I need an Electrician

After the living room light got stuck on ON, we decided we needed an electrician but wanted to wait until after James' trip and after we met with the landlord at the end of the month. But a new problem has arisen and we just can't wait or I am going to start an electrical fire. But how do I explain the two problems to a Hebrew speaking electrician?
With childish Hebrew and sick figures of course!

I'll let you see if you can figure out what happened. Don't forget to read from right to left!

Problem 1:

On Saturday....


On Monday...


Problem 2:



So Graeme, do you think The Spectator will give me a job as a cartoonist if this chemistry thing doesn't work out?

The Oven Saga

We wanted to replace the old broken oven and we found a cheap used one in the English online classified. We called the lady, Miriam, to come and see it and she gave us lovely ambiguous directions like "take the street that goes down the hill and then turn right at the street that is at the bottom." Jerusalem, if you have never been here, was built on a landscape like bubble-wrap and the street layout planned by a four-year old with a crayon. We ignored her vague directions and with he help of google maps, we found the place.

While inspecting the oven, opening the door and peering inside, we discovered that it was gas. Or rather, she told us it was gas. Then she told us repeatedly that ALL ovens in Israel are gas. I didn't believe her since our current old beastie was electric.
But whatever, it was not what we needed so we left.

Ten minutes later, after climbing halfway up the big hill in the rain, we get a phone call. "Did you mean the inside part? Well that part is electric." So back down the hill we go. Then she emphatically tells us that ALL ovens in Israel are electric.
Regardless, it is electric, it works and it is cheap.

So then I had to organize a movers. Unfortunately, the guy that was recommended to us speaks only Hebrew so I had to get a labmate to organize (he will get the first batch of cookies). But we were told the mover was honest and he was cute. (I have to admit, I was dodged out by the movers advertised in the English classifieds. Many said "Only Jewish Labour". Frankly I don't care who your mom was as long as you do an honest job and it bothers me that they would advertise such a thing.)

Then the other morning, after Siu and I got back from schleping in the pouring rain to and from Miriam's apartment to give her money for the oven, we get a call from the mover. "Where Miriam? She not here!"

Miriam has her cell phone off. Grrrr.

Anyhoo. Eventually the mover got the oven to our house. My eyes just about boggled out of my head when he just tossed the oven on his back and hauled it up four floors of stairs. But let me tell you, the recommendation was a little off. Sure he was honest and efficient and all sorts of good things, but unfortunately he would only be cute if I was about 50. Too bad! I was all ready to ogle some moving-man muscle.

Here is a pic of The Chicken with our inaugural chicken.

A Whole Year

Can you believe it? It has been a whole year since I arrived in Israel. This time last exactly one year ago, I was dragging 70 lbs of luggage though a narrow street in the old city trying to make it to the Austrian hospice. For the next few days, I had a terrible tummy ache and wondering if I had made a good decision.

So did I? Absolutely.

It's funny, now at the very middle of my time here and having said so much already, I find my self strangely at a loss for words. And you all know, that rarely happens. Perhaps I will have something more sage to say when I leave.

So I simply take my teacup of bad Golan wine and head out on to the little balcony off the kitchen that looks south over the twinkling lights of the city towards Bethlehem. A toast to Jerusalem. L'chaim!

We need the Maytag Man

Elvis, our violently shaking washing machine who lives on a couple of cinder blocks beside the tub, flew off the handle last night. Or rather, the handle flew off. Right off into James' hand leaving a load of white t-shirts hostage inside.

But we will not let such an icon die. Who needs a handle when you can use a butter knife to open the door? My husband, the pantsless wonder, demonstrates the technique:


In other news, the oven died a few weeks ago when the glass on the front broke. Incidentally, right after I spent two hours cleaning it. Normally one can repair this, but our oven is circa 1960 and the thermostat didn't work anyway. On top of the that, a previous owner had removed the range and replaced it with a piece of vinyl covered plywood.


Only the classiest appliances for us!

Sun Tanning

Welcome to the roof of my apartment building at 7:30 am this morning.

Behold the awesomeness of Israeli energy efficiency. Passive solar water heaters are simply everywhere. Over 90% of Israel residents have a solar water heater on the roof. We flick on the red switch next to our bathroom for 20 minutes in the AM just to give the sucker a little boost and then we have piping hot water all day courtesy of that great nuclear power station in the sky: the sun.

The genius of these guys it the simplicity. No fancy-dancy photovoltaics here. Just essentially a panel of black pipes hooked up to a hot water tank. You either have a wee pump to circulate the water or put the tank up on a stand, using the warm-water-rises principle to let the water circulate itself.

Lets see. The government website says you save 2000kWh/year and at ~16 cents (CAD) a kWh (according to our power bill), that is 320 bucaroonies a year of power savings. Sweet. And they cost only about 1000 bucks to buy and install (with the tank).

These suckers are so great that as of 1980 it is law that every new building has them. Our building is from the 50's so no pipe spaces were put in the concrete walls. As a consequence, there are black pipes everywhere snaking over the roof top down the exterior walls into each apartment. Not the most sightly thing but they are like power lines; you stop noticing them after a while.

Thousands of solar water heaters stand like guards on every roof becasue all of Israel's energy comes from imported coal and oil and this is not a good thing. Israel fears any reliance on the oil-rich neighboring arab countries. The anti-oil craze is bizarre for me as a researcher since all of Alberta's psyche was focused around the oil industry. If your proposal did not have the word "tar sands" in the fist sentence, rejection by the funding gods was inevitable. Here, research money is focused on getting rid of reliance on fossil fuels due to environmental, financial and, like all things in Israel, political motives.

Hence, the boss has recently become some high-falutin' chair of solar energy.

What does that mean for us grunts in the lab? This means there is money for students to work on our high tech ideas to collect solar energy, and we will make progress, but don't hold your breath.

You could hold out for highly-efficient inexpensive plastic photovoltaics that also make Julienne fries, but I think often the "low tech" solutions like passive solar water heaters, proper insulation of your house, heat pumps, double paned windows, a bus pass, a bicycle, getting a tune up or planting shade trees are the best and easiest decisions for now. As a consumer, this is where I would put my green money first.

Evening Concerts

Every evening our apartment building is a concert. Since the heat started we always have the french doors wide open that face out into the courtyard. Music is always wafting though those french doors like our own personal recital.

As evening descends, it is extremely pleasant to listen to Raffi and his son play violin duets from one of the corner apartments. Later in the evening, often the jazz piano starts from across the way or possibly the classical piano. Even the soft tooting of our beginner flautist make the building seem cultured. Once I even heard an opera singer practicing. If I have to trade spring peepers and calling loons for anything, this isn't too shabby.

The people in our building are a talented bunch, and considering how clearly I can hear them across the courtyard, every-time I make one of my frequent mistakes on the piano, I have to cringe. Ahh well, they should just be glad that I don't play the trumpet anymore.

On Pins and Needles

To keep my hands busy on the long and hot Shabbats, my friend Renske sent me a hand applique quilting block to work on. The patch has been sitting in my house for a couple of weeks unattended because I had yet to find pins to start the project. Pins?
No problem, I could find those at the Zellers or at the Fabric-land. But of course this is Israel, and nothing it seems easy or straight forward for me- although, of course, it makes perfect sense to the locals.

There are plenty of fabric stores in each city which seem to nestle together like colourful Easter eggs. In Jerusalem, there are half a dozen or so fabric shops near the corner of Jaffo and King George, right beside the turn off to walk to the shuk.

Each is a long narrow shop, plied to the ceiling with crowded bolts and rolls of fabric in every hue and texture with very little or no order. The shops are so full that the bolts spill out onto the street both as vibrant advertisement and to provide a little breathing space inside. In the indoor area that these outdoor bolts vacate each morning usually you can find the proprietor or proprietress, ready for business. They are almost always near the door seated on a folding chair or behind a very small and crowded counter barely big enough for the cash register. Despite the sameness of the each store set-up, if you look carefully, you will notice that each store has a specialty: fabrics for curtains, upholstery, ball gowns, clothing, head scarves, etc. I am kicking myself for not taking the camera with me yesterday.

Even though all the fabric jumbled together is overwhelming enough, there were some curious things missing. Where were the threads, needles, pins and buttons? I finally managed to buy pins yesterday off one of the counters displayed as an impulse item like a chocolate bar or a People Magazine. It took two stores in Tel Aviv and three stores in Jerusalem, some bad Hebrew and some funny hand signals to find them. Heaven help me if I ever need a button.

By bedtime I had the quilt piece cut and basted. Then I got up and started stitching, and found it quite addictive, so I kept stitching and stitching. Needless to say, I finished the block this afternoon.

There really isn't much to do on Shabbat but quilt and write blog posts.

Brown? Nah!

We have definitely entered the season of brown. All the verdant grasses, beautiful wild flowers and blossoms of March and April have been desiccated into only golden stalks (golden sounds less depressing than brown, doesn't it?). But this is only in the "wild" spaces, where plants are left to their own devices.

Climate has never stopped Israelis. They are the great world Innovators of Irrigation and Superheros of Sprinklers! They can grow oranges in a desert and tomatoes on the saltiest land on earth!

In the city, the intense irrigation means many of the domestic plants in people's yards are now in heavy bloom. One neighbors' houses have the unfortunate look of suffering from a giant chemistry experiment gone wrong. The flowers appear to be oozing out of the roof.


Even as those flowers are fading, the Jacaranda trees are blooming purple, which reminds me of Christmas time in Adelaide. Our whole street is a bower.


There are so many blooming plants here. It didn't occur to me until we came back from Canada how much Jerusalem smells like flowers. The whole air of the city is perfumed.

A day of Breaking Things and Getting them Fixed

We got the window fixed this morning before work. While Uri the glass dude cut the new pane to the right size, his side kick, Mr. Smashy, got rid of the old glass and decorated the floor with all the ancient putty. Fifteen minutes and 190 shek later (no worries-the landlord is paying for it) James and I now have a much less drafty apartment.

By the way, the window blew open because the latch doesn't work. Some idiot painted over it. Any suggestions for getting it working again?

I had my first session on the HR-TEM alone today. All was going well until a couple of hours in when the computer started getting really slow. And then the PC had a conniption fit and completely froze and then I heard the unmistakable sound of the column valves closing. That is TEM speak for the microscope going into the fetal position and sobbing. I was freaking out thinking I had done something wrong and hurt the million dollar thing. I had to tell the formidable Russian HR-TEM lady that something had gone horribly wrong. The way my labmates speak of her, I was expecting a real smack down. Surprisingly, she was OK with it and just got down to the business of rebooting the computer, talking nicely to the microscope and getting it going again. No damage was done but I decided to quit for the day while I was still ahead.

The rest of the day was spent much like yesterday: monopolizing two computers in the nanocentre with papers spread everywhere, moving between different types of data trying to figure out what exactly it was that I have been making. The going is slow since the crystal system is super-dee-duper complicated, but I now have a working hypothesis to take to the boss tomorrow. Yippee!

Just before leaving the nanocentre, while scrubbing my environmentally conscionable tea mug, I dropped it in the sink and broke it. Good thing I stopped working on the TEM when I did.

But don’t worry, my day got made when I checked the mail this evening. Waiting for me was a post card from Tofino from my kayaking buddies. How did they know I had been looking at the trip pics on Facebook and feeling really sad?!!? Thanks guys! Your postcard is proudly displayed on the fridge.

A rainbow please?

Last night about midnight, I got out of bed to bring the laundry in just as the first claps of thunder started. All night, it rained in driving sheets, the wind howled, the hail pinged and the lightning forewarned the thunder which boomed. Car alarms repeatedly went off on the street below as accompaniment to the symphonic cacophony of weather. When we got up this morning, it was still storming and wave after wave of thunderstorms have brought heavy rain and hail all day. I have never been in a storm that has lasted so long.
I have been surviving this chilly and damp day cooped up in our apartment by wearing my striped long underwear and streaming movie adaptations of Jane Austen novels of which The Chicken has no interest. James has been snuggled under a blanket on the chesterfield reading chemistry papers. But given the rain, he wonders if his time would be better spent turning our wooden bed frame into an Ark. I have been aiding the effort by scheming live traps for the pigeons that poop on our balcony. They might just come in handy for finding dry land forty days from now.

Tales of Domesticity

My husband is so cheap he wants us to be trailer trash. We went blanket shopping on friday, and instead of the nice duvets, he was drawn to these fuzzy blankets whose patterns tended towards safari. Even the plain purple one made me think of the Trailer Park Boys. I convinced him to spend the extra 30 skeck on a duvet. Then looking for a shower curtain, we finally found some cheap ones. But instead of looking through the stack to find a half decent one, James, in his impatience to end the torture of shopping as soon as possible, grabs the one on top that would have only been appropriate if we had pulled up to the shop in a DeLorean. Again, veto power was employed and we agreed on a different pattern (but as a compromise, it was blue).

We have inherited a rather old microwave belonging to the apartment that has been encrusted with years of goo. In fact, the guy we are subletting from hasn’t used it at all; it is the previous tenant's shame. James felt we should clean it and use it. Actually, after a little Chicken elbow grease, it didn’t look too bad. All hail the house-husband!
Unfortunately, the dampness from cleaning made the number pad stop working so we were still up the creek for warming up last night’s leftovers. Blast. An hour later of drying, the top two rows of numbers work. By morning, it should work like a charm.

The New Digs (Part 2)

The kitchen, complete with an open package of Tim Tams. Yes, you heard it first here! Your favorite Aussie chocolate bar masquerading as a cookie is available in J-town!

The view from the living room.

I am happy to say, the place is virtually hair and grime free!

The New Digs (Part 1)

Up in the the top left is the bedroom. Do you see the ugly fleece blanket I bought the other day? Turns out it wasn't an ugly blanket but an ugly duvet cover. Sigh. I wish I could read labels.
The view from the kitchen and the foyer, complete with piano for me to annoy the neighbours.

To boldy go...to Kiryat Moshe

In a few minutes I am leaving to meet Captain Kirk to see if I can rent a room in his apartment for two weeks while I wait to take possession of my apartment. I wonder if he will speak like he types. You be the judge from his emails:

DEAR JANET... I WONT BE HOME TILL 9 PM THIS EVENING...
PERHAPS IT WILL BE EASIER THURSDAY MORNING BEFORE 10 AM...
I LIVE AT 58/2 SEDEROT HERZL IN KIRYAT MOSHE...

and a later email:

DEAR JANET...
9:30 AM WILL BE FINE... SEE YOU THEN...
BEST WISHES...

GERSHON... SHEMESH

See? I think Gershon Shemesh must be Hebrew for William Shatner.

Food and Housing

The maple shekel has found a place to live! YEA! However, I don’t get to move in for another three weeks. I think I am going to move back to the Austrian Hospice in the old city and hang out with the Nuns for 23 US bucks a night, rather than the 70 I am paying here at the Belgium House/ Faculty Club place.

The chicken and I will be living in Talbieh, on the top floor of a 4 floor apartment building. We have a great view of the city, two balconies, two big rooms and a kitchen, and not to mention a piano. Since I couldn’t be bothered with a TV, I will be spending a good chunk of my time playing the ‘ol black and whites and torturing the neighbours.

On the way back from my meeting with the new landlord I strolled my way through campus to have a four star meal. I carefully chose from the vending machine menu my entré (cookies to go with the plain yoghurt in my fridge). Mood lighting came from the street lights along the campus pathway which did not dull the view of the city from our lofty campus perch on the hill of Gi’vat Ram. The flower arrangements were provided by the two trees with the giant stinky flowers that look like cream coloured trumpet bells pointing to earth. Dinner entertainment was provided by the territorial maneuverings of the highly educated and very abundant campus cats.

How, you might ask, is Janet of the legendary gut sustaining life on such a meager diet? Do not fear, dear reader, for campus food is subsidized! For the cost of Ho-Ho’s special soup, I am chowing down each lunch time on a giant plate meat, veg and carb at the cafeteria with my like minded labmates. If cafeteria food doesn’t keep the weight on, nothing will.