Theater night at the Abba Chushi Center

This morning, Rachel texted me saying that Smadar (a women who works with new olim in Haifa) told her about some kind of concert near us that night. She said it was pretty cheap - 20 shek for both of us. Let's do it, I said.

The flyer she showed me later made some vague reference to music and art, but we really didn't know what to expect. Also, I was kind of skeptical about the address: 71 Abba Hillel Silver. Abba Hillel Silver is a street that bends both geographically and demographically away from the rest of Neve Sha'anan. During our August apartment hunt we looked at a place on this street. We were disconcerted by the way the street proceeded downhill away from the rest of the neighborhood, and seemed to only contain and endless row of huge, impersonal housing complexes. After looking at the apartment (which was kind of shabby), we passed by a group of men sitting around near the building entrance, eating pizza.

"You don't want to live here," they told us. "This neighborhood isn't for you, you should go live in Neve Sha'anan, on the other side of the hill.

Needless to say, I didn't think this was the kind of street that would house a concert venue. But I was wrong.

Tonight, we passed that apartment building and kept walking until we noticed signs for the "Abba Chushi Center", named after an early mayor of Haifa. We turned a corner and, lo and behold, there was an enormous open space with a relatively attractive looking public building in the middle. Once inside, it became clear that this is THE community center for this area of Haifa. Posters and signs and sheets were everywhere in sight, advertising countless activities and classes offered in the center. We proceeded to the auditorium.

As was to be expected at an event like this in Haifa, the crowd was noticeably a) old and b) Russian. These observations served to further amplify the bizarre hilarity of the performances that were to ensue.

It was a pretty big auditorium, and our seats were right in front, second row (score!). In the lobby, we met up with Rachel's ulpan friend, who had brought her boyfriend along, and they too sat in our row. Just before the performance, a whole crowd of young ulpan students also showed up, and as the MC gave his opening remarks, it became clear that the evening was specifically targeted at olim (hence the ulpan connection), and that all the performers were also olim themselves.

So I've set the stage: auditorium mostly full of old Russians, but two rows of young internationals in the front. The stage has got serious sound and lighting equipment, and a serious looking guy is sitting ready behind a serious looking computer screen. A 40-something blonde woman (dressed like a 20-something blonde woman) is hovering around, seemingly in charge of something. The lights dim.

Here's how it all went down:

Act I: Tortured Violin Genius

A tall man stepped onto the stage carrying a violin. He was wearing a white shirt tucked into jeans. Over this, he was wearing one of those long suit jackets that only Chassidim wear. He was definitely no Chassid, though. He was clean shaven and had bangs that remind me of John Linnell. His face looked dark and mysterious.

He began to fiddle, and he was really good. But it wasn't not your usual fiddling. In the background, the sound system pumped out drum-machine drumbeats and synthesized accompaniment music. It kind of felt like a club. The lights were neon and flashing all over the place.

He played about three or four songs. I could tell which parts were hardest because he screwed his face up in concentration and I thought his head was going to explode but then he collected himself. He looked like some kind of supervillain that is going to be thwarted one day by James Bond.

As the last song came to an end, the lights began flashing like crazy. Somehow they made the room look like it was shaking back and forth and I thought I was going to have a seizure. Also, a fog machine started spewing fog in the back of the stage. All this with a guy fiddling for his life. It was pretty trippy.

Act II: Pre-Teen Ballroom Dancers

As the two couples glided onto the stage, my first thought was "man, these people are really small". But after a couple seconds I realized that they were children.

Let me explain the confusion. They were very young (announced as 12, later corrected to 14), but they were dressed like adult dancers. That is to say, the boys were wearing fancy suit pants, one was wearing a vest and bow tie and the other was wearing a tie with some black dress shirt. The girls were wearing these weird dresses/costumes with crazy sleeves and skirts - all revealing way more skin than 14 year olds should be revealing.

Then they started to dance. Holy moly! These teeny boppers could dance! The pairs were waltzing and tango-ing and doing all kinds of moves I don't have words for. There was much fancy footwork, emotional head movements and dramatic gesticulation. These kids were shooting for "Dancing with the Stars". Or ice dancing.

They would dance to a song playing over the stereo, but the song would randomly fade out in the middle, and they would just stop dancing, and the crowd would applause. This usually resulted in some SERIOUS gesticulation, in the form of arms spread wide by the girls, as if to say "Yes! I am wonderful!" and one-arm gesturing, combined with an unsettling stare/smile by the boys, pointing to the girls as if to say "Get a load of THIS".

Somehow, the overall effect of really young kids dancing, dressing, moving, and gesticulating like adults was both unnerving and mesmerizing.

Act III: French Guy

First, they set up his props, which included a cafe table with a bottle of wine, two glasses, roses, and chairs, and a five foot tall model of the Eiffel Tower with a hat on top of it.

The guy himself was an Israeli who had lived in Paris for a while and is now a returning citizen. He was wearing a sparkly gold skinny tie over a mother-of-pearl shirt. He had curly long hair, and to be honest he looked a lot like Weird Al (thin version).

His act consisted of talking about different French musicians and then singing their songs. In French. I'm not sure why he thought anyone would be able to understand him, but that didn't stop him from singing his songs, and singing a lot of them.

Some of the songs were silly and some were sad. He was very committed to miming the emotions as he sang the song, as if to compensate for the fact that they were all in French, and no one could understand him (oh, except this one girl in the front row who we saw mouthing the words along with him).

Sometimes he used props, and for one or two songs he had some old guy in a cap and red sunglasses play accordion to accompany him. At another point he invited a couple from the audience (he took two of the young ulpan folk) to sit at his cafe table. He poured them glasses of wine and then took a swig directly from the bottle, and they stayed there for a little while while he sang more songs.

One of his songs, he said, he was going to sing in French, Russian, and English. For the record, we couldn't understand the English part. I think the song was about Moscow.

French guy took about 10 times longer than all the other acts. He would go on about French musicians to no end. The expression on his face showed that he was so happy because he knew how much you appreciated French music. Finally he was done.

Act IV: Return of the Pre-Teen Ballroom Dancers

This time, the girls were disturbingly skimpy dresses, and the boys were wearing black shirts with a thin v neck that went down to their navels. And the dancing involved a lot more hip movement and butt shaking from both genders.

The truth is, the whole act sort of made sense for the girls, but not for the boys. Girls do things like ballet and dance and figure skating and cheerleading and all that, so if you're a 14 year old girl it's not the craziest thing in the world to put on a dress and dance like that.

But the guys... how do these guys not get beaten up at school? Ok, maybe they do, who knows, but you'd expect boys that age to be just a LITTLE self conscious about doing the tango with a skimpy dressed girl while wearing an outfit reminiscent of Chris Kattan's "Mango" character on SNL.

But if these boys were embarrassed, it sure didn't show. Their faces were serious, only to be broken by a huge grin of pride and self-satisfaction. They looked liked the characters on Glee.

As I said, disturbing and mesmerizing.

Act V: Drums

This was a pretty normal act. Two guys came in playing large African drums. Then they switch to darbukas. Then they pulled out this big wall/net where they had hung up lots of buckets and pots and pans.

"These look like ordinary items," they said, "but we are going to show you how they can be turned into percussion instruments."

Wait, let me guess: by hitting them with drumsticks? Correct!

So they did a whole percussion piece with the stuff on the wall and it was amazingly awesome.

For the last bit, they called for volunteers, basically to bang on lots of stuff they had with lots of drumsticks. One parent sent up their cute 5 year old son and the guys were like awww. This, apparently, was the cue for all the REST of the parents to send up their kids as well and all of a sudden the guys were like wait, we need some adults for this to work also.

Ultimately one of the guys kind of forced a few ulpan people to come up and participate and then everyone banged on a bunch of stuff, but it sounded good because the guys were drumming cool rhythms over everyone.

Act VI: Finale

At some point during the end of the percussion, French Guy showed up out of nowhere and started banging some of the pots. Most of us in the audience felt that he was kind of hogging the stage, and were dismayed when, after the drum guys cleared off, he came back to the microphone, apparently ready to sing another song. Didn't he already get a turn?

This song turned out to be "גשר צר מאד", which he sang to end the performance on some kind of Jewish, Israeli note. To further the hackneyed Israeli quotient, he sang "הבאנו שלום עליכם", and then pushed it over the edge with "הנה מה טוב ומה נעים".

Scientific English, Jewish Hebrew

I was sitting in class today and thinking about the fact that there is so much English in my science classes. One professor writes all her slides in English, but even the classes whose slides are in Hebrew nonetheless require a high level of English knowledge.

Indeed, it's safe to say that an Israeli who is either studying or working in the sciences can be assumed to have a decent understanding, though perhaps not a verbal mastery of, English.

I was struck by the similarity to the knowledge of and familiarity with Hebrew that comes with learning Judaic subjects. Technically, you can study Judaism (be it Torah, Jewish law, Jewish thought, or whatever) without a strict knowledge of Hebrew. An etrog could be a citron, an eiruv a communal partition, and mikva a reservoir. But for reasons, partially ideology and partially convenience, we use the terms and phrases already provided for us in Hebrew.

In the case of Hebrew and science, the reasons are mostly convenience and probably not ideological. After all, I doubt that speakers of French, German or Russian feel much ideological need to learn science in English (tuh!). But as someone who has a lot of experience observing the Hebrew of English speakers in a Torah setting, there is a certain reverse-familiarity when observing the English of Hebrew speakers in a science setting.

Banks!

The fundamental problem with blogging about things that happened weeks ago is that I don't remember the details. As such, the story of how we chose a bank will be brief, and lacking in the depth and detail of our shipping story, the irony being that the choice of bank will probably have a greater impact over the long run.

The three main banks we've seen around Haifa are Leumi, HaPoalim and Discount (or, as I pronounce it in my head when I just read the Hebrew - DiscoNet). There are plenty more out there too, it's not like health care where there are four big names and that's it. There's zillions.

There is a Leumi branch literally next to our house, and there's a HaPoalim branch in Ziv, the nearest commercial intersection. We first checked out HaPoalim, and then checked out Leumi. We were kind of hoping we'd like Leumi better, since it was so close.

However, we liked HaPoalim. People advised us to not get too bogged down trying to choose a bank based on who gives you the better deal, down to the shekel. Rather, they said, look for a bank that has good hours and service. Although the hours were more or less the same, the HaPoalim branch is a large building with many people working. There is an orderly number system, and you get to see someone quickly. Our lady was very nice, and answered all our questions. She had a very clear pamphlet that outlined all of the costs for various transactions at the bank.

Leumi, on the other hand, was a small branch. There were only two people working, and the guy we spoke to was kind of tired and impatient. There was no system for getting a number that we could see. So we went with HaPoalim.

The accounts themselves were pretty much the same at both places. Because I am a student, both Rachel and I were able to get student bank accounts. We were told in both places that the benefits for students are much better than the benefits for עולים חדשים.

As for the fees.... so far there haven't really been any. We heard stories about Israeli banks charging fees for every little transaction, but we haven't felt it. The student bank account lets you perform most normal transactions without any fees, and you can always do things like go online to check your account, and things like that for free. You have to pay for a checkbook, but so far the only time we ever write checks is paying the rent, so if we have to pay 8 shkalim for every 25 checks we write, we don't really care.

Supposedly the fees come out when you start doing things like transferring money from the US into your account here, or vice versa. We haven't done much of that, and there are ways around it.

As a nice bonus, we each got two gifts from Bank HaPoalim - a backpack and a spiral notebook whose front cover is a red leather-enclosed calculator. How cool!

...לא יקרא עוד שמך יונתן

As you may recall, the first time we tried to get our תעדות זהות, we forgot to bring our documents. We went back the following Sunday with all our documents. We showed up early again, waited in line again, and declared our purpose to the lady in the booth again, who said "weren't you guys here last week?"

Our turn came pretty quickly, and a nice lady began filling out the forms. There isn't much to the process, so it didn't take long. She did tell us one thing we'd never heard before: that we have some sort of three month grace period, during which we can "change our mind". I'm still not sure what that means exactly. Maybe it means if you leave Israel within the first three months, you've essentially aborted your aliyah, and maybe your kids aren't considered Israeli, or something. It was kind of a surprise.

Our main concern was Rachel's name. If a couple makes aliyah after they get married, but before the woman changes her name in America, she can do so pretty easily by just telling the מסרד הפנים what name she wants on her תעודת זהות. Rachel wanted her name to be Rachel Levinson, but she also wanted it to say "Horwitz" on the bottom part (there are two cards that make up a תעודת זהות, a top and bottom card). That way we will avoid confusion and/or suspicion at airports, mostly. Rachel has already been suspected once already!

We told this to the lady, and although there was some initial confusion, it seemed clear that she knew what she wanted. However, when we were finished, she told us to go pick them up at the card-printing-booth. Lo and behold, Horwitz was nowhere to be seen on Rachel's. By this time, our lady had already moved on to the next customer in the queue, and we didn't have time to wait for our next go around. Rachel had to make another trip later that week just to get it fixed; now it's as it should be.

However, there was one other name change - instead of יונתן, my תעודת זהות read יהונתן. I immediately realized why: when we were processed in the airport's little מסרד הפנים, the guy behind the desk spelled my name with a ה, even though I've never spelled it that way. Didn't have his coffee yet, I guess. But clearly the mistake was carried over to the very card that is supposed to identify me. Like Rachel, I too got my named legally changed, albeit unintentionally!

My first reaction was to go with her and have mine fixed, too, in case the extra letter ever caused confusion. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that would probably happen rarely if ever. After all, who would raise an eyebrow at יהונתן vs יונתן?

Plus, I thought to myself, when it comes to Jews in Israel having a ה added to their name, I'm in pretty good company.

East-West

On the way home from מסרד הפנים we walked along רחוב הנביאים, one of the main streets in the Hadar neighborhood of Haifa. Hadar is a neighborhood where mostly Russians and Chareidim live, and it hasn't enjoyed the best reputation. However, parts of it (along with other neighborhoods in Lower Haifa) have been recently gentrifying. רחוב הנביאים, while by no means posh, appeared pretty nice with fun stores to poke one's head into.

Looking for a drink, we poked ours into a store called מזרח-מערב (East-West). Although we didn't find any drinks, we did find a surprise - the store was filled with international food products. They were mostly Asian; hence the name. The products they sold included soy sauces, chili sauces and pastes, all sorts of rice, rice noodles, nori, other sushi components (mats, pickled ginger, etc), and TONS of sushi-serving paraphernalia. We've since heard that they also carry some of the Western hot sauces we are used to, such as Goya's chili sauces made in Mexico, but we didn't notice them at the time, and I find it hard to believe that they would have escaped our view.

Although we excitedly bought some sushi rice and soy sauce, our excitement was tempered by a) the fact that, as it turns out, you can get a lot of these Asian ingredients in your average neighborhood Shupersol and b) the soy sauce was super sugary.

On that last note, make sure to look at soy sauce when you buy it in Israel. The Israeli brands will probably have sugar in them, so if you want normal soy sauce, look for a foreign brand, or check the ingredients. I can only speculate why the Israeli sauces are sweet; my guess is that soy sauce is seen as a condiment, and therefore sweet soy sauce is a tastier thing to dip food into than regular soy sauce. Indeed, most soy based dipping sauces are mixed with honey or another sweetner, and teriyaki sauce is simply sweetened soy sauce. Still, I find the sugar level of the Israeli stuff much too high, and the product overall unacceptable.

We plan to return to the East-West store. Although you can get some of their stuff locally, their selection is much larger. And maybe one day we'll get sushi platters and fancy engraved chopsticks!

For our next stop, I want to check out a store I've heard about where you can whole bean coffee or even (gasp) still-green unroasted coffee...

"זה נראה כמו טיל"

On our first Thursday after landing, Rachel and I paid our first visit to קריית הממשלה, the government building complex that houses the Haifa branches of Office of the Interior, and the Office of Absorption, among many others (such as the Student Authority, but that's another story).

Our only knowledge of the complex's location came from its online street address. We used a combination of Egged's webstie and Google Maps to try and plan a route, and we brought a map, but when we set out we still weren't 100% sure where it was.

Fortunately, as is almost always the case in the umpteen times you don't really know where you're going in Israel, someone on the bus can tell you where to get off. Our someone told us to get off when he got off, and pointed in the general downhill direction.

When we passed a security guard, we asked him where the קריית הממשלה was, and he pointed. "Look for a big building," he said, in Hebrew. "זה נראה כמו טיל". I knew that word, but couldn't remember what it meant. So we kept walking until we saw this building:

Oh yeah, טיל means "missile".

Turns out, this unmissable sight in the Haifa skyline is where all the governmental offices are. This is good, because we've gone there at least three times so far, and as long as we're headed in the right direction we can always find it, even if we get a little lost.

Our plan was twofold: to visit the מסרד הפנים to get our תעודות זהות and the מסרד הקליטה to get started on our סל קליטה payments.

The מסרד הפנים opens at 8 AM and, like at the DMV, the line outside starts forming earlier than that. We got there around quarter-to, and there was already a line of 10 to 15 people. Israel's a pretty bureaucratic place, and there's always someone who needs to visit some kind of office for some reason, and a lot of them were in this one building. Once they opened the doors (at 8 and not a second earlier... even the DMV has more compassion than that!) it was pretty quick getting through, though.

Before entering the מסרד הפנים waiting room we had to state our purpose to a lady in a booth. We told her we were there to get our תעודות זהות. Ok, she said. You brought all your original documents, right?

Shoot. We didn't bring that stuff. If had occurred to us, we probably would have, but it didn't. Maybe becuase we thought we would need that stuff at the מסרד הקליטה in the airport, and we didn't need them in the end.

We told her we had them, of course, and got a number to wait. But when we got to the waiting room we'd have to wait at least an hour or so, and we didn't want to waste our time if it turned out the documents were really necessary. Instead, we went upstairs to the מסרד הקליטה to try our luck there.

Upstairs, there was no line, and we saw a nice man right away. He didn't take a lot of time, and got us set up with our סל קליטה right away. What he does is take your bank account information, and sets up a direct deposit for you to get your shekels. He gave us some information about ulpanim for Rachel, too.

And that was it. Not too painful! Although we didn't actually have to wait at מסרד הפנים, or deal with anyone there, we could see right away that it wasn't nearly as bad as some people describe. The lines were there, but the waits were manageable. Everyone was chilled out and polite. Maybe things are different in Haifa, but we were pleasantly surprised.

And on the way home, we took the Carmelit!

That was weird

[My mp3 player (I know, so 2000's of me) is called the iRiver SPINN]

The cord that connects my SPINN to my computer has two ends, one USB and one proprietary end that only fits into the SPINN. As if that wasn't bad enough, today I tried charging the thing and accidentally tried plugging the proprietary end into my USB port; they kind of look the same.

It didn't fit, but as soon as the metal touched, there was this faint crackling sound and the computer shut off.

Yet another reason not to but the SPINN. There are several others. Its uni-wheel navigation system is annoying, and its touch screen doesn't work well. And its black background is impossible to see in daylight. And, unlike the old iRivers, you can't add music to it by dragging and dropping via a normal Windows window. You have to use their clumsy, slow, software.

I have a ton of real posts to write (i.e. about Israel), as soon as I figure out how to compress photos on my netbook (another post, too).