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".