How not to start your day in Israel

Hearing a huge explosion right outside your window that makes your entire building shake (actually, it felt like we were lifted right off our foundation) and sends you flying to the window (probably not the smartest thing to do) to see what’s happened.

Thank G-d, it was just construction workers blowing up the roadbed across the street in preparation for the new boulevard that’s being built. But you can understand our being a bit jumpy over that after yesterday’s so-called “copycat” bulldozer attack in Jerusalem. Which was apparently followed by a carjacking right near Modi’in, which may or may not have been terrorist-related. That’s what caused the highway to come to a standstill last night, btw, not the checkpoint.

(Oh, this is another “day late, dollar short” posting. How rude of our neighbour not to leave his internet available all the time. :Þ )

Meanwhile, today’s adventures consisted of:

- getting our new washing machine! Yay! I never thought I’d be so excited to do a load of laundry! Unfortunately, until our dryer rack comes in our lift, I can really only do one load a day. Other than our little clothesline over our air conditioner that can handle about 4 t-shirts, there’s nowhere to dry anything.

- our lift is here! Oy vey. I’m a little overwhelmed at the thought of having to unpack everything. But it will be SO nice to have our stuff! I wonder how much stuff we’ll have that we’ll look at, and wonder why on earth we brought that?! This also means that Morey had to go to Haifa to sign and pay for the lift. Today is the Yahrzeit (anniversary of his death) of Morey’s Uncle Norman and his cousins were heading to Haifa to be with his Aunt Shirley. We were invited, and originally offered a ride, but it turned out too many people were going for us to fit in the car. But, thank G-d, there was room for one person, so they were able to pick up Morey and take him to Haifa. So he’s able to be with the family, see his Aunt and cousins and then tomorrow, take care of the lift.

- the internet guy came! Ya- wait. Not a yay, because here, when you get internet, you have to call another company to get your modem. What the internet company didn’t tell us is the modem has to be installed first. Makes perfect sense, but when you’re calling for the service, and you have to deal with translating service phrases, and you have 8000 other things on your mind, things like that don’t occur to you. Internet guy - scheduled for today. Modem guy - scheduled for tomorrow. Argh.

- getting to Rachel’s house by myself on the bus. Major Yay. I figured out what bus, was more or less sure about the schedule (but forgot how long the actual ride takes) and made it only 20 minutes late. It was me and one other couple on the bus (I’ll rant about the bus system thoroughly in another post, maybe). When it was down to just me, it occurred to me that I could get off somewhere sooner, and walk a block or two. I started to ask the bus driver, but it turns out, she’s Arab and speaks only a little Hebrew. So we spent the rest of the trip trying to understand each other in our broken Hebrew, talking about Canada, about how long I’ve been here, where my family is, where she’s from, then she pulled over in front of Rachel’s house - where there is no bus stop to be seen - told me it was “assur” (prohibited) to do that, but because I’m new, she’ll do it for me. Was a lovely trip, followed by a very interesting visit. Rachel hosted a meeting for the women of the shul we’ve gone to the last two Shabbats. Shul politics knows no borders. They tried to conduct the meeting all in Hebrew, with English translation. What was cool was I was able to understand quite a lot of words. What was funny, was I was able to understand enough to get thoroughly confused. As Kelli said at one point, she wasn’t quite sure what the issue was, but she thought it had something to do with lettuce.

And I just tried to get online to post this, but our very weak, unsecured wireless connection is nowhere to be found. Oh please let the internet people be able to reschedule for Friday morning....