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Snow patrol

With Jerusalem on the verge of its bi-annual one-day snowstorm, I was reminded of the last time the white stuff blanketed the Judean Hills.

I’ll be the first to admit it. I’m not a big snow fan. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the beauty of a snowy day, I do. It’s very pleasant to look at…from a distance. But up close, it’s just so darn inconvenient. Especially in Jerusalem where everything shuts down. Completely.

In other locations around the world, a little snow means you might have to drive a little slower or put chains on your car tires. In Jerusalem, the city is paralyzed. Schools are closed. Supermarkets don’t receive deliveries. Bus service is canceled. Last time it snowed, even the trendy new Waffle Bar in our neighborhood was shut tight. I mean, what more could you want than a hot caramel and whip cream covered waffle on a cold snowy night, but no…

People who live outside of Israel don’t expect snow in Jerusalem. With our baking hot summers and close proximity to the Dead Sea, it’s easy to forget the city is perched on the top of a mountain, at an elevation of 2500 feet.

My worst snow experience in Israel by far was several years ago. It was during the time I was working in Tel Aviv. I needed to get back home but as I set out from my office, the news was reporting that the main highway to Jerusalem was closed. But Highway 443, which I’ve written about before, was still flowing, albeit slowly.

As I approached the summit near Givat Ze’ev, the snow became thicker and visibility dropped to just a few inches. Cars were skidding off the road, the sides of which were lined with people who’d gotten out of their non-functional vehicles and were actually walking in the meter high snow drifts, where to I don’t know. There was a bus turned over on its side.

I got on the cell phone with my wife and she talked me through three hours of the most treacherous driving I’ve ever experienced. There were times when other drivers whose vehicles had already skidded into oblivion physically guided my car when I could neither see nor steer. I was so traumatized I didn’t go back to work for the rest of the week. And don’t ask me about the phone bill (fortunately the company was paying).

These days, I work from home. That doesn’t entirely ameliorate my distaste for the Jerusalem version of the proverbial winter wonderland. But with everything I need just a 30 second commute away, I say: bring it on snow, I’m ready for you this time.

Homeward bound

Well, my niece Elisheva is finally back from her six months of post-army travel, the last four of which were in South America. We’re all breathing a sigh of relief that she’s back, safe and sound, even though she was in pretty steady touch through Facebook, Skype and all the other usual communication methods of the 21st century.

Still, it was great to finally set eyes on her today, and witness the changes in this now better-traveled twentysomething. I wouldn’t have necessarily pegged her for the adventurous type prior to her trip, but after hearing the tales of her treks and trips through South America, it’s obvious that the bug has bitten our Shev-Shev, and she’ll be heading off again to North America, Central America and god knows where else before she buckles down for some university studies.

For now, though, I’m enjoying the small, but pertinent details of her travel lifestyle. The small stud in her nose, her browned skin, her habit of saying Salut instead of Labriut or God bless you, when someone sneezes. That’s clearly courtesy of her travel friends, which included Israelis, Germans and Belgians. And they’re all threatening to come to Israel in the near future, so we may get to meet Carl, Hans and the other members of the crew.

Finally, and maybe surprisingly, she’s been settling back into Israeli life pretty easily, greeting friends and family who are coming ’round to see her, and enjoying the simple pleasures of home life, from a full fridge to hot water whenever you shower. Shev shev, we’re very happy to have you home, for as long as that lasts.

The fruit of passionfruit

Just in time for Tu B’shvat, I picked a huge bowlful of passionfruit from the vine in our yard, all perfectly brown, wrinkled and ready for eating. Such a sense of satisfaction, to have a bowl of fruit in your home, ripe for eating, and from your very own garden.

I had been kind of cursing the passionfruit, courtesy of my sister Sarah, who’s been warning me that the vine will take over all growth nearby, including the bougainvillea and mini peach tree. I had even considered cutting the whole thing down come spring, and putting in a new vine, something floral, scented, easy.

But then, Yossi, the gardener, came for one of his monthly-to-six-week visits. After ridding the garden of the vociferous winter weeds that I can’t keep up with these days and doing some general cleanup, he told me to come outside with a bowl and gather the passionfruit. I have to admit, I’ve been so out of touch with my garden that I wasn’t expecting much, a few, maybe several passionfruit for snacks.

Instead I ended up with a bumper crop of some 25 passionfruit, and good advice from Yossi to keep the vine, but just cut it back come spring.

Now I had to figure out what to do with the passionfruit, since there’s just so much spooning out of the yellow stuff that I could do, given that I’m pretty much the only one in the house who eats it. Enter Nigella Lawson, Brit foodie chef extraordinaire. I remembered seeing a recipe for passionfruit curd in “How To Be A Domestic Goddess,” and as I always aim for domestic goddess status, was excited to try it out.

I’m happy to say that the recipe is flawless and the results stupendous. As per Nigella’s suggestion, I smeared some on plain cake, a shortcake that I happened to have in the freezer. Truly luscious. And there really is no greater satisfaction than having a jar of passionfruit curd sitting in your fridge.

Recipe details

Great to slather over a thick slab of white bread for a morning breakfast.

Ingredients

* 11 Passionfruit
* 2 large eggs
* 2 large egg yolks
* 150 g caster sugar
* 100 g unsalted butter
# Put the seeded pulp of 10 of the passionfruit into a processor and blitz just to loosen the seeds. Strain into a jug or bowl.
# Beat the eggs, egg yolks and sugar together.
# Melt the butter over a low heat in a heavy-based pan, and when melted stir in the egg mixture and the passionfruit juice, and keep cooking gently, stirring constantly, until thickened.
# Off the heat, whisk in the pulp – seeds and all – of the remaining passionfruit, let cool slightly, then pour into a clean jar. Keep the jar sealed in the fridge.

Nail Laka

Sometimes, you just need a manicure. And yes, I’m talking men and women here, because, men, your nails could also use some TLC. But the thing is, it isn’t always so easy to just go and get a manicure in the land of Israel. You need to know who to go to, to call and make an appointment, to think ahead. You can’t just walk into a nail salon off the street, and get your nails trimmed right there, on the spot. Because there hasn’t always been that kind of salon.

Until now. Yes, I am happy to report that the walk-in nail salon has arrived in Israel. True, it has existed in Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan and Rehovot for some time now, but now the holy city, Jerusalem, can also boast its own Laka nail salon, an express service nail care kiosk located several malls, including Jerusalem’s Malcha Mall.

The concept is great; execution fine, not perfect. You can walk up to the Laka stand (located across from the Ronen Chen store on the mall’s second floor) at any time, and within ten minutes, sometimes faster, be seated with manicure in process. A manicure express takes 15 minutes, costs NIS 30 and includes cleansing and strengthening the nails, followed by a two-coat nail polishing. A full manicure takes 25 minutes, costs NIS 55 and includes trimming the skin around the nails and the rest of the express manicure care. There’s also a ‘man’ manicure and a girls manicure, for kids up to age 14, for just NIS 25. There are pedicures, French manicures, hand peeling, hand massage and an anti aging treatment.

I went for the full manicure, was cared for by Natalie, a friendly young manicurist who told me my hands needed more care — tell me something I don’t know — and tried to push the salon’s products on me. Once she realized I wasn’t buying, she laid off and we chatted off and on about nothing in particular. And that was it. Within 25 minutes I had Red Red Wine on my fingernails and having already paid my NIS 55 and NIS 6 tip before being polished, was off to stroll around the mall.

I would comment that the kiosk is a bit cramped, and they should know to ask for payment before polish, so that the manager doesn’t have to root around in the customers’ wallets. Then again, that was the Israeli touch, having no qualms about handing your bag to a total stranger to have her extract your wallet and money. And while I might have felt crowded in my middle seat, the woman two seats to my left was completely comfortable, with her baby napping comfortably in her stroller inside the kiosk. So there’s room for all kinds of packages.

Enjoy the Laka near you.

Baby namings

My weekend began and ended with babies, not my own, but two friends’ newborns, one who had his brit on Friday morning, and the other who had her simchat bat on Saturday night.

Both ceremonies took place on the eighth day after their respective births, although there was, of course, no clipping included in the simchat bat ceremony.

What did strike me were the unique similarities and dissimilarities between the two events. Sure, they were both religious ceremonies, held by two religiously observant families who take this kind of thing seriously. The mothers were both proud and weepy, exhausted and thankful, given that this was a second baby for both, and each have an active toddler to take care of as well.

But there were differences as well. The brit followed a more traditional pattern, with the clipping, naming and usual jokes of the mohel, who clips at least three-quarters of the baby boys in southern Jerusalem. The menu was bagels and cream cheese, coffee and cake.

At the simchat bat, the ceremony was more creative by definition, given that there still isn’t a set ceremony for girl babies, which allows for more creativity on the part of the parents. Both sets of grandparents spoke, as well as the parents, and the aunts and uncles had roles as well, offering blessings and quotes for the new baby. The menu? Cakes and cookies, strawberries and cream and fresh mint for one’s cup of tea.

And then there were the names. For the boy baby, Ilan Leib; Ilan for tree, given the proximity of his birthday to Tu B’shvat, the birthday for the trees, being celebrated next Saturday, January 30. And Leib for the baby’s paternal grandfather, who died last May.

For the girl, Amit Adva, named for her maternal grandfather who died this summer. His name was Moshe, but he was called Buddy by many, and so they called her Amit, which means friendly and faithful, the most obvious traits of her grandfather.

And now there are two more people in the world, small people at this point, but with names and families and generations who have come before them. They’re nine and ten days old, but they already have histories, and they haven’t yet emerged from their cocoon of feeding and sleeping and crying. I’m thinking that’s something to contemplate.

On the hunt for a gan

I’ve been on a gan hunt. For the last two months, okay, maybe more like six weeks, I’ve been searching for the right day care options for my boys, who will be 23 months old in September.

I had no idea that finding a gan — or mishpachton, nursery school, or any other kind of day care center — would be such an ordeal. I mean, this is Israel, land that loves children, land that is always last minute about everything. It just never occurred to me that I’d have to start looking for the appropriate childcare situation for my boys in December, for September.

But when you have twins, people told me, you want to be sure you get the right place with space for two kids, not just one. You want to be sure there’s the right ratio of ganenet — the gan teacher — to kids. As in 6 or 7 kids to one adult, as opposed to 12 or 15 to one adult (although I’ve never seen that on any of my gan visits.) You want to make sure that the food served for lunch is freshly cooked, not microwaved schnitzel. That they offer plenty of outdoor playtime, fun arts and crafts, and the right kind of space for naps.

This all made sense to me. After all, I’ve got enough reservations about putting my kids into an institutionalized setting at the tender age of two. If I’m really doing this, I want to make sure it’s in the right kind of place, with the right kind of teacher.

But something about the search made me feel like a New Yorker fighting for space for my kid in a top-notch private school, to ensure them the right path in life. As in, if they go to the Kol Haneshama gan, will that automatically send them on the Reform schooling route? Will a mishpachton in someone’s home not offer the same kind of finger painting options that they’d have in a more formal setting? And should it be an English-speaking setting as opposed to Hebrew-speaking, creating a bi-lingual option in their developing brains?

Yes, all these and more, were the questions floating around in my brain, knowing all the while that none of it, really, makes a tremendous difference at age two. I finally did what I usually do in these life-altering situations — as in profession, relationships, health — and went with my gut.

That led me to Gaby, a lovely South American ganenet who leads seven small people in her home-based mishpachton, just over the busy corner makolet owned by her husband and brother-in-law, where we often stop in for milk and bread. True, you sort of have to walk through the makolet to get to the staircase that leads to her apartment. And you pass crates of soda, boxes of cereal and the cups of Turkish coffee being drunk by the makolet workers from an overturned crate. But Gaby just calls down to Sasson, her husband, if she’s run out of Multi Cheerios for breakfast, and someone runs it up to her. And if she’s taking the toddlers down to the backyard for some outdoor play, her husband or brother-in-law come up to help everyone down.

You know how it is. It’s the Israeli way.

Ceremonial competition

Just experienced one of those ‘only-in-Israel’ kvelling moments. We attended the IDF ceremony celebrating our niece Noa’s completion of her officer’s course. She’s a commander in the ‘Raful’s Boys’ unit, recruits with criminal records or with very troubling backgrounds. (They actually had a documentary made about them a few months back. They’re known as Raful’s Boys for Raful Eitan, the 11th IDF Chief of Staff and former minister and MK who pioneered this special track for teenagers who would otherwise not serve in the army and then have a much harder time functioning in Israeli society.)

But back to Noa and her ‘tekes.’ It was held at a familiar army base basketball court, where my other niece, Dena, also received her officer’s pin a few years back. There are certain similarities at all these ceremonies, from the soldiers marching in, to the army band playing some familiar tunes, accompanied by a soldier singer.

There are the families, of course, and friends of the soldiers, turning out to cheer on their particular soldier. That aspect of the afternoon is particularly reminiscent of a summer camp visiting day. The parents are expected to bring some tasty morsels for their soldier child, and some people go all out, bringing ‘Sinai’ mats (large straw mats that work better for picnics than an easily crumpled blanket, and which used to be purchased during Sinai vacations), chairs, tables and even mini-grills. We, ever the Americans, brought bagels and cream cheese, lox, tuna and egg salads and cookies. Hey, that’s what Noa requested.

But beyond bagels vs. hummous, some families came prepared with props. One crew had printed tee-shirts with the face of ‘their’ soldier and the words “Ken Hamefakedet,” meaning, “Yes, Commander.” Another family had made fleece scarves congratulating their soldier, while two sisters marched in to the bleachers with a huge banner printed up for the occasion.

We brought the boys, and Noa did say that they provided her much entertainment while waiting for her pin. But now I’m determined to up the ante for the next ceremony. Immigrants no longer!

Malls 101 (or how not to design a movie theater)

Ever since we bought our big screen TV a few years back, I have avoided going to the movie theater. The combination of raucous crowds and cell phones that refuse to be silenced don’t make for a particularly conducive cinematic experience. I prefer cranking up the surround sound at home and microwaving a bag of popcorn.

3D changes all that. It’s the one thing you can’t get from even the biggest plasma screen. So, this week I gave in and headed to the Rav Chen theater in Jerusalem to see Avatar, the stunning new sci fi flick from Titanic and Terminator director James Cameron.

The movie was everything I hoped for: incredible graphics, a gripping storyline, and 10 foot tall blue aliens with tails, dreadlocks and minimal clothing. The crowd nearly restored my faith in Israeli movie audiences: quietly reverent as they sat riveted wearing their dorky 3D glasses as the multi-dimensional action unfolded on screen.

I say nearly because, before we could see the film, we had to get into the theater itself. There was one small door open with single ticket taker, a security guard, and about 150 excited mostly young adult males pushing and shoving their way to the front. An orderly queue, maybe a rope with ticket goers winding leisurely around the building perimeter? That’s so Los Angeles.

And then there’s that second uniquely Israeli movie invention: the snarky exit straight to the parking lot. As we left the theater, I expected to re-enter the mall but no…we were directed into a dank and poorly lit stairwell that led us outside.

Didn’t Israel study Malls 101 at the University of Consumer Culture? The idea is to coddle shoppers into spending more of their disposable income, not to unceremoniously funnel them out into the cold and back to their cars.

Here’s hoping that 3D will be relegated to recycled gimmick drawer. I don’t relish having to return to our pre-big screen movie going days, sexy blue aliens or not.

Quote this

Israelis like quotation marks. I’m in the midst of puzzling this one out, as it’s frustrated me for some time. Why, for instance, would the name of a school, as depicted at the front of the building, be spelled with quotation marks around its name? Or the names of two elephants gifted by Thailand to the Biblical Zoo? The end result is that any kind of text reads like a contract, with everyone referring to themselves in quotation marks.

I decided to research this a bit, after noting that an English translation of a press release I was using referred to the organization in, yes, quotation marks. Here’s what I found:

According to Wikipedia, acronyms in Hebrew are denoted with a punctuation bit called the geresh, which is often typed as an apostrophe. The geresh is singular to Hebrew because it started out life in the Torah, where it was used as punctuation and is now used primarily as a note of cantillation in the reading of the Torah and other biblical books. A double geresh (״), known by the plural form gershayim, is used to denote acronyms; it is inserted before (i.e., to the right of) the last letter of the acronym. As in Tzahal (צה”ל), the Hebrew acronym for the IDF, which is also an acronym for the Israel Defense Forces.

Anyway, until the early 1970s, most of the printed Hebrew texts put opening quotes low and closing quotes ones high, often going above the letters themselves. The word “ישראל„ would be a good example.

However, this distinction in Hebrew between opening and closing quotation marks has completely disappeared, and today, quotations are done as in English (ex. “ישראל”), with two high quotes. This is due to the advent of the Hebrew keyboard layout, which lacks the low opening quotation mark („).

Yet the use of quotation marks in what seems like odd places – to an English speaker like myself — appears to be rooted in the German language roots of Hebrew. When Hebrew was revived as a modern language by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (whose seminal Hebrew-English dictionary is currently celebrating its 100th anniversary), the Russian revolutionary followed the norms of those who had come before him, basing modern Hebrew on biblical Hebrew, but with touches of Eastern Europe, where many of the first pioneers were born and raised. According to one blogger, Hebrew grammar and punctuation were based on Western standards, and the German punctuation system was adopted, until 1994, when the Academy of the Hebrew Language changed it to the English system. And in German, quotation marks are often used where English would use italics. Quotation marks are used in English for the titles of poems, articles, short stories, songs and TV shows. German expands this to the titles of books, novels, films, dramatic works and the names of newspapers or magazines, which would be italicized (or underlined in writing) in English:

So the names of two elephants, instead of being italicized, underlined or left alone, are instead placed inside quotation marks. To me, the American English speaker, it appears incorrect. To those educated in the local system, it’s just right.

It’s never just traffic

About ten days ago, we had just arrived back in Israel and were driving to Netanya, for a family Chanukah party being hosted by my oldest, married niece. What should have been an hour and a half-long drive (okay, maybe an hour and 45 minutes) ended up taking more than two and a half hours. The delays were everywhere, on Route 443, which spans from Jerusalem to Modi’in and beyond, and on Highway Six, Israel’s only toll road and what is usually an impeccable stretch of highway.

At the time, we couldn’t figure out what was causing the delay. We figured it was because of the rainy, windy weather that made the roads slick and was probably causing more than a few accidents. It was also the second-to-last night of Chanukah, and people were probably heading out for their final celebrations, like us.

We finally made it to Netanya and my niece’s residential suburb, while my sister and her family never got past the checkpoint on 443. They — and many other drivers — were turned back toward Ramot and Jerusalem, and when they found themselves at the entrance to the city at 7:30 — the time that we were supposed to be lighting candles at the party — they gave up and headed home.

But it was only this week that we found out what was the cause of all the traffic. Turns out that someone was trying to blow up motorists on the road on that very afternoon. The firecrackers attached to the bomb went off, but the bomb didn’t. Lucky us. Another Israeli wasn’t as lucky, and was killed in a shooting attack while driving home.

One of my nephews, in the other car, wondered out loud what would have happened if the bomb had gone off and we were all on the road. His question was first greeted with silence, as they all pondered that one. Makes you kind of wish that it had ‘just’ been a traffic accident.

 

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