We arrived on Tuesday, August 27, after installing a computer at my parents' house in Philadelpia, picking the kids up at camp, doing all of their laundry, and then going to Rochester to participate in Lizzie's (Mike's sister's) wedding. The wedding was beautiful. Lizzie was beautiful. They wrote their own egalitarian ketubah and had Uncle Buzzie translate it into Aramaic and Hebrew. The wedding was on one of the finger lakes. The band was funky. And all the relatives and lots of Lizzie's friends were there. She has collected a lot of them over the years. She and Dave seem so happy together. It's time for Lizzie to have this kind of happiness.
Our flights to Israel were long but uneventful, though we did have a long wait in Boston retrieving bags that we had placed in lockers there. We had a layover in Belgium -- didn't find any affordable chocolate in the airport. We waited to buy our chocolate when we got to Israel (Elite isn't bad).
The events began when we arrived here. Our apartment is the pits, to put it mildly. Plumbing needed fixing, Salvation Army furniture, sheets with holes in them, kitchen with dishes and flatware for 5 (barely), and little in the way of cooking utensils. The landlord brought us more sheets, kitchen stuff, etc., but all worn out or full of holes or stained or ugly and just plain not of a quality we can live with. The furniture is uncomfortable (what's there), and there's a lot missing. And the steps in the apartment are a trip -- as steep as a ladder, open, uneven, no railings. After a week of trying to get along but having the discomfort of the apartment color everything, people started to tell me that I needed to move. So we began to do that. I've been on the phone with landlords, rental agents, a lawyer (to get out of our current contract), ... We found an apartment last Friday, and we move in tomorrow after his current tenant is out. We still need to settle with our current landlord and get back the rent we already paid her.
The new apartment is as beautiful as the first one is miserable; more expensive, but infinitely comfortable and livable -- a luxury apartment. It is also in a real neighborhood; where we are now is a street with houses, and people aren't interested in socializing (like in our Atlanta neighborhood, but we had been hoping for something different). Both kids have friends who live closeby; it will be a great location for them. So now we are busy getting a phone installed, packing bags, and so on. We'll clean up the current apartment and move everything to the new one all day tomorrow. Hopefully, the old tenants will have left the sheets clean for us. Otherwise, I'll be doing laundry in two places. At least the new apartment has a dryer; also a washing machine and all modern appliances. No TV and no phone; we're working on those. And we have to make the kitchen kosher and buy whatever things we can't make kosher. But we're ready now to be comfortable and to live. In another week, by Sukkot, we should be settled in. I'll try to have the shipment and the piano delivered on Thursday or Friday. The move will probably slow me down for another week, and it might cost a lot to break my lease, but it will be well worth it.
What a mix of people we've found here! The stereotype is that Israeli's are prickly on the outside but when you get to know them, they are soft and friendly. For the most part, it doesn't seem to take much to make them friendly, and even if they won't be friendly, it doesn't seem to take a lot to get their help. Some people we've met are more helpful and friendly than I've ever met anywhere. We've had more invitations to lunch, tea, and dinner than you can imagine -- four during the two days of Rosh Hashana. Our friends from up north called friends of theirs in Jerusalem to help us get settled. Friends in the U.S. sent email to friends in Tel Aviv and other places who called and offered help and friendship. Even some people on the street are kind. When I was afraid that a package had gotten lost (I sent two and received one and it was very damaged; I must admit I had had enough and was crying), the man at the post office drove around to the neighboring post offices with me to try to find it. The car we bought is great (it used to belong to Amnon, one of my post-doctoral assistants), but we haven't been able to register it in our names yet due to beaurocracy. The father-in-law of the person we bought it from drove all over the city with us one day from office to office as we tried to register it unsuccessfully. The insurance man said, no problem, he would just add us to the insurance policy of the person we bought the car from so we can drive it. The parking people at Hebrew U. said, no problem, as long as I bring them good registration in November when I have to re-register the car for the new year (the new year starts after the holidays). So we have the car, and we're insured to drive it, and I can park it at both campuses of Hebrew U.
My Hebrew is still awful (garua), but I manage okay. On the first day, I told the taxi driver that there were only four of us but that we had lots of restaurants (meesadot). Suitcases is meesvadot. That's our funniest story. Then, the other day, I told somebody lo toda (no thank you) instead of lo davar (it is nothing; don't worry about it). Still, for the time being, I'm the best Hebrew speaker in the family and mostly I've been able to navigate just fine, often without using English. I certainly wouldn't try to give a talk in Hebrew though.
Joshua is getting used to 6th grade -- he keeps asking me if I'm sure I don't care about his grades. He understands more than half of what is going on, I think, so that's not bad. He asked the principal for a private tutor; he doesn't like not being on top of everything.
School here is different than the states. Six days per week, with a short day on Fridays. A regular elementary goes from 8 until 1, only 5 hours per day, and on Fridays from 8 until 12. Joshua's school, because it has an added Judaics program (like the Solomon Schechter day schools the kids go to in the States), has an extra hour per day. We pay for that extra hour -- much less than 1/6 of the private school tuition we are used to paying. And because of the need to employ so many musicians from the former Soviet Union, the city funds a strong after-school music program where the kids can get their instrument lessons after school. So Joshua will take piano and trumpet lessons at school from concert musicians. Makes life easy; lessons start after the holidays as everything else does.
Orly is not in school yet. She's in an ulpan (intensive Hebrew program) and will finish in early November. She ought to be the best Hebrew speaker in the family by then. We don't know yet where she'll be going to school. So we know nothing yet about Israeli junior highs (9th grade is in junior high). We still have to arrange for Orly's piano lessons.
After the holidays. Apparently all serious work shuts down from the end of August until after the fall holidays: Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot/Simchat Torah. School is all review until then. Nobody is looking for apartments at that time (making it easy for us to find one to rent but hard for our current landlord to find a new tenant). Companies allow employees to take all the week of Sukkot off counting as vacation only half a day per day taken (and that doesn't count the first and last days, which are paid holidays). So Mike, who just started working, will take off six days and use three vacation days to do it.
Weekends here are strange. Israel is slowly moving from a six-day work week to a five-day work week. Also slowly moving from short workdays split by a long nap time in the afternoon to an 8 or 9 hour continuous day of work. Those who work five days a week work from Sunday through Thursday, and even those who work Friday only work a half day. Both the university and Mike's company have 5-day work weeks. Unfortunately, school is still six days a week, precluding taking a lot of real weekends for travel. I think we'll do it anyway, taking the kids out of school some Fridays.
Fridays are spent getting ready for Shabbat (the sabbath) -- shopping, cleaning, cooking, etc. And there are starting to be traditions of Friday afternoon naps (Saturday Shabbat afternoon naps are a long tradition) and Friday afternoon visiting (tea, cake, and talk), even among people who don't usually nap.
In fact, afternoon naps are not unusual in Israel. It is a Mediterranean country with very high temperatures in the middle of the day (and little air conditioning). Business and pleasure are traditionally done before 2:00 and after 4:00. It's a long day. Because I've been picking the kids up a school and home in the afternoons, I've been adopting the Israeli nap habit. In general, one doesn't make noise or call people on the phone from 2:00 to 4:00 in the afternoon.
Mike started work on September 4. Lots of benefits he gets that we don't get in the States and a far different culture of work. Employees are given vouchers for lunch. Because there are so many observant Jews in the company, afternoon services are help each afternoon in the stairwell (observant Jews pray 3 times a day). Actually, when I was on sabbatical at MIT nine years ago, they also held afternoon services in the stairwell. And, as I said before, the in-between days of holidays only count as half a workday (because kids have off from school, I assume), so they are quite cheap to take off. In addition to the Jewish holidays (and there are a lot of them), Mike has 22 days of vacation per year. On the other hand, he works a nine-hour day rather than the eight hours we are used to (not me, I'm used to nine or ten or eleven hours, but Mike works eight-hour days in the states).
Talking about praying, the mix of religions here is pretty phenomenal. Lots of churches, and lot of nuns in habits on the streets near the old city. Lots of mosques. We live quite close to an Arab village (the area we are living in was no-man's land, on the border between Israel and what was then Jordan; where we are moving to was Jordanian territory; we're walking distance from the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew U. and the original Haddassah Hospital -- the area changed hands several times over the past 50 years), and we hear the calls to prayer quite clearly -- at all hours of the day and night, it seems. We knew Moslems prayed five times a day, but we can't understand why we hear the call to prayer in the middle of the night. And then, there are kippot (yarmulkes, skull-caps) all over the place. It is a Jewish state. It's easy to eat out; most of the restaurants are kosher. And the prepared food (e.g., tortellini, which my kids love) is all under kashrut supervision. So keeping kosher is easy.
We've renewed friendships with old friends and relatives, and we met a relative who we knew of but didn't know before this -- someone we share a lot of friends and acquaintances with. The mailman brought him our mail, so he knew we were coming -- he called my brother and sister in law (who he knows well and who live in Haifa) to find out when. The funny story is that he used to live across the street from my other brother in Brookline; there, too, the mailman alerted him that my brother was moving in.
We had a reunion with Elliot/Hillel, my brother who lives in Haifa, and his family. We visited them in Haifa, and then they came to Jerusalem for the weekend. This year will be the first chance the kids have to really meet and get to know their first cousins. Haifa is two hours away, though, and because there are no weekends here, we probably won't see them as much as we'd all like. We will, however, spend the whole week of Sukkot together with them.