Fight For Your Right

Know what's cool? Reforms. Reforms are totally in vogue right now. In the US it's health care reform, pension reform and education reform. In the New Middle East it's government reform. So naturally here in Israel we have our own reform movement. But our reform movement is not directed against the government or any other public institutions. No, it is directed against someone far more sinister.

Cell phone companies.

That's right, Israel is officially engaging in cellular reform. As you can see in this blog post and video clip, a new law recently passed which will limit how much cell phone companies can charge you for breaking your contract, and things like that.

Just more evidence that Israelis really care deeply, and passionately. About their cell phones.

Finances in Israel

Four and a half months after making aliyah, Rachel and I decided it would be a good idea to sit down, go through our credit card bills, and figure out just how much we're spending on stuff.

Just kidding. We actually meant to do this a long time ago, but we just got around to it now.

I thought it would be interesting to compare our results with the "sample budget" that Nefesh B'Nefesh has on their website. NBN actually has three sample budgets, one for singles, one for a family of six, and one for a retired couple. I think Rachel and I came closest to the retired couple, although that budget is listed in dollars, and we're at the point where it only makes sense to discuss such things in shekels.

I'll move through the categories that NBN uses: rent, transportation, food, phone/cellphone/internet, utilities, health insurance, entertainment, and arnona (municipal tax).

Rent

This one is hardly worth talking about, since it can vary so widely. We pay ₪2,400 a month for a 50 square meter, 1 bedroom apartment here in Haifa. That's at the higher end of what couples around here would pay for a 1 bedroom, but probably at the low end of what they'd pay in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.

The point is, if you really want to get a sense of rent, pay no attention to NBN. Go to www.yad2.co.il, click on נדל"ן, click on השכרה, look up a particular city or area, and see for yourself. And use the הצג על גבי מפה feature, it's great.

To sum up:

NBN Single: ₪1,200-3,200

NBN Fam of 6: ₪3,700-6,290 (6,290 is a nice round number)

NBN Retiree: $600-1,500

Yoni & Rachel: ₪2,400

Public Transportation

I walk to school, and Rachel takes the bus to uplan. A ₪50 cartisiya (10 rides) gets her through the week, so I'll say that's ₪200 a month. I'd say We also travel to Jerusalem once or twice a month - ₪160 per round trip for both of us.

If you're a student, you can get an unlimited bus ticket for about ₪1,500. This is valid for about a 10 month period. If you're a daily commuter, this deal is totally worth it, and puts all of your intercity bus travel at a flat rate of ₪150 per month.

NBN says to budget ₪300-400 for a single. I might have said that's a little high, considering what I just told you - that a non-student can ride the bus for about ₪200/month and a student can ride for ₪150. But singles tend to travel around a lot, especially for Shabbat. So this range is about right.

To sum up:

NBN Single: ₪300-400

Yoni & Rachel: ₪400-500

Food

Before Rachel and I made aliyah, I believed that food was relatively cheaper in Israel than in America. To put it daintily, this is a big fat lie. Sure, certain things in Israel are cheaper. On a good week you'll find yourself paying the equivalent of 50 cents/pound for staple produce, like tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and eggplants. Sugar and flour are pretty cheap, too, and milk isn't too bad.

But that's where the bargains end. Non-staple produce (i.e. anything other than what I've just mentioned), dairy products, meat and processed foods (i.e. anything that comes in a package, from a can of tomatoes to veggie burgers) - are expensive, and quickly add up. As much as we felt that food made up a solid portion of our budget in New Jersey, it makes up a larger portion here.

But what's really tricky about food is that everyone buys food differently. Some people plan their meals, and some people don't. Some people stock up once a month, and some people shop every week. Some people don't have time to cook, and so most of their food is bought at work, at school, or on the street. Some people don't know how to cook. Some people eat three actual meals a day and some people skip breakfast, barely eat lunch and only really eat dinner. Each one is going to end up with a different food budget.

Here's what we do. We eat three meals a day, and we cook a lot. We plan out suppers week by week, and for breakfast and lunch we keep a running supply of cereal, bread, cheese, tomatoes.. that sort of thing. Each week we'll usually do one major grocery shopping for those meals and a second once we figure out our plans for Shabbat. A typical Shabbat grocery bill, especially if we are cooking two substantial meals, usually costs about as much as food for the rest of the week. Once a month we'll do a grocery trip where we stock up on things other than what we need for meals - be it toilet paper, flour, sugar, etc. We only eat at sit down restaurants if we're getting together with friends or family. About once a week I'll eat lunch at a school cafeteria or buy a felafel or something.

All that being said, let's talk numbers.

For us, a typical month of groceries, one sit down restaurant dinner for two, and about 4 or 5 street restaurant meals (about ₪20 per meal) has cost us around ₪2,000. That's what we've spent without a budget; that is, without setting ourselves a monthly limit, and consciously striving to stay within that limit as we do our shopping. I think if we did budget, we could knock it down, maybe closer to ₪1,500 a month.

NBN assumes a single person will spend ₪1,000-1,600, that retirees will spend $550-800, and that families will spend ₪2,400-5,000. This seems to assume that the typical American oleh shops for food without knowing how to budget, and tends to buy the same sort of food he ate in America, regardless of whether or not it is more expensive here. That is probably true.

Here's the takeaway message: food is more expensive here. Despite that, I think people can feed themselves for less than what the see in NBN's budget, but only if they plan their meals, don't eat out, and choose ingredients that are cheap.

To sum up:

NBN Single: ₪1,000-1,600

NBN Fam of 6: ₪2,400-5,000

NBN Retiree: $550-800

Yoni & Rachel: ₪2,000

Utilities

Utilities are divided into four categories: electricity, gas, water, and arnona. I'll describe our usage of each.

Electricity: we're around the apartment a lot, so we have lights on and computers running all the time (though I don't think that uses so much electricity). We use electricity every time we heat up water to take a shower, and we also run a washing machine about once a week. In the winter, we run a heater in the living room when we're in there, and we have a heater on a timer to heat our bedroom when we go to sleep and when we get up. We get a bill once every two months. Our first was around ₪220 and our second was around ₪600 (because of the heaters). So I'll say our average monthly electricity usage is ₪200.

Gas: we only use gas when we cook, but we cook a lot. Our first bill was ₪35, while the second (more realistic) bill was around ₪90.

Water: We try to keep our showers short, closer to 5 minutes than 10 minutes. When we do the dishes, we turn off the water when we aren't rinsing something. And we use water when we run the washing machine, but it's supposed to be water-saving. We're supposed to get our second water bill soon, but in our first bill we paid ₪100 for the first month. I think when we get the next one it will be more like ₪150 per month, so I'll go with that.

Arnona: Like rent, this varies. But as an oleh chadash you get a 90% discount. We're paying about ₪20 a month.

To sum up:

NBN Single: ₪400-600 (+ ₪40-120 for arnona)

NBN Fam of 6: ₪925-1,500 (+ ₪40-370 for arnona)

NBN Retiree: $150-$300 (+ $10-100 for arnona)

Yoni & Rachel: ₪440 + ₪20 for arnona (more once the discount wears off)

Phone/Cell phone/Internet

We don't have a land line. The truth is, you don't really need one. The phone companies realized this, and recently announced new rock-bottom rates for land lines. But you still don't need one. Between gchat, skype, and the Magic Jack, we are in constant contact with our friends and family in America. With the Magic Jack, we can talk to them for free.

We pay, on average, about ₪200 a month for our two cell phones. We have a pay-as-you-go plan with Cellcom, which means that beyond a base rate of ₪11 per phone, we pay for talk time and texts. Compared with the other, fixed, plans that were being offered to us, I think we made the right choice, as those plans were going to cost ₪300 and above for the two of us.

For internet, we use HOT as the provider and Smile (012) as the ספק. If you don't know what that means, don't worry about it. We pay ₪86 a month for I don't even remember how much bandwidth. It's not lightening fast, but it gets the job done. And although, due to technical frustrations, we often need to reset our connection (it's a long story), we never actually have internet blackouts.

Fun fact: Apple only agreed to sell iPhones here once Israel's three cell phone companies (Cellcom, Orange and Pelephone) agreed to sell 100,000 units each. Per year. For the next three years. That means, in 2013, there will be 900,000 iPhones in a country that currently contains 7,000,000 people. Because Israelis are serious when it comes to iPhones. Maybe that's why NBN's estimates are so high.

To sum up:

NBN Single: ₪300-600

NBN Fam of 6: ₪600-1,500

NBN Retiree: $150-250

Yoni & Rachel: ₪286

Health Insurance

This one's a little tricky. Rachel and I are with Maccabi, and we have their highest level of insurance - Maccabi Zahav. Our monthly bills have been, starting from November, ₪160, ₪90, ₪98, and ₪104, respectively. I don't really get why we aren't paying the same thing each month. Also, people have told us we should be paying less, but we honestly just haven't bothered asking Maccabi about that because even our highest payment - ₪160 - is so much lower than anything anyone would ever pay for in the states.

Is it worth it? That's a whole 'nother story.

To sum up:

NBN Single: ₪0-160

NBN Fam of 6: ₪0-740

NBN Retiree: $0-250

Yoni and Rachel ₪100

These areas of expenditure are not exhaustive. NBN budgets for entertainment, but we don't spend much on that. We watch TV shows and stuff online, and we went to our first movie yesterday (The Social Netowrk. It was good, but the theater was deserted and creepy. On a Thursday night.) We don't have a TV, which stinks; not because we want to watch Israeli TV shows (which you can do online anyway), but because we can't play our Wii.

I also left out my "home" category, which includes things like pieces of furniture, appliances, kitchen supplies, mosquito-control apparatus, etc.

So there you have it. I'd like to stress that Rachel and I are not the kind of people who keep track of all their purchases on a daily basis. We exercise restraint when we shop, but we don't really deny ourselves anything. So I think our budget is a realistic approximation of how much you'll spend if you aren't great at budgeting, but know how to control yourself.

Chocolate hummus cake

So far, my food science studies have not given me much fodder for studies (that was like a Tom Swiftie without an adverb...). I am taking four classes. One is essentially a glorified nutrition course where I've learned that food affects different people in different ways, due to genetic variability. Aha. Also, research shows that compounds in herbal medicines might be able to cure like any disease you can think of, but research is inconclusive. To that end I gave a presentation on ginger which said that ginger might be able to cure like any disease you can think of. Thing is, the research is inconclusive. It was a smash hit.

Another class reviews analysis methods like chromatography and mass spectrometry. It's an excellent class, but it's stuff I mostly knew from before. A third class in food microbiology has indeed taught me some new material, but most of it doesn't make for good storytelling (unless you are very interested in the finer points of mold and Clostridium). The last class is statistics. And I can say, with a confidence level of 95, that most of the bell curve out there is not interested.

But today we had a food fair, and it was fun. It was for the food analysis class. The project was to "invent" a food product, which in reality meant "bake a cake or something". The real part of the project was learning how to use this Israeli nutrition program to calculate your product's nutrition value. That program is called Tzameret - a word which, as a friend once told me - means three things: the pointy top of a tree, the top echelon within an organization, and (wait for it) the little tuft of male chest hair that pokes out of the shirt. In this case, it's an acronym for something... I forget what, but it has to do with food.

So I had a great opportunity to make something fun. I decided off that bat that this was not the forum for a labor-intensive dish. That would make the work itself more difficult, would run a higher risk of failure, and the food would probably not survive the transit from home to school. Instead I decided to make something which features an unexpected ingredient.

My thoughts first turned to avocado pie, a dessert Rachel and I have made once or twice. You can find numerous recipes for it on the internet, and it generally consists of avocado blended with something creamy (cream cheese or milk), possibly blended with sugar and/or lemon or lime juice, and poured to set in a crust (usually graham cracker). The first time you taste avocado pie, its deliciousness is amplified by the fact that you were totally worried it would taste nasty.

I decided against avocado pie primarily because of the avocado selection here in Haifa. You can sometimes find the Hass variety - the bumpy skinned kind you usually see in the NY area, but more often you'll see a smooth-skinned variety, kind of like the Florida variety, but smaller - Hass sized. The problem with this variety is that it takes about a million years to ripen; ok, more like two weeks. But you still have to plan way in advance if you want to use them. Also, I find them less creamy, which means they wouldn't work as well in the pie.

So I didn't have anything as of last week, but then I luckily stumbled across a recipe for chocolate chickpea cake on the blog Serious Eats. It's a chocolate cake where you substitute chickpeas - ground, drained chickpeas from a can - for the flour. It's not something I would have tried the way I tried the avocado pie. The latter sounded good, but this sounded... not as good.

I realized, however, that it would serve perfectly for this project. It was creative, so it looked like I'm trying hard to "invent" my own product (even though that wasn't really necessary). It was an easy recipe that I could easily bring with me to school without fear of it melting or spilling or crumbling en route. And, last but not least, what do Israelis love more than chocolate and chummus? Come on!

I made up my mind, and baked the cake. The batter tasted a lot like... well, chummus with chocolate and eggs in it. Not so good. But as it baked in the oven, the cake filled the kitchen with a nice chocolate aroma. When it was done, I took a little taste. It had a good, brownie-like texture and a rich chocolate taste and a distinctive aftertaste of chickpeas. Mission accomplished!

How did the cake fare in a room full of Israelis? They were pretty surprised at first. Everyone who looked at the label I made (with Rachel's Photoshop skills of course) expressed skepticism at the combination, but while some brushed it off with a laugh others seemed genuinely interested. When the tasting began, my cake remained untouched for a while, with only one or two people trying it and not replying. The truth was, at one point when I walked past a guy with a piece of it on his plate I could smell the chickpeas. Not promising.

The tides turned, however, when one girl tried the cake and really liked it. She got a bunch of other people to try it too. It turns out she has a niece with celiac, and her sister always struggles with baking gluten-free desserts. Chickpea cake is a great way to pull that off. By the end of the fair, most of the cake was eaten. Most people agreed that it was tasty and had good texture, and that you could taste the chickpeas. Some people liked this chickpea flavor. Others just liked the fact that it wasn't too sweet, especially after eating the hundred other desserts that were prepared by other students.

Overall, a success. But I don't think I'd ever make it for its own sake.

Living Stereotype

When I recounted this conversation to Rachel, she didn't think it was particularly funny. But for some reason I found it so stereotypically Israeli.

The characters in this dialogue are all adult faculty members at the Technion, having a conversation in a room I was sitting in. The dialogue is paraphrased.

Man #1: So I just got back from Thailand

Man #2: Yeah?

Man #1: Yeah, two weeks! Last year I went with my wife, and we took the classic Thailand vacation, but this year I went with my son, so we did the safari - the jeeps, the whole thing!

Man #2: Cool!

Woman: Wait, you went to Thailand?

Man #1: Yeah, it was great!

Woman: You know, I've traveled to lots of countries, but I didn't really like Thailand. India and Nepal are so much better.

Man #1: No, Thailand is great. Plus, check it out! [whips out an iPhone] I got this for 300 shekel! Here it's what, 3,000 shekel? Ten times cheaper!

Man #2: Whoa, does that thing have a GPS on it?

Man #1: It's got everything! What doesn't this thing have?

[conversation breaks up as presentation begins]

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!