Update: Mystery Fruit #8

Teardrops of the Fruit Gods, aka "Shesek" in Hebrew, just keep getting better and better.
It has been brought to my attention that there are trees practically dripping with ripe specimens of this mystery fruit all thoughout our neighborhood. Itzik tells me the rule is that any fruit hanging over the street is fair game. He and his 10 year old daughter spent a happy afternoon last weekend walking the streets of Talbeih and Rehavia picking and eating keseks right off the trees.
So only not are they delicious, they are free for those of us with long arms!

Independence Day

Being a holiday, James and I ventured out to see some cultural events. Last night we went to a very family friendly concert. Even though we couldn't tell what they were saying, we could feel the cheese oozing from the speakers. On the way home we caught the fireworks display by chance so we stopped on the side of the road to take them in.

Today, fueled by a perfect Omlette-de-James we visited a cordoned off neighbourhood where people in period costumes were doing skits on the history. Because of the language barrier, there wasn't much for us except a group of really fantastic Arab musicians accompanied by three talented dancers with shimmying hips, weaving arms and come-hither eyes. The whole crowd was totally enraptured including a wandering toddler who founder her way to the stage. Both James and I agreed the dancer we couldn't take our eyes off was the one in black and gold. As a wake-up call to the real definition of feminine beauty, besides being a stunner, she had I would guess at least five months of extra booty to shake.

There is a raging roof party going on on our building. We are listening to drunken people scream out Prince right now, but we were sonically berated earlier by some catchy Israeli songs including some surprisingly good Hebrew reggae. If the party goes past midnight (I am almost sure it will) and I am still sleepless, I will be heading up there to ply them for drinks. If you can't beat em join em.

The Bitter and the Sweet

According to David, an ever present theme in Jewish culture is the mixing of the bitter with the sweet. Times of celebration are also times of mourning. The sweet fruits and nuts of the passover seder are always alongside bitter herbs to represent the celebration of redemption and freedom and the agony of generations of slavery. Even Jewish-Kurdish kubah soup, a new staple in our culinary repertoire made with beets and savory meat filled dumplings, is a delicious paradox of both sour and sweet. This week's secular holidays are a perfect example of this tradition.

Today is Memorial Day, which started last night at dusk with one minute of eerie air raid sirens. This is a day to remember the sacrifice of soldiers of the Israeli Army, victims of terror, and the members of the resistance movement during the British Mandate. (I for one am a bit tossed up in the whole Jewish resistance movement thing; only two years later than Israel's independence, India jettisoned the British with a policy of non-violence. Blowing up a hotel full of people is not exactly something I would glorify. But this is besides the point of this post and is, literally, history.)

Today at dusk, there will be a ceremony to the end the sober Memorial Day and start the big party of Independence Day which continues through Wednesday. I just checked and there are events scheduled until 3:30 am tonight, and that isn't even the party for the "youth". Tomorrow, the parks will be full of families with wee hibachis roasting kebabs (this activity seems especially popular with the Arab community). There will be concerts and street exhibits and a bunch of museums will be free.

And I, I will not be getting any more TEM done as the nanocentre will be closed. Again. After two weeks of passover and my vacation coming up, for the love of Mike, I just want to get some work done!

On the holidays I will really be getting in the spirit by mixing the sweetness of seeing a free concert in the park with the bitterness of TEM-less frustration.

Weekend Warriors go to Haifa and Acco!

On Friday morning The Chicken had the dangerous job of waking me up at the god-forsaken hour 4:45 am. After I grunted a few times and my feet reluctantly made contact with the floor, we quickly packed and caught the first bus to Haifa for another Warrior Weekend.

Haifa is a beautiful deep-port city on the Mediterranean which only in modern times has surpassed the importance of the ancient natural port of Acco across the bay. It is through Haifa that the long lost package from my mom that accidentally came by sea snail entered Israel (Thanks mom for the chili powder and the cofffee!). Haifa is built on the side of a steep hill that only the poorest of backpackers walk up as there is a five-stop subway that tracks up and down the hill.

In the last hundred years or so, Haifa has become a major religious site for the Baha'is: a widespread six-million-strong religious group that believes all of the major religious figures of history are messengers of the same god within their own historical and cultural contexts. The latest two prophets lived both in the 19th century. The Bab and Baha'u'llah, both have ties to the area around Haifa. In a wide swath down the hill is the shrine to the Bab (his bones are interred there) and all the administrative buildings for the religion. To glorify the site, believers have made 18 terraces down the hill with impressive and heavily manicured gardens that in 2001 were finally finished. But if I know gardeners, I am sure there are still more plans in the works.

I have decided that if God decides that I should be his latest megaphone, my apartment in Jerusalem should become a shrine to the new Religion of Janet. I think Israel needs to be the home of one more major religion just to make sure the bickering never ends.

On Friday evening, I gave into my favorite food vice. I discovered that the ice cream at McDonalds is only three shekels. So for the low price of one loonie, I supported an international conglomerate and had a very blissful 10 minute respite from the heat of the sun. And then a few hours later, I bought another for desert.

Friday was spent visiting the gardens and walking the three kilometers up to the cave of Elija where I discovered that I can no longer speak French. I only speak Fre-brew now. I asked the french speaking caretaker to refill my water bottle with this classic phase of Fre-brew: "Je voudrais mayim shell robinet."

Visiting Haifa was a lot of walking let me tell you and the next day seemed like even more.

Saturday was spent exploring the old city of nearby arab Acco which is not just old, it is old old. Unlike the old city of J-town which in places is a pit of tourist despair, the old city Acco city is pregnant with he comings and goings of real life. No selling tacky pictures of the Virgin Mary here; instead they are selling tacky flip-flops from cardboard boxes, clothing, food and giant chest high water pipes in the market. The tourist sites were the best organized of any place I have seen in Israel and there was much to see. This was once the seat of crusader power so there is a giant crusader fortress and tunnel. There is the old arab bath house with a hilarious movie to go with it. We saw the spot where 250 Jewish resistance prisoners escaped from jail, and the sites were Napoleon unsuccessfully sieged the place for two months. This little fortified city busted Napoleon's dream of conquering all the way to India. I took my shoes off and visited my first mosque and watched kids jumping off the ancient sea wall into the Mediterranean to the delight of the music-pumping tour boats and jerks on sea-doos (yep, Israel too has jerks on Sea-doos).

When we finally got home late Saturday evening, I barely managed to make it though the door and grunt a few times. My feet happily relinquished contact with the floor for the next eight hours until The Chicken had the hazardous job of waking me up for work.

Air Raid Sirens

The air raid sirens went off this morning.

Today is the day Israelis remember the Holocaust. So instead of being scary, the two minutes of sirens were just sad and eerie.

Our hostess for the Seder supper told me that her mother in law, was raised in the city Warsaw and was a real city girl. In what probably was the 20s, she met a very dashing young man who was moving to Israel soon as he had purchased a house there. They fell in love, got married and got on a train all within the space of a few weeks. She had been imagining a life similar to to the one in Warsaw but when she arrived in Israel in her fur coat and heels, she discovered that her new husband had purchased not a house in one of the cities, but a farm house, complete with farm. Later in life, when they had retired and moved off the farm, she and always said she would die five years ahead of her time. She claimed that everyday on the farm she would wake up and pray "Please God, I will give you five years of my life if you would just take away the cows!" We all laughed and laughed at the story.

But then our hostess shrugged and said something that stuck with me.

"Well, even though she hated the cows, look what would have happened if she had stayed in Warsaw."

So many people died that the decedents of survivors are left to tell the quirky stories of why their families remain.

Blossoms and Birds

It is April and already we have had a day that reached 28 degreed. I am going to cook in July.

For those of you thinking about visiting, late March and early April are a good choice because everything is blooming now before The Great Wilting (a.k.a. summer) starts. I can't even begin to name the wild flowers we see everyday on our walk to work though the Valley of the Cross. Without even really looking, I would guess there are near a dozen different species that have bloomed this month. We have seen little daisies and big showy poppies, little red fellows and purple thistles, strings of bright bright yellow pompoms and fruit blossoms.
The only flower I can name with any certainty are the purple flowers on the Rosemary shrubs which is EVERYwhere along path edges, and I have decided it is stupid to continue buying it a the grocery store when I walk past fifty waist high plants every day.

Along with the flowers, there are all sorts of strange birds. One little blue fellow visits our pine tree each day. Somewhere between a hummingbird and a sparrow, he flashes his iridescent feathers, belts out a few surprisingly loud calls and then flies off to another tree to assert his territory with Napoleonic zeal. Almost every day on the walk to work we see a flash of a wood pecker, a lazy roosting jay (the fluffy guy in the pic), or a scuttling fowl.

We always see squawking magpies. The Middle Eastern variety are a dowdy black and grey. Poor James and his bright blue shirt must have offended the orthodox sensibilities of a local campus magpie last week. The magpie let his opinion of James' shirt be known with a fecal bomb. Luckily after a good washing the shirt survived but James' ego remains a little bruised.

Who are we kidding, this post was all about showing off my pics.

Dear Body,

Dear Body,

You and I have had quite a few years together now and we have had some good times. We have skied mountains, kayaked rivers, done yoga until we felt like Gumby and found heaven together in the form a chocolate cookie called the Tim Tam. I have dutifully fed you all sorts of veggies and give you your demanding 9 hrs sleep per night. I appreciate that you always kindly held off on nasty colds until after exam seasons was over.

There have been times when we disagreed and you have let your opinion be known; the time last year when I ate too many of my mom's famous maple syrup ribs comes to mind. Or when I did 900 sit ups in grade eleven. But all in all, I thought we were friends.

Lately I feel you have not been keeping up with your side of the bargain. I understand there are natural and necessary parts of our time together: growing leg pains, the tortures of puberty, etc. and I have weathered your storms with, I hope, some level of grace. But you are pushing the limits of my patience.

I ask you to choose between your current favorite ills: zits and grey hairs. You are not allowed to give me both at the same time. You seem to have a hard time letting me become a zit free adult and I have been chalking this up to my supposed youth, despite my imminent 30th birthday. I have been ignoring the grey hairs but the one that I found lying blatantly across my ponytail like a skunk stripe yesterday was too much.

The fact that I was pulling grey hairs out of my ponytail should be enough of an indicator for you that the status quo is no longer acceptable.

I eagerly await your decision between Zits and Grey hairs.

Sincerely,
Your Mind.

Mystery Fruit #8: Teardrops of the Fruit Gods

After a long hiatus, this strange fruit is back to reporting on strange fruit. I realize that last week's posts had a lot of religion in them seeing as it was both Passover and Holy week. But I promise, these mystery fruit have come straight from the heavens.

They have a slightly fuzzy shell that is barely noticeable when you bite into the juicy flesh. The best and the sweetest specimens had to be eaten with satisfying slurping noises over the sink as the juice dribbled everywhere. Inside there were anywhere from two to six brown seeds that popped out easily and were barely an inconvenience. So they get a 4.5 out of five for fruity convenience (where apple being the most convenient and the most annoying is the pomegranate).

They are the perfect combination of sweet and a bit of tangy- somewhat like what a kiwi tastes like when it hasn't traveled the globe. A four out of five for flavor (wild blackberries being the best and the dubious holder of the worst tasting fruit award is Quince).

So that makes a eight point five out of ten from the Canadian Judges! These mystery fruits were so tasty they got the rare honour of being purchased twice, despite costing a shocking eight bucks a basket.

Happy Easter Everyone!

I have been slow on describing Good Friday in order to give James' Science paper as much time as possible as top item. (Yes, another shameless plug).

On Friday morning, James and I hoofed it to the old city without coffee to be there for 6:30 am. We were a little late and as we rushed around a corner, were met by a crowd of 150 or so Lutherans, Anglicans, Episcopalians (American Anglicans), Presbyterians and, get this, Arab Lutherans. Besides the suspiciously large numbers of fair people, my religious compatriots were easy to pick out by the weak and slightly shy singing.

We made our way along the narrow passage of the Via Dolorosa, which legend states is the route Jesus carried his cross to be crucified. Along the way there are stations where different events are said to have happened, such as each of his falls or when Veronica wiped his face. The stops are marked with shrines on the side of the wall or itsy bitsy little churches that seemed to have been hewn from the old city rather than built.

At each stop one of the ten or so Reverends with accents from all over the world did a reading and a prayer. James proudly told me later that he thinks "our Rev", a real booming Scotsman, had the best voice of them all.

We ended not at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which is run by the Catholics, Orthodox, Armenians, Coptics and the Ethiopians, but next door at the Church of the Redeemer, which is run by the Lutherans but takes in every one else.

Why the early hour? Probably to avoid the open stores with the shameless hawkers and the crowds of the other brands of Christianity doing the same thing throughout the day. As it was, there were people singing in French and Latin behind our group, we passed a group of nuns, and shortly after we finished James and I had to stop for a procession of about 50 monks followed by 30 priests followed by 100 or so people.

I had been expecting to see people carrying giant life size crosses and performing painfully acetic pilgrimages, but perhaps it doesn't actually happen that often or we were too early risers for the crazy folks with Jerusalem Syndrome. The morning was quiet and, well, quite pleasant.

True to form, James claims he has filled his church quota until Christmas and I went to Easter Sunday service solo this morning.

Three Cheers for Dr. Chicken and his Fungus Poop!

I encourage everyone to go check out this awesome paper that just came out in Science today. For those of you who don't know, Science is the biggest cheese journal for ALL fields of science whether you be a psychologist, archaeologist, physicist, geologist or about any -ist you can think of. This is THE journal. Being published in it is truly a once in a life time achievement for any scientist.

The aforementioned awesome-possum paper reports a synthesis of a molecule made in some cells, and the cells are in a a fungus, and the fungus lives on a sponge, and the sponge is on a rock, and the rock is on a reef, and the reef is down in the Caribbean-o.

I was lucky enough to wake up next to one of the authors of the article this morning and was able to interview him. "This molecule has been known for forty years," Dr. Chicken told me. "But for the longest time everyone who thought about trying to make it themselves, looked at its complexity and thought 'no efffin way.' "

One of the reviewers called this molecule "dastardly complex," but this tiny team of three was able to do it in amazingly few synthetic steps using some seriously fancy pants chemistry. "The sulfurs are baaad," says Dr. Chicken about one of his own key parts in solving this synthetic conundrum.

Now you may be asking, is the molecule useful for something? No one knows really yet. But it doesn't matter. The important part is that by developing the new tricks to make this molecule, they have opened up pathways for a whole family of similar molecules that may prove to be powerful pharmaceuticals.

Dr. Chicken assured me the fame and glory that surely will follow this publication will not give him "the mystical ability to put his pants on two legs at a time." We will be checking this to be sure.

Seder Supper for Passover

Last night was the first night of Pessah and throughout the city, people were burning little fires on the side of the road in in parks to burn the last of the chametz in their house. We were invited for Seder meal at my boss' parents-in-law's in Rehovot in the evening. The boss picked us up and as we booted it out of the city in his new car (he is very proud of it), we could see a line of cars trying to get to Jerusalem that reminded me of the 400 leaving Toronto on a July friday night.

The evening was what a family dinner is all about and we are very glad to have been a part of it. The whole family are really nice and super interesting people. There were five kids under the age of nine so the volume of the dinner party was quite high and the mood energetic. There are so many details of the evening that I could tell you about, but I have done my best to adhere to the code of blogging brevity.

Out from deep in a closet, Sarah, the family matriarch brought out a bunch of well loved copies of the Haggadah, a book with the ceremony of the Seder written in it. James and I played "guess what page we are on" with our English copies as the lengthy texts were read and sung by everyone at the table throughout the meal. The boss' six year old son put my Hebrew reading to shame even though the text was like Shakespeare-Brew.

The Seder itself is a traditional meal where many of the food items are symbolic of the story of slavery in Egypt and the exodus. There were matsot, hard boiled eggs, a paste of apples and pecans, chopped liver (it was a lot less tasty after I was told what it was), parsley dipped in salt water, bright red horseradish, red wine (some of which is flicked about when each of the plagues were mentioned) and some odd fish blobs that were over processed to the point of hotdog status. I guess really traditional people still buy the fish alive and keep them in the bath tub for a couple of days and there is a whole ceremony to making these fish blobs. This solves the mystery of why we had seen live fish for sale for the first time at the market on tuesday.

And then there is the feast part. Lots and lots of yummy food. After we had read and sung and ate our way through the Seder, Rami the Grandpa brought out his accordion and played as the rest of us hummed along and chatted and drank coffee.

By the way, James says the kippah he was lent really hides his bald spot well. I have a sneaking suspicion the one he was given was a old reject children's kippah, so perhaps we should buy him his own to keep on hand.

Late, late in the evening, full and happy we piled into the car whereupon James and the Boss' six year old son nodded off on the drive home.

I will end this post with the phrase that ends the Seder:

Next Year in Jerusalem.

Happy 100 Postaversary!

Look to the far left and a little bit down. See where is says 2009 (53)
Then below it says 2008 (47)?

That is right, I have made a whopping 100 posts. You would think I would have something better to do than all of that writing!

I guess James has heard all of my stories so I have let my storytelling gene be expressed though the tap tap tapping on the keyboard. It is amazing to look back and see all of the adventures I have had in the last five months: really horrible culture shock, finding an apartment, going to war, husband training, new job, and last but not least, all of those mystery fruit.

Thanks everyone for reading my little blog. I get a real kick when I find out though the grapevine or comments that folks have been getting enjoyment from it.

If you are a newcomer to the Maple Shekel and you have read the archives from the beginning straight though to this post, now would be a good time to get off your butt, have a shower and go to work. Don't worry, the blog will be here when you get back.

Many more mystery fruit to come.

I be takin' your Chametz loot, YARR!

I love Passover.
We just came back from Tal's apartment, where she was shockingly dressed in an old tee and baggy pants rather than her usual stylish well-put-together bohemian-jew look. Tal was madly cleaning her apartment to get it ready for passover and she gave us two bags of chametz- wheat and fermented products and other reject items from her kitchen.
We got: flour, sugar, wheat bulgar, barley, bran flakes, ketchup, oats, sweet chili sauce, sushi rice, rice noodles, lasagna noodles, spaghetti noodles, wine, pecans, cherries, icing sugar, a loaf of bread and a big bottle of vodka.
Not to forget a perfectly good frying pan because they weren't sure if it was a meat or dairy pan.

Siu asked why the no wheat for passover when the rule is about leavened products. Well my understanding is that this is all to mimic the hardships of 40 years wandering the desert. In my observation, Kosher food rules seem to have been expanded upon just-in-case or perhaps sometimes for simplicity. Case in point: during passover no leavened products has become no wheat products at all. Another Case: no cooking meat in its mother's milk. This meat/dairy rule includes chicken even though a chicken doesn't lactate.

Holy Double Holy Week, Batman!

Practicing Jews all over the city are madly cleaning their houses this weekend in preparation for Passover or Pessach which starts this week. To remember spending forty years chilling out in the desert with Moses en route from Egypt to Jerusalem, this is a holy week full of ancient tradition and ritual- and absolutely no leavened or wheat anything.

The obsessive cleaning is ostensibly to look for any cookie crumbs or stray noodles between the couch cushions that may ruin your wheat freeness. Even all of your kitchen dishes and pots are to be sanitized with boiling water to get rid of any remaining live cultures which may accidentally constitute your food as leavened. Yossi tells me that the the lazy folks, himself included, just keep an extra set of dishes just for this week to avoid all the sanitzing.

Even non kosher Jews will go whole-hog kosher this week. No bread or wheat products will be available for sale in the grocery stores. Instead they will be eating Matzoh which is sold in cinder block sized cardboard boxes. Matzoh looks like four inch square pieces of cardboard and tastes accordingly in my recollection. I don't know how The Chicken is going to live without his new favorite Friday food: Hallah bread (seen above).

We have been invited to a Seder Supper on Wednesday so I will let you know how that goes.

Not only is it passover, but this is the Christian holy week. Any other year and I would be singing my brains out at church for the week's four services. Although I was usually exhausted by holy week in the past, I must admit I feel a little bereft without choir as part of my life anymore.

I expect this means that the old city is going to be a gong show with large packs of singing Christians and dudes carrying giant crosses though the streets. I will not be missing the action and will be heading into the old city to check it out the resurrection mayhem next Sunday.

The Devil in the Details

Yesterday, I got asked what kind of Christian I was by a couple of practicing, kippah wearing Jews. I said Protestant which then prompted the question "What is the difference between Protestants and Catholics?" I have noticed my Israeli-Jewish friends are confused that I am picky about which of the multitude of churches in Jerusalem I will "go pray at". They assumed they were all the same.

Right there I started spouting a history lesson about the reformation and counter reformation and Martin Luther to which one of them exclaimed "I hear of him! Martin Luther King, nahon (right)?" And then I realized I had to find a more succinct way to answer the question.

As a complete outsider to Christianity, what would the most obvious differences between Catholics and Protestants be? I had to toss away hundreds of years of history and ideology about communion, the role of confession, divorce, the Virgin Mary etc. and go for the very basics.

Only a moment later, the next conference talk started, so I had a good 15 minutes of mind wandering to come up with the key the differences in tradition that would make sense in the eye of the Jew. This is what I came up with:

a) The Catholics have better decorations.

b) Catholic priests are always unmarried men. Protestant leaders are allowed get hitched and sometimes they are women.

c) Protestants are really good with peer pressure whereas the Catholics have the Pope.

They don't seem like very important differences for wars to have been fought over, do they? Especially in religion, the devil is in the details.