Aliyah! Step-by-Step: Making a Life in Israel

Finally I can get in to post again! I came back from the trip all ready to write up what all had occurred in my terribly interesting (cough) something of a life and found that my password no longer let me into the site. Not only did it not let me in but also the admin of the site could not get in. But all is good now, though kinda sloooowwww it seems. Anyway, I’m unmuzzled.

I’m also unfrozen in two ways. First, I’m back from the frozen tundra that was the United Kingdom. I arrived there with my little summer frocks to find people bundled up in jumpers (sweaters) plus full-on winter coats, hats, mittens, scarves, you name it. And here is little Miss Cold Allergy sans jacket, warm clothing, and her benydril.

I got into the airport just at noon. Lucky for me that I am always paranoid when traveling about either losing my wallet or having it snatched and thus brought along with me 800 sheks in cash, kept in a separate place from the bank cards. Lucky because when I went to withdraw that there foreign currency, I discovered that my bank card is “use in Israel only.” No problem, thought I, I’ll use my only-used-once-before Isracard Mastercard. No go. I scrutinzed the pin number on the official paper and entered it twice –that is, twice each at two different machines (being afraid that if I went for a third the machine would eat it). It didn’t recognize the pin. I’m still trying to sort that out and spent an hour on the phone yesterday to get them to send me the pin to my email account –they agreed finally, said they were sending it and…no email. So me and my 800 sheks hauled ourselves to the foreign currency exchange where the sheks wilted and I nearly fainted –I got handed back 105 British pounds. GAH. Can I tell you what 105 pounds will get you? Very little. It did, however, get me a return bus ticket from the airport to Oxford and I boarded the bus hoarding the change.

Once I arrived in Oxford I spent another 5 pounds on a taxi –if I’d only known that the hotel was only a 10 minute or so walk away, I would have saved that 5 pounds and walked. But since I had absolutely no clue where it lay, the taxi was the way to go. I stayed at the Bath Place hotel which was really fabulous. Yep, I’ll happily give it a plug. I had an absolutely beautiful room with the most comfortable bed I think I have ever in my life slept in. I want that bed. I want the fluffy thing that was spread over the mattress but under the bottom sheet to make one’s sleep even more comfortable and errrrr fluffy. When I first got in though, I gave barely a glance at the bed before I LEAPED into the shower. Remember, I’d had no hot water in my apartment for 3 days at that point. The shower was hot and lovely. I fixed a cup of tea while drying my hair and getting ready for my talk and, despite not having slept for fear of sleeping through my 4 a.m. need to leave my apartment for the airport, I felt wide awake and full of adrenaline. I then ran to find the building in which I was to give my talk, got set up, met lots of folks I have been emailing and collaborating with for years without having ever met in person and saw again colleagues that I’d seen before. All went smoothly through the talks and then I felt like I was going to fall over. But, I decided at the last minute to go along to the planned dinner and was very glad I did (first because the food was quite nice and I was starving having not eaten since the plane and well the pretzels were very nice on the plane –all 5 of them –but the meal was inedible, second because it was good conversation). Toward the end, however, I literally began falling asleep as I sat there. I shivered my way back to the hotel and fell into bed.

In the morning I had a very nice breakfast (free with lodging) and then had a quandry. It was even colder and rainy that morning and I’d returned home the night before with my hands swollen up like Ronald McDonald despite having had a gallant gentleman from the group lend me his jacket on the walk to the hotel. I had a light summer dressy dress with a sweater that one wears in the summer (one of those see-through shimmery things) to go over it. Ohhhhh no. I ran up, put jeans on and a short sleeve top and then ran to a Debenhams that was on the way to the day’s conference. I was hoping, in the 15 minutes I had to shop, to find an entire suitable outfit (warm) for the day and at dirt cheap price. Alas the U.K. is frightfully expensive. So when I found a zip-up jumper on sale, with the remains of my original 105 pounds, I promptly bought it and said, yo I’m Israeli and I’m f’ing freezing so this is going to be it. I donned it and ran to the conference just in time for the day’s events, including chairing a session that no one had uh told me beforehand I was supposed to be chairing.

When I got back (to Tel Aviv) I had a Dude for the Dude (hot water heater) come in and he promptly told me he couldn’t fix it because the problem was with the turn-on fixture. See, the wall had gone all crumbly where the hole had been cut out for the wiring and on/off button and so the plate (like a plate around a light switch on the wall) had come undone on the top. This meant it was no longer holding the on/off switch up against whatever wire connector things and so on was not on. But he couldn’t help me because, he informed me, his job was not to fix walls, the current plate was fractured from being pressed on when the wall behind it was crumbling away and a new one was needed …only a bigger new one since the hole was now bigger and they don’t make those. So, he tells me, what I need is to bring in someone to either plaster in a bit more wall and then attach a new plate or to adhere some big metal plate that the plate could then be adhered to, but whatever, it wasn’t in his line of work. I paid him. I thought about the situation. I got out some masking tape (not being able to find any trusty duct tape in the apartment). I applied copious amounts of the masking tape to the fractured plate and surrounding wall. And now I have hot water. I am unfrozen at last.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 11:20 pm and is filed under Israel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.