Why Israel is our home

Dear friends and family,

My last posting led to a bunch of responses, and I wanted to thank all of you for the support and encouragement. Clearly, the difficulties we experience are not unusual for our situation.
I'm going to start working next week, and combined with intense social activities over the Jewish holidays month, I suspect my schedule will be fairly hectic. So I gotta hurry and blog beforehand, and what's better than the promised highlighting of the positive aspects of landing here?!

The biggest advantage, without a doubt, is being close to our families. Indeed, in the past 3 weeks, there was hardly a day where we didn't meet a family member. It's hard to exaggerate the importance of these get-togethers for us, and especially for the girls. They're really thriving, playing with their grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.
We also have many friends from our past in Israel, and our presence here allows us to see them more, if not very frequently. And in general, relationships between people here are much warmer and spontaneous. It's not rare for our daughters to arrange a playdate on the spot with friends, when they're picked up from their daycare. This is a sharp contrast to our reality in the US, where playdates need to be agreed on days in advance.

There are additional advantages, such as the much better food (at least to our taste), especially the amazing produce, or the wonderful Mediterranean Sea. But in my opinion, there is one central benefit for us here - we really, completely, utterly, entirely understand how things work around here. We are well familiar with the culture. Unlike in the US, we're versed in the nuances.

Let me try and give an example to better explain that last point. In an attempt to demonstrate it also to my US readers (at least the non-hockey fans), I'll examine a piece of Canadian folklore.
There is that cute song which I used to hear a lot on the radio - "I Make The Dough, You Get The Glory" by Kathleen Edwards, a canadian singer (see clip and lyrics). Let's examine the following portion of the lyrics:

You're cool and cred like Fogerty, I'm Elvis Presley in the 70's
You're Chateau neuf, I'm Yellow Label
You're the buffet I'm just the table
I'm a Ford Tempo you're a Maserati
You're the Great One, I'm Marty McSorley
You're the Concorde, I'm economy
I make the dough but you get the glory

You surely get the idea of the lyrics, but what about the finer details?! When I first encountered the song, I thought - who the hack is Marty McSorley? And what does she mean by "The Great One"??? Turns out the latter is a legendary hockey player, while the former is, how to say, a less legendary hockey player. If you're Canadian, I guess, these go without saying.
I hope it conveys my point.

Have a great weekend, and a happy and sweet (Hebrew) new year to everybody!
Giora

Landing in Haifa, Israel

So we’re back in Israel, landed two weeks ago, and we’re mostly settled into our wonderful new apartment in Haifa. Phew, there is so much I want to tell, but so little time to write...

Some past feedback hinted that my writing tends to be too optimistic. Thus, in this post I chose to emphasize our difficulties. Starting one’s life in a new place is never easy, let alone when kids are involved. Indeed, after a too-good-to-be-true beginning for all three girls, we started running into various bumps.
With Maayan, we had more than a week of crying in the mornings, breaking my heart each and every time. Happily, a couple days ago she got to the point where she has started staying at her daycare without shedding a tear.
Hadas became, almost immediately, an integral part of her kindergarten class. However, she is still encountering many difficulties in adjusting to the new environment, and her behavior, mainly at home, certainly reflects them.
Noga, a new kid among a group of kids who’ve been together for two years, is having the hardest time. She feels fairly lonely at school, a situation she never had to face in such intensity. Astonishingly she’s seemingly pretty happy most of the time, but once she lets out her feelings, it’s evident that she’s not. I can’t tell you how sad (and tearful) it makes me to see her struggling. How helpless I feel as a parent, knowing that I have little ability to make her social reality a more pleasant one. I trust her social skills, and I’m certain that she’ll find her place sooner rather than later, but the way there is tough, both for her and for me.

The above are, without a doubt, the main difficulties, but they aren’t the only ones. Although it’s been more than two weeks, I still feel I’m in a culture shock, returning to the Middle East from the US. It’s not only how people drive around here – that’s way too obvious (although still frighteningly unbelievable!). You see things differently after living elsewhere for a long while, and I am unable to turn a blind eye on the many deficiencies around me. Let me give some examples:

The security guard in the custom offices immediately recognized us as returning residents, saying “you’re STILL smiling...”. Jokes aside, we quickly realized that people on the street rarely smile.
The urban areas are amazingly ugly. No milder way to put it. It’s in everything – the patchy buildings, the black oily stains on roads and pavements, the ad-hoc signs, the total lack of urban planning.
The notorious Israeli tendency to disregard the law has deep influence on one’s daily quality of life. The pavement, theoretically for pedestrians, is frequently occupied by parking cars (just try walking with a baby stroller...). Dog poop is on every corner.

Surprisingly enough, the fact that we’re still waiting for our belongings to arrive, thanks to the port workers’ strike, became the smallest obstacle. Indeed, we’re sleeping on mattresses on the floor, and wearing mostly our traveling cloths, but that turned out to be minor.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of good things about living here, both objectively and specifically for us (being close to our families, to name one). I’d say that all in all we’re doing OK, despite the above.

I hope to write more and highlight those brighter aspects too, as soon as I get the chance.

Hugs and kisses,

Giora

We're still alive...

... and having a wonderful time in the San Francisco bay area, meeting with friends and family and enjoying the perfect weather! And tomorrow we will start the long journey back to Israel. Our trip is practically over.

Since we last posted, we spent 8 days camping in Yosemite, Kings Canyon and Sequoia national parks. Yosemite was magnificent, though very crowded and touristic. Coming after Yosemite, Kings Canyon seemed like a quiet backwater. Nature is less majestic there, but it was still beautiful, with high cliffs and cool rushing rivers. We found it very relaxing.

We hope to update our latest batch of pictures soon, and will continue updating on the process of settling down in Israel.

Love,
Anat

Wear Sunscreen

We’re very meticulous in wearing sunscreen, particularly with the girls. We operate under the assumption that the younger the kid, the more crucial sunscreen is. At some point, we questioned this assumption – if the risk for young kids is higher, how come you see much fewer cancers in kids than in adults and elders?!
My friend Tal provided us with a clear and precise explanation:

Cancer is a multistep process: you need A to go wrong first, B later, then C, and so on. The chance to have cancer is proportional to the age - the longer you live, the more likely you are to have some cells further along this chain. What people do not always realize is that a lot of progress along this chain is done during childhood. Not necessarily enough so that kids would have cancer, but it significantly increase the chances of cancer at a later age.

So, as the famous poem goes: wear sunscreen.

Giora

Ruminations about American History

I must admit that I know very little American History. Before our trip, I had a vague notion of the pioneers who headed west in the 19th century, but I hardly knew what the Oregon Trail was. Hence, I was very happy to learn a lot about this period in the history, for example in an excellent interpretive museum in eastern Oregon. The details are fascinating – those pioneers walked more than 2000 miles, over a 6 month period. Remember all those famous wagons you’ve seen in many movies? We learned that they were for the luggage and sick ones only. People usually walked all the way!
It’s interesting to compare these journeys to modern day hikers, walking the Pacific Crest Trail (the western counterpart of The Appalachian Trail, though probably much more beautiful). Obviously, the recreational motivation is very different from the pioneers’, as well as the constant safety net etc., but the distances are similar. We’ve met a hiker on the trail, and the distances are shocking. Hikers cover 2500 miles, from Mexico to Canada, through extremely mountainous terrain. Due to weather constraints, there is a very narrow window every year, during which you can start. Typically, hikers walk an average of almost 25 miles a day(!!!), for several months. Personally, I strongly doubt if I have ever been fit enough for something so difficult.

A less glorious aspect of American history has to do with Indians. I once heard a Native American insisting that he was an Indian, so I’ll drop the PC terminology...
We got to learn a lot about several Indian cultures in our current travels. We learned that in the 13th century, South West Colorado’s population amounted to 30,000 people, more than today! We consulted the web and were astonished to find out that in 1492, about 50 million people already lived in the Americas! (however, the vast majority were in South America).
We visited the Navajo Reservation in northern Arizona, and clearly saw its evident neglect. More than anything else, it reminded me of the Bedouins in the Israeli Negev. We couldn’t forget the facts we know about some other Indian reservations and their extreme poverty. And we couldn’t help noticing that in the aforementioned Oregon Trail interpretive museum, the fate of Indians who already inhabited the lands was practically ignored.
I’m not trying to be a saint or to claim that one side was the ultimate evil. However, when looking from the outside on the history, it’s pretty sad to see.

Giora

The Wheels of the Minivan Go Round and Round

When we were planning our trip, we considered several transportation alternatives. Renting a car turned out to be ridiculously expensive. The seemingly natural choice was our Ford Windstar minivan, Wendy. Yes, we always grant names to our vehicles.
However, though merely 8 years old, Wendy has a very rusty body, and we got several implicit warnings from our mechanic back in Pittsburgh, about her fitness for the task. A mechanic in Colorado defined her as “all rotten”...
We chose to take the risk, and count on Wendy. We had her delivered by truck to Nevada, saving the 2000 miles drive and increasing the chances she’ll get us to San Francisco, our final destination.
As such, we were continuously expecting her to break down. She did once, when we had to replace a starter in Colorado, but that’s fairly normal. Other than that, and I know I might be taunting fate, so far so good… The gas mileage is not stellar, we get quite some clanking now and then, but after several thousands of miles and several long lags (e.g. Anat had an exquisite way of celebrating her birthday – driving for more than 25% of it...) we’re in California. We still have almost two weeks to go, but we will be spending them within a distance of several hours at most from the bay area.
Wendy has also made Anat very proud (justifiably!): when a mysterious fuse blew out, silencing the music, Anat found its location in the vehicle manual and replaced it all by herself!

Our current plan is to donate Wendy to some charity, which will probably sell it for scrap or for parts. Again, it might be too early to say, but I think we were really lucky with gambling on her!

Giora

Disconnect

As the end of our trips comes into sight, though we still have a couple weeks to go, I’ve found myself thinking about the special state-of-being that such a long journey brings about. It is a delicate balance of disconnection from every day routines, daily life and work while keeping in touch with loved ones, and in my case, also spending some time thinking about research and teaching and my soon-to-start new position. Much of this balance is affected by the presence of on-line access. Whenever we have internet, I feel like I have just stepped out for a moment and will return shortly to my academic pursuits. But when we have gone for some time without coverage, the details seem to fade to the background. Yet still, at odd quiet moments I find myself outlining the syllabus of the class I will be teaching in the fall, trying to frame a cohesive argument for a paper, or planning future experiments in my head. I think of this as a hallmark of the academic life – on the one hand, I have the extreme privilege of taking such a long trip but on the other hand, and because it is a career I am so invested in, it goes with me wherever I go.

As our date of return to Israel approaches, naturally I try to imagine what our life there will be like. Surprisingly, at least to me, I haven’t been very successful. Much like I didn’t come up with very detailed scenarios of how the trip would be (though that might have been due to all the other things I had on my mind before we left :-), I’m not formulating clear pictures of our life in Haifa, either personal of professional. I don’t know whether to ascribe it to the fact that really, I have no way of knowing any of the details, to the fullness of our day-to-day experiences that don’t always leave enough time for such pursuits, or that I’ve just become so zen that I’m content to simply let things unfold and live the moment. I’d like to claim the latter unequivocally, but in all honesty it’s probably a healthy mix of all three. I do feel very optimistic and confident that things will work out even if there are some difficulties in adjusting. I hope this proves to be justified!

I think I owe much of this confidence to the fact that I’ve witnessed our family adjust beautifully to changing circumstances over the last several years. Starting with the trip in New Zealand which I was quite apprehensive about before we set out, through settling down in Pittsburgh, welcoming Maayan to our family, and now this extended journey - we have mostly done well. The hardest part is always leaving friends and family behind, and I hope we will manage to keep in touch with all our dear friends we are leaving behind in Pittsburgh.

Anat