...And Americans Are Superficial??

Just a quick rant.

It's kind of common knowledge that Americans are perceived to be stupid, fat, and superficial. Right? I've already ranted about this. But what I haven't ranted about quite yet is how unfounded that stereotype is compared to other cultures - specifically mediterreanean cultures. And specifically Israel.

When I was in talks with various kibbutzim in the spring to see if I could set a living situation up before I was going to go into the army, I had a bizzarre exchange of emails with the Baram kibbutz secretary. At first it was just the regular Israeli bullshit - questions tinged with distrust about "what sort of horrible things does this guy want to do to our kibbutz"/"how will he fuck us over". Then, as I got my boss to send them a 500 word recommendation about what a nice/innocent/quality guy I was, they started to warm up.. But of course the recommendation did nothing to paint the real picture that the kibbutz secretary wanted - my actual picture.

"Could you please send a few pictures of yourself that might help us with our decision"

ummm. Ok.

Anyway, the other things that I notice in Israel with regard to superficiality is an obsession with jewelry, shiny things, and hair. It's just my observation, and maybe I'm just paying too much attention to it, but girls on dates or girls who are glitzed up for a night on the town constantly check themselves out if they even remotely sense that there might be a shiny surface in front of which they could shamelessly check themselves out for a minute. The weirdest part is that boyfriends just stand, staring admiringly, entranced by this high maintenance idiot and her grooming skills.

Americans may generally like big cars, big houses and big tvs. But Israelis have them covered in spades with the whole physical appearance superficiality thing. That's it. Rant complete.

Your Son's Name is Moron?

Israelis, however magnificent as they may be with English, have unfortunate luck with how some of their names sound in English. Not only do they sound goofy due to their pronunciation with an Israeli accent, but some of them are hilarious because of what they mean in English.

Sometimes I imagine an American businessman who is salivating over some new contract with an Israeli company, who wants to call the contact guy on the other side to see if both of them can ink the deal, only to realize that he's about to call a guy name Nimrod. Or Moran. It's a wonder that names like "Idiot" or "Shithead" do not exist out here. Aside from the names synonymous with imbecile, there are the names that are, perhaps even more unfortunately, synonymous with excrement. "Doodoo" is a fairly popular name, and is the first name of a very famous singer here, Dudu Aharon. There is also the common variation of "Doodee". If I have a son, I'll seriously consider naming him "Jackass" or "Poop" as my way of adding to the diversity of great Israeli names.

Then of course, there's the accent. With the eastern european style "r" sound embedded in the Israeli accent, and names being short and filled with these "r"s, it makes for funny sounding names. I've always known that "Or" is a very common Israeli name. But I sometimes wonder what it's like to the foreigners that Israelis meet when they're travelling the world after the army, when they first hear the name "Or" - meaning "light" in Hebrew. In English it sounds like "ohhh" - a sort of sound that you can imagine someone makes who has a stomach cramp and realizes he has to go unload in the bathroom. But what if you put all of these silly names that are centered around this awkward "r" sound together. I always make fun of this by pretending I'm a proud Israeli mother:

"Yes, these are my Sons Ahhree, Ooohree, Oooori, and Ohhhhhhhh." - (complete with a look of abdominal pain on the last one).

Maybe I'll just have a daughter. That way I won't have to worry about a life of torment in the English speaking world...

Jews Throw Rocks? Arabs Throw Wood? I'm Back in Israel?

It's been about 2 months since I've been in Israel. In the face of some serious bureaucratic messes, I decided to go home and attend one of my best friends' wedding and my brother's medical school graduation. It was refreshing to be back, not only because I was able to enjoy a glimpse back into domesticated, homely stability - a total rarity in these parts - but it got me away from complications that had arisen from the Israeli army.

Excuse the metaphor, but the army is being very much of a selfish girl right now, I would say. Unsure of whether "she" really needs me right now based off of her needs and my advanced age (in military terms). "She" is indecisive and is making me sweat it. But the good news is that this old guy has a meeting with the head honcho at the recruitment center to see if some decision can be made, rather than keeping me up in the air. Despite the ambiguity of my future, I decided that I'd return to Israel to attend some work interviews (in high-tech, project management, and non-profit) and keep on trucking in Israel. I still love the place and know that even if I do end up serving in the army, it will be later this year. I want to continue building a life, speaking Hebrew, learning Arabic, meeting people and travelling around this fascinating country.

So, after a day of travelling, I arrived in Jerusalem to get acclimated and ready for some upcoming interviews. I just so happened to choose a hotel right outside of the Damascus gate in the Old City of Jerusalem. The owner, who showed me around the hotel and my room, is a dishonest and seemingly conniving arab guy who, according to tripadvisor.com, has a history of fuzzy math, hugely inflated currency conversion rates, and a "violent attitude". In keeping with the reviews, he did try to screw me over with a 30% premium on the room that I had booked on a website; however, I held his reputation captive by threatening to write an honest review of the place on various travel review websites. He begrudgingly relented and we went our separate ways.

Anyway, at about 5 in the afternoon, a procession of religious Zionist Jews was beginning to swell into a relatively small square directly below my balcony. These guys were celebrating "Jerusalem Day" - the commemoration and celebration of the retaking of Jerusalem from Jordan in 1967. As the numbers grew, so did the decible level of their chants - "HaTikva" and "Am Israeli Chai", among others. As I was sitting on my balcony, taking all of this in, I started to notice that every now a group of teenaged boys would walk up to the barricades and police tape separating the square from the hotel area - a completely Palestinian neighborhood - and would start taunting the bystander Palestinians by yelling racial epitaphs toward them and boasting of Israel's reconquest of Jerusalem. The Arabs were standing and observing the spectacle while cleaning up their shop areas for the end of the day; and I was fascinated that this palpable tension that I had always noticed when in Jerusalem was now tangible and brewing before my eyes.After a hundred or so more Israeli teens ran over to the gathering along the barricade, carrying Israeli flags, some Palestinians started to lined up on the other side, making the few police officers noticeably nervous. I went downstairs to get a picture of this from behind the Palestinians:

It looked to be dying down after 5 minutes of this face off, and so I went up to my room to try to take a nap. I was about to knock off for a bit when I heard some more yelling and commotion. Stepping toward the window that leads to my balcony, I saw an Arab guy launch a huge piece of wood, while another threw some sort of heavy metal object at a cop trying to quell the situation. As quickly as that had started, a bunch of elite SWAT style commandos ran in and started shooting a few rubber bullets at the Arabs. The Jews' reaction to this was, for some reason, to throw rocks at the Arabs and at the hotel building. A few rocks hit my balcony and came very close to hitting my window. Check out the video:

Although the celebrations are merited in my mind, as I believe that Jerusalem, in some capacity or another, should be an integral part of Israel proper, this celebration and the quality of people that it attracted truly exposed the warts in Israeli society. I know I may sound naive when I say that people should really make a concerted effort to co-exist in Jerusalem and in Israel in general; but I feel that the root of this type of discrimination and cycle of hate comes from a deceivingly small number of people on each side of the conflict, and it is at these nationalistic gatherings (Jerusalem Day and Nakba Day, for example) that these diminutive groups are exposed. While it is a sorry spectacle to witness, I can find solace in the fact that maybe since these people are exposed as who they are, the rest of society can ostensibly learn from their poor example of egalitarianism and humanity.

No matter what the moral is of these clashes, it was an interesting thing to come back to. And I don't mean to sound melodramatic, but I really did feel like I came back to a war zone for a bit.

So You Want to Drive in Israel?

As a new immigrant to Israel, I am allotted 3 years to convert my American driver license. This means that in my first 3 years, I don't have to take the pain-in-the-ass theory test and pay an extra couple hundred dollars. So, I decided to take advantage of this nice little "grace period" and get an Israeli driver license.
I've heard this conversion process being described as "an expensive scavenger hunt". And I think that does some justice to it - at least from an American perspective. It may seem like a simple and painless process to some europeans who tell me their licenses cost them thousands of euros and 6 months to attain. But, to me the whole process was a two-week affair of running around town, waiting for hours on end in the Israeli DMV, and witnessing the ridiculousness of the actual practical test itself.
First, I had to pick up a form from some optometrist in central Tel Aviv, and then, for some reason, walk to another optometrist and get a quick eye check. The next step was to go to a doctor for a "check up". It consisted of him asking me none of the questions on the form, making eye contact with me for about 2 seconds; and then sending me on my way after 2 minutes of checking boxes and signing the form. A couple of days later, I took a bus to Holon, just southeast of Tel Aviv to get the DMV to sign the form saying that I was medically ok to drive. I get there at 8, tear off a number from an extremely conspicuously-placed ticket roll and wait... and wait.. In the 5 hours that I was waiting there.. ya I said 5 hours..
Something registered in my head about how bureaucracy works in Israel in those hours of waiting. Not once but thrice were there huge outbursts from people trying to NEGOTIATE the terms of how the bureaucratic process of whatever motor vehicle issue they were dealing with, would be carried out. In two of these instances, security guards were called in to quell the outburst. You would obviously never see anything like this in the States. I brought this up to my roommate who told me that she felt that people think they can negotiate the terms of anything - even in a government institution - because the wages are so low in Israel that workers feel it is not necessary to do some of the more effort-intensive (and required) tasks that their jobs entail. So, Israelis feel that if they push hard enough and in the right way, they can get whatever it is that they want out of an institution, because, presumably, it is something that is definitely a part of the job description of the person with whom you're dealing.
Anyway, after 5 hours of that, I set up the second-to-last thing that I had to do for this conversion process - setting up driving lessons. It basically consisted of driving around in a piece of shit car and listening to the driver instructor lazily go over Israeli traffic laws for an hour.
Next up was the practical test. It started at 7:30 in the morning in front of some train station. Sketch. I started to drive and stopped at a stop sign, waiting to make a left turn onto a busy street. There was a lot of traffic coming from the left and the right and, although I could have made a quick maneuver to make the left turn, I decided to wait and play it safe so that I could pass the test without a hitch. After about 30 seconds of waiting, the tester sighs and postures in his seat uncomfortably as he tells me, "we could have already made the turn 3 times. This is a very unsafe way of driving".... WHAT? NOT driving quickly to get into to crazy crowded traffic is considered to be unsafe? I know that that is how Israeli drive... but in the driving test, this is what they test for? To make sure you're as crazy as the other maniac drivers out there?
So, finally, I floor the accelerator and get into traffic, driving like a typical Israeli asshole. The tester comments, "that's more like it"... and after 10 minutes, I had an Israeli driver license..

Achmad

Somewhere in the long days of cramming Hebrew into my head before I left for my brief trip to America, I managed to make a couple of friends. Most were Latin Americans here on some program or another in which they wanted to feel Israeli for a couple of months. I have no problem with that; after all, who knows how transient I will end up being. But it was those who were on the other end of the spectrum - the ones who have been here the longest - who are the most intriguing to talk to out here.

One of the friends whose acquaintance I had the pleasure of making, was a rarity in and of himself in our language learning "ulpan", as it is known, and, indeed, a rarity in these parts of Tel Aviv. Born and raised in the center of old Jaffo, an Arab town sitting quietly to the south of Tel Aviv on the meditereanean cost, the only Arab presently learning in the "ulpan" was Achmad.

I met Achmad in early October after I had started level ג (the third level), which was surprising to me, as I assumed that, by simply living in Israel and being raised 2 km from the the second biggest Jewish city in the world, Tel Aviv, that Achmad would be nearly fluent in Hebrew. And I was wrong to assume that. Achmad, as it turned out, was raised in a family that didn't allow him to integrate much into anything outside of Jaffo - especially into any Jewish community. In fact, Achmad's family didn't even know that he had started to take advantage of a not-so-well-known government program that aims to help Palestinians and Israeli arabs integrate into mainstream Israeli society (outside of the 20% arab minority) - presumably to increase upward mobility.

The first day that I met him, he walked into class smiling at everyone, which I found strange, as I knew he definitely wasn't American. And he certainly didn't look European. As he sit down next to me on my left, our eyes briefly and nervously met, as if not sure whether to acknowledge each other's presence. This is sort of the inherent dynamic in these ulpan classes full of strangers, representing almost every western nation you can think of. So, on top of the "stranger" boundaries that exist, there exist also cultural and national boundaries. Finally, when we had to do a partner exercise with reading, he broke the ice.

"Hi I'm Achmad."

"I'm Josh. I'm from America... where are you from??"

"Jaffo".

"No. I mean, which country are you from?", I asked, thinking that he didn't understand my question.

"Israel, man. I was born in Jaffo".

I couldn't believe it. Someone brave enough to break those iron-clad boundaries that exist between Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews was in front of me. I was, of course, even more amazed later when, over a shot of espresso at the café down the block from the ulpan, he told me that his parents had forbidden him to venture into Tel Aviv to mingle with Jews. We sat there exchanging stories and viewpoints about what we thought of this chaotic society, an outside perspective and a hybrid perspective - both inside and outside. He was very much into asking about America and how it was going through an American university.

"So there are parties everywhere, chicks, big barrels of beer and everyone is just having sex, right?", he said, with his level ג Hebrew, and his eyes wide open in anticipation.

"Well, no. I guess you could find that somewhere back there, but it's not very common".

I actually get asked this question by Israeli Jews from time to time. The reaction is always confusion - and, of course, some obscure reference to a part of an American movie like American Pie or Animal House. I guess it makes sense with the way that American entertainment has captivated the world's attention for the last half century. But, I have to say, I was maybe equally or more blown away by what I heard from him regarding Arab's views to Jews.

Achmad started with a story about the first time that he met a Jew - in Jaffo - when he was a young boy.

"Dad and my uncle always used to tell me not to come into contact with a Jew when I was younger. They told me that they had tails and horns, and that I better not mess with them. So the first time I met a Jew, I looked in back of him to find the tail, and saw nothing", Achmad recounted.

I couldn't believe it. It's like a Middle Eastern-style Chupacabra tale that really makes you wonder how engrained and widespread this insane and parochial view is of Jews in Arab society. Maybe it's isolated to Achmad and a few others, but that experience really hit me in the face. It got me really thinking about what the psychological roots of anti-semitism, and indeed racism are. It turns out that many academics liken it to the psychology behind urban myths, like the Chupacabra or the Yeti. People cling to these stories, I imagine, perhaps out of the need to scapegoat, or purely out of the human being's propensity to naturally side with anything that promotes a feeling of belonging to another group, a sort of solidarity "us" against "them" sort of concept. Whatever it was, it opened my eyes, but still gave me hope for how the future of Israel might look like; individuals who can rise above the mistrust, hate and hyperbole to take advantage of the relatively (in middle eastern terms) egalitarian social construct that has been built here in this imperfect, but occasionally improving democracy. Glad to have finally met one of them from the other side: Achmad.

Israeli/Syrian Music in the Golan

About a week ago, I was lucky enough to have had my dad and my older brother visit me in Israel. They were here for about a week or so and we really squeezed just about everything we could in Israel in such a short amount of time. Some highlights were:

1.) Discovering great neighborhoods in Jerusalem just walking around on the way to the old city.
2.) Going into the "western wall tunnels" that go underground tangent to the Western Wall in Jerusalem. On this tour, we were able to see essentially the entire Western Wall as it was before the second temple was destroyed. Incredible.
3.) Staying in a great hotel overlooking all of the Sea of Galilee (again, one of my favorite spots in Israel).
4.) Having an amazing lunch in a druze town in the Golan.
5.) Arriving in Eilat only to find that our reservations were somehow not made. Subsequently, we found a very expensive hotel room at the Hilton (the best hotel in Eilat) that overlooked the entire gulf of Eilat (gulf of Acaba). It was on the top floor looking south out over the gulf and we could see Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt from the window.

But, I think one of the best experiences on this particular trip was when we were decending from the Golan heights down to the Sea of Galillee around sunset in our car. We tuned into a radio station (103 FM) that had great 60's and 70's Israeli music. The juxtapositon of these great songs and the timeless feeling that they exuded and the image of the peaciful Israeli frontier land, was really euphoric. What was especially interesting and amazingly metaphoric was how every now and then, a Syrian radio station on the same frequency, most likely from close-by Damascus would push the Israeli station out of the frequency, before the Israeli station would take over once again. I just sat there amazed at what I was hearing and how representative it was of the recent history of this land. But, back to the the euphoric feeling that this juxtaposition gave me - I often tell friends out here that sometimes I live vichariously through the feeling of how Israel was in its pioneer days, back when this special rugged collectivism was the central tenet of how Israel overcame the seemingly insurmountable odds of merely existing. I truly cherish that feeling and lament that this feeling has been swallowed up the folds of time, and slowly eaten up by the urban decay and selfish individualism I often find in Tel Aviv. I guess this is the main reason I want to move to the Golan. As well as as I can articulate it, I want to experience that feeling first hand "in the field". Imagine how living on a kibbutz in the northern Golan and serving in the military will instill this feeling in me. Let's hope this becomes a reality.

אין לי סבלנות

As most of Israel had already made its way to a friend or family member's house for the first night of the Jewish new year, a peaceful calm settled upon Tel Aviv. The roads were almost empty and I was riding shotgun in a car driven by my roommate to catch a family dinner that we were right on time for.

"אין לי סבלנות"-"ugh I have no patience" my roommate announced as she kicked the accelerator hard and sped toward the row of cars and their red lights not even 20 meters ahead of us, before sternly applying the brakes to a full stop. As we stopped, she pulled out another cigarette and lit it - her 20th of the day probably.

A few days back I was walking along a street close to my apartment, approaching the stoplight at the end of that street. A bus breezed by me with it's engine noticibly at high RPMs before slamming on its brakes in order to complete the right hand turn that it had to make without killing anyone aboard. Is that really necessary I wondered to myself, thinking about the bus drivers in Colorado, who with their cool and collected driving could lull me into doing something that usually alludes me: sleeping in a moving vehicle. How much gas do you waste and how many transmissions per bus-life do you go though with that insane driving? I started to think as I approached that intersection why was it necessary to honk at someone who fails to move within one milisecond after a light turns green. Or why it was necessary that there is a brief yellow light before the green light in Israel.

There is a palpable, thumb-twiddling, muscle-twitching, head-scratching impatience woven into the fabric of the Israeli national psyche that I never understood until recently. It is a national phenomenon and is a defining characteristic of the Israeli mentality: live in the moment. If something isn't available right now, you will go get that thing that you want without much regard for the immediate or distant future.

Tunnel vision => That thing you want

After listening to many Israelis offer an explanation of why they find it acceptable to build in the West Bank, I finally understand why and can decode their apathetic reasoning. After analyzing some of the political moves by the Israeli government I finally understand why there were made: solving a problem in the short term is a more attractive option than the non-indulgence involved in longer term solutions. The latter could be considered a means of existential defense but, you get my point.

Blah blah blah. It's 2:39 in the morning and I'm wrecked. Good night.

Contrabando Dominicano

I suppose that while this post doesn't really have to do with Israeli culture directly, it does serve to highlight the diversity of the folks that Israel attracts to it's shores. This diversity can come in all sorts of flavors: culturally imperialistic Russians from the most recent wave of Aliyah with their hole-in-the-wall stores complete with Russian-only signs, the eastern European hassidic Jews who, in the 110 degree heat of the summer, can still run around the streets of Tel Aviv dressed head to toe in black, yelling at the gays for poisoning the Jewish purity of Israel, the hyper-groomed, ultra aggressive males dubbed "arsim" driving their subwoofers-on-wheels, and of course, the Dominican guy who comes to Israel looking for, among other things (whores and drugs), a way to get to Madrid to join his extended family and to become a hair stylist.

If you were to ask me how this Dominican guy, Juan, got to Israel or under what specific circumstances he fled the Dominican Republic, I honestly wouldn't be able to tell you the truth. He was more slippery than a goddamned bullfrog. But, in between the Spanish rants full of hyperbole, lies and ignorant, racist garbage, I was able to surmise a few indisputable facts about the man:

1. He liked women

2. He had a burning desire to make sure that you knew that he liked women

3. He was ambitious in his 'highly developed' strategies of arriving on EU soil

4. He was running from the law

5. He wore snakeskin boots

The other problem with this muchacho was that he couldn't speak a lick of English. Now, this is generally a problem outside of the Spanish-speaking populations of South America, Western Europe and the United States. Case in point: One day, about two weeks ago, back when I was still staying in the hostel, I was walking past the reception desk when I looked over at a scene that was developing. A latin-looking guy, about 5'4", with greasy, frosted hair, and a bad attitude (even for Israeli standards) was chewing out the Israeli receptionist all in Spanish.

"Como te dije, pana, quiero que me asegures de que si me quedo acá y si dejo mis maletas acá, que no hay ladrones en los cuartos que me las van a robar, comprende?"

The receptionist had no clue what this guy was saying. Even though Israel is known for having some of the best language teaching methods in the world and teaches English to every Israeli from 1st grade on, Spanish is not what would be considered a very high priority language to learn around here. So, needless to say, all the receptionist could do was look around for someone to help him and try to talk to the guy in English. Sensing that this situation had to be diffused somehow, I started to speak to the Dominican in Spanish. As soon as I spoke to him, he smiled at me like I was a picture of Hesús or something and calmed down a bit. After about 20 minutes of translating between the receptionist and the Dominican about everything ranging from whether there were thieves staying in the room they had assigned to him to what the spoken language was in Israel, the Dominican trusted the hostel enough to book one night there.

I, of course, had become his only outlet to the world, his only way of expressing his aforementioned racist and chauvanistic bullshit. And while I was quietly disgusted by what this individual was saying to me, it was nice to speak a little Spanish again - to feel a sense of self worth in the face to the brutal day-to-day blows that learning the Hebrew language inflicts upon my self esteem. But some of the tangents that this guy would fly off on were simply ridiculous.

One of the first questions he asked me was, "so, where do you get women?"

"Um, you might end up running into some Spanish speakers at the hostel. Maybe you could start something there".

"No. What I mean is where do you get the women?"

Pause. "Well, I don't know. There might be some bar around here that has some sort of side business like th.."

"What kind of women?"

"I don't know. I've never gone looking for whores".

As if I had cursed his mother or said I was gay, he stared at me with his eyebrows turned down like he couldn't believe what had just come out of my mouth.

He did eventually find his whores. He told me that upon entering a whorehouse that his Panamanian friend had recommended to him, he made the money sign with his hands and started humping the air, all the while making a confused face to convey the fact that he was asking a question. This seemed to work; however, he came back only half satisfied; the whore was way too expensive for his taste.

The straw that really broke the camel's back for my relationship with the Dominican was when he asked me if I would accompany him up to Haifa (a fairly large Israeli port city about an hour north of Tel Aviv by train) for a day. Suspicious, I asked him why.

"Well, I'd pay for your round trip transport, your breakfast, lunch and dinner if you walk around the port with me and try to negotiate with one of those cargo-ship guys for them to ship me to Europe as contraband. Do you know what contraband is, Joshua?"

I just stood up, shook my head and walked out of the room, leaving behind my old scheming Dominican friend to his own thoughts. Maybe he managed to make it up to Haifa and get somebody to jam him into one of those little barrels and ship him off to the EU. That's how I like to imagine it, anyway. A little, hot-headed, melodramatic Dominican guy cramped in some barrel waiting as patiently as he can as he makes his way to Barcelona.

Homeless No More

Well, after 3 weeks of listening to Afrikaners throwing up at 6 in the morning on the tail end of a 3 day bender, after catching the inevitable "hostel flu" and paying dearly for it, and after having at least one item of my food stolen every day, I've moved out of the hostel I was staying at and finally signed a sublease for an apartment that is one block from the beach in Tel Aviv.

Even though my room could not by any means be described as quaint, charming or spacious, it is, for all intents and purposes, decent pad for a foreigner to live in for a while. With a balcony from which one can see the Mediterranean, two Israeli shootafim (roommates) and an unbelievably low pricetag, I have to say that I lucked out a little bit when I stumbled upon this place on a great housing website called "www.HOMELESS.co.il". That's not to say that securing this apartment was a cakewalk... quite the contrary, actually.

In typical Israeli fashion, an Israeli couple who was looking at the apartment at the same time I was told me that they had already signed the contract and had, consequently, secured the apartment.

"eeehh vat are you saying?", Ofer, my current roommate and the tenant giving the tour, asked - surprised as I was.

"!אההה... כבר חתמנו את החוזה, אז הוא לא יכול לעשות שום דבר!" - rapid fire Hebrew with finger pointed at me...

"Ok, we talk with landlady and see what a fuck is going on", Ofer frustratingly said.

Two minutes later, Ofer came back with an answer: The landlord had never met or spoken with the Israeli couple on the tour with me.

Acting confused, the couple just shrugged it off as if maybe they had spoken with an associate of the landlord. Either way, they never signed the contract and I had already set up a meeting with the landlord to sign the contract just to get a foot in the door. I guess seeing the way Israelis successfully and stealthily weasel around these processes rubbed off on me in a positive way. With a few more situations like this one to navagate, I'll hopefully be a pro.

There was also the issue of me not being an Israeli citizen. There was absolutely "no way" that the landlord could let a tourist sign an official contract; but after a few minutes of sweet talking her with the other Israeli tenants - assuring her that I was just a nice Jewish American boy looking to study Hebrew in peace - she reluctantly conceded that it would be ok for me to move in... under the condition that I accept some "Jewish penicillin" (chicken soup) from her family's restaurant the next day. For the sake of securing the apartment and for the sake of killing off my "hostel flu", I accepted. All that was left to do was to move out of the hostel.

Not all was rough and tumble in the hostel; It was a great place to meet people from all around the world - and believe me I met some INTERESTING people that will be the subject of the next post - but to keep my sanity (in all senses of the word), to save a couple hundred dollars a month, and to give myself the best environment for achieving my goal - Cultural integration - it was a must to move out. Now, I can study all the Hebrew I want to in peace. Let's just hope that the block that separates this incredible beach from myself and also the temptation to have a little party every night on the balcony is not enough to throw me off course... it will be hard.