new year / new life

Today will be our first day off since we arrived (it's Rosh Hashanna, thank goodness!). We've been out every day, all day, pounding the pavement, getting ourselves set up. I imagine we could easily have been floating around for a month without a phone, bank or apartment without someone to vouch for us and show us around.

Apartment-hunting is extremely difficult -- I imagine it's just as hard to get a place in NYC, although here you don't have any real estate agents to fall back on. Good places are advertised, shown and rented all within 24-36 hours, so it's essential that you work fast. We've come close to renting a few places, but there have been snags: an unreasonable lease and nervous landlord at one place, someone else had first pick (and signed) on another, a Nov. 15 move-in date on a third.

For some reason stoves and fridges are not standard features in apartments here -- tenants often (i'd say about 60% of the time) have to buy their own, which we may very well have to do (used appliances are very available, but to get one it means another few days of wrangling and a more complex budgeting equation). it's also the tenant's responsibility to pay property tax (I understand that it's folded in with the bi-monthly municipal utility bill) and each building has a monthly maintenance fee. So even when we're presented with nice, available places there's always a hot-and-fast debate to be done about location, fixtures, potential additional expenses, its comparison with other places we've seen, etc.

We've had to do similar gymnastics with most other business as well -- short working hours and big bureaucracy at school (and everywhere else too) have prevented much progress there (Ben still doesn't have a contract -- apparently all the school needs is the email offer from the head of the department, which makes us nervous). There have been lots of unexpected bank issues (it takes a month to process a bankers' check, you're committed to using a certain branch of a bank for all your business, which would be okay except the bank Keren took us to is a 30min bus ride from where we'll be living). Also, you have to apply for an ATM card, which takes 10 days to arrive. The only place to change travellers' checks affordably is at the post office, so there was also a very nervous bus ride to the bank with my bag bulging with cash. Those are the times when i'm extremely glad I married someone with huge biceps!

We've managed to work out most of our issues (except apartment, of course) pretty reasonably but we're still feeling as though we're in freefall without a clear landing place. Cobi (Ben's quasi-advisor at TAU) suggested that things don't happen as quickly here as they do in the States, but I think we've impressed him with the speed at which we've managed to get so much done (due entirely to Keren being such an amazing friend/interpreter/guide -- she's done so much finessing and haggling and arguing for us that, as Ben joked, we're now required to name our first born after her).

But things are calming down. it's Rosh Hashanna (Shana Tova! -- Happy New Year!), so everyone gets Sunday off (normally, the weekend is Friday-Saturday). Keren brought us to the big Rosh Hashanna dinner at her parents' house last night. Her brother has a 2-yr-old, so for his benefit (and a little bit ours too, I think), the (normally very secular) family decided to do the long, traditional New Year toasts and blessings with the meal (haha, we sat down at 7:30pm and got up at 10:30pm). The dinner was 5+ courses long, and opened with some gift-giving, a short passage of poetry, and tasting and toasts over each of the 10 (or so) different symbolic dishes.

I'm so glad they made English translations of the blessings for us -- for me, that was the highlight. the names of each of the 10 foods make a play on the blessing phrase, so you remember the blessing via the food. For instance, for beets, loosely translated, the blessing is something like, "so that this year we may beat our enemies." Each of the 10 dishes was passed around individually, toasted, and each person took a piece or two. The most culinarily interesting was the gefilte fish (although I don't think it's pleasant plain -- it requires a lot of horseradish sauce!). But all the food was incredible -- I ate a ton!

Today Keren offered to take us down to Jaffa and south TA. We've been so busy that we've only seen north Tel Aviv and the Ramat Aviv quarter (the northern 'burb where TAU is located). I'm looking forward to a whole day off.