Keeping It Israel

I have a confession to make and it is an uncomfortable one. I am afraid of heights. Sometimes.

Today we drove fifteen minutes southeast to the Carmel National Park. The main road goes along the ridgeline and it begins to feel like you are driving into the sky. After entering the park, we turned left onto a one lane road and I could see up ahead another left turn and then nothing but clouds and sky. I froze and eventually backed up, and drove back out to the parking lot along the main road.

We had a decent walk and were able to locate the trailhead we had initially planned to drive to on the way out. I ended up driving that same side road from the other direction and it was okay. We didn’t careen over the edge. It was okay. Really.

The frustrating thing about this is I realize it is irrational. As a child, I had recurring dreams about falling and the sensation still freaks me out. It doesn’t always happen, but basically I feel light-headed and a little dizzy. It is sometimes hard to stand up. It may be a panic attack but also could be vertigo. Usually, this involves being close to the edge and having a direct line of sight down. As someone who prides himself on discipline and self-control, the clear lack of self-control during these situations is alarming and humiliating.

A few weeks ago, Adena, Aviva, and I took the bus to the Stella Maris monastery here in Haifa.

This is the upper terminus of the Haifa cable car located across the street from Stella Maris. Long story short, here are photos of Adena and Aviva riding the cable car down the mountain and back up. I didn’t tag along.

Living in Illinois for the past nine years has meant that I really didn’t have to think about this very much. Here in Haifa, this issue has re-asserted itself. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. I fly in airplanes and sit in the window seat. I have been to the top of the Empire State Building. I like hiking and I even took the cable car in Portland two years ago with my friend Dave. Full disclosure: it took about fifteen minutes for me to actually board the cable car, but I did it (Dave is unusually patient). Maybe the solution is to use this time here in Haifa to work through this with repeated exposure.

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These photos are not from the hike we expected, but from the trail that led down from the main parking lot.

Believe it or not, we have settled into a routine and life feels a little more mundane now. In the best possible sense.

On a typical day, we drop Millie off at her daycamp outside the Dan Panorama Hotel on HaNassi, then Bev catches the bus to campus. From 8:30 to noon he has language immersion class with people who are about fifteen years younger and starting medical school. A few are starting graduate programs or are here with partners who are in school. Laura arrives at eleven, and between 7:30 and eleven, Adena and Aviva run errands, go to the park, and just hang out. Bev takes the 4:30 bus home and just misses Laura, who leaves at five. That’s okay though, because the girls are watching TV and he gets dinner ready while Adena wraps up her workday at six. After so much angst and drama, mundane feels nice.

We didn’t go to the beach last Saturday (Bev and the girls went Friday afternoon) and instead visited one of the few conservative synagogues in town. Turns out, the girls have trouble sitting quietly in the service here too.

On Tuesday, we got to try out our health insurance. The camp counselor called and suggested that we have a doctor look at a bug bite Millie had been scratching. Adena and Millie went to one of the three doctors “in the network” here and while it was certainly different, it was a good experience.

The bus ride was about thirty minutes and the (Russian?) doctor was helpful.

We have been trying to get an appointment at the Ministry of the Interior for about a week to apply for a visa extension. Our tourist visa (three months) expires September 10th, so it has been a little stressful. Bev tried using the web form to schedule an appointment, called the office several times, and even sent a fax. On Thursday morning, he took the bus down to the office.

That’s the approach to the Sail Building (where the office is located) with the harbor in the distance. We now have an appointment for the four of us on September 4th, but again, this was much harder than it should have been.

The staff person made it clear that she was doing me a favor and that we should have made this appointment as soon as we entered the country.

There is construction on HaYam Road, which runs parallel to our street and is one of the main routes down to the beach. The metal barriers shown below were placed there a few weeks back to clear the way for buses rerouted down our street, but they also took away already scarce parking spaces.

The bottom floor apartment in the building is apparently for sale, and we have seen lots of people coming to look at it over the past few days. Note the big banner below.

Our apartment is on the top of the building hidden behind the tree there. Here’s a video tour of our apartment.

We didn’t have time to straighten up, so please ignore the mess.

• It would be hard to live in Israel if your name was Kenneth. People are constantly saying “ken” no matter where you go.
• Make the Turkish coffee just before you get in the shower. That way, it is ready and cool enough to drink when you get out.
• It is hard to cook in someone else’s kitchen, but it helps a lot if they have a gas stove. I wonder how much it would cost to switch out our electric stove at home…
• I have not seen a female bus driver since leaving the States.
• Trucker hats are really popular and highly valued here.
• The best places to get food on the Technion campus are in the Civil Engineering, Computer Science, and Physics buildings. Go figure.
• Sour cream comes in packages labeled “גבינה לבנה”, which translates as “white cheese”.
• If the campus michlol (general student store) doesn’t have it, you don’t really need it.
• Do not buy or eat corn-on-the-cob in Israel. Under any circumstances.

In Israel, everything slows down on Friday as the country prepares for shabbat. Our street, which usually has a decent flow of cars and beeping (and now the occasional bus or two due to some road construction on a sort of parallel street), is very quiet.

I appreciate the ability to feel the different pace that shabbat brings each week. And it was a good week, on balance. Millie had another stellar week of camp. Aviva was busy making puppets and playing at parks and reading the “BarbaAbba” and Baby Yoga books. We even got some mail!

Today, we had a lazy morning, went food shopping, Bev got “the best haircut experience ever” (his words) and then I started work. Bev took the girls to the beach and there was no drama – no car issues, no trouble finding a shady spot – just fun in the sand.

We are planning to check out the conservative synagogue tomorrow (there is only 1 in Haifa). Now it is time to relax.

Please note that the observations below are based on my personal experience. They do not reflect the opinions of any organization, employer, company, or other contributors to this blog.

Amidst the drama, have I mentioned how happy we are with what both kids are doing this summer? (I may have, but I am going to say it again!) Millie is finishing her third week at the Haifa Zoo day camp. She has loved it from day one. Most mornings they start with feeding an animal (one day it is honey badgers, the next it might be baboons, and the next it could be camels – like in the picture below). There is swimming or crafts or games, and each day they take care of their “personal animal”. Today they had a field trip to the Eretz Yisrael museum in Tel Aviv. Everyday parents get a message from the counselors (via the WhatsApp group) about what they did, including photos. She will have two more weeks of day camp as the summer winds down.

We have been extremely fortunate to have found a wonderful babysitter for Aviva. She is a medical student at the Technion, from Long Island, and is just more than we could have hoped for. She and Aviva will spend hours at a park; or they will have a beach adventure; or play hide-and-seek in the apartment. Today they went to a craft store to get supplies to make puppets (which is what they are working on in the photo).

But why take my word for it?

The days are long and full, but the kids are alright.

deus ex machina
noun: a person or thing (as in fiction or drama) that appears or is introduced suddenly and unexpectedly and provides a contrived solution to an apparently insoluble difficulty

Our bank referred us to a website maintained by Visa that lists all the ATMs where our debit cards should work, but we had tried a couple of these last week without success. After talking with Adena’s parents, we realized that maybe some but not all ATMs would work at the specified locations. On Monday Bev tried taking shekels out of ATMs at two different banks in two parts of the city—and they both worked!

Apparently you have to not just find an available ATM, it also needs to have the ₪ and $ symbols at the top too. The debit card has a one-percent foreign transaction fee, but pretty soon we will only need to use these to withdraw cash (rent, preschool tuition, babysitter, etc.) because the no fee credit cards finally arrived and are in Jerusalem with Uncle Paul and Aunt Laura. We haven’t checked to see what the fees are for wiring money yet.

Bev managed to mostly fix the damage to the car mirror. It is bent a little at the edge, but it seems secure and you can still use the electric switch to move it—just not as smoothly as before.

On Sunday, Adena and Aviva visited the Haifa police department only to learn that Bev needed to be there too. So they made the most of being “downtown” and visited the train museum.

After the false start on Sunday, on Monday Adena, Bev, and Aviva successfully filed the police report downtown.

The police officer was extremely calm and stoic. We appreciated his “all business” bureaucratic tone and were done in fifteen minutes or so.

The bus ride home was more eventful, but Bev was still able to make the last hour of ulpan.

Ruti (shown above) is one of the best teachers he has ever had and he is learning a lot very quickly. He was even able celebrate these wins with a bag of the “American peanuts” he loves from the downstairs vending machine.

Next up, is switching the health insurance and extending our travel visas. We will keep you posted.

The last post was a bit of a downer, with Bev explaining many of the difficulties we have encountered so far. Today might have put us over the edge. And yes, the trouble revolves around having a car. Again. This time, as we were on the way to the science museum we got hit by another car—not serious, no one was hurt and the car damage was relatively minimal (the driver’s side mirror was hit and the plastic on the back came off).

While both we and the offending driver pulled over (as best we could, we were kind of in an intersection and let’s face it, there is nowhere to pull over 90% of the time on any street in Israel)—he then proceeded to drive away. We did get a photo of his license plate.

So now, I will make my way to the police station Sunday morning (by bus with Aviva in tow) to file a report and try to get information about the person driving the car so I can give that to the rental car company. And I expect the fun will only continue from there.

Not how I wanted to start Shabbat. But really, if it is not one thing, it is another. Living in Israel temporarily is nothing like being a tourist in Israel, or being a student in Israel. And for sure it is nothing like being an Israeli—not having a citizenship number puts you at a great disadvantage when trying to do many day-to-day things. And while there have been kind individuals (strangers even) who have helped or tried to help (like the receptionist at the bank yesterday), it just feels like we are quite alone in a sea of red tape and reckless drivers.

We had an okay time at the Madatech (national museum of science, technology, and space) and interestingly, this facility is where the Technion was originally located before it moved to the east of the city center in 1985.

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It is hard to not think about going home. Even putting that in writing is hard. But we are all feeling it. I do have hope that once the school year starts in September, it will be better. But that is a month away.

 

When we started planning this trip we knew that there would be some challenges. The late 80s TV comedy “Perfect Strangers” clearly showed that things don’t work as smoothly in another country, particularly if you are a new arrival or are not a citizen.

But this is ridiculous.

Back in May, I went to our bank to open a safe deposit box and learned that they offer a Visa credit card with no foreign transaction fees and free cash advances at ATMs. The person I talked to assured me that it could be done by the time we left the country roughly four weeks later. I returned that Friday with Adena to apply for the credit card and add her to the safe deposit box (they take security very seriously at our bank). We didn’t get to talk to the same person during that visit, and as the new staffer was helping us fill out the application on his computer, he mentioned that he typically worked out of the campus branch and that they didn’t handle a lot of these applications over there. It also took a really long time and by the end, I was openly questioning if he knew what he was doing.

A couple of weeks went by and I happened to be in the bank putting some more items in the safe deposit box (documents, because we don’t have anything interesting) and bumped into the original staff person. I asked if we could check the status of the cards and I learned that the young man who helped us had not actually submitted the application. We sat and re-entered the information and were told that the whole thing would be expedited.

After we left for Israel without the cards (surprise!), we made a plan with the staff member for them to be shipped to her at the branch, then she would send them to us in Jerusalem. They arrived in Jerusalem earlier this week. As in July 31st. She mailed them standard post on June 28 rather than priority mail or FedEx. Where is a customer service satisfaction survey when you need one?

Since then we have learned that our debit cards can be used to buy things in a store or restaurant, but not to take cash out of an ATM. We have also learned that Israeli bank accounts are only for citizens and students.

There is one branch in Tel Aviv that foreign nationals must visit to setup an account and get this, you have to seed it with $50,000. Seems like a surefire way to discourage money laundering, which is the explanation given for this policy!

We also learned that the health insurance we purchased prior to coming here has much better “in-network” options in Jerusalem rather than Haifa, despite it being the exact same company that all the Technion students use.

The ₪1500 fee for the ulpan I am taking (is that even the right verb?) must be paid at the campus post office and cannot be paid with a credit card. The same goes for the ₪110 textbook we are using for the ulpan shown below.

I am waiting on a letter from the Technion that we can take to the Ministry downtown (in the Sail Building) to extend our tourist visas from three to six months. This will allow us to avoid leaving the country twice over the coming months to reset the tourist visa clock. The recent “nation-state” law suggests that these matters will be taken very seriously.

We are hoping to meet up with friends somewhere in Europe for Thanksgiving, but extending the visas at the Ministry will simplify things. I keep thinking “Ministry of Magic” from Harry Potter when I hear the word, but I bet it won’t be as cool.

Oh, and the vending machine downstairs ran out of the tasty peanuts I like yesterday so I settled for a Nature Valley crunchy granola bar. After I paid, I passed a previously unnoticed vending machine with not one, but two full rows of delicious peanut packets. Blerg.

Life is hard, and this is especially true in this country. Seriously, nothing is easy and I am surprised when people are nice. It really wears you down and you feel exhausted because every day means fighting these mini-battles. We will probably just wire money to ourselves two or three times and give up on opening a bank account. When we finally get these Visa credit cards in hand, they probably won’t let us take cash from the ATM either. But this is our life here and we will manage.