We're Back

From outer-space, na na na na, etc. After a not so nice oodles-hours trip from Ben Gurion airport to JFK through Geneva, we arrived home around 4 pm. My wife went to sleep immediately; I went to get the milk (not like we needed any, but that's the "after trip" ritual I learned from my village elders). Then *I* went to sleep -- just to get the edge off the exhaustion of the trip, dontcha know. Woke up at 1 am. Dee-yamm! Love that jet lag. And I have to be at work tomorrow too.

Going Back

We're on our way... leaving the hotel at 2:15am to make a 6:15am flight - designed to make nobody happy with this. More when we get back to the states. Thanks to the Groners for a wonderful Shabbat send-off replete with good food and cute babies.

Book Store Alert!!

Attention Mr. & Mrs. Israel and all the ships at sea.

A crazy ol' coot in a twilight zonish bookshop gave me the heads-up of the best bookshop in Jerusalem. It's 6 Shatz Street. I was there last Thursday but the store was closed and the only place open was a cruddy little outhouse of a bookshop that I remembered from years ago. The new shop, opened 5 years ago (after I had already left) but expanded only one year ago, is immense. I purchased books I had only dreamt about. Shatz street is near Pomerantz, but don't confuse the two.

The Book Gallery
6 Shatz Street (26 King George), Jerusalem 94267
tel: 02-623-1087, fax: 02-625-5513
info@bookgallery.co.il
http://www.bookgallery.co.il

Israel Diary, Day 2 - Part 2

Our main tasks on this trip are:

(a) to enjoy two weeks away from the daily, minute-to-minute pressures of the synagogue and the City as well as the brutal commute my wife enjoys for most the week to sunny New Haven,

(b) revisit all the nostalgic wonder of my years in Israel [note, most of that wonder is in the Sniper Zones and we may not get to that right now],

(c) eat shwarma, and other delicacies of the Holy Land,

(d) buy books, a whole mess of books,

and (e) shop for thangs that only Israel provides (like tzanua women's clothing and affordable hats).

We also need to (f) visit and see all of our friends in the country. This turns out to be a very heavy agenda.

Every day we set out to a new neighborhood to explore, eat, and shop. On Day 2, we explored Emek Refaiim. I'd never really spent time in the neighborhood and I see why - no book stores. Plenty of restaurants... we had lunch in Kapit with a good friend and dinner at Norman's with about a dozen yeshiva boys who should have been at night seder.

That night we heard the comedic-monologue of Israel Campbell at the Hartman Institute sitting in a room with the student bodies of Pardes and HUC. This guy was very good and I'm going to try to bring him to my shul.

As for the book buying, we started a three-day excavation of Stein's Book Store. Both the Emek Refaiim restaurants and Stein's Books are distinguished by being the closest to our hotel (not "Close" as nothing is close to our hotel except other hotels and the stupid Windmill thing). More on the Stein's adventure later.

Israel Diary, Day 2

[Note: All the fulminous bloggin' that I was able to do erev Shabbat was courtesy of the our Shabbas hosts' yummy computer. I am now in the Panorama and this is bound to futz up, here's hopin']

I was able to share a minyan with the school-trip in the morning (the rest of the time I've been on my own, I'm not sure where the school went... rumors say the Negev) and we enjoyed the hotel's complimentary breakfast bar. So far, this hotel has been way better than the King David. I have no idea why the KD has appeal. I think its because of the hotel's history, or the wealth of the average occupant. But it's a poor hotel.

Example: this hotel has internet access, a useful gift shop, a decent breakfast, and complimentary newspaper every day. The KD had no internet (18 months ago when I stayed there) no gift shop, a slightly bigger breakfast and NO PAPER. That steamed me: what self-respecting hotel doesn't give you at least the cruddiest paper in the morning. If it weren't for hotels, the USAtoday would probably have folded (just as rental cars keep the "Probe" and "Sebring" on the lots and cabs & cops keep the big American cars on the market).

Anyhoo, the breakfast. As you probably can tell, I find food fascinating. Yummy too. And breakfast is my favorite meal of the day. I guess its because every culture recognizes that you have been "fasting" all night and that break-fast is the most important meal of the day. This gives you, the literal consumer, license to eat whatever you want. Meat? go ahead! Pizza & coke? Strange, but acceptable. And traditional breakfast food is so filling and, dare I say, yummy, that you have permission to eat it all day. As any bachelor knows, breakfast foods - cold or pre-packaged n'frozen - are the staple of the lazy man's diet.

As I said, every culture knows this about break-fast... except Israel. Israeli breakfast, at least how I learned about them in yeshiva, are pathetic. How Israel manages to safeguard a county on morning diet of cucumbers, watery white yogurt, and brown ditch-water coffee is beyond my ken. Must by a God thing.

Hotel breakfasts try to be at least Continental in style, with an occasional nod to the American fascination with cereal. So, no matter the hotel, the breakfast is the same. A big pile of vegetables, many of them already, conveniently, smothered in white creamy paste; an extraordinary collection of high fat cheeses, cut fruit, and random pastry. The Panorama does a decent job of keeping me fat and happy - but even the vaunted King David, with their 50% larger buffet, is bigger because they put out a greater variety of things I wouldn't eat even if you paid me.

Israel Diary, Day 1 - Part 3

The first day the hotel was filled with a "God TV" convention. As far as we can tell, these were television evangelists from Manchester, England. Philosophically, were such creatures to exist, then they *would* exist in the Dan Panorama hotel.

We didn't have much time that night to do anything big except attempt dinner. We set out from the hotel - which is near bloody nothing except the other hotels - in search of my favorite restaurant: The Blues Brothers, on Ben-Yehuda.

I like the place because of the cheap food, the good food, and the name. Alas, the store... she is dead. I guess bad business (although it could be bad meat). That was very sad. Instead we had a mediocre Italian experience at Luigi's on Yoel Solomon. Good cappuccino. Good bread. The soup tasted like Osem's finest and I find that all Israeli tomato sauce is too sweet. Israeli tomatoes are too dignified and yummy on their own to be whomped into paste. That ol' Israeli spirit.

We returned to the hotel to khopp Maariv with the school trip. Oh, did I say that on our two week "get away from everything" vacation we happened to choose the same hotel that the eighth grade school trip was also using. Hee hee. I can't complain, though; got good minyan out of it.

More anon, till then, Shabbat Shalom.

Israel Diary, Day 1 - Part 2

In Geneva, all the rest of we frummies, possibly totaling over 10 men but nobody was weird enough to try anything, davened shacharit on our own at different times and different places. This was not good for Rashbi who arrived 40 minutes late to the switch-off and demanded to the bewildered Swiss and bored Israelis that he needed to herd us together for a minyan. He succeeded in doing so on the plane, before it took off. The first leg of the trip was on Swiss(air), the second leg was El-Al -- who're used to having the crazy Hat People take over the galley with their mumbling.

For the most part, things were smooth and we landed in Israel with aplomb, saw no real trouble getting to our hotel, the Dan Panorama. Like many things in Israel, the hotel has been renamed from the popular earlier name to an obscure nonsense name (cf. Inbal). The Panorama is the old Moriah hotel whose only distinction before this, in my book, was that it was across the street from the last 161 stop in Jerusalem (back in 1991 when I was in 'Hamivtar). My wife is still bemused by my habit of pointing out both 161 bus stops in Jerusalem and when the buses pass by. Old Psychotic habits die hard.

The hotel is full. Yay. Filled with weird Europeans, true, but its great to see so many people in one hotel. The neighboring hotels look deserted (esp. the King Solomon which is right next door). Alas, my compassion is tempered by my dyed-inna-wool capitalism. Originally, we had arranged to stay in the Solomon but they refused to give us a reduced rate. The Panorama is $10 cheaper than all comparable hotels (and that's significant over 12 days!). Score one for capitalism.

Israel Diary, Day 1 (Retry)

We arrived Tuesday evening, Lag B'Omer after an artificially extended Swiss (nee Swissair) flight. The plane was scheduled to leave JFK at 7:30. Like good little travelers, my wife and I wanted to be there 3 hours beforehand. To get to JFK, like good little Newyorkers, my wife and I wanted to leave 90 minutes before we wanted to arrive. As a trained posek, I determined that it would be trei-derabanan (aka "sayag l'sayag," aka "a fence around a fence") to leave at 3 so we decided to leave at 4.

We met some of the craziest, snarliest, traffic ever seen on a non-holiday, good-weather, Monday afternoon. Our driver, a pleasant hyperactive middle-aged South-Asian, was ideologically opposed to traffic and called Queens his home. Whenever we met traffic, we'd sharply veer off onto a side-street or wadi, getting us to the airport in 90 minutes. We may have gotten there at the same time had we stayed in the original traffic but I adhere to the driver's orthodoxy of "Keep Moving."

I was expecting heavy security at the airport. The last time I took an international flight was in November 2001 - so soon after 9-11 (and before Crazy Shoe-Bomb Guy) - that the security dudes didn't know the drill. As it was, I was positively profiled as a friendly "Good Ol Boy" with a hair-covered wife. Yet another time in my life when I was glad to be a lily-white black-hatter.

Behind us on the Swiss(air) line was a man who was to be that trip's requisite wacko. We've nicknamed him Rashbi, the acronym of Rav Shimon Bar Yochi. This dude, 6 foot tall, penguin-dressed Chassid, with long salt-n-pepa beard, no jacket, and blue-crystal cell-phone. We knew there was trouble from the start when he was having one of these cellphone conversations: "Hi Shmuely, I just got cut off" (babble for a minute, pause) "Hi Shumely, got cut off again" (rinse, lather, repeat).

When he finally finished his phone call, he turned his sights on us and asked if we were going to Switzerland or Israel. Note, I was wearing The Hat - which is recognized in most countries and all restaurants as the sign of RELIGIOUS JEW. When we said "Israel" he said that we could still make it to Meron, the hometown of Rashbi, in time for the last of the Lag B'Omer celebrations. I took control of the conversation by using Weirdo Countermeasure #2 - blunt and uninteresting. It worked for a moment, until we saw him again in Geneva for the plane-switch.

Shabbas in Hashmonaim

We are spending Shabbas in Hashmonaim with good friends of my wife from college. For all the time I've lived in Israel (totaling close to 3 years, on and off, since '82), I have never spent that much time in this area of the Aretz. Moreover, I had always heard about the big town of Modi'in (and I got a small driving tour of it today) but I don't remember it *existing* when I was here in Gush back in '96. Fast place, this Israel.

Addendum: According to the Modiin History Website, the town really got underway basically in 1996, and more established in 1998. This makes me feel old and slow.

Argh!

As usual, I had a honking big blog to send to the Styx but the computer ate it. I've got to find a better system. Any of you veteran bloggers out there who wanna help, I'm hip.

Honeymoon in Israel

My wife and I arrived safely in Israel. I'll try to contact you Israel people when I have the strength. We are in the Dan Panorama, though, and they have some internet access in the basement. In checking my email, I have already used up 25 minutes of my pre-purchased time (this is sobering news for me).

Anecdotes about our trip so far will be forthcoming. But we're here at last!