A/C, Ivrit, Kotel, Oranges

Here are some of the latest happenings here in our household:

1.  Air conditioning repair:  Our a/c was in need of a performance review and it was deemed that one of the "returns" had never been installed.  So the a/c guy came one day to create one.  How did he do this, you ask?  With precision tools and state of the art measuring equipment?  Absolutely!  

Came time to measure and cut the hole. They look around.  "Surely," I think, "they are wondering where they put their measuring tools."  Then, guy not-on-the-ladder walks over to the toy box I keep in my living room.  He picks up the top of a game box.  He looks at it, and hands it to guy-on-the-ladder and tells him to use this precision tool to measure the hole.

2. Ivrit:  I realized this week that the Israeli mouth and the American mouth must be made differently.  Because I cannot for the life of me say certain words.  Take, for instance, hitpatchut = development.  For some reason, I cannot pronounce this word.  I try, I practice, I look really, really hard at it. I say "hitpachtut" which must mean "killer jelly fish" or something because the teacher always looks at me weird when I say it.

I went this week to buy gifts for our Ulpan teachers.  We all decided this was important to do.  I knew I wanted to buy picture frames, which is to me a great gift for anyone in any situation.  So did I look up the word for picture frame before I went to the store?  Of course not!  And on top of that, I went in to the store and my mouth totally betrayed me.  I got as far as "Ani rotza..." (I want...and yay I got the conjugation right!) except that in a store you are supposed to use another word that means more like "I am looking for..."  Great start.

I ended up sounding like a two year old.  Blabbering the word for picture, and then making hand motions in the shape of a square.  Hand motions??? Seriously??? After 5 months of Ulpan?  That's all I got?

Then the woman looked at me weird and I got that "Oy" feeling in my stomach.  Then she said, "Oh, you want a picture frame?"  In English.

3. Friends:  We are meeting some really great people. mostly (ok, all) Anglos who live here.  We have lots in common - for example:

We miss solid white tuna
We feel guilty about leaving our kids who don't live in Israel
We realize we will sound like immigrants forever
We dream about trips to Target
We compare air conditioning systems
We can't find Baco Bits

4. Doing "Israel stuff" - So, when you live here, and aren't here for a visit, there is WAY less thought put into doing Israel type stuff.  I mean, you have to work, go food shopping, sweep, go to Ulpan, sweep, you get the idea.

So....we are very proud that this past week we did two Israel things.  On Monday we went to the Kotel for a family Bar Mitzvah.  It was...um...the first time I was at the Kotel since we arrived.

On Friday we went with one of our daughters to Shvil Hatapuzim, an orange grove that also houses a very nice kids' entertainment place.  It was HOT, but lots of shade and water activities.  It was fun driving north and seeing signs for Caesaria, etc.  It sort of reminds us where we are.  The best part for me was some kind of water shooting gallery where my grandson Tani decided that I was his favorite target.  We had a good old fashioned shootout.  He won.  He is 5.  Stop laughing.