Monday, January 29

Where do we find ourselves?

My premedical postbac applications are about complete, Vanessa & I had an awesome run around the country, I've enjoyed a few relaxing days in Tel Aviv and Yaffo. Yet things feel... unfulfilled?

You probably have ready that, yesterday, Israel suffered its first suicide bombing attack in months and months. It happened in Eilat, a resort town lodged on Israel's Red Sea coast, killing three plus the bomber. This bombing was Eilat's first, and local authorities issued a high alert. Some friends and I were planning to drive down to Eilat for a week starting tomorrow. So now I'm mulling over alternatives.

My ambulance tour with Magen David Adom starts in a couple of weeks. Understandably, they want me to learn the Hebrew words for things like "tongue" and "liver." Less understandably, they also include "Do you feel wetness?" on the to-know list. No idea where I'll be posted yet. They could place me in Jerusalem, Haifa, Ashkelon, Bethlehem... MDA likes to hide this stuff until training. I can't remember which cities I requested when I enlisted in this program last year, so I figure I'm in for a surprise.

I can't believe I'm flying home in two short months. SEVEN month out of NINE -- Done. Any friends reading this, you'll be welcome to crash @ V's and my place in DC come April. Just give me advanced notice, if you can.

There are lots of photos to post, but I'm working off a buddy's machine. Look forward to some pretty sights after I settle in with MDA in mid-February.

I have no revelations, insights or dreams to share today. Just a sense of waiting. The next and last step of this journey is almost here, and after that... I'm home, with plenty still to sort out.

Suprise Visit

Hi. I am writing from home. It's unexpected, I know.

News came in that my dad would undergo a sudden heart bypass just before Christmas, and I was able to catch a flight a couple of days afterwards. So instead of my folks visiting me, it's reversed. These things happen. At least I got to fly business class.

The big thing to be grateful for this New Year's is the health of my mom (cancer) & dad. More thanks that my dad's docs discovered his blockage by tests and not, say, a more consequential indicator. Since the procedure he's been doing great: he was able to come home just four days after the operation, and he's started to really watch what he eats (with mom's help), plus he's walking around more each day. As small as these things may sound, they are so imporant for his full recovery -- hopefully in 6 months. Thankfully the biggest hiccup has been me breaking my dad's toilet -- accidentally -- while tring to fix it. I am preparing for years of jokes. We're all praying for a healthier 2007... and writing our Democratic congressmen to make sure we get it.

Flying home felt like a weird dream. I remembered fast how North America and the Middle East are separated by more than distance. The snow covering Canada's northeastern tip, not to mention the forests and winding rivers that followed my plane all the way to Washington, were breathtaking. We have so many natural resources that Israelis just don't. It's easy to forget. Then there was the land itself: We have so much! Almost 12 Israels would fit into England... and 440 into the US. Add another 23 Israels into the US if you count our inland waters.

Sadly, I have had to devote tons of time here to postbac apps. Writing a short personal statement is the pits. (Law schoolers, get my drift?) But I've also gotten to spend lots of time with my family & friends. Seeing Vanessa before her journey to Israel this weekend has been particularly excellent. We are gearing to have a Blast next week, traveling all around the Holy Land.

I am a little nervous for the parts that come after that. There is a lot I will need to accomplish, application-wise, and even more I want to see before beginning my ambulance service. And I've never traveled like that before. I just hope the weather's nice.

OK, peace until next time. Happy and Healthy New Year: If you don't have your health, you have nothing.

Cover Bands Can Rock

December 9, 1:44AM

Yes, so I just saw this amazing cover band in our pub. They sang in both Hebrew & English. Solid background instrumentals (inc. keyboard), two solid soloists (inc. a tenor) plus one state-of-the-art rock guitarist can bring any tune to life, no matter how many times you've heard it before. Simple pleasures...

The Day after the Day of Infamy + 65 yrs

Friday, December 8, 2006

This ulpan program ends in 20 days. Yikes. What adventures await in Life After The Ulpan? No one (and I mean no one) really knows.

Actually, that’s a lie. I’ll be traveling, as you may know – partly with friends & family, partly solo – and then joining up with Magen David Adom, Israel’s ambuance corps, on Feb 11. The thought of traveling continues to evoke both excitement and fear, as I haven’t traveled “around” before. I expect that I’ll seek out a safe-house for my computer, since hauling it from hostel to hostel seems like a very bad idea. So who knows how blogging will work during those 6 weeks… I may be able to post quick updates from libraries or internet cafes; I don't expect to be able to blog any more elaborately than that.

Speaking of traveling. Apparently, the Negev Desert is laced with bus-routes and has tons to offer backpackers. It’s also hit-or-miss: the Negev Winter brings with it unpredictable weather that includes flash floods and cold, cold nights. The North, of course, is loaded with stuff I want to see, trails to hike, etc. Yeah, who knows where I’ll be during that month of going it alone, or how it will go. At least I know how to ask for bathrooms, and for a lift.

This has been another short week of long days. Movie recommendation of the week: if you’re young & like the kind of mindless humor executed in Old School and Anchorman, see Hot, Wet American Summer, which co-stars Miles from Fraiser. If you’re not one of these people, don’t bother. Also, everyone should check out the amazingly realistic Titanic 2 parody-trailer: Titanic: Two the Surface. It won’t take you long to find it online. And then to be amazed!

A fragrantly absented-minded event in the life of an (already) absent-minded young man: Yesterday I committed the Deadly Sin of forgetting Vanessa’s birthday. Shit, shit, shit.

In other news, I finally received my one pair of jeans back from the laundry service. Peace.

PS Did you know that octopuses, squids & other cephalopods have 3 hearts and blue blood? Their blood gets its color from the copper-rich oxygen-transporting protein hemocyanin. Not everyone’s cool enough for hemoglobin, I guess.

Ever wonder why they still call this place the promised land? Here's another pic from my Mt. Carmel hike last weekend. It's Yoni, Yoni's friend & Sivan in front and the kibbutz's perch on the Med behind them.

Umm...

Here's something I typed up last night... what time, I can't remember.

Back to class/work tomorrow AM, again. Ugh.

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12.2.06

Happy December, everyone. At this writing, I’m a little (“k-tzat”) under the influence thanks to a couple bottles of red wine that I received complimentary-style from our dining hall following a special Shabbas dinner.

More than half of the kibbutz is vacationing at the Dead Sea, as Plasson has sent every one of its workers and their families away for two days, all expenses covered. So seventeen buses left the kibbutz sometime early Thursday morning, and I’ve had the last couple of days off. It is very quiet here. The time off has reignited to my tennis game, as I’ve found a new partner, and has also fostered tons of sleep. I realize that I must clamp down on post-bac applications this month, or else risk having to apply in the midst of backpacking about the Holy Land. Also, I’m searching for the right moment to sit down with this Ulpan’s director and tell him why I think he and his administration is unprofessional.

Yes, more later.

11.25.06

I'm Back

Here I am earlier today while playing conquistador on Mt. Carmel (I think), which extends all the way down from Haifa. It was a really nice Shabbat hike, with great views & company alike. Here’s a shot of the kibbutz’s banana fields, through which we had to traverse to reach the mountain base. This place produces a ton of bananas… big ones.

I have no good excuse for neglecting to update this site for… two months? Please have some patience as I attempt to reform my ways. As far as events go, there’s still not much new to report, except that I’ve started looking at pre-med post-bac programs. But that’s boring.

Hebrew classes are OK. Still uninspiring. That said, I’ve gotten into some outside studying that seems to help, at least for vocab. Part of the kibbutz ulpan deal is that we write a test at the end of the course… The Jewish Agency owns this ulpan, it turns out, and demands results. My teacher’s started making a fuss about it, encouraging us to prepare, etc, but most of us ulpanists could care less. Almost everyone (including me) sounds ready to move on from this place come the end of December.

And I have some great things to look forward to. My parents will be flying in from Turkey about the time we finish the kibbutz ulpan, along with my old friend Aaron, and I’ll get to show these folks around a bit (as far as my Hebrew / geography skills will let me). Vanessa comes next, and we’ll be touring around together until mid-Jan, at which point I’ll get to travel solo until I begin volunteering for Magen David Adom – the Israeli Ambulance Corps – about four weeks later. I think that my brother Ed may also visit during all of this, thanks to the BirthRight program.

Incidentally, my friend James and I took a really nice trip down to Jerusalem last weekend to visit some friends on Shabbat. Somehow most of the folks we met up with are studying at a liberal yeshiva called Pardeis, where they can study anything Jewish they want… as long as it’s Torah or Talmud. So conversation with these people, esp. when they’re all together, tends to revolve around things I’ve never heard of. But that was OK, and James & I spent most of our time consuming tasty Shabbat meals anyway. Seriously, we ate a Ton that weekend.

While in J-town I also attended my first Sephardic service in a hole-in-the-wall synagogue perched a few hundred yards from my friends’ place. I observed Shabbat last weekend probably more conscientiously than I have ever observed it before. Definitely couldn’t have done it without at little help from my [Pardeis] friends, though, and probably won’t repeat it until their help returns. The final highlights of the weekend were running into two old friends – Julie Nemerovsky and Nicole Luna. Nicole, I can’t believe you’re engaged… and that you’ll be a rabbi in two years. Engaged. Yikes.

So I can beat my computer in chess, almost every time. I’m resisting dropping $20 for the upgrade I need to play on harder levels. This isn’t the only example of my latest stinginess: Before setting foot on USA soil, I already feel the expenses accruing. I am trying to prepare, mentally, for being in debt for the next decade or so. It will be a bitch.

A short reflection on Israeli politics. Everyone here is tired of the government and everyone in it. That includes more than just PM Olmert and Defense Sec Peretz (who has no business serving as Defense Sec). In the old days, PMs resigned if they failed to perform in times of crisis. See Golda Meir after the Yom Kippur War. Menachem Begin resigned even after forging peace with Egypt. Yitzhak Rabin resigned (to end his first term in the 70’s) after a scandal emerged around his wife. The current government contains at least two high-ranking members under investigation for sex crimes, an incompetent Defense Secretary and a PM who appears to be stuck in the mud. And people are hanging onto their posts desperately, as if stepping down would be a major faux pas. There are a thousand questions are being asked in this country, and no one in government can provide an answer that people will stand behind. Meanwhile, check out the wall that Israel’s building around the West Bank…

Maybe we’ll live to see images of Israelis and Palestinians tearing down this wall, someday. But I’m not counting on it.

On a final note, Shawn of the Dead is hilarious – at least, the 2/3 that I saw are. I recommend it to everyone who can stomach uproarious geysers of fake zombie blood splurting in a thousand directions, all the time. Peace.

Tiberias, etc.

October 13, 2006

Sorry, everyone, for taking so long to post. This entry's come together in tiny pieces over the last few days, mostly due to distractions.

Can you believe we're nearly half-way through October??

This is about the time when I start missing Halloween...

At this writing, I’m coming off the last of two daylong shifts in Plasson that my class has worked to make up for our half-week Sukot vacation, which ended Tuesday. My friend James and I used the break to check out Tiberias, a small city planted on the east banks of the Kinneret (a.k.a. Sea of Galilee) about 2000 years ago in honor of the Roman emperor. Check out some Tiberian history (fascinating) here. The place is filled with historic sites & friendly orthodox Jews, plus some gorgeous views in the clear warm weather (apparently I need to be savoring what’s left of our sunshine before the rain/clouds begin… I haven’t focused much on the weather in these entries, but it’s worth noting the crystal-clear skies we’ve had virtually every day since early July. The only memorable cloud cover I’ve seen was two weeks ago, when it drizzled for about 15 minutes) , and good falafel / schwarma roasting sweetly on street counters. Tiberias, like so many places here, also has tons of potential for development. When this region finally is granted some long-standing peace & stability, I think we’ll see unprecedented growth. Even after the summer’s war, I’ve met plenty of folks who are just itching for a piece of the property market.

But our stay by the Kineret was also a palpable reminder of how desperately limited Israel’s resources can be (yes, you’re entering the Boring But Important section). Lake Kinneret, about 7mi wide by 13 mi long, is Israel’s only above-ground source of freshwater, and people here talk about freshwater the way Americans are starting to talk about oil: if Israelis don’t change their consumptive habits, the pot inevitably will run dry. As things stand, overdrawing and contamination threaten the water quality of the Kinneret and the coastal aquifer, respectively, leaving Israel’s mountain aquifer as the last “safe” water source in the country. But water overall is still vanishing faster than the winter rains can replenish, and the mountain aquifer lies problematically beneath land that the Palestinians want, and may conceivably be traded away in the coming years. So the water crisis is real.

How can Israel turn this situation around? A 2002 government report suggests that the biggest setback right now is inefficient and unqualified staffing in the gov’t divisions that oversee these sorts of things. You can also check out http://www.biu.ac.il/SOC/besa/water/zaslavsky.html for what may be a more focused look at the issue. This isn’t the first gripe I’ve heard about Israeli bureaucracy (sp?)… my UHaifa bud Eugene, who’s getting ready to risk it for 18 months in the army, was turned down for his visa after riding two hours to Jerusalem. Upon repeating the trip (and return trip) the next day, he found that the first day’s efforts owed their fruitlessness to a visa officer who turned him away so that she could take early leave rather than spend five minutes processing his application. And I’ve had some run-ins of my own. Basically, if you ever want to get anything out of Israeli bureaucracy, know someone.

Wrapping up on Water. I don’t know how they’re going to fix it. There’s a ton more to read on Israel’s water problems, and I won’t bore you with the volumes of detail you can look up on your own time.

Also this week, Eugene crashed in for a couple nights and seems to have caught the eye of about every ulpanist lady here. All I can say, Eugene, is you're a salty, salty dog.

On the docket for this weekend: Serious Relaxation. Too much time sorting through plastics just makes a guy want to… sit. On Shabbat I may also get to tutor one of my Ethiopians co-workers on his English. That could be fun.

The Russians next door have been beckoning me for an hour join them for drinks (vodka, appropriately)… I figure I at least owe them a visit.

PS Eating garlic cloves at the end of a meal, as tasty as they may be, makes a person’s breath smell of moldy rotten soiled-over waste.

PPS Sadly, my camera batteries died just before Tiberias, but I’ll try to get a hold of some pics from James’. We're going to try to make it back up, so if I don't land photos from this trip, stay tuned for pics next time.

What am I supposed to do?

September 25, 2006
(Almost October!?!)

One problem with blogging here on Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael is that nothing new happens, ever, from week-to-week. I could write about how Plasson’s unwrapping a giant toilet-maker on the production line or how some Israeli singer I might like to see is visiting the kibbutz later this week, or how I have saved enough ration points to eat Well thru the rest of September, but really, people, are those the kinds of things you want to learn from this site?

So despite a lovely Rosh Hashana weekend in Netanya with cousin Debbie & Co (see entry a few weeks ago for her family pic) I’m feeling lost in the ceaseless grind of the kibbutz. Our comings & goings remain numbingly similar to the way they were when we arrived almost two months ago. Remember Springsteen’s reflection…

I get up in the evening, and I ain’t got nothing to say.

I get home in the morning,

I go to bed feeling the same way.

I ain’t nothing but tired – Man I’m just tired and bored of myself.

Hey baby, I could use just a little help.

…not that life is utterly monotonous, but it can be like that. Uncomfortably Numb. I’m missing Stories – the kind that come from the crazy shit that kids my age do when they stop following the rules (just a little, at least) or when they innovate something and try to make it real – and while it’s partly my fault for not taking much initiative these days, it’s also the place itself and the people here. Hanging out with a bunch of eighteen-year-old partykids can be OK, but more often than not I’ll opt out. Not that I’m proud of any antisocial habits, but it’s almost reflexive.

Case in point, last night: I’m walking back to my room from the coffee lounge after what had turned into a long day of online research on traveling, and I run into Jonathan – a nice guy & one of my favorite Mexicans (there are around 25 in the Ulpan, all just graduated from the same high school) – who invites me to another Mexican’s room for a “party.” So I figure why not and follow him, a minute later emerging into a moth-hole of a room (15x15?) brimming with drunk Mexican dudes, maybe three chics (18, 18 and 17), a bottle of Jeger and now me. The Mexican guys are lecturing me on how I can’t leave until I’m drunk, and I’m thinking, this just isn’t worth it. I’ll warm up to the idea of drinking myself under the table packed between 20 bellowing back-smacking Mexican ulpanists about as fast as most of those peachy-faced kids will grow a mustache. Not that I hold anything against the Mexicans, really… what would you have done?

Eventually, boredom & financial straights pay off. “Activities” include planning for Jan 1 – the day my stay here ends – calling old friends, etc. Vanessa visits for the second week of January, and there may be others stopping in, too (which, if you potential Israel travelers are reading, would be Excellent). Cheap flights in Europe – check out Ryanair.com, for example – and cheap stays in places like Turkey are the kinds of things that get my juices flowing these days. There’s also a ton to consider re: What Is Ben Going To Do Come April??

At the end of the day, there are things to do here, maybe even things that are in some way kind of new, but presently the kibbutz has changed into a staging point for the rest of my trip. Does that sound pathetic? I’ll work on it.

PS My latest “thing:” videocaming on Skype. Check me out as I ponder over live conference calls, videocam-style.