This post wanders here and there. At the end of the day, it is more about advancing the plot than character development. You have been warned.
Last Friday we signed a contract with Gan Betnua (motion?) where Aviva will be going each day starting in September. It is a shade under fifteen minutes from the apartment, but more importantly we all had a good feeling about the staff, facility, and programming that we saw. Adena visited another gan for comparison purposes, but Gan Betnua seemed much more structured and transparent. It also gives us an excuse to walk down to the Louis Promenade overlook each day. The babysitter (nanny?) we hired is working out very well and the girls seem to really like her. This is easy for them in part because her name is Laura. She brings props to engage Aviva in imaginative play, took her to the beach (more later), and even built a blanket fort with the girls last week. The grounds crew heavily pruned the tree outside the office Bev is using at the Technion and he can now watch people coming and going through the window (below).
Aside from the car issues and problems with our bank, things are fine. We have even gotten used to going to the grocery store every other day. Luckily our landlord left one of the handy carts (I’m sure there is a name for it) below in the storage room.
Friday afternoon Millie took Bev and Aviva on a tour of the Haifa Zoo. She knows it well from daycamp.
We were able to see most of the zoo in about an hour and a half. This includes the lions, stork, and fennec fox shown here.
Afterwards, we stopped at Gan HaEm (mother’s park) which is located right at the zoo entrance. The girls enjoyed the playground and I poked around a bit. Apparently this park was funded by Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, and his wife.
There is also a carousel donated by a gentleman from Los Angeles, but I don’t think he is famous. It reminded me of the playground at the Jerusalem Zoo that was funded by billionaire Illinois gubernatorial candidate J.B. Pritzker. There are a few sculptures at the park, but I thought this one was particularly interesting.
It is entitled “Motherhood” and even if you walk all the way around it, you cannot tell exactly where the mother’s body and the baby’s body begin and end. Later it occurred to me that that is probably the point the artist was trying to make.
As we walked home we passed one of the many kiosks on the street selling lottery tickets. Each of the kiosks has lottery ball monsters on top (below), and I wonder if the lottery administrators were trying to be ironic, cheeky, or both with this design feature.
On Saturday we went to the beach. Spending three to four hours there is becoming part of our Shabbat routine and this week we tried Carmel Beach as an alternative to Dado Beach.
There are wooden structures along the designated swimming areas at the Haifa beaches that provide shade, but they fill up quickly. If you want a prime spot under one of these structures, you probably need to arrive before 8:00 am, which is impossible for us. Fortunately, the north side of Carmel Beach was blocked last weekend, which meant that we were still able to get a shady spot there when we arrived at 8:45 am. There is more sand at Carmel Beach and south side is protected from the waves by the north-south jetty shown on the map, which makes swimming easier. There was a sulphur smell in part of the of swimming area and the seaweed was heavy in places, but it was nice. The chorus of the song “Santa Monica” kept playing in my head and although it was crowded, everybody seemed genuinely happy to be swimming along together.
“We can live beside the ocean
Leave the fire behind
Swim out past the breakers
Watch the world die”
Keeping It Israel 