Ted’s Aliyah, Day 7

Again, this is not MY writing, it is the only-slightly-deranged musings of my very talented husband, Teddy (Akiva) MacLeod.  If you like his writing, check out his art (sort of!).

Day Seven - One Week Down, A few thousand more to go…
“Attention group of swimmers from the school trip!” said the Hebrew lifeguard on the beach this morning, “STOP pretending to be drowned and floating lifeless in the water, IT IS NOT FUNNY!”
How many times have I seen Israeli kids plop down in the water and act like this? More times that you would think, it must be some universal public beach joke that I don’t know about. Weird.
This morning I set out on my own (in a foreign, non-English speaking country) to exchange that broken fan from yesterday. I took the same 59 bus, so getting there was no problem. When I got to the “electricity store”, with my head full of possible confrontations that I would be expecting for having the gall in trying to return a broken item, I set the fan down on a counter and waited for someone to notice me. Yeah, I know, such un-Israeli behaviour. Nevertheless, I immediately spoke to a nice clerk at the store in English and quickly exchanged the fan for a new one that typically of this store, would be ready for pickup TOMORROW. Oh well, at least I didn’t have to shlep to a service center.
After this easy task, I walked next door to a huge grocery store to see what was what in the world of different groceries. I found some old favs like Helman’s mayonnaise and Nutella on sale, so I picked them up so we would have some “comfort items” in the house. The meat selection was pretty good, although frozen salmon was so expensive. Like 60 – 70 shekels each, which is more than $20. Fruit and veg were extremely cheap, but I was puzzled that I couldn’t find ANY macaroni and cheese for the kids.
I ran into Tzivia and the kids at the local market after my bus ride back and we swung by a park on the way home. Right beside the park was Naomi’s possible Grade three classroom for the next few months. I thought it looked nice and had a little girl feel to it, although Naomi didn’t think much of it.
Once home, Tzivia immediately went out shopping as well as to enjoy a bit of kid-less freedom, while I planned to take the Littles down for their daily beach run. Just as we were ready to go, there was a knock at the door. A new OLIM (immigrant) named Eva had just arrived today and didn’t know anyone who spoke English, so the social worker downstairs, Nitsie (I think her name is) brought her up to chat. I talked for a bit and then invited her to come back at 6:30 for dinner, remembering how nice it was when someone made dinner for us on arriving in Israel last week.
So we went swimming and when we returned, Tzivia also arrived with raw chicken for tonight. We cooked it up in a home-made white wine sauce (wine is cheap here, but cooking sauce is expensive, go figure) and had Eva over for dinner. Eva’s story is a bit different than ours. She is from New York and is here to go to school, taking Nutrition courses or something, and is more interested in touring the country and making friends. Making friends, please… young people…
Okay good-night everybody! I’m going to taper off these notes a bit after this week because I need to concentrate of finding a job now, (ugh!), so I am going to redirect these creative energies a bit. I will now only be writing the really interesting stuff that happens from now on, such as the hassles we've been having all week trying to open a bank account before our on-hand money runs out, yikes!