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