We Lived In Israel For Almost Two Years

Coming back and forth between Israel and the US has made me thing about size and scale.  One of the first things I noticed coming back to Arizona was the overall scale of things.  The rooms are very big, the ceilings are very high, the streets are very wide, the distances are very long, etc….

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There is a woman in Ra’anana who finally got her israeli tour guide license right before COVID started, when all the tourists vanished.  She’s done some tours for the local kids, including our girls, who absolutely love her, and I guess there were enough parents who were jealous of their kids (like me 😀) so…

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The “claim to fame” of the city of Hevron is the Ma’arat HaMahpela, the Cave of the Forefathers and Mothers – מערת המכפלה.  Its where Abraham & Sarah, Isaac & Rebecca, and Jacob & Leah are buried.  Originally it was just a cave (a “double cave” actually – that’s what the Hebrew name for it…

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Last week I visited a friend who lives in Efrat, a town about 20 minutes south of Jerusalem in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc.  We met at his apartment and had coffee on the balcony.  The town is situated across several small hilltops and the views are amazing.  There was a cool breeze blowing over…

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Today is the first day of school. It’s a very exciting and busy day, there was a flurry of emails and WhatsApp texts the past few days, from the school office, the parent WhatsApp groups, the teacher’s WhatsApp information group, etc. There were a few iterations of the health attestations that need to be filled…

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I guess it’s that time of year again. I saw the English version of the prayer in one of the English Israeli newspapers last week.  I thought it was a nice sentiment and didn’t think much else about it. Then this week I received a WhatsApp text from my local Ra’anana shul containing the Hebrew…

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I had a meeting with another Israeli biotech company earlier this week, this time in Tel Aviv.  I love going to Jerusalem, the holy city, but I also love going to Tel Aviv.  This was just a quick in-and-out for a 9:30AM one hour meeting, but just driving through all the glass and steel skyscrapers…

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Yeah that pretty much describes my situation right now.  That was what a friend texted me back after i told him that I had been turned down by a second hospital for a job.  I guess a quarter of the country is unemployed so I shouldn’t really feel too bad about it.  And I have…

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Our first camping trip in Israel!  We went camping with one other family at the Mishmar HaCarmel campsite.  It’s on top of the Carmel mountains near Haifa.  The campsite was in a beautiful pine forest very similar to the campgrounds we’ve been to in the Arizona mountains.  Instead of reserving a specific numbered campsite as…

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My last post was the one about kneading the dough for the challah.  The following funny-if-it-weren’t-so-sad thing occurred when I went to post that story: I had updated the website service I use to do the online journal and as I was looking at it one final time before I officially published that post, I…

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Val always made her own challah for shabbat in Phoenix.  We used a recipe where she would use a bread-maker machine to make the dough, then braid the loaves and bake them in the oven.  But since we’ve been in Israel we haven’t had a breadmaker. So she found one recipe she had for completely…

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We’ve been here for over a year now and I’ve been working part time so far (sort of). (Hoping to change that soon, btw.) So, as I mentioned in a prior post, in addition to keeping this online journal I’ve taken to writing about some of the issues that I feel are important today regarding…

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Its day 10 of my 14 day home quarantine.  It sucks.  I try to keep to a regular schedule.  I read a little, write a little, I have some remote medical work I can do, but not nearly enough to keep me busy.  I watch movies with the kids in the evenings sometimes, and we’ve…

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My first experience with Turkish coffee was when staying in an Israeli hotel and they had the free instant coffee in the room.  You’d boil water in the electric kettle then take one of the red Elite brand long thing single use packages of instant coffee, add it to the water, add the sweetener, and…

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I completed my time here in the thick of the COVID pandemic, working in both the office and hospital.  We wore masks every day all day, Regular surgical masks most of the time, N95 masks sometimes, and 3M respirators for higher risk exposures. Even though the exposure is higher at the hospital, i didn’t feel…

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