Three things I avoid

Female travelers are always a little more wary and cautious, not only for the obvious safety concerns. We simply have extra needs that make things sometimes more difficult. But we persevere in the name of adventure. Out of necessity and with only one horrifying brick-shaped mistake, I have now mastered the feminine hygiene aisle without being able to read a label. I have braved the dichotomous and adjacent stores of One-Size-Fits-Slut and Haredi-Humble to buy new tops. I feel pretty confident about getting around and getting what I need these days. Unfortunately there are three things that I avoid still:

1) Buying cosmetics. When my blush ran out in the fall, I headed to the Superpharm (Israeli version of the Shoppers Drug Mart). In the cramped cosmetics aisle, I braved five or six overly painted sales ladies, standing around like bored and hungry venus fly traps. When they were distracted by a cute baby in a pram, I quickly found what I needed and luckily checked the price before I headed to the cash. It was 55$ to replace my blush that costs 6$ at home. I dropped it like a hot potato and made a bee-line for the door. I used every little last crumble of my old blush and had my mom send me a new tin with my X-mas presents.
But then I ran out of mascara, and well, I bit the bullet last week and headed back in to the Superpharm with a mission: buy the cheapest mascara I could find. I did. It was 17$, marked down from the original 35$.

2) Getting a hair cut. For the most part, Israeli women have lovely, thick, long hair, sometimes with great wild curls. I imagine that most of the hair dressers here have never touched hair like mine- thin and poker straight- let alone give it a half decent cut. One of James' favourite hair cutters in the Christian Quarter of the old city, a man with the biggest pompador I have ever seen, tried to convince me with a pick of some blonde chick with layers and body and curls, cut out from a hairdressing magazine. "This," he tapped the photo "This look good with you," he said. I declined his offer kindly and laughed on the inside.
As a result, I have not cut my hair since I left Alberta. It was a cute little bob. Now, a year and a half later, I officially have the same hair cut I had in grade twelve. Lovely.

3) Buying jeans. A good percentage of the female population in this city never wear pants. And secondly, after we went through the settlers' protest a couple of months ago, I realized how very tall I am compared to the general population. Making my way through the crowd was like wading though tall grass. And those fabulous boobs that I see around here? They often come with appropriately sized hips. All in all, finding jeans in a 28 long that doesn't have that weird gaping part in the back is going to be interesting. I am down to two pairs and have had to put my dress pants into regular rotation.
I am soon going to have to buck up and find a half decent jeans store (Tel Aviv perhaps?) or hold out till the Munich conference and hope I luck out with the Germans.

Second Chances

Well, the paper just went out to the next wish-on-a-star journal. But this time, when it gets rejected, my paper will almost certainly be directly sent to one of the offshoot journals by the same publisher- which are also very good. Wishing on a star and getting a meteorite instead isn't so bad.

I rewarded myself this afternoon by doing lab work- I did a simple distillation of chloroform over P2O5: kickin' it old school. Why did I have to do this? Because I put dry chloroform on the "TO ORDER" list two weeks ago and found out today that it hasn't yet been ordered.

The Chicken too is getting a second chance. He made a call and the Hebrew folks are letting him take another exam next week so he has to study study study.

Double Whammy

My paper bounced. Which means it didn't even go out for peer review. The editor looked at it and said "Nope" and sent it back to us with the classic form email of rejection. I received the email on Friday morning and had an hour long chat with the boss instead of working on job applications. The conversation ended with the instructions that I should have all the introduction rewritten, the formatting changed (including switching from American to British spelling) and have it ready to send out by Monday.

After moping all of Saturday, and then working like a busy bee, I had it ready in the allotted time. But then I found a mistake. Not a type-o but a hmmm-I-had-better-do-that-experiment-again mistake. So paper is on hold. And I continue to have a merely average publication record.

But I am not the only one who got a kick in the pants this week. Over the last few months, The Chicken decided to eschew the collective experiences of one hundred years and thousands of other Hebrew language students and teachers, and "learn his own way." This equates to "I don't do homework." He is now paying for his folly, because we got our marks back and he didn't pass the course. He is too stubborn to take the course over again, so this is the end of the Hebrew Highway for James.

He vows that he will continue to study "in his own way." But after seeing his learning method in action, I have my doubts.

Sweater Sweater

Just when I think that I might be starting to understand this place it sends me a curve ball.

Waiting for me in my mail box tonight was a letter, with my name on it in Hebrew. Above my name there were a couple of odd words that seemed out of place on an envelope.

I ripped open the letter to find confirmation of a health insurance policy- just like the ones we received a couple of months ago when I renewed our policies. That's strange, I thought. And then I looked more closely at the name on the health insurance policy:

Needless to say, Sweater Sweater is going to be calling the Harel Insurance Company come Sunday.

The Sorrows of a Slave Master

I have a new slave. Well, not a slave per se but rather a new PhD student to mentor and help me on my project. I have trained new grad students before, and I must admit, I feel I am not very good at it. I am not very good at inspiring others to work hard, and furthermore, I perhaps don't give them enough of my attention and get frustrated sometimes by the constant interruptions. Where is this? How do you do that? What is the molecular weight of these nanoparticles? Something went wrong! The glove box is smoking!

The new PhD student already has a masters degree from one of the applied chemistry labs which is a mixed blessing. It is great because she is already somewhat competent and confidant in the lab. I only need to show her new techniques once and she has it.

The down side of it is, I have to be a bit of an ass and break her out of bad habits, or habits that don't work well in this type of chemistry. Like how she organizes her lab book, how she labels vials in our shared fume hood, even how she cleans glassware.

At the time, waaaaaay back in the day when I was just a mere seed of the synthetic chemistry "sage" I am now, I secretly, or maybe not so secretly, resented the unfortunate post doc who had to train my stubborn ass. But I must admit, on everything he taught me, he was right (Thanks Bryan for putting up with me!) and I, of course, must continue the tradition.

The last PhD student I started training back at U of A, I could tell always felt stupid when I constantly corrected her, even though I frequently reminded Melanie that the only reason I know not to do something is because I had made the mistake myself. Coming in straight from your undergrad, you know you are lab-stupid. But after a masters? I imagine it is a little more pride-ripping and insulting to have the post doc harp on you.

I hate being a jerk, but I guess I can take some advice from the King James the Chicken version of the bible: "She that spareth her rod hateth her new grad student: but she that loveth her chasteneth her bad lab technique."

How does The Chicken cross the road?

Some things are culturally universal. Just like in Canada, parents in Israel teach their children to not talk to strangers, respect their elders, tie their shoes before playing outside and to look both ways before crossing the road. One thing that you also teach your kids in Canada: you do not hang out in the middle of the road.

Teaching your kids to stop in the middle of the road is a unique Israeli quirk as a result of some civil engineers for whom pedestrians could only have been an afterthought. Often there are one or two medians in the street and completely separate pedestrian traffic signals for each lane. And the timing of the little green walking man never makes any sense. You are often stuck on median for 30 seconds to a minute before you can get to the next median or the other sidewalk. The one in the pick here has fences but many just have you perched on your average three foot wide median, with up to six lanes of traffic buzzing past you.

For years I have been trained that when little green man shows himself, I should get across the street quickly and directly. It is so ingrained that I have walked out into traffic here several times almost getting run over and being honked at in anger in the process. And there have also been a few near misses when James hauled me back to median with a swift yank to the back pack (either my head was in the clouds or I was in the middle of telling one of my many stories- either way I was distracted). I was a dangerous walker here at first, but I am much better after a year and a bit of practice.

How does The Chicken cross the road?
In Israel, with stops and starts.

Paper in

My stomach just flipped over.

After weeks of sitting at my computer, eyes bugging out, nerves frazzled, butt flattened, today my friends, merely moments ago, I pressed the big "Submit" button and sent my paper off. This time I am first author and all of the work inside is mine.

I feel a bit ill.

After one week I will know if it made it through the first round of the editor and got sent off for review. If it makes it that far, it will be a couple of months before it gets rejected. Sorry. I should be less pessimistic. A couple of months before we know.

It was a real hassle this time picking some of the references in the introduction and choosing who our suggested peer reviewers could be. Although there were important key references that had to go in, there are always some choices to be made, especially in the introduction, about which references to put in and which ones to leave out. It can be a game of politics which the boss plays well, but I am still a novice. Basically, while making your point and setting precedent for your experiment and findings, you have to subtly cite all the people you suspect might be chosen as reviewers so you pump up their egos if it ends up on their desk.

But also, the editor looks at the reference list to come up with reviewers, so you have to avoid citing people whom you think are hard-asses and won't like your paper. In fact, in the very last version, only this morning, one reference got the boot (well, more like a swift kick to the delete button) because the boss thinks the first author is a "loose cannon" and perhaps he might have even used the word "jerk".

But the biggest battle is always perfecting the text so that it reads just-so. You might have noticed that I like metaphors. My PhD boss and I would always fight over my uses of metaphor and figurative meaning. In a talk abstract I once wrote "the field has recently been resurrected to the forefront of research" and he said "what did you do, crucify it?" and made me take out resurrected.

The new boss is no different. The lovely and colorful "marriage of two concepts" got changed to the dull and lifeless "combination of two concepts. " Equally, "girth" got switched to "circumference."

The funniest one came when I described something as worm-like. The Boss didn't like that but I recalled that the name wasn't mine. I pulled out the paper from where I got this worm idea, and sure enough the boss was right. They didn't use the word "worm". They used "vermicular." After I explained what that meant to the boss, "vermicular" got the veto too.

Oh well, at least I can use as may metaphors as I want here. My blog editor, the Chicken, isn't that picky.

Yaffo: flea market of the gods

Yesterday The Chicken and I took a weekend warrior trip to Yaffo, the old city part of Tel Aviv.

We hopped on the famous and infamous train to get there. Famous for replacing camel trains and three day donkey rides from the Port of Yaffo to the Holy City, sometime around the turn of the century. Now infamous for taking a whopping hour and a half to do what is now a forty minute drive. Buy we were told the trip was pretty, and they were right. We snaked our way between rocky desert hills, now verdant green with the winter rains, the train gently rocking back and forth. I thought it was beautiful. When I asked James if he thought so too, his response was a soft snore. I guess we will have to take the train another time as well.

Yaffo is an ancient and once very important port with a colourful history- that colour being red, as in blood red. The Egyptians took it by hiding it in clay pots- trojan style- then breaking out and slaughtering a bunch of Caananites. Some other stuff happened and then notably Saladin took it and made it a Muslim port. Then there was Napoleon, who killed three quarters of the inhabitants and they say the smell of corpses could still lingered two years later. Somehow the Ottoman Turks then got it, probably with more blood shed. Then of course Allenby and the British took it in 1917 with the help of new-fangled guns to kill everyone off, followed by the state of Israel in 1948.

Despite the long and important history, there really isn't much there. A clock tower from the Ottoman Turks who realized that every important European city has a clock tower and so built them all over their empire in the hope to make their cities just as powerful. There is the ever preset monastery, a couple of mosques and the best part of all, the best flea market I have ever been to. Yaffo is where all the junk of Israel, seemingly hundreds of years of it, goes to seek new life. Pots, pans, mix-masters, TV remotes, shoes, clothes, furniture, old maps, crystal chandeliers, ancient hanukah candelabras, cassettes and LPs of bad Israeli music, a life size statue of Spartacus, a mannequin with ethnically correct giant bazungas, a rusty automatic xylophone, terrible velvet art, WWII green helmets, telephones from every era, and endless treasures to be found. Some of the furniture was particularly remarkable and sometimes very beautiful. The market must have extended 6 or 7 city blocks. Hundreds of people were wandering around and looking for a "good deal" on that perfect piece of junk.

James was taken by the framed old maps, and I think we will be back to pick one up as a souvenir.

Now, lately I have been getting emails and notes from people who have gone skiing, went tobogganing, or skating or other joyous winter activities. My family, in particular, went on a three day cross country skiing trip without me and hid it from me until after it happened. I must say, I am absolutely green with envy. But, on the flip side, it was 25 degrees yesterday in Tel Aviv, and we topped off the day by going for a swim in the Mediterranean. After reminding myself, yet again, that I have to swim in the sea with my mouth closed, I floated and floated and let the gentle waves rock me in the sunshine.

We also did some people watching since Tel Aviv is where the funky mesh of Old meets New, East meets West happens in Israel. This elderly Muslim lady was wearing a nice green velvet robe. I was shocked when she turned around and it said NIKE in big letters across the front. We also saw two girls head down to the beach with a coat rack. Sure enough, they set it up and hung their purses on it. Then there was the usual hairy men in speedos, seven year olds on child-sized working motor bikes with no helmets, and giggling fully dressed Muslim girls wading though the water. A very pleasant day all together. We must go to the beach more often.

Turkey Curry Hebrew Style

So we all know that the country Turkey also has another meaning. Turkey is that wonderful bird that you roast up with stuffing for Christmas dinner.

The word for that yum-tastic fowl in Hebrew is "Hoh-doo" which also means the name of a country, and that country is.... wait for it...... India.

I swear, nothing comes easy in this language.

James and I are still making our way thorough the remains of my giant bird. We have eaten a lot of turkey sandwiches and the other day we made Turkey Curry, a.k.a. Hoh-doo Hoh-doo. Which, if you say fast enough, makes you sound like a Turkey.

Did you try it? Is the person next to you looking at you strangely?

Guest Post: Jerusalem then and now

Maybe you didn't know it but The Chicken has been to the Middle East before, a couple of years before I met him and during a time of youthful idealism and self exploration. Every once in a while he leads me down his memory lane with him but suprisingly not that often. The turn of the decade it seems has been the impetus for some reflection and recalling his time here at the turn of the millennium, ten years ago.



On the evening of December 31, 1999, I joined a crowd of about 200 people at Gethesmane on the Mount of Olives for a New Year's Eve service. About an hour before midnight, each of us was given a long red torch, which we carried in a short procession up the hill to the place that is known as "Abraham's House". As befitted the turning of the millennium, a lot of international media crews were there, asking people questions like "A lot of people would say this is a dangerous place to be right now. So why are you here?". It was a little rainy. I met some American girls working as nurses at Hadassah Mount Scopus. As the final seconds of the millennium ticked away, a cameraman trained his giant video camera on me and the girl I was talking with. "I need a kiss!!!" he said - but that would have felt awkward, and I wasn't going to do something inappropriate just for the sake of giving him good copy. The moment passed, and before long I was back in the quiet streets of the old city, which was absent any signs of the millennial procession except for a small flock of nuns on their way back from midnight mass.

Ten years ago, I had no idea where my life was heading, what I'd be doing in a year, or where I'd be a year from then. I had gone to the Middle East more out of sheer desperation than anything else, because everything I'd done before felt like a miserable failure. It sounds like a cliche, but I thought I'd become an artist here. I needed some time to myself to work out what I really wanted from my life and at the time the last thing I wanted was another lab job. But life has a weird way of working out. A few weeks later, I borrowed a copy of Don Cram's old textbook "Organic Chemistry" from my friend Faisal's apartment in French Hill. I carried that book with me in my backpack through Cyprus, Syria, and Lebanon, and it planted the seeds that would eventually lead me back into the lab. If I went back in time to tell my 26-year old self on the Mount of Olives that I'd do a Ph.D. in organic chemistry, work for 2 years at MIT, publish a total synthesis in Science, and would soon (2001) meet an incredible lady that would later be my wife (whom, I should not forget to add, is responsible for dragging me back here in the first place) he surely would have thought I was talking about someone else - there was no way I would have believed that all those great things would ever happen to me. I certainly never expected that 10 years later that path would take me back to Jerusalem.

Just like 1999, it feels like an end and a beginning here. I have no idea where we'll be or what we'll be doing in a year. But this time, that in itself seems more a cause for excitement than despair. I hope the next decade brings us just as much love and adventure as the past one has. Maybe on Dec 31, 2019 we can come back to Jerusalem to reflect on it.

A Shook Snapshot

At the shook today, I headed to our usual fruit stand and loaded up on a week's supply of apples and a pomegranate.

I thrust out my arm holding my bag of loot for the proprietor to weigh several times before he took my bag over the many other hands holding out bags of fruit. The proprietor was busily weighing the bags, taking money, tossing coins into a wooden box and handing back change at lightning speed. All the while, dangling precariously between his two lips was a long cigarette seemingly never touched by his busy hands.

He weighed my fruit.
"Mumble mumble mumble" he said gruffly through his mostly closed mouth. "Ma?" I replied.

"Shmoneh ve hetzi" he tried again more loudly, the cigarette dancing madly, the long ash weaving treacherously looking as if at any moment it would end up amongst the great pile of bananas before him.

I fished the required coins out of my pocket and held them out. All the while he was weighing yet another customer's fruit. Spying my handful of coins, he eagerly tried to take them and knocked my hand in the process. Ten Agarot dropped neatly with a little plop into his cup of coffee resting on the table.

Without a word, he just waved me away, and he and his cigarette turned to grab another's outstretched bag of fruit.

I bet he finished the cup of coffee.