photo happy

so for those of you who read my last post... i'm feeling more hopeful, mainly because of this: ACTIVISM FESTIVAL!!!
i'm volunteering there with a group called Bikurim, "an Israeli NGO that aims to strengthen the foundations of a pluralistic society in Israel through the use of socially aware children's literature." it's great, the book they are currently aiming to distribute is a lovely story with beuatiful art and i'm proud to peddle it. i love Micka, the one woman i met so far, and i'm sure it can only get better as i meet more people with the project. she's the one i mentioned in my last post... and it was successful. a kinda-friend!

(i realize now that i failed to mention Elisa, a nifty energetic lady with whom i've been spending a ton of time with since i got here. she's from Buffalo, has her degree in baking, likes my cooking, and we are each other's only friend here that we didn't meet through our men. she's been here a while, since doing birthright in august and staying to make Aliyah and hang out for a bit with her taglit-acquired boyfriend. we made tiramisu yesterday. damn, those things take a bitchin' long time to make!)

so i'm going to be at the festival all weekend... and housesitting this week at a friend's gorgeous place in the near-by German colony. it's Shavuot this week, a holiday where you eat dairy and drink wine, so we'll have a garden gathering while we're at this beautiful house. maybe i'll make a cheesefake. pumpkin, or chocolate-peanut butter? oh DAMMIT i need soft tofu and you can't get that anywhere here. :( well, i'm going to plant-based-cheese-making workshop tonight at Ginger, the vegetarian community center, so maybe i'll learn of something i can use. (ohhhhh how i used to devour cheese blintzes. if i could make a "cheese" blintz, i will worship at this workshopper's feet.)

oh here's pictures of our "garden" of tea mints and other herbs. and neighbours. :)

and old pics of our Purim brunch with friends. remember you dress up for Purim? :) we ate lunch then went on an avdenture to find floods from the rainstorms we'd been having, but just ended up goofing off in the desert mountains somewhere on the way to the dead sea. also,
there was a flood at his place so there are some ugly pictures of a wet ceiling.

xo


p.s i started reading the Foer, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." it's awesome. :)

thank goodness i'm literate

so i've been missing home hardcore lately. the past week and half or so have been particularly rough. i think it's faire (if you're Medieval, or if you're literate like i've claimed to be, fair) to say that i suppressed everything when i got here. i was kind of emotionally flat. i didn't realize it at the time, but i'm pretty sure this is an accurate description. i was a bit stunned, and thus took everything in really easily. i didn't realize that i wasn't really taking things in though... i was just letting them slide around me, like slippery fish in a barrel. (i'm reading Memoirs of a Geisha, so forgive the Eastern poetics.) and i think because i wasn't really taking it in, i wasn't fully grasping the enormity of my situation here.
and now i do.
and i'm kinda panicking, just a little. i know, it's against the number one rule if i'm going to be an intergalactic space traveler! but here i am!

i miss my friends. a lot. yes, i'm talking to YOU. i miss people understanding me. i don't know if you've ever had to make friends as an adult, but it's not fun. in fact, it's exhausting. and i'm too old for this crap. where's my camp crew, with whom i can be totally emo and totally ridiculous all in the span of 4.7 seconds? where are my jammin buddies that fulfil my creative and sonourous needs, no matter the hour? where are those special few, that don't even need to hear my voice when i call, and they're at my house in a jiffy making tea/cookies/music because they heard, in my silence, that i needed it? where's my mom? where are YOU??

i applied for a job last week. the position requires bilingualism, and unfortunately that second language is Hebrew, not my second language of Pig Latin (thanks for that, Mom). it seemed like a pretty cool job so i sent in a resume and a kick-ass cover letter, hoping to attract their attention. to my dismay, i attracted their attention. i got called for an interview. and i got called for a second interview, at which i needed to read two pages of hebrew. and on our way home, driving south from haifa the night before my interview, i got so overwhelmed that i wished i was applying for a job in electrical engineering or as a harvard math professor or a bee farmer or ANYTHING - as long as it was in English, because anything at all could've been easier to fake than knowing how to speak hebrew. and then i just kinda wigged out, shed a few buckets, and got into bed and read "Time Traveler's Wife" for the next two hours until i couldn't focus my eyes anymore. the thing is, i've read time traveler's wife, maybe 5 or 6 times. and i love it. but reading it was not because i love it... it became my home, my friends, what felt familiar to me.

To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one. ~Chinese Saying

books are my friends right now. Memoirs of a Geisha = case in point. read that one a few times too. and just finished it for the fewtimes+1th time. gonna try and read a new book, then transition to a new friend. maybe one will come of Micka, the woman who volunteers with the publishing place. (write about that after... i'm meeting her tomorrow). we'll see - if she becomes a friend, and if i read White Oleander (again) or go onto Nick Hornby, or my first Jonathan Safran Foer. ("first??" i know - tragic, right?) I'm still in the middle of When You Are Engulfed in Flames, but you can go in and out of that one, it being essays and all.

ok. i feel better now. :)

and p.s, i kinda got offered that job. so i'm proud of myself, in the end, that at least i did something totally scary, and learned something from it too. i didn't take the job cause i would've had to start work at 630am some mornings... and i didn't even need to work backwards to when i'd have to wake up to blurt YAH RIGHT at them (in my head).

blogsnack

so i got back from Sinai, Egypt two days ago and have a pretty good framework saved in my draft blogs, so it's coming. just wanted to post this little snack of random tidbits. ready?

• Bloomie said "goodnight." melllllllllt much.
• i went to the dome of the rock maybe a month ago and never blogged about it, which is kinda weird cause it's a pretty big deal. plus we had to stand in line behind these soupy-eyed zionist christians who kept trying to tell us what a "happy peoples" the jews are and how generous we are to "allow" land to people other than other jews. hrm.
• i was sitting in a place called Mamilla yesterday, which is kinda like an outdoor Yorkdale. situated right beside the entrance into the jewish quarter of the old city, it's kind of an abominable place, filled with suggestive advertising and rich americans. if carrie bradshaw were jewish, this is where you'd find all the carrie bradshaw's of the world. this description of Mamilla is rather irrelevant. the point is that while Eyal was in the bathroom, i was sitting on the ground infront of Renaur Men, taking photos of kids playing on these odd bronze duck sculptures, and a journalist approached me to buy my photos for her newspaper. so i'm gonna be in the paper. probably the gossip page, but i never had lofty goals for my photography career, so i'm happy with it.
• i start up at ulpan again on wednesday, and i'm kinda ambivalent about it. it's good to learn, and it's not as though i'm doing elaborate essays that eat up all my time, but i don't like getting up at 730. that's pretty much my whole gripe. unless i'm waking up to the beautiful Gulf of Aqaba and cold guava juice, then it's 6 for me. (sigh.... Sinai...)
• half an hour ago, i found a slug on my soap bottle in the shower.
• i met Eyal's aunt, Ofra, yesterday. she's a self-proclaimed "cat lady, but not the crazy kind. [She's as] regular as anyone else!" this is slightly untrue. she's actually a pretty phenomenal lady. honest, kind face, ballsy, effervescent and stunning, particularly considering she's almost 70. her daughter is Tamara, the cousin of Eyal's whom i think i mentioned in a previous blog. they appear to be the people of the family with whom i will connect the most intensely. Eyal really connects with them, so i guess my comfort with them makes sense.
• today i got an amazing email from Dawna Coleman/Davis that made me smile so much that it hurt. i boasted to a few people about how i have one of the wisest, most interesting people on the planet as my friend. also really loved my chat with Sally. i miss you Sally.
• i'm tired.

"in my cloud of hot dry desert bliss, i can inaccurately say that i hate everything but Sinai."

- me, day after returning from Sinai, after sleeping under a damp blanket

with cold feet and waking to ringing cellphones

and screaming neighbours

so here was the general thing, during the week around and during Passover. i wrote this whole thing out in lovely prose, but it disappeared into cyberland before i could click the good ol' "publish" button so now the prose is gone forever, and here in its stead is its less verbose cousin: the point-form.

- to Haifa (top left yellow district, city on the south-west side of the bay) friday night!!

- slept out sunday night in the trees on this cliff thing, beautiful view of the city, became enveloped in fog the next morning - super nice.

- had Pesach at Eyal's G-ma's place: a really nice night, made yummy foods to bring, and Eyal's G-ma made little sweaters for Bloomie and Yismo - AAAAAAAADorable

- that very night, we set out around 1030 and picked up friends Yoav and Sasha in tel aviv, then drove practically straight through the night, besides an hour nap in a parking lot somewhere along the way. the car was stuffed to the gills, under my feet and in my arm pits. you'd think we were running from the government.

- got to Eilat around 7 am (j'slem is right above the dead sea there, and then Eilat is riiiiight at the bottom), we walked across the border into Egypt, took a taxi to our beach, called Al Mahash. the place is run by Chamdan and his brother, really nice Bedouin guys whom Eyal and his family have known for years because they've always come to this beach for vacation time.
- when we got there, we put down our bags, ate a crapton of food, and then passed out right there where we ate. it was pretty much like this for the next five days. although some extra activities included: morning swim (felt very brave since the water is very chilly at 630am), snorkel, water frisbee, guitar jam one night, and getting a delightful surprise visit from Marion Janet, the sister of a very old friend from Canada who happened to be staying on the same beach as me. go figure!!!
- the place (and i'll post pictures) consists of:

• a couple of half-walled structures (or some with just a roof) made of bamboo or straw or something, and huts made of the same stuff
• the main area (which was also where they made food - although they served it anywhere) has rugs covering the sand, pillows to sit on (which looked like lions had been told there were antelope inside but we slept on them anyway), and short tables
• the huts were rugs covering the sand, and two foam matresses. we brought a net for the nighttime mossies. note: mosquitos were the only thing not entirely pleasant about this trip
• oh, and we were situated right at the gorgeous waters along the Gulf of Aqaba (which made me think of Aladdin the whole time). you could saudi arabia across the water because we were at a narrow point in the gulf. neat.

so ok, we did that for five days and then had to go back....
- oops, didn't know my visa was only for one entry into the country. hehe. no worries, got it sorted out quickly.
- got a flat tire on the way home, and i timed how long it took between stopping and getting on the road again, cause i thought that's what David Sedaris would do. only 23 minutes and 19 seconds. go team.
- i was very shocked when i got back to jerusalem and there wasn't any water and everything was made of stone and everywhere there were (are) people in lots of clothing, not at all like the beach. and i felt like what i wrote at the top of this post.

starting Pesach break...

life is spinning pretty beautifully here...

we're on break from ulpan for two weeks because of Passover. so my first day off was on wednesday and was spent mostly at Amanda's...

as a birthday present with her hubby Chanan (her birthday was on wednesday), i slept over the night before and got up with kids so she could sleep until whenever she wanted. Chanan gave her little treats throughout the morning then made her brunch (french toast and fresh carrot/apple/ginger juice!), and i left around 2 - after which they went for a nice mountain drive and played in a river while the kids slept in the car. pretty awesome. :) and that night i went back to amanda's so we could bring and have cake. :) then eyal and i went to a 'school's out!/pesach' party at our friend Yoav's place.

DAY 2/thursday:

i spent some time at amanda's again, came home, fell asleep for a few hours, and was woken to the sweet whisperings of 'let's go on an adventure.'

OK!

so eyal and i ended up at the dead sea around 11pm with snacks and a blanket... we (let's be honest here - he) built a fire, and we (this 'we' is acurate) ate baguette and hummus and baba ganoush and cucumbers, then decided just to crash there. so we slept under the stars huddled under a big wooly shawl, woke a bunch of times to stare at the expanse of stars around me, got up around 530, and watched the sun rise over the sea while sitting in a hot spring pool up the way from the seashore. amazing. i got out when it was too hot to endure the sun AND the pool, then napped in the sun. amazing. i woke to find eyal grinning and covered with dead sea mud, looking like quite the creature. he washed off and i took another sit in the pool, then we packed up and drove toward home around 9.

when we stopped to refuel (the car and ourselves) at a gas station/cafe, there was a bus travelling south that had stopped for the same reason as us. and this guy walked from the cafe onto the parking lot and dropped his empty drink bottle on the ground, with the cafe ten feet behind him and a garbage can ten feet in front of him. so, for those of you who knew me well enough, you can only imagine how fuming i became. littering is something that makes NO SENSE to me. it's dirty, disrespectful, wasteful (if the thing is recyclable), and passive. i have no patience for it, so don't ever do it when you're around me. (or at all, really.) there are appropriate receptacles in most civilized areas. and if not, i'm the kind of person who will walk around with garbage and recycling in my bag/pocket/hand for hours/miles/days until finding such an appropriate receptacle. also, admittedly, i will take recyclable items out of the trash (as long as it looks decently non-diseased) and redeposit into - ba ching - an appropriate receptacle. so this guy clearly does none of these things. he stopped to smoke a cigarette before getting on the bus, and as he finished, i took his bottle over and gave it to him. unfortunately, i couldn't sweet talk him and help him to see his error in the friendliest way possible, cause i don't speak hebrew sweet-talk. also unfortunately, he was an a--hole. (i think some adults read this blog...) so i just smiled, offered him the bottle, and pointed to the garbage can. he cursed loudly in hebrew, waving me away, so i put the bottle in the bus on a ledge beside the stairs (it's like a greyhound bus) and started to walk away. the guy - you won't even believe this - started shouting and angrily kicked the bottle out of the bus, perhaps even at me. it didn't quite make it out of the bus, but landed loudly on one of the stairs, so he cursed again and kicked the bottle practically right at me. so i smiled at him (really tried not to laugh - what, are you FOUR or something?) and picked up the bottle and took it back to my picnic spot to put in our garbage bag. it was infuriating and hilarious. eyal said that he's the stereotypical immature macho piggish israeli man. some just turn out that way, i guess. i can understand that; we have that product in American-flavour too.

so now... we're up north in Haifa, at Eyal's dad's place. last night we slept outside again, this time in a little wooded area nicknamed 'the balcony' because it's very high up and looks over a valley and some the city. really beautiful. super windy last night, and today a huge cloud passed right into our area and made everything really eerie. very cool. and tonight is the seder at Savta's house (hebrew for grandmother - her name is Sarah), and ten driving down to Eilat to leave our car in a parking lot and walk across the border into Egypt. we're going to spend 5 days on a beach in Sinai, a favourite vacation spot for Israelis. apparently though, the beach we're going to is great because "there aren't a lot of israelis there." haha.

so updates on seder and Sinai in a week or so.

Chag sameach to all you out there who knows what that means!!

xo

in-between heavy stuff.

so i know i promised more decadent divulgings, like visiting Eyal's family and the insanity of Jerusalem and Israeli politics, but i just posted a juicy post so this is an inbetweeny light and fluffy cupcake, with apple sauce instead of oil.

the landlord won't do anything about the mold in the apartment, nor do we have any solutions for making it less damp in here. i've come to systematically hanging random piles of clothing outside on our line (can you do something systematically to something random?), just so that each piece of clothing can dry out every so often. it's kinda like doing the dishes even though you know you'll be eating off them again soon. plus my mom told me that sun kills mold so hopefully it'll help beyond just keeping things dry. ugh. how gross is mold? ugh.

i'm looking for a job, which in englishified hebrew is this: ani mechapesset avoda. as soon as my resume template lets me have more than 2 previous jobs (we've had a fight about it, he hasn't budged yet but i'll wear him down), i'll have a resume ready to submit to two interesting places, and some other places too. the interesting places are: BCVS, a residential treatment centre for Orthodox women 16-20 with an eating disorder, and this other place that i can't think of the name right now, but it's a centre for kids with special needs. day programs, respite, cool rec facilities and such. or maybe a vegetarian soup place.

as you can see from my brilliant hebrew above, ulpan is going well. i can say a variety of things, some of which are useful; i can use a variety of verbs in a mix of tenses, some of which only if i'm talking to male-identified person. i can say, for some reason, "No way!" and "There's no point" and "You and me, we will change the world." i've found myself sitting between Barrie, a guy in his early 50's i guess who is smiley and jokey and supportive of the Hebrew struggle and non-obnoxious like many other people in the class, and Jeremiah, a guy about my age with no neck and a mediumly-fierce Zionist attitude but he knows i'm against that so he keeps quiet about it. we hung out the park the other day and gossiped about the annoying people in our class, mainly this one British guy in his 30's named Pesach who is constantly seeking attention in a slightly passive way and who's English name is- no joke- Paul Simon. he says he's looking for a wife. i say GOOD LUCK BUDDY.

in vague emotional news, today i'm having a very hard time being here when i know one of my best friend's in the universe is going through a really tough time. it's painful. really really painful.

Randoms:

• I'm obsessed with this collection of blogs. Don't even go. Your friends will never see you again.
• My favourite line from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Tom Stoppard): "Hamlet, in love with the old man's daughter, the old man thinks."
• I just started reading Bernice Chu's blog and i really like it!
• I made an awesome walnut "cream" sauce for pasta the other night. *gurgle* yum.
• This is awesome: http://www.orthodykes.org/
• For some reason I decided to use capital letters where appropriate in this section.
• Keep an eye out for my soon-to-come picasa album. :)
  

today i miss: dad, the Shanly house and all its inhabitants.
***Just in case this little section isn't clear, you are ALL in my heart at ALL times... but of course, sometimes people stick out one day, for one reason or another. these are those people.***

my toast is ready. gotta go.
xo

Israel's Hallowe'en

so i've been avoiding posting this entry only because i want to include links to pictures, but i haven't been able to figure out to get photos off my cell phone yet. i still haven't figured it out, but it's just time to post this already.

so as promised, the Purim extravaganza.

it's actually nothing like hallowe'en. people do dress up, but not to scare away evil demons. although, even satan's henchmen would have at least paused on their journey of ill-will to cock an eyebrow at the group of religious guys dressed as a marching band, full out gold lamé pants and hats and jackets, and knee socks and shiny shoes and leather chin straps with buttons I KID YOU NOT. it was amazing. and i saw these guys in one of the most religious neighbourhoods in jerusalem. me'ah she'arim ("one hundred gates"), it's right around the corner from where i live. it's a ghetto there... so grey, so dirty, very poor, built very exclusively upon generations of a few families, they don't really integrate with the rest of israel... there are signs instructing people to dress modestly and every shabbat there are protests against cars, with police and everything. it's quite the place. anyway, this is where i saw the marching band. so people let loose on Purim. (oh Purim, is a 3-day holiday celebrating the deliverance of the Jews from planned mass extermination by Haman, a high-ranking political minister of the Persian Empire, a really long time ago. like 6th century BCE.) it's mitzvot (a mitvah is like a good deed - 1 mitzvah, 2 or more mitzvot) to leave food out for people who live on the street, save money to give to less fortunate people, and prepare treat parcels for your friends. also, it's advised that you drink hard liquor, and public drunkenness is actually celebrated and seen as a display of joy during the holiday season. be boisterous, all! it's really awesome.

we stayed home and watched Weeds.

we're really obsessed. it's bad.

But i did participate a little bit! the week before, I made hamentaschen for treat baskets with Amanda at her place. I seriously hadn't eaten or even looked at those since I ate a strawberry one in preschool at Temple Har Zion with my cousin Ilana. How I remember that is completely unknown. They turned out awesome - I was very impressed with myself, especially since the fate of the dough was a bit unclear when it was first made. Amanda and I made a filling of apples, dates and some kind of nut... i forget which. maybe brazil? anyway, it was delicious. Eyal said it didn't taste anything like hamentaschen he'd ever had before, but he'd never had a homemade one, so i'll take it as a compliment that it doesn't taste store-bought. plus, i stacked them in a jew-friendly shape. [photo to come.] another proud moment for me. 'cause i like puzzles.

oh and also, we went to Beit Zayit again for brunch, Purim-themed (so Eyal and i just dressed up in whatever, some silly stuff), then went chasing floods in the desert but didn't really find any. but we took a bunch of pics... the first ones are Eran's ceiling caving in (you see all his drums under his homemade porch a little later in the set), then there's general craziness (including rocking out on air guitar to Queen - you will probably spot these), and visiting some awesome spots looking out into the abyss. Present are: Eran (short hair, big smile, usually wearing my poncho), Eli (longer hair, on Eyal's shoulders a lot), Eyal (looking geeky in the neon checked shirt), Leon (furry, tail, cute) and me (the girl of the bunch).

so that's it for that.

today i miss: Sally, Broo, mom, Lon

xo

p.s i made an awesome walnut "cream" sauce a few days ago. with garlic and fresh cherry tomatoes... *gurgle* it was "ta'im"! (which means tasty.)