November 29 through December 6, 2022
Hard to believe we've been in Israel three weeks now... the only other place we spent this much time (on this sabbatical) was Morocco. Starting to feel more like a local than a tourist (sort of) 😀.
This week we went to visit Lena Shapiro (from TBI) who is doing a semester of high school near Jerusalem (the program is called "Heller High") on a kibbutz. It took a bit of work for us to get there via public transport, especially since the second bus decided to just skip our stop 😦. We wound up in Jerusalem and had to take a taxi back to her kibbutz, and the driver decided to rip us off (I'm sure we paid more than twice what we should have 😒). Nonetheless, seeing Lena was lovely and she gave us a nice tour of the place and we had dinner together. We thought about staying the night (there is an adjoining hotel run by the kibbutz) but they had exorbitant rates (over $200/night) for no good reason. We must have "rich tourist" tattooed on our foreheads 😑.
I spent some more time exploring Tel Aviv and happened to catch their annual photography exhibition which was very cool (and free!). Lots of interesting and thought-provoking images 📸. This year's theme was "Action" and the photos tended toward social action and encouraging change. It was held right next to City Hall so I also got to see the City Garden area and Yitzhak Rabin's memorial (Prime Minister who was killed in 1995). I recently found a cool artists' market (near the big Carmel Market) that happens twice a week and is awesome. Good thing it's only twice a week or I'd run out of money for sure 😮. Also this week I went on a tour of Tel Aviv's "White City" architecture, which is a UNESCO world heritage site. Although I'm not an architecture fan or expert, it was interesting to learn how the city was planned back in the 1920's. Now when I walk around, I can (sometimes 😉) spot what I learned on the tour. Lastly, Art and I went to an old "retro" movie theater here that was showing films from the current "Solidarity Film Festival." We wound up seeing "Kaepernick and America" in which I learned more about this controversial American football player than I did while we were living in the US. It was also fun walking around a new part of town, the theater district, and trying out a new restaurant.
Yesterday we went up to Haifa to visit one of Art's friends from way back who recently made Aliyah and moved from Ohio to Israel (to be closer to their grand-kids). They gave us a half-day tour of Haifa, we had a delicious lunch together, and they introduced us to their son's (Orthodox) family. The grand-kids included a 1-year-old baby so I got in some good baby-holding time 👶. Getting there and back by train and bus was much easier on this outing. A fun time was had by all 😜.
Asides: Tel Aviv is much noisier than Haifa (Haifa is more of a suburb and Tel Aviv is more like NYC); food delivery is very prevalent here and is done through a service called "Wolt" which incidentally also delivers weed (or so I've heard 😉); many Israeli websites do not include an "English" option so I'm getting better at Google Translate; most Israelis expect you to know at least some basic Hebrew (and I only know shockingly little); coming here during "winter" was a good call since the winter is rather mild and there aren't that many tourists; we're still getting used to how expensive everything is here (why is cereal almost $8/box?? 😲) but we're managing nonetheless; dogs and babies can be found everywhere (most restaurants are dog-friendly); post boxes are extremely hard to find here (but why??); and homelessness (sadly) exists in Israel too.
Art has been working on improving his cooking skills (in varying degrees) and has taken on more of the domestic load. One step at a time 😉 And Laurel celebrated her 24th 🎂 without us there 😓 but soon we'll be together in Amsterdam!
Deena and Art
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