Parents Visit, Other Visitors, B-ball, Mazal Tov, etc., etc.

Oy. I have a lot to write about, and not much time (I am in med school, after all). I will probably just run through most of it.

Hannukah in Israel was wonderful. Not only was it Hannukah, which is a great holiday in-and-of-itself, but everyone around me was celebrating! Eating at my favorite (read: the only) sushi place in Haifa, the three people working there took the time out of...making sushi....to assemble a make shift Hannukiah (three saki cups turned upside down) and light the candles. Even the dean of the med school gave a Hannukah talk, and then we ate sufganiyot. Actually, there were sufganiyot everywhere. At the hardware store, they had plates sitting around the store full of sufganiyot. It's amazing. On the other hand, the "latke" apparently never really made it to Israel, which is too bad, because I am a HUGE, HUGE fan. But...I think I imbibed enough sufganiyot to hold me over for a while, so it is probably not so bad that I didn't also have a bunch of potatoes weighing me down.

Best of all, my first Hannukah in Israel was also marked by my parents visiting me. I took the liberty of posting a few pictures from their trip here below (I hope you don't mind....). Besides treating me to a few nights at the majestic King David and eating at the finest restaurant Jerusalem has to offer, they also came back to Haifa to sit in on an Anatomy lecture (well...my dad did), and clean my apartment (thanks, Mom!) We also went to Tzfat (much more beautiful than I remembered it), and made quite a few trips to the Carmel in Haifa. Overall, it was really wonderful to have them here, and I hope they had as much fun as I did.

Since then, I've had a few other visitors. Shmuel stops in every so often. Elazar Volk has stopped by on his trip to look at the Technion. And I spent this past Shabbat up "on the mountain" (at Shmuel's) along with David Held and Jason Ruchelsman, both friends from MIT. After Shabbat, I showed Jason the better parts of Haifa (that is, Burger Ranch), and we make a very important pilgrimage to one of the most unfortunately named barbers this side of the Euphrates (let's just say common decency does not permit me to post the name in English....though, for all of those with a strong stomach and some knowledge of Hebrew, here is the barber's name: דודי פינס ).

This week was my second time playing in the weekly basketball game along with a rag-tag bunch of Israeli and American med students (as well as a few doctors). Actually, to call this a basketball game is a bit of stretch---it was more of an on-and-off debate with some basketball thrown in for good measure. I am not exaggerating that much when I say that almost EVERY SINGLE play was contested. Entering the gymnasium, an outsider might think we were arguing over a rather difficult page of the Talmud from the way people on the court were picking apart others' actions on the court and even the rules of basketball. There really was a point were my desire to leave was beat out by my appreciation of a good laugh. Plus, I got a few minutes of play-time in to show everyone that there are, indeed, terrible basketball players from Indiana.

Otherwise, I've been doing as much studying as I can possibly handle....and watching "Curb Your Enthusiasm." Actually, I had a discussion with Jason at the Shabbat table, where we came to the conclusion that most of the absurd things that happen on the show probably really happened in real life...in Israel. Indeed, there is something just sort of absurd about the way things happen here. And if subsequent blog posts haven't been enough proof of this, I will give example of something that happened today (!) that would make Larry David HIMSELF blush: I was sitting in my living room (watching "Curb," ironically enough), when I get a phone call from a friend of mine here in Israel who we will call "Lior." "Lior," who is currently a soldier stationed in Jerusalem, calls me up and says, "Michael, I'm going to need you to come down to Jerusalem next Motz'ash (Hebrew abbreviation for "Motzei Shabbat", or Saturday Night)."
"Why, Lior?"
"Well, I'm going to need you to play wingman. I just met this really attractive girl from Australia, and she has a very unattractive friend you're going to need to deflect for me."
"Come on, Lior. You could have at least lied to me....alright, I'll be there."
"Thanks, I owe you."
"Where did you meet this girl, by the way?"
"Well.....I picked her up at Yad Va'shem."
".........."
"We were there with my unit, and saw her get off the bus...and, well, I couldn't help myself."

Anyway, I want to thank everyone who has taken the time out to call/email/facebook-message me. As much fun as things can be here, it is still good to hear from all of my friends/family back home. Also, I wanted to give hearty "Mazal Tov" to my good friends Michal and David on the birth of their daughter, Nessa.

With that, I leave you with a few pictures from the past few weeks:

Three Stars and the Volks

Me and my Dad Outside my Apartment


Me, my Mom, and the best shnitzel maker in Israel (in Tzefat)


Me in front of the unfortunately named barbershop

Crazy Israeli Cab Driver #1,320,837

Last night, I had to take a cab since it was late and the buses had stopped. Now I should first point out that even the act of getting into a cab for me has become so fraught with injustice and indignity that I shy away from it as much as I can, due to the knowledge that, no matter how much strength I muster up, I know that these cab drivers are going to take me for the proverbial ride. That is, when they hear my American accent, they hit the special button on their meter that charges me double what someone with an Israeli accent will get.

Anyway, I wandered over to the cab stand (actually the worst place to get a cab, since the cab drivers ascribe to the idea of "power in numbers," and collectively agree to screw you over), and asked for a cab to Bat Galim, about 10 minutes away from where we were. One of the drivers stepped forward and offered to take me. Just as I was about to get in, the friend I was with remembered something, and held me over for about 5 minutes, while the cab driver impatiently (i.e. constantly reminded me of his presence every 15 seconds) waited.

In hindsight, I realized that this action of making the cab driver wait around for me was the best thing I could have done: it showed him (inadvertently, in fact) that I was going to preempt his rip-off-of-a-cab-ride by wasting as much of his not-very-expensive time as I felt like. And, considering he probably wouldn't be getting any fares that night, he was forced to wait for me. I should point out that I did not mean to be so rude, but I think it at least invoked some amount of respect in the man's heart.

So it was possibly this imagined respect, or some recent traumatic event in his life, that this cab driver immediately began telling me some of his old war stories in a very funny half-English, half-Hebrew (his English was arguably worse than my Hebrew...which is saying something). When I say "war stories," I don't just mean old yarns; the man started telling me about his life as an Israeli commando in Lebanon and elsewhere.

If I understood him correctly, he was trained in anti-terrorist activities, which he incorrectly (and probably a little ironically) translated as "terrorism." He told me stories about being in Beirut in '82 ("I got shot in leg. Here." Me: "Oh wow. That must have been terrible to remove..." Cab driver: "No. It is still there. It does not hurt so much. Only when it gets cold out."), about being in Lebanon multiple times after that ("We landed by sea, and there was a spy who saw us. You know what ambush is? They surround us, and 8 of our men died"), and his time in Italy, ("I dressed like real Italian, with sunglasses and suit. I studied his life. This Arab, driving in Mercedes around Italy. He killed many Jews. He planned the attacks. One day, he went to turn on his car, and BOOM. I put a bomb under the car.").

But he kept coming back to the fact that he didn't feel bad for doing what he did, because he is "protecting Jews." He put it this way: "Here in Israel, we are not just protecting other Israelis. We protect Jews in America. And Jews in Europe. We protect Jews everywhere."

Anyway, it was a pretty intense conversation which I realized could only happen in a cab in Israel. It made me think about how I hope to give back to Israel, somehow, in my life. Then, I considered the fact that, thinking me an American tourist, he though I might enjoy a few made-up war stories that sounded bad ass. Though I honestly doubt it.

And, in the end, I didn't really mind paying him the 50 shekels for the cab ride.

Michael

Getting Locked Out of My Apartment, and Other Fairly Stupid Stories...

This actually happened about 3 weeks ago, so everyone who has heard it can skip to the end of this post, where there are other updates.

There I was, finished with work for the afternoon, a beautiful day, the sea is almost calm enough to see my reflection in...so naturally, I decide to go for a swim. This is especially of note because, despite the fact that I have to take about 15 steps to get to the ocean, I have never actually swam at the beach in front of my house. So I had to make a few preparations including taking a key with me that I wouldn't lose in the sea, since I was living alone at this point. So I found my extra key, and tied it to the inside of my bathing suit pocket (that velcro's closed) and set out to go swimming.

As I was leaving my apartment, I had to get the key out of my pocket to bolt my door...and it wouldn't lock. It was the right key, it fit in the key-hole, but it wouldn't lock. So I start trying to open my door (which needs a key to open even when it is not locked), and it wouldn't open, either. Try as I might, I could not figure out what was going on. And then it struck me: since I had taken my spare key, I had left my regular key on the inside of the door (where you need your key to lock/unlock the door as well), and Israeli doors have this peculiar safety function, whereby NOBODY (even someone with a key) can unlock your door if you have the key sitting on the inside.

So I'm standing there, feeling like the dumbest kid ever, wondering how am I going to get out of this fix. Should I call a "instalehtor," the Israeli version of a fix-it man, to take my door out? Will he even be able to do anything to my monstrous door? I don't even have my cell phone....Hmmm....Can I climb into the window? There *must* be a way I can use my awesome climbing skills to get me out of this bind...

So I walked around the apartment, only to realize for the first time how very far my second floor apartment is from the ground (about 25 feet). And...nothing that even looks remotely sturdy enough to handle my girth. So I really start panicking. What am I going to do? Will I have to call the fire department to put a ladder up to my window? Does Bat Galim (my neighborhood) even have a fire department? And, again, how am I going to do any of this without a cell phone?

Ugh. Anyway, to cut out the rest of the hysterical thoughts running through my head ("... what am I going to do about medical school?!") I finally realized that I need to do what I should have done about a month ago when I first moved in: meet my insane Russian neighbors. Well. I actually had no reason to believe they were insane. Or Russian, for that matter (besides the fact that 90% of this neighborhood is Russian). But they were, in fact, crazy Russians.

So I knocked on their door, and a Russian Grandfather (he will henceforth be referred to as "the grandfather") who looked a little too much like my physics adviser from college, but with a few gold teeth, the thick, undeniable reek of cheap vodka on his breath, and no knowledge of English...or Hebrew, for that matter. After it became quite clear that we had no common language with which to communicate, he went and got a woman I suppose to me his daughter, and the "mother" of the house. She did know Hebrew, and I was able to communicate my need for a tall ladder. She starts yelling to wall in Russian, and a massive, baby-faced man who looked about my age emerged quite clearly from a nap, and got a ladder that was about 6 feet tall (not quite the 25 feet I needed to get into my apartment's open window).

However, freshly equipped with some equipment, I am determined to not be locked out of my apartment forever, and I start to look for somewhere around the building that an extra six feet of height might actually help. The grandfather accompanied me on this most silly of quests, and even in his mid-afternoon alcohol induced stupor, he was able to send an agreeing nod to me that this was, indeed, not going to work.

I then notice, for the first time, that there is a porch off of this happy Russian household that is about 4 feet off the ground, which would put me another 4 feet closer to the end of this farce. So I climb up onto the porch with their ladder, and realize....that it is still about 15 feet short of my living room window.

This is the point where things turned towards the funny. My new friend, the drunk Russian grandfather, started bringing all of the various pieces of broken furniture that had been sitting in our shared yard rusting away for Lord knows how many years, developing sharp points and other things that would make them distinctly NOT good for climbing on. Yes---he had brought over these aging living room pieces not because they reminded him of his days cruising for ladies along the Moskva River in the 1920's. He wanted to stack them up into a pile.....on which to put the shoddy ladder....to try to climb up to my window.

Fortunately, as soon as the pile was up to his standards (read: a mess) and was about to attempt an ascent of Rusty Mountain (despite my pleas in a combination of Hebrew and English he couldn't possibly have understood), his "grandsons" emerged from the house to pull him off of the hill o'junk. Once grandpa had been convinced to give up on his climbing adventure, I had a new item to ask for: a rope. The grandson was unsure, then asked the grandfather if he had a rope in Russian. The grandfather ran inside with a speed and focus that could only be attained by a man his age with the help of some particularly strong concoction....and emerged a minute later bearing a long rope with a grappling hook at the end. You might be asking yourself, "why did this old Russian man living in Bat Galim have a grappling hook?" That, my dear readers, is a mystery to me to this day.

So grandpa looked up at the rusty, metal apparatus directly below my window (that was apparently there to hold an air-conditioner at one point), and started twirling the hook above his head, for enough time for me and the grandsons to get out of the way. After about 5 tries, the old man actually had got the hook solidly caught on the air-conditioner holder. To test the stability of the air-conditioner holder, grandpa started swinging around on the rope with all of his weight...and it held.

So let me try to paint a picture of this scene right now: Russian Grandpa, Russian grandkids, and I are all standing outside my apartment building, on a small porch piled about 4-5 feet high with rusty, old furniture, on top of which is a ~6 foot ladder, looking up at this criss-crossing of metal about 20 feet above our heads, to which is attached a grappling hook, which a drunk old Russian man is swinging around on.

Well, I was the first to volunteer to try to climb this rope. I figured, it WAS my fault that we were all out here; also, this Russian grandpa was certainly not going to (succeed at a) climb up this rope, and his grandkids weighed about 50-75 pounds more than me, when I feared that weight was going to prove a big issue in surviving this climb. So climb I did. And I got as far as the air-conditioner holder, when the grandkids started yelling for me to come down. I was *so* close, but I was worried that they saw something that I did not, and, as I did not want to die, I listened to them. In fact, I do not believe they saw anything, since as soon as I got down, one of them took off climbing the rope, climbed onto the air-conditioner holder (which trembled under his weight), and jumped into my living room window.

One minute later, I was in my apartment. Home, sweet home.

I thanked them numerous times in Hebrew and English. Then we parted ways, and I rushed to tell someone about this story. Fortunately, the story doesn't quite end there. About 30 minutes later, the Russian expedition team knocked at my door, along with a heaping plate of shnitzel (breaded chicken breast). I invited them in, showed them around my un-furnished apartment, and brought them into my kitchen where I offered them a drink. We talked about our respective lines of work, and the grandkids drank some orange juice.

The grandfather (I kid you not) helped himself to 2 shots of vodka (that I had offered everyone). The end.

Anyway. My life:

Things are going well. I conquered another bought of Jerusalem Sickness, which is some unexplained virus I seem to pick up every time I go to Jerusalem (I think I started calling it Al-Husseini's Revenge, after the last Mufti of Jerusalem, a good friend of Hitler, among other terrible things). I was in Jerusalem en route to Efrat, where I spent Shabbat at my former Yeshiva (Yeshivat haMivtar). Which was very, very relaxing (except for the bus ride there, which was running late due to a crash, so a detour was taken through Beit Jallah (aka a Palestinian town)...but we made it in one piece, so alls well that ends well).

Medical school is going along: nothing special there...just the normal human dissections, biochemistry, cell biology, neuroscience, embryology, Hebrew, Introduction to Clinical Medicine, and Ethics and Law. Ugh. Gone are the lackadaisical days as a physics undergrad at MIT....

I gained a roommate. His name is Michael Sherman (yes, it has gotten a bit confusing with all the Michaels around), and he is from Boston, and a fellow student on the medical school program. You will all meet him if you visit.

And....back to work. I plan on updating this a bit more often with glimpses into my somewhat boring life. I also enjoy hearing from you....please write!

Michael