the 720 the Israeli gentlemen at the equipment seemed effortlessly finish. That, combined with several other very clever machines, have created a male-breast-soreness phenomenon for me, which has been plaguing me today. I just have to keep my head above water after our trip to the gay beach. Naomi and I, after I had worked my dloits and cloits and teramis rex muscles (probably some real muscles as well), hit the beach. The Tourist beach, which was next on our list, was a nice beach. The waves were big and I was allowed to pretend that I was drowning after being hit in the genitals with a particularly large wave. Yofi (read:beautiful). This beach provided ammenities such as the familiar Old Man Yelling into a Microphone as well: "LITTLE GIRL; THIS IS NOT PERMITTED. COME TO THE BOOTH SO WE CAN REPRIMAND YOU PROPERLY!"

We recently found out that Rina has accomplished the impossible and taught Freya a new trick: Shake. I tried numerous times to further her academic career (Freya's, not Rina's), but she seemed more interested in the rather pedestrian accolades of eating her own poop. I can only assume that my mother-in-law is a master educator, but I still hold that I have laid a solid groundwork for her success. Congratulations, Freya! Now if you can learn to be seen and not heard.

Our night's plans were canceled by Yoni the Great's homework, much to Naomi and my dismay. Luckily we managed to get ahold of Omri, Tali's brother, and go out to a place called King George. This is on a street Naomi and I accidentally refer to as "Hamelech King George" which translates to "The King King George". We're not from around here. The restaurant was founded on cheap food, so this was the major draw for Omri's gang. Omri decided that tonight was my initiation night to become a true Israeli. "To be a real Israeli, you have to lie," he instructs me, "so tonight, it's your birthday." It was a magical birthday indeed.

A couple of other things that are different:

The use of cars

It seems to me that cars are primarily used as weapons in Israel against the pedestrians of the city. I'm pretty sure "Laws" translates to "Suggestions" here, because people seem to do as they please. Scooters cruise down the sidewalks. Cars use people as breaks. A red light seems to mean Speed Up. Also, parking seems to be a free-for-all, as is demostrated by the above pictures.

Our cell phone

Our cell phone works so hard to be useful to us. It doesn't seem to bother to track incoming calls. It makes no efforts to notify us of messages that we have received. It also seems to have a random word generator that tries to assist me when I text. If I type part of a word, say "ide...", it will assume that the natural word I am trying to type is "ideological". If I type in a complete word but don't put in the space it tries to help. I type in "Ken", the hebrew word for yes, and it suggests "Kendra". Who the hell is Kendra? It also applies peer pressure. The other night I sent a text to Omri to see if he wanted to get a beer and our phone cheerfully suggested "beers". Go phone, go. On a humorous note, the word for cellphone in Hebrew is "pelephone", which translates to "miracle phone" or "magic phone".

Back to the beach!

When you don't really know what to do with your day in a town with a beach, you don't have to make any decisions: You have the beach.

I started off my day with my typical boost of morale via the Ulpan. The other students were expected to turn in the first 10 chapters of their hebrew autobiographies. I learned the names for articles of clothes. The teacher handed out pictures of transvestites for us to describe the clothing to each other. We derailed when the American students had to explain what a mullet was to the teacher. An imprecise translation of "business in front, party in back" was attempted and failed. Finally we got the image across, which caused the teacher to nearly die laughing. When she tried to pronoune "mullet" she had some difficulty, so I suggested "Kentucky Waterfall", which the other two Americans loved.

There are about 10 beaches down the coast of the Mediterranean in Tel Aviv. We started at the top one, which was Yoni the Great's favorite spot. Naomi thought we should attack this corn-cob-style and just go down the row, so we ended up at the gay beach for the afternoon. I must admit I am quite under-chisled for this beach as well as under-tanned and also over-dressed in my swimsuit. Naomi seemed to enjoy the experience, though. Unfortunately, it also wasn't a very good beach because the sea floor was covered with what could only be twisted metal fragments.

We went out with big plans in mind in the evening. We found these walking Bauhaus tours online where you can walk down a street and the paper explains the history of various buildings. We stopped by a shop that was hastily closing at an unseemly early time for Tel Aviv and we were quite confused. It turns out that an obscure Jewish holiday was about to occur - I use the term obscure only in the sense that Naomi didn't know it was going on - and the whole town was closing down for the night. The WHOLE TOWN. Within moments of this illumination the town went from a boiling caldron of entertainment to Ames, Iowa at 9:15 pm. For a bit Naomi and I were at a loss but then Naomi suggested we head to the beach again. Thanks to an active tourist trade there are certain areas of town that would be virtually commiting suicide if they closed down, so we managed to find refuge for the evening.

Yeah, art's okay

Another day, another class. After having a two-hour conversation on the enlightenment of mankind - while I went over my colors - we headed to what has to be one of the best-kept computer labs with some very new machines in it, which we used to their full capacity playing a 8-bit educational game circa Oregon Trail. For every correct asnwer I was rewarded with an animation of a child with some sort of skin disease - perhaps Pemphagis Bulosa - shooting a basket. Now, despite my lack of ability to understand Hebrew on the fly, I am great at patterns, as was demonstrated in second grade when I finished three levels on Number Munchers multiplication game without know what multiplication was. That blistered kid could have been in the NBA. The game concluded with seals clapping for some reason and I headed for home.

We had a take-home test, which I took on my own and then Naomi and I went over. I had Naomi in tears laughing at my answers. My biggest problem with the class I am in is vocabularly, so when I make guesses they can have comical results. Example: After Dani worked on his homework, he TENTS with his friends. So I've got some memorization ahead.

Naomi had a whole day planned for us, which was a lot of fun. She had lunch all set out when I got home, which was fantastic. We walked to the library in blistering heat, though the thermometer said it was just a little above freezing: 33 degrees. As with all routes Tel Aviv, we took the long way.

Naomi likes museums, but I think she would love a hybrid museum/track that she could just jog by the fine art so that she could get the whole experience into about 20 minutes. This pace couldn't have clashed with mine more. The compromise ended up with us looking at so very so-so art in great detail, when we had recently arrived, and then glancing at the Miros/Picassos/Dalis/Pollocks on our way out. This experience has been noted so that our next trip to a museum will start by hunting down the best stuff first.

We hit up a fantastic book store that had a shelf-bending number of used books. The owner was an American who I think might have lived there as well. I also think he may have read all the books. He had that kind of vibe. We finished the evening at the really cute restaurant called Orna and Ella, which was fantastic. I've also discovered that you can get Hoegarden specialty beers around here - which I didn't know existed - as well as Duvel, for something like $5 a bottle in a restaurant. It's absolutely magical...

Second day can't be so bad, eh?

So for all of you out there dying for me to say that Hebrew School would be easier than I have written; you are going to be disappointed. After waking up veeery slowly from a sound sleep, I managed to get to class powered by a fistful of cheerios (made by Nestle in Israel) and a dream that I had grown as a student. When I arrived, the teacher had decided on speaking Fluccish for the morning and the students in the class were lazily writting their Hebrew dissertations on the philosophy of lexicography and it's social implications. I prudently decided to run myself through counting as a vigorous mental exercise. I managed to dodge being called on for most of the day but two thirds of the way through I was discovered by the teacher and she asked me about "what I can't do." I said "i can't speak hebrew". She said this answer was unacceptible and then said something in spanish and I laughed...then realized the class was all looking at me, along with the teacher. "what?" I had proved my point! I broke her down to english but she still made me said I couldn't do something else so i said speak Japanese. It was good enough to coast me through the day. I did learn that things could be worse, though: A girl in my class used to speak perfect Hebrew but got into a terrible accident and is now starting over from scratch. Tomorrow my attitude will be different.

Naomi and laid low during the afternoon. I brought her to tears working on my homework - she's so supportive - and after finishing that and reading for a while the two of us hit the town. We went to the largest mall in Tel Aviv, which is as populated by teens as any american mall. Using the crest of my mohawk as sort of a dowsing rod, we manage to find all the shops we don't really want to be in. All is well, however, as I have mastered ordering iced coffees. Apparently they speak Hebrew outside of Hebrew school here, so I have to be on my guard. I have a blank look set aside for any questions that come my way. Naomi is my savior. She dives in and explains everything to the shopping attendants, who proceed to give me "you are SOOO cute, what with your trying to learn (slowly, apparently)." She then has full conversations with them in flawless Hebrew. This is usually followed up with comments about how her Hebrew is rusty. So modest.

We decided to go along with my answer in school today and help me experience Japanese culture via sushi. As usual, we took the We Don't Know Our Way Around Tel Aviv route and ended up in the restaurant, which was decorated with victorian era paintings and frescos. Their menus sported the name "King George". As we left King George and headed for actual sushi - our mistake - we found the place we were looking for two doors down. Best sushi I've had. One of my small joys is getting a menu in Hebrew, reading the words, and occasionally being rewarded by correctly reading a foreign word in another language. Example: shhh-eee-rrr-i: Sherry! llll-ii-cc-ooo-rr-ss: Liquors! Hooray! We sat at the bar and watch a jedi master craft sushi with an 18" ginsu knife. It was glorious. He spent five minutes administering tiny cuts to this carrot and then throwing bits away. We though he was practicing until he somehow unfolded the carrot to produce a perfect replica of Big Ben complete with a working timepiece. I couldn't even muster up the WORD for carrot. So it goes.

Schooled!

I've been here a week; it's high time I receive an education. Cock-eyed and optimistic, full of wonder and joy at the lovely summer morning I wandered off to school. Well, first I walked Naomi to the passport office and then went to school. Mile total: ~5 miles. THEN I got coffee with a successful all-Hebrew transaction. Today was great. Now on to school!

I don't know Hebrew from a hole in the ground and I'm in a class of linguists of the highest degree. After sitting in class for five minutes I realized I was in over my head. I was essentially in a class of native Israelis. I looked down, and, sure enough, I was completely naked! Wake up wake up wake up from nightmare school day! I borrowed a textbook - which we are on page 400 of - and tried to keep up. The teacher uses the time-honored tradition of calling on you at random so you're always terrified she'll pick you. I realized that not knowing my name didnt' save me, either. She was asking people what they during their weekend. I think she was asking this in Chinese. The students answered in German/Spanish/Russian/Ewok. I planned a beautiful response approximately like this: "Oh, we had a lovely weekend lazily driving up and down the resplendant coastline of Israel, who's chief imports, in case you didn't know, are..." and so on. Then she got to me and changed the question up just for me. Crap! She asked me something in Afrikans. I stammered out an answer: " I student two heads...no...two years. from america." Crystal clear. The class continued in this vane. By the end, she told me I'd be fine. Apparently she speaks English - where the hell was that when I needed it?!

I went to a cafe post-fantastic class and studied. I managed to rush through the first 90 pages of the book so that I can hopefully catch up. They started from scratch (so they say), so I can in theory work a mere 40x faster than them and be comfortable. Naomi came and found me after a full morning of passport hell. She can't leave Israel without it. You'd think all the traipsing she'd done into and out of the country she'd done prior to this would have raised similar alarms, but these are strange times.

A week of walking in sandals has left my silky-smooth feet a wreck of hideous weeping sores, so we collected band-aids. We got lost and then found our way. Distance total today: ~6. We caught some dinner, along with a drink called limonana, which god himself handed down to the Israelis and said: "drink! with this fantastic beverage you will live forever in eternal bliss." God, too, doesn't capitalize. It's lemonade and mint, and it's glorious. We then proceeded to walk to the big mall. Distance total: ~8 miles. Then left and got lost. Total: ~10 miles. Then walked to the beach: ~12 miles. We caught a drink and headed home: ~15 miles. My bandaids fell off after the beach so I left a blood trail all the way back home. We are keeping the blood-thirsty cats at bay using this laptop as a wedge in the door. They are coming---

Roman Around

You can see a lot in Israel if you put yourselves in the hands of natives. Today, our tour guides were Udi and Schlomete. When we arrived at our apartment in Tel Aviv after flying in, Yoni the Great (who now reads this blog :) was not the only one to greet us. Udi and Schlomete (who's name I'm almost surely butchering) were there with open arms. And groceries. It was really amazing to me that the first people I would see in Israel were people I already knew from Ames! I met them several times in Ames, as well as their son - who incidentally is now close friends with one of my favorite graphic design professors. The 7 degrees of Iowa continues with fury! Today the two of them whisked us away with a down-to-the-minute itinerary. (In case you haven't figured it out there is no spell check on this web browser and you are at the mercy of my wild guesses from Level 2 Spelling and my irreverent comma usage.)

On kibbutzes (kibbutzim is the proper plural)

A kibbutz is a small commune built of many families living a socialist lifestyle. Every person works and all profits go to the community. You work and you get what you need to live. I can only assume this lazy and inexact explanation will draw a comment out of Giora...

Kibbutz 1

So prior to going to see my first kibbutz we went to a bar called the Kibbutz with Omri, Tali's brother (Tali being our awesome Iowa City friend who single-handedly kept Naomi calm and collected before our wedding which is why I have a wife and not an empty beer glass at a local tavern..) Anyway (my god, I'm off on tangents like crazy tonig-). ANYWAY, this bar was modeled after my previous sloppy explanation. Brilliant, really. You pay a cover and then food and drink is at cost. It was a hotspot. Omri brought us to a birthday party where he knew one person so we pretty much just hung out among ourselves and collected interesting others.

Kibbutz 2

We visited Ramat Hashofet first for a rendezvous with Naomi's childhood in Israel, Rina and Giora's homes in Israel and Naomi's grandma. Udi and Schlomete waited while we took a quick walking tour which was a little disappointing. Naomi led me to Rina and Giora's homes, which touched and had a path from one house to the other...up to a couple of years ago. As it stands, those two homes were the only two recently renovated homes in the entire kibbutz. Naomi was slightly deflated but we kept our momentum and arrived for Naomi to see her savta for the first time in 3 years and for me, her mohawked goy husband, to meet her for the first time. It was a heart-felt reunion that was very touching to see. Her savta was so very happy to see Naomi. I barely managed to stammer out a couple of Hebrew sentences over the entire encounter, but I smiled a lot. Naomi translated and explained things to me so it was nice.

Next up, national gardens. Absolutely amazing. I have great pictures of all of this on the Canon, which I didn't bring the correct cord for, so imagine someplace nice. I learned a lot about the Rothschilds, who were a family of very rich businessmen. The story goes that a prince once came to the original Rothschild and needed to hide a chest of gold with him because he was going into exile. Years later, the prince returned to find the gold still hidden unmolested and this created a name for Rothschild and his integrity. He then had five sons and instructed them to move to different cities around the world and do business with eachother and trust one another absolutely. This created an empire. How badass are they? Their crest consists of five arrows, one for each brother, a lion, and a unicorn. Yeah, that's right, a frickin' unicorn. A family so powerful they didn't even need to pick a real animal for their crest. Anyway, the son of one of the son's invested very very heavily into early Israel and bought a bunch of the land and financially backed multiple settlements and when he died in his 80s the country mourned his loss and buried him in a crypt and built the mother of all gardens around him. His family still donates heavily to Israel which is why half of Israel has Rothschild somewhere in its name.

We ate a picnic there as well and dear god this is taking a long time to explain. I can do better. We went to a fun town and got ice cream. We then proceeded to see Old Stuff. Roman stuff. The coolest was an enormous intact aquaduct with a public beach. People would sit on the aquaduct and picnic and it was very 2000-years-ago-meets-today. More old stuff was seen. We went to a concert at the nicest public park I've ever been to. There must have been a thousand people there using the playground, the track, the pond, the walking paths, the grassy areas. Fantastic. We were then deposited, exhausted, back to Tel Aviv. Oh yeah, and I made my first cultural faux paux! hooray! Best if delivered in documentary style:

When in the wild you can encounter many different behaviours. As I was walking in a local park with an Old Thing Worth Seeing, I stumbled across a family of Muslims. Their offspring ran up beside me and gestured what can only be inferred as "take a picture!". As I did this the adults became agitated. The males began yelling and the women began covering their faces. Finally the alpha male said "okay, just the kids, just the kids" after understanding his offspring had initiated the interaction. I took a picture of the children and as we were walking away it was explained to me by natives that Muslim women cannot have their pictures taken. Well shit.

Okay, that's it. :)

Whitest kid at the beach

So on day one, we woke up at 3pm. On day two I woke up at 4am, wide awake, and rolled over to see Naomi looking back at me with the lucidity of a person who was ready for lunch. After having a good laugh about wakihng up before the sun, we ended up playing a game and relaxing before trying to get more sleep. Fail. So we dragged ourselves through yesterday successfully. Naomi went to her first day of work at the hospital and met with the powers that be, and I went to the Hebrew school to take the placement test.

The placement test was so hard! I sat staring at the first page, leaving blank after blank empty, and managed to write down two things: My name and my telephone number. Then the girl next to me looked over and let me know that I didn't need to fill out any more of the id information and I sighed a relief. The instructions for the sections were all in Hebrew. Great. The first section of the test was easy enough. The second section was a paragraph about something involving students, a bus, a crazy driver, and a lesson they all learned, but this was lost on me. I feel like I was missing a few critical words - one of which was repeated ten times in the story - to really understand. However, I am an excellent test taker so I managed to get a few right anyway. The second story was a bit lighter. All in all, the lady placed me in a beginner's class that had been going on for about three or so months that she said I'd be okay in, but only after I repeatedly assured her that I would rather do this than go to the beach. So -

The beach was a lot of fun! Despite my Iowan terror at Water That Moves, it was pretty nice. We went with Naomi's second cousin, Yoni, who I will explain about in a minute. We went on a wild hunt the other day for swimwear that didn't look ridiculous and actually managed to find a suit that ended prior to my knees, showing off my magnificent thighs: Both well sculpted from years of taekwondo and translucent white from years of dormancy. Yoni said seeing me in that suit made me look British, which I suggested might be because of my luminescent paleness, but from now on when I mention myself in a suit it's easiest to picture Daniel Craig in your minds. That's what I do.

Naomi, the swim champ, is scared of waves. I like to jump up and be taken away by them and meet them head-on. Naomi meet's them butt-on as she's running to the shore. We swam together for two minutes. After that she suggested we could sit right where the water hits the beach and enjoy the tide. They have this in Iowa - it's called a wadding pool. It's for toddlers. So we went our separate ways - Naomi to the sun and me to the yam (Hebrew for sea).

Yoni and I went out and I explained the differences between Israel and Iowa, which was quite amusing to him. Yoni is great. He met us at our apartment when we arrived and has given us several tours of Tel Aviv already. I have been practicing my Hebrew on him which he enjoys, along with my constant two-year-old-questioning "what's that called?" One of the great things about the beach is the lifeguards sit in a tower and yell things over a PA system. I love it because it's manned, not by some sexy Israeli man or woman, but a grumpy overweight 50-year-old who sounds like he could be anybodies grandpa. As Yoni said "Not like David Hasselhoff." I assured him it wasn't like that in America either, unless he was referring to was a middleschooler who watched mainly girls instead of the pool. So a yound David Hasselhoff.

What, you don't have anything better to do than read my blog all day? Go enjoy yourselves!

Things that are different, Part I

We are in a new country right now, so obviously some things are different. Most of these things are very obvious: signs are in Hebrew, people speak Hebrew, there is a body of water that I can't see the edges of. Things of that nature. Most of this stuff is very easy to ignore and chalk up to Being Someplace New. However, tiny little differences can really baffle the mind and make foreign travel very odd. I'm going to list some of these things.

The Toilets

So our toilet has flush buttons. That's right, buttons. If I were to label them, they would say #1 and #2 because the first button is a very lady-like flush for, I'm guessing, #1. The second flush is a real Niagra of a beast that takes a good five seconds to die down. Some toilets have handles - the little one is nested into the bigger one.

The Doors

The doors are really interesting to me. instead of having a single rectangle for a door and then having a door stop that keeps it from swinging through, Israeli doors have a smaller door that fits into the door space and then a larger rim that prevents the door from swinging through. It reminds me of a testube cork.

The Doors, Part 2

All doors open inwards, which makes me look like an ass who can't open a door. Also, it hurts chivalry - it is awkward as hell to open a door with one arm and let a lady go by.

The Lights

We are on the third floor. There are buttons that you press with lights on a timer. For the average person the amount of time the lights are on is probably enough, but since I can't seem to use a key I am further challenged by having to try to open a door in pitch black while Naomi laughs at me.

The Crosswalks

My favorite. The lights are green for Walk and red for Don't Walk. Easy enough. However, many of the streets are four-lane behemoths with turn lanes and a big median. The put a crosswalk light on the median AND on the far side of the street. No, they aren't synchronized. Sometimes you can just cross half the street. Sometimes it's just the far side of the street, and the untrained user doesn't remember to look a the closer signal, which is red, and starts to walk into oncoming traffic. These lights have finally knocked Freya off the top of my list of "Things That Will Be the Death of Me."

More to come later. :) By the way, we ate a fantastic dinner last night at a restaurant called Bar Giyora. Yup, that's why we went to it.

Captions:

1. Naomi's Hospital

2. A man feeding cats - there are no birds to feed, for some reason...

3. Bar Giyora!

4. Random street art

Forget jet lag, we'll stay on Iowa time

We woke up bright and early today; at 3pm. So far, so good. That's sleeping in for us even on Iowa time, so we're doing great! Unnoticed by us until that time due to our hibernation, our windows apparently overlook the surface of the sun, because it is blindingly bright. I'm guessing this will be the only day we'll be able to ignore this feature and sleep to any reasonable hour.

Last night we went walking towards the beach, or as Iowan's think of it, the edge of the rational world. It turns out that Israel is to cats what Moscow is to dogs - there are legions of strays running loose. As Naomi translated to me from a passing conversation "the fake beach is covered in cats". Once we wo

rked our way towards

the real beach, however,

things became quite lively. Every hundred feet (excuse me, every 30 meters) there was a waterfront

restaurant with tables on the sand. We're choosy, so we picked the second such restaurant we saw.

We chose correctly, because about 20 minutes after we sat down they started live salsa music. It was fantastic!

We drank and danced and relaxed and repeated. We managed to get Hebrew menus, which was okay because I just had to look for "bira" and I was okay. Carlsburg is the big beer here, but

I picked one called Tuborg which was quite refreshing. The wine Naomi drank, as well as all the wine on the menu, was Israeli. On the way home, we managed to disco

ver all sorts of fantastic street art, which I insisted we pose beside.

We've Arrived!

And we're stealing internet! Woot! I'm also kicking myself for not bringing a mouse. :/

This was composed in the Madrid Airport:

Yay! We're tired! So, we're currently sitting in Madrid airport, which looks like a movie set from Star Wars. So sleek and modern and echo-y. We are about to board a flight to Tel Aviv with what appears to be 175 Christian zealots aching to bring the heathens closer to the light. Our nearest neighbors are from the exotic local of Indiana and appear to have never used an airport before; each new request from the security staff brought waves of questions while a ways up the line I could clearly hear a different airport attendant declare "This ISN'T AMERICA! You're in EUROPE NOW!

Using this new netbook is a delight, especially during waiting periods like this, but every minute or so I apparently hit the "random action" key, in which some unforseen event occurs. My cursor may jump to the middle of my previous paragraph, or it may highlight and delete a sentence. Five minutes ago the random event somehow bought a dozen roses for a guy named Steve Jones and changed our cell phone carrier to Sprint.

The fun part about international travel is that seems to give Naomi and I a pretty accurate glimpse at our life 70 years from now. We can't hear a single word we say to one another on the airplane, leaving us constantly confused as to what the other one wants. Also, at any given minute, I may look over to find Naomi fast asleep - I may even still be talking to her. Also, Naomi is an absolute menace with her rolling bag and has rolled over everything I care about in life - including herself. Lastly, I'm wearing a fedora, the old-manest of hats. See dad, I listen.

Update:

So, as we boarded the flight to Tel Aviv, a rabbi entered into the mix of people. He was carrying no less than 800 bags, all of which he had difficulty stowing. But waiting behind him while he got into position was so worth it. He took his seat beside - wait for it - a priest and a minister! I could NOT make this up! I nearly died when I realized it. The punchline? The priest and the minister requested another seat! I'm not sure why, but it was probably to avoid comedians.

Miss you all, but not really very much at this point. :)

Good Peeps

We met with our future subletees last night for dinner. They are good people! We met at Motley Cow for dinner and I think both Naomi and I were taken aback when they were about 10 years older than we expected - I would say mid 50s. After about 10 minutes of introduction and awkwardness common in any first-time meeting, we got along quite nicely. We chatted about medicine, our common ground, but a couple of glasses of wine/beer/water (Naomi - who had to work), we were talking about how Naomi and I met, their grown up children, our dogs, and even more interesting conversation as dinner progressed. By the end of the evening Dr. Dunn was telling us about how he was in anatomy class when he found out JFK was killed and how Robert Kennedy was killed the day before their wedding. Very surreal. Our house will be in good hands.

Thanks to Jordan's Courier Service, we'll be getting our dogs to Ames this weekend and keys to us. A Slutzki family friend is giving us unlimited access to their house in Haifa for whenever we need it. This will allow us to have free housing for the last week of our trip, which is great! We'll still probably end up staying in hotels a couple of nights for convenience, but it's a fabulous offer. I also looked up wifi hotspots so that I can keep my "incredibly interesting" blog going while abroad. Hopefully the change in culture will add some interest.

By the way: "It's my last day of work!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Inspirational Photo 2

Leaving soon!

The trip approaches! Time to prepare.

I bought a netbook last night, which is the cutest little computer. It's smaller than a piece of paper, about an 1" thick and weighs about 3lbs. It has the power of a 3-year-old laptop, essentially, but is much smaller than those ENIAC-sized beasts. It has built-in wifi so we at least have a way to check email and upload photos.

We are meeting our subleters for dinner on Thursday. Motley Cow! Hopefully they're good peeps.

Tali is coming over to our place two times today - once to help Naomi pack (entertainment) and later to help me remember how to conjugate Hebrew verbs in past and future tenses. I suppose I should know that.

This weekend we go through our deep clean. Since we depart Monday morning - not Tuesday like I thought - we are hanging around IC to pack and relax. Sorry parents (both sets); we'll just not die while we're traveling so you'll get to see us later. We are in discussions with Jordan about coming to pick up our dogs, otherwise Rina is making the trek.

We are bringing the Canon along so we have something good for the theives of Israel to take. Big pix for all.

Three-ish days of work left! Hooray!

Wednesday...So Loooong!

First off: Our anniversary was a success! After Jordan and Amanda left we actually spent the afternoon working. By dinner time the bathroom was DONE! Jordan can testify to the fact that I was perpetually distracted by this project all weekend, so it was nice to call it quits. Dinner at 126 (mom and dad, you remember this place, right?) was fantastic. Mom and dad, thank you for the extravagant bottle of wine you sponsored. It was fantastic!

The gears of travel are starting to turn...slowly and steadily. I received an email today that our summer tenants are in town, so we're meeting with them next week. I have been digging around online to find all sorts of things to do while we are in Israel, as well as shoring up last minute travel details like a rental car and such. We have plans to deep-clean the house next week, which will take the pressure off of the weekend. Somebody moved August 20 to Monday, which I swore was on Tuesday, so we now have one day fewer to wait! The grammar of that last sentence hurts my brain but I'm pretty sure it's sound.

Other random details:

I ran 6 miles on Monday. It was awful. It was also as far as I've ever run, so at least I could be proud of my pain.

I only have 1.396 weeks of work left! Forever! For REAL forever!

Naomi has been falling asleep at 9:00 for the last couple of days. This has left me to watch Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure at night. "Bill, strange things are afoot at the Circle K."

Brandon - 1, Naomi - 0, and...Laurence - 1

Yesterday, due to impatience on both of our parts, we did our gift exchange. Yesterday afternoon, Naomi called me to declare that "both our gifts are here!" When I got home, we pretty much made a fast-grab for the gifts. I went first and opened my awesome new shoes which I'm sporting today. Naomi went next, and got...board games? Wha? The look of disappointment was quite comical. It took me a minute to realize that the gift she just opened was actually a belated wedding gift from Laurence, who told me he was going to find the perfect board game for us. And he did: Pillars of the Earth is a fun-looking board game that is based on the classic novel, abook Naomi has on her bookshelf. So Lolo also gained ground. No gifts for Naomi. Man, was she ever depressed after that! :)