Fact Check

Okay, Nim put the following post up himself. Everything he said is the absolute truth, except that he has no shoe factory, and that photo is a bit dated. The true part is that he is my awesome friend. . .

My Awesome Friend Nim

This is my awesome friend Nim! If something ever happens to me, I would let Nim have my kids so they could work at his shoe factory.

International Blog Day

International Blog Day is almost here!
About GVO, Projects, Weblog, Blogger News
Don’t forget! The second annual international Blog Day is coming up this Thursday, August 31st. Please spread the blog love by participating.
A very exciting thing is the vast array of languages in which people are blogging about Blog Day. It will be a day in which we celebrate our right to express ourselves online, and help each other to be heard above the din of spin and bad news… and in some places, help people to be heard despite efforts by governments, politicians or companies to silence independent speech online. Thanks to Israeli blogger Nir Ofir who conceived and organized Blog Day. I repeat a recent quote from about why we should all participate:
On these days, of war in the middle east, I would like to remind you all that BlogDay is a celebration of people and for people. It is a celebration of the ability to visit blogs that are different from our own culture, point of view and attitude and it is a celebration of free content written by people like you and me. Wars, in the other hand, are being foughtby governments. Let us not let governments to stop the celebration of Internet, Blogging and democracy.
Here are Nir’s instructions for participating:
In one long moment In August 31st, bloggers from all over the world will post a recommendation of 5 new Blogs, Preferably, Blogs different from their own culture, point of view and attitude. On this day, blog surfers will find themselves leaping and discovering new, unknown Blogs, celebrating the discovery of new people and new bloggers.
BlogDay posting instructions:
1. Find 5 new Blogs that you find interesting2. Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending on them on BlogDay 20053. Write a short description of the Blogs and place a a link to the recommended Blogs4. Post the BlogDay Post (on August 31st) and5. Add the BlogDay tag using this link: http://technorati.com/tag/BlogDay2006 and a link to BlogDay web site at http://www.blogday.org/
If you are interested, Global Voices invites you to help fellow bloggers living in other parts of the world get to know you better. We’re finding that people in different countries blog for different reasons, and that blogospheres in different places have developed different kinds of relationships with the rest of their culture, politics, and mainstream media. We’d like to help people understand you and your region’s blogosphere better. So if you have the time, please help us do this by writing a post any time between now and Thursday (or several if you like), answering some or all of the following questions:
Why did you start blogging?
What do you blog about mainly?
Do you blog in your first language or in another language, and why?
What motivates you to keep blogging even if (like most bloggers) you’re not paid much for it?
Is your audience mainly inside your own country or around the world?
What do your family and friends think about the fact that you are a blogger?
Does your boss know you have a blog?
What is the relationship between blogs in your country or region and the mainstream media?
When you blog, how would you describe what you write? Is it part of a conversation? Is it ranting? Is it a daily diary? Is it journalism? Is it some or all of these things at different times? Does the definition matter?
Have blogs started to have an impact on politics in your country? Have they started to influence what stories get covered in your country’s media? We’d love to know some examples.
When you’re done, please trackback to this post, or leave a link to your post in the comments section of this post. If you don’t have a blog but would like to share your views about the state of blogs and blogging in your country, please feel free to leave a comment on this post. On Blog Day, we’ll do a post or two summarizing, quoting, and linking to what you said.
Rebecca MacKinnon

Goodbye, Hugh!

Israel, Phase II starts today.

Enjoying the Pool

Monday nights are late night swimming and movie night at our pool. The pool stays open until midnight!! Here are Maira and her best friend Miriam, new arrivals in Israel Aliza and David, and Hugh enjoying an evening swim.

Creepy Conversations

Shailee, my daughter, asked me to write in a different color today.

Even through all of the crazy turmoil of the past summer, there have been new immigrants arriving in Israel by the plane-load! Israelis say they are flattered that people choose to come from wealthy nations as well as poor. I think it's cool, and a nice boon to Israeli society. They could use the brain-power, money, and rule-following, bill-paying ethics of the immigrants.

At the same time, watching the hoards arrive feels a little creepy-apocalyptic to me. Witness: the ingathering of the Jews. . . It can't be a good portent for the world that Jews are feeling uncomfortable enough in nations like England, France, and the US to forgo the economic and political stability of the First World.

Many of these new arrivals found their way to my town and we meet through friends and at the pool. Conversations have turned to pragmatic topics such as whether one should rent or buy in Israel and the prospects of property values in the future. One jarring factor: Properties are doing pretty well in this area for Israel, except of course if Iran blows us all away with his new nukes.

Real conversation I had with a friend pool-side: If you know that Ahmadinijad will send a nuke in a specified amount of time, would you try to leave Israel? Well, of course, I say. Her husband's position, though, is that a world without a Jewish state would not be worth living in for a Jew. Interesting point, but why are we thinking about this???

I guess people had those sorts of conversations back in the climax of the Cold War, But I remember them feeling a lot more theoretical then. Was that just my age-appropriate feeling of invincibility? These current quandaries feel much closer to real.

Restless, bored, anxious

Restless:
My kids are home all day. See them here playing with the neighbors. It's been really hot, so we don't go out much until the evening. It's humid and swampy, just like the Eastern Seaboard (US), but no chance of a cooling thunderstorm to break up the heat.

Bored: It's been a long summer wasted on that stupid war. See my toe? It is product of a very undignified, sitcom-esque spill last week. Can't put it into a shoe, so running and cycling are out. The drag from the water is painful, so I can't really swim. So I wrapped it and swam pull laps (arms only) a bunch of times, which is maybe the reason for it's slightly infected state. So swimming,I guess, is out too. Argh!

Anxious: Approach-avoidance conflict. That is how I would describe my family now. We want to stay in Israel, but we don't want Hugh to go back to the US. Counting down from 5 days. . .

Jon Benet

What a relief to be thinking about Jon Benet Ramsey again. What a pleasant distraction from obsessing about who won the war (as if anyone can really tell the day after it's over), the spread of global terrorism, and the coming of the next World War. If only we could bring back the OJ Simpson trial. Isn't there some new evidence to be scraped off the glove? Better yet, there must be a soiled dress out there that needs attention. Ah, for simpler times. . .

Okay, so I obsess a little. From checking news sources, to blogger updates, one could really spend their whole day in the act of deepening confusion. Lucky for me, as I am soon to find myself with children in school, little gainful employment, and a very long-distance marriage; got to fill my time somehow. Anyway, the more I read, the more muddled affairs seem. I like the bloggers. It's nice to know that there are smart people, and less than smart people, out there thinking things through sometimes even creatively. Check my side bar for some that I like best. I will put more up as I find them.

At the Pool

Shailee spends an afternoon at the pool with her best friend Nori.







If you are looking for something interesting to read about the perpetually muddled situation over here, I came across this article:
http://www.tnr.com/user/nregi.mhtml?i=w060814&s=taub081606

Cycling

A rare sighting of Maira, age 11, outside during daylight hours.

I saw in the comments that Jean and Dana are wondering if I get out on my bike much.

It took me 3/4 of the year here to work up the nerve to start riding regularly. The roads are not so well suited for riders here, not like the quiet sprawling farm-land that Dana and I used to ride through in Howard County.

Here, if there is enough of a shoulder, the road is probably a major artery and not so fun to ride on. On the other hand, a minor road is likely to be too narrow. Not to mention that Israeli drivers have little inclination to share the road with other drivers, let alone cyclists.

This spring I finally got fed up with the sad sight of my bike gathering dust. I found an acceptable route that was actually pleasant. It goes north toward Haifa on a road with a wide shoulder, then up into the Carmel mountain with a hefty 10K or more climb, for a total of roughly 35 miles. There are many cyclists along this route, so I often ended up riding with someone which was nice.

What I like about Israeli cyclist is that they like company. If I ride in the states and come across a faster cyclist, or any cyclist, they just wave and move on. Here, when we meet, we adjust our rates to ride together. (Or, I should say, they don't seem to mind slowing down for me.) I see people waving each other down if they are going in opposite directions, then change directions so that they have someone to ride home with. Very nice.

That was all fine until summer hit.

The climb, like everything, is totally exposed and very unpleasant in the full sun. By summer, I would have to leave by 6 AM to avoid the heat. Anyone who knows me well, knows that 6 AM doesn't happen. Then the rockets started coming, so North became off limits (though I have friends that continued riding that route).

So after some more sad weeks while my bike sat neglected a corner, I finally found another route that heads south to Givat Ada. It is shorter, and less challenging. And to avoid the heat I go in the evening just in time for rush hour, which is not so bad going toward a small town like GA, but a little crazy around the train station in Binyamina. Remember what I said about adaptation?

Anyway, the rockets are once again tucked away in the bunkers of Southern Lebanon, and the days are shortening. So maybe I will resume my Northern route soon.

Zichron Yaakov

View of Zichron from the beach.

Evening Swim

Evening swim.

Off to the beach

Shailee, age 8.

My kids keep going to play in the miklat (shelter). We live in a row of ten cottages which share a communal shelter.

It turned out that during the stressful moments of the sirens, it was comforting to meet friendly neighbors in the shelter. The children of the complex brought games down.

When we first heard the sirens, the look of anxiety on the children's faces was heartbreaking. But when they found that they would meet their friends in the shelter and play Uno, they relaxed. Now the shelter still holds the allure of a quiet, private place for Uno playing. I guess if the cease-fire holds, the door to the shelter will go back to being locked and the children will be a bit disappointed.
Now we are off to the beach.

Adaptation

This is Namir. He is six.

Yesterday Shailee, Namir and I went to Jerusalem for the evening to the Khutzot Hayotzer, or the Arts and Crafts festival with our friends Tzofit, Gur, and Ronel.

I have been looking around carefully to see if everyone will act differently now that the war is 'over.'

When the war began, the difference was obvious. I walked into the supermarket to do my Shabbat shopping to find the normally festive atmosphere replaced by a palpable tension.

When the rockets reached Haifa the following Sunday, most people stayed home from work. I walked through town, the streets were deserted, and I could hear the news coming from every home. Later in the day, friends called each other to decide whether it was safe to go to the pool. Most of us went.

Monday morning, back to normal. I felt safe. Adaptation is amazing. And Israelis seem almost religious about not allowing the enemy the victory of disrupting their lives. So we went about our business, just now carrying a large block of anxiety on our shoulders.

So now? I haven't noticed anyone unloading their blocks yet. Now we worry about the blame, cost, outcome, durability, etc.

Cease-fire

Cease-fire is excellent. Seams that all sides are proclaining victory, and defeat. But a day without rockets is a good day. Lets see if it holds.

Lots of people have been writing to me to see how we're holding up here on the southern border of the 'red zone.' Thank you for your concern. I decided to start this blog so you can check in with me at your leisure, and I hopefully will not be too lazy to keep it updated.

If you don't already know, I came to Israel with my husband, Hugh, and three children in August 2005 on my husband's one year sabbatical. Hugh is a professor of mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland. He came to Israel sponsored both by UMD and Fulbright, and he has been working very hard at establishing research ties with colleagues all over Israel, and especially at his host school of Tel Aviv University.

We spent the year living in Zichron Yaakov, which is a beautiful small town just south of Haifa. Turns out that we all love living here. Well, we love it a little less from inside the bomb shelter, but that's another story.

By late spring Hugh began to make plans to return to the US. I felt, however, that somehow, the family was not ready to go back. The kids spent the year on the very taxing task of adjustment, and were just beginning to feel comfortable. They just began to speak Hebrew, find meaningful friendships, and adjust to the new social requirements. What a shame to yank them out of here just when they got settled.

Not to mention, that I also didn't want to leave. Just a little longer, I thought. One year is just not enough. Hugh can go back to teach his class, and the kids and I will continue on here. Luckily with his flexible schedule, Hugh can come back here several times and especially for the long break between semesters. Seemed like a good idea late spring.

Then summer came and brought the war with it. I can't really explain why I am still staying. My parents call all the time asking what it will take to make me come home. I can't say I am without apprehension, but I am not ready to leave. Anyway, cease-fire today. Yipee. Can we go back to normal life now???