Here are some of the little things I've been noticing/learning about Tel Aviv in the last two weeks.
1. Israelis are still very much influenced by the egalitarian, fairness-loving ideals of their founders. You can see it in when they get in taxis; only Israelis slide into the shotgun seat next to the driver, staunchly rejecting the "chauffeur and idle bourgeois" relationship implied by sitting in the back seat.
However, in spite of this nod to equality, they are not a line-forming people.
Not outside the bus, not inside the pharmacy, not at the museum. I have yet to figure out the exact protocol for elbowing into the fracas, but it seems to involve assiduously denying that everyone else around you is intent on the same goal. For example, when I gave a pointed, "Slicha!?" (excuse me) to an older lady who flagrantly slid in front of me at the corner bodega checkout, she turned and said, (in Hebrew) "Ah, you are also waiting?" Uh, no, Ma'am, I'm just standing here with two liter bottles of pop, three little cups of yogurt, and the Friday Jerusalem Post balanced in my arms, about a foot away from the register, because it's the hot new thing all the young people are doing.
This woman was clearly not familiar with the proud American tenet "No Cuts, No Buts, No Coconuts."
2. Israelis and Dairy Products: Man, Israelis are flippin' besotted with dairy. I'm sure a lot of it has to do with having a sizeable population that follows the kashrut (kosher) laws (let me break it down for you gentiles: due to the prohibition against mixing meat and dairy, a lot of observant jews tend to eat what are called "dairy meals" (i.e. vegetarian, often featuring, you guessed it, dairy products) for lunch and dinner (rather than deal with the expense, and relatively greater difficulty of preparing/storing/transporting meals with meat in them). And Israel does have a pretty big dairy industry for a country its size (its funny to drive in the country and see herds of familiar Holstein cows out to pasture in a landscape that looks like Arizona).
But even so, man, these people are obsessed. There are about kajillion variations on the typical Israeli table cheeses available for purchase anywhere, whether you shop at the huge open air shuks or one of the many grocery-store chains. . They're made with sheep and cow and goat milk, in textures ranging from spreadable to semi-hard, and though the flavor spectrum leans heavily to the mild side, they're all delicious. And yogurt--Jesus Christ, I think the amount of live and active cultures happily bubblin' away in this country could bring digestive regularity to all of the middle east (and who knows? maybe that would be instrumental to the peace process?)
. It's so funny to go to someplace like AM/PM, a 24-hour mini mart, where you'd expect to find a huge soda fountain bar, two or three rotating hot-dog cookers collecting grease, and a whole wall devoted to potato chips and Hostess bakery items (at least if you were back in the States). Instead you're greeted with a perimeter of refrigerated cases lining the walls of the store. Inside them? Tons of fresh vegetables and fruits, which is weird enough, but also thirty kinds of yogurt. No exaggeration. fruit-flavored, plain, with granola, with chocolate chips, Greek-style, with honey, in huge tubs, in tiny cups, in kid-sized squeeze tubes, organic, whatever. and that's just the *mini-mart* selection! Forget about the grocery stores--they have their own wings devoted just to yogurt and yogurt drinks (nah, that's not true, but almost). Anyway, in summation. Cheese, yogurt: a people obsessed.
3. Israelis inexplicably love English logo t-shirts--there are lots of t-shirt only stores on Allenby, King George, and Bograshov advertising "5 for 99 Shekels," their windows full of shirts folded into neat little, Gap-esque squares to showcase the text on their chests. Some have pictures of Scarface with dialogue from the movie underneath. Vintage-looking t-shirts with counterfeit "Abercrombie and Fitch" logos on them are popular, and so are ones with charming slogans like "Sexy Bastard," "One Tequila, Two Tequila, Three Tequila, Floor," and, "I'm a Virgin (written in huge letters) Butthis is an old t-shirt (written in tiny ones)." Lots of other cringe-worthy shirts are for sale too, but it's not so much the shirts themselves that are so funny, but the people wearing them. There are a lot of hugely innaproprpriate t-shirt+wearer matches on display like:
-Two ladies in their late thirties pushing baby strollers down King George, wearing identical belly-baring t-shirts with block letters screaming "Bikini Inspector."--A lone man in his sixties, walking down Allenby St. wearing a black t-shirt with the explanatory text: "Just a Fucking T-Shirt."
--A 12-year old girl at Shuk Carmel wearing a mock-soccer Jersey with the number 69 (so witty!) and the last name "PutaMadre" (Spanish for "motherfucker," and an adopted curse word of choice in Israel).
--The otherwise rational-looking dad at the beach with his kids wearing swim trunks and a white shirt with neon green text splayed across the chest cryptically explaining "I help the D.J. at night. I am the D.J." (Maybe it's like a zen koan?)
--A barely pubescent kid at the beach with a navy blue shirt that reads"Triathalon, Triathalon, Triathalon, Triathalon, Triathalon"
--Another young kid around the same age at Gan Meir whose shirt asks "What the Fuck?" with a picture of Bart Simpson.
--A very nice looking girl about my age, walking a dog with her boyfriend whose white tank top said on the back *and* the front in a fussy cursive font, "I can teach you how to fuck."
Look, I know there are tons of people walking around with bits of foreign text on their person because other alphabets are graphically pleasing or exotic-seeming. But, here in Israel, almost everyone speaks a little bit of English, and *most* people speak very good English, so how does this shit happen? Maybe I'm just not giving Israelis enough credit,
4. Inter-Jewish Relations: Okay, does everyone know the Tom Lehrer song "National Brotherhood Week"? No? Well, one verse of the song goes:
"Oh, the Catholics hate the Protestants, and the Protestants hate the Catholics, and the Hindus hate the Moslems. . . and everyone hates the Jews!"
Well, Tom Lehrer was on the right track, but it turns out that the Jews all hate each other, too. Especially here in Israel.
The international schism between the more traditional Orthodox and Coservative denominations and the more liberal Reform and Reconstructionist Jews is old news. And before I moved here, I read a lot about the culture clashes between the Haredim (the Ultra-Orthodox Jews, comprising a very small minority even here) and the more mainstream secular Jews. The enmity between the two groups stems from disagreements about not only religious practice, but also public education, foreign policy, federal welfare aid, gender relations, and pretty much every other topic that would ruin a dinner party.
BUT. That's not all.
The assimilated Jews complain endlessly about the newly-arrived immigrants. The Russian immigrants despise the Ethiopian olim. The Ashkenazi Jews take issue with the practices of the Sephardim. The Jews from European backgrounds see themselves as superior to the Jews of Arab and Persian descent. The (slightly more relaxed) Modern Orthodox sniff at the comparatively footloose practices of the Conservative Jews (a relatively new denomination in Israel). The Jews who keep kosher cluck and shake their heads at those who flout the kashrut laws. And everyone is skeptical of the Jews who convert late in life.
Yeah, I'm making huge generalizations for the sake of effect-- the truth is that only a small minority of all of these different sub-groups really share these beliefs, and an even smaller number actually voice them in public. Still, it's dismaying to uncover each new variation on bigotry in a country shaped by the equal-opportunity ethos of Zionism.
In the most recent Jew-on-Jew hate crime, the public Religious schools in a nearby city, Petah Tikvah (whose name ironically translates as Port of Hope), have refused to enroll over a hundred Ethiopian immigrants in their schools in spite of orders to do so by the Ministry of Education, protests held at the gates of the city's primary and secondary schools, pleas from leaders of the Ethiopian Jewish community, and denouncement by members of the Knesset (the Israeli legislature). As of today, just three days before the beginning of the school year, the conflict remains in deadlock.
So, I hate to leave you on a heavy note, but that's all fer now. But stay tuned to hear more as I attend my first day of (elementary) school, start Ulpan, and continue to commit linguistic and cultural gaffes across the city.
Love to all,
Becky
August 24th: Caves and Wine
i'm just back from officially signing my lease (though i still need to give the very nice landlord a 20,000 NIS bank guarantee. . . scary to freeze all that money for a year, yo!) and i spent all day from 8:30 am til 6:00 on a hiking trip out in the country, in beit givrin national park, with everyone in my cohort. Beit Givrin has about 300 man-made caves (carved out of limestone, which i guess is pretty soft and conducive to cave-carving?) made by the Philistines, the Judeans, and other back-in-the-day peoples. We went down into a bunch--including two that were underground cisterns for wealthy Judeans' hillside villas that, of course, reminded me of the underground cisterns we saw in Istanbul (or rather, under Istanbul) although these were dry. We also saw two caves that were underground pigeon coops, basically. Pigeons were a big food source, I guess, and these caves had rows and rows of little 1 foot wide recesses carved into the rock, stretching all the way up to ground level, almost. Those were the little individual roosts for the pigeons!And the best cave was one we traveled through for about 25 minutes. It was built as an escape route/secret hiding space network for the Judeans when they revolted against the Romans (unsucessfully, natch). Al, it was so cool. We had to *crawl* on our hands and knees, with flashlights clutched in our hands (or our mouths), to go through these tunnels. In some places we had to army crawl, even, and in other spots we had to slide down ramps or climb up narrow, slippery passages, or slowly contort ourselves so we could go feet first down into a short drop. It was AMAZING! The tunnels occasionally opened into ante-rooms that were big enough to hold everyone (if you were taller than me, though, like 5'4'' and above, you couldn't stand up straight) before narrowing again. It was so wild to try to imagine the real Judeans, in the Iron Age, hiding and strategizing down in these tunnels, and all the people who'd been through them since. I enjoyed feeling a little bit like Indiana Jones. .. .
I was also pretty stoked because half of the group was too skeeved by the narrow confines of the tunnels to do the climb! And of the group that did start out, three people went back after we made it to the first ante-room because they found it too claustrophobic. So, for once, I was part of the brave group! ! ! ! However, as you know, if there had been any possibility of live spiders being down there, it would have been a 100% NO GO for me (I didn't tell anyone that, however. Must try to maintain my street cred as long as possible).
To add to the excitement, the group also got stuck in a very brief sandstorm as we were hiking. The guide just told us to close our eyes, and we waited for it to move on (a sand storm is a cyclone cloud ). It only touched down on us for a minute or two, and it sort of felt like being poked with needles, or getting a really intense microdermabrasion (skin exfoliation) treatment. When we felt the sand prickles die down, we opened our eyes to see a twenty-foot high cyclone spinning its way down the hill. It was really beautiful. However, it lefts its mark in our hair, in our ears and nostrils, and in a few peoples' mouths. (Guys, look, it was my first sandstorm, and even *I* knew to close my damn mouth. Come on!)
So after the hike was through, and we were DRENCHED in sweat, caked in a gritty mixture of sand, clay, and dirt, and read to drop from exhaustion, it was time to go to the winery. Naturally. Their are lots of Israeli vinyards popping up all across the countryside these days. The rocky, sort of barren soil in the area is apparently terrific for growing grapes? After we wearily shuffled off the bus, we walked through a gorgeous courtyard flanked by a large willow tree and a mini grove of blooming white oleanders, we entered the sanctuary of the winery's gloriously, gloriously air-conditioned tasting room where we had a guided wine tasting (meh) with five kinds of Israeli cheeses to accompany them (Yay!). Then, on the way back, we saw a flock of goats and sheep, with one shepherd (who was talking into his bluetooth headset) and three tan-and-white spotted sheepdogs (who were not).
August 22th: Everything you didn't Particularly Care to Know About Renting an Apartment in Israel
To quote columnist Jim Anchower, of The Onion, “Sorry it's been a long time since I rapped at'cha.”
The intensity of my apartment search reached a fevered pitch over the last 72 hours, and now that I've found an (expensive) place, the ensuing lease negotiations are consuming a lot of my time and energy.
Everyone in Tel Aviv dreads apartment-hunting. Renting is very expensive and competition is fierce for available spots. (Mom and I went to view a 40 square meter (40. Square. Meter. Period) studio on Ben Yehuda earlier in the week, and we were 2 of over 15 people looking at the place, just that evening (and it was going for 4,000 shekels a month, roughly 1,00 dollars). The only place I know of that compares to Tel Avivbis Manhattan, and like so many New Yorkers do now, I gave in and hired a realtor to help me.
Gadi (pr. Gow-DEE) has been really helpful. He's a Tel-Aviv native, was born here in fact, and not only does he really love the city, he know the ins-and-outs of all the different neighborhoods. He's in his early thirties and has followed a life track that's pretty typical for most Iyoung sraelis (but very foreign-sounding for us, um, foreigners). After graduating from high school, he did three years of compulsory military service in the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces)--I'm not sure what. After being discharged, when he was around 21 or 22 years old, he spent time traveling the world. Lots of Israelis go to Africa, some go to Western Europe (though it's not as popular of an option), and many, many do like Gadi and trek it to India. Gadi ended up spending four years there (during which time he picked up “ay leetle beet” of Hindi (enough to convince the Indian Embassy in Tel Aviv to use him as the realtor for all of their staff members), in addition to already being conversant in French, English, and Hebrew. (Sigh).He returned home in his late twenties and "did uoo-neh-vare-soh-tee" in an abreviated three years to earn his undergraduate degree.
And now he runs his own real-estate brokerage firm, and does a lot of work with English-speaking Jews making Aliyah (becoming Israeli citizens) and other Anglos like me (yes, Israelis actually do call American/Canadian/British/
Even bereft of scooter rides, I do think we're getting our money's worth, since the intricacies of the rental process here in Israel differ greatly (and confoundingly.)from the standard operating procedure at home. What's that you say? You'd like an exciting primer on Israeli Leasing Procedures? Oh aaaaaal-lright, if you insist. Here it goes:
For one thing, alien residents like me face a lot of additional roadblocks, all put in place to ensure we're good for the 12 months of rent money the landlords are squeezing out of us. Most foreigners' leases require the signature of one or two Israeli co-signers, in addition to bank guarantees from an Israeli lending institution in amounts ranging from 15,000 NIS (new Israeli shekels) to 50,000 NIS. And to make things even more fun, the banks who issue the guarantees charge non-citizens 5% of the guarantee amount for the privilege. Once that's in place, it's still considered prudent for the landlord to require aliens to pay rent three or four months at a time, or even to pay in one lump sum for the whole year!
Once the lease has been signed, most tenants become responsible not only for utilities (electricity, gas, and the most expensive in desert countries like Israel(currently in the midst of a five-year long drought) water) but also the arsana and the yav beit. The first is the bi-monthly municipal property tax (mysteriously calculated by a secret cabal of city council members according to neighborhood location and apartment size), the second is a maintenance fee paid directly to the building's yav beit (literally “custodian,” sort of like a super), a fellow tenant who takes on the responsibility for maintaining the building's exterior (washing the steps, watering any plants in the entryway, painting over graffiti, and the like). So, to put it bluntly, all that shit adds up fast, yo.
Needless to say, I am not exactly liquid enough to suffer these strictures without significantstomach upset (stress-induced, you see). . .I think the ten-dollar word for my financial situation (and a good one to remember for Scrabble if you haven't heard it before) is: impecunious.
So, we'll all have another week of orientation together, then we'll start observing in the classroom at our individual elementary and secondary schools on September 1st (weirdly, though Israeli universities don't begin the academic year until after the high holidays, schools teaching grades 1-12 all do, even though those two weeks are always, “notoriously unproductive for students and staff,” according to one of my professors.
And in the same week, we'll start our various Hebrew classes, all taught at Ulpan Gordon. The ulpan system is a wholly Israeli invention, though its highly participatory teaching techniques, innovative curriculum design, and rapid-immersion ethos have spread their way across the world to influence the way languages are taught globally. In fact, the U.S. Military language-instruction academies (training army and navy linguists in all sorts eye-crossingly difficult languages like Korean, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian) are largely structured on ulpan techniques. The Ulpan, is a state-sponsored, county-wide network of Hebrew-language schools designed for new adult citizens (there are about 220 in Israel today—and remember that Israel is the roughly the size of New Jersey). Ulpan's legendary efficacy and intensity developed gradually as a result of the near constant influx of new immigrants to Israel, all with different native tongues. The countries forefathers wisely believed that promoting widespread fluency in one state language would aid acculturation and help knit together Jews from all different social classes, religious traditions, and home countries.
Olim Chadashim (literally “new arrivers,” or new citizens) typically begin Ulpan with five weeks of “boot camp” in classes of thirty or so people at one of many immigrant Absorption Centers. Class is taught for seven to eight hours a day, six days a week, for all of those five weeks. Ulpan teachers (among the most skilled, dedicated, and patient teachers in the universe, I think) speak only in Hebrew from day one (one reason why, besides the rapid-immersion it facilitates) is because they typically teach in a classroom where there might be half a dozen different native languages spoken,.and achieve amazing results. At the end of those five weeks, students emerge with a suprisingly level of fluency (enough to negotiate everyday interactions like making store purchases, asking and giving directions, going to the bank, and the like) and the crucial basic reading skills needed to decode apartment listings, understand bus and train schedules, and fill out job applications.
New citizens aren't the only students in the Ulpan. Visiting students like me, visiting “dee-ahs-poh-RA” Jews from all sorts of other countries, employees of international companies with business in Israel (lots of high-tech development firms) and immigrants ineligible for citizenship (like the large population of Filipinos who have poured into the country, many of whom work as private caregivers for senior citizens and disabled people—more on that soon). There are Ulpanim with programs designed especially for the deaf, the blind, and the mentally-challenged, as well as classes geared towards nurses, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals who need to learn a very specialized vocabulary.
So, anyway, that's what's in store for me (with an abbreviated “boot camp”). Once University classes begin, I'll continue taking Ulpan classes twice a week (probably in the evenings, though it depends on my class level). And I'll be teaching three days a week at an awesome elementary school in (very swank) North Tel Aviv.
But you'll just have to wait—biting your nails, staring at the clock, obsessively refreshing your email inbox—until my next letter home to hear all about it.August 15th: And God said Remember this Day and Keep it Holy. . . By Going to the Beach
Momma and I just returned from an amazing day at the seashore! We started out down Bograshov sometime around 11 or 12 (without cellphones or watches and hampered by our still-impaired circadian rhythms, neither of us are really sure what time it was when we left) already wearing our swimsuits and equipped with floppy sun hats, liter bottles of water, pistachios, dried mango, and pretzels (to calorically restore the massive energy reserves needed to bask in the sun and float in the waves. We had bid Michael-dawg a pathos-ridden farewell (Michael sort of goes through a modified Keubler-Ross-style Stages of Grieving whenever I leave the house:
1. Denial--he sees me put on shoes or grab my bag (without getting his leash) and helpfully waits at the door, tail wagging. ready to accompany me.
2. Passive-Agression--He repeatedly slinks away from the bedroom (where he stays, with water and toys and fan, in order to minimize any mischief/noise complaints), curcling up into a ball on the couch, or trying to burrow into one of my open suitcases on the floor in the dining room.
3. Depression--He shakes pathetically once I scoop him up into my arms to deposit him in the comfy bedroom armchair, loses all appetite for rawhide or treats (obviously, proffered as bribes at this stage), and punches me in the gut with the full impact of his deadly "sad puppy eyes" look.
4. Anger--Once we shut the bedroom door and he hears the key in the front lock, Michael wimpers and offers up some impassioned barking. This stage has been mercifully brief here in Tel Aviv.( Back in Chicago, where his separation anxiety was only compounded by the plaintive accompanying yelps of his siblings, Ali's dogs Justin and Osi, it has lasted as long as fifteen minutes. Yes, Ali's neighbors do hate us, why do you ask?)
5. Acceptance--He resigns himself to his fate. An hour to five hours of truly dedicated napping, genital-licking, and sun-bathing. Oh cruel world.
Anyway, back to the beach. When we arrived, we expected to have to gingerly make our way through acres of spread-out towels and wide-open beach umbrellas to find an open spot on the sand. Since lots of people work a 5.5-6 day workweek (working a half day or until sundown on Friday), Saturday is THE prime time in Israel for relaxing and having fun, which includes one of the cherished Israeli past-times, "Chillin' at the beach." (No, that is not a literal translation from the Hebrew.) However, we were pleasantly surprised to see tons of open space up and down the beach, and this, in the most heavily-trafficed section of the shoreline, near tons of waterfront hotels and beachfront amenities. So, we rented an enormous, Goldstar Beer-logo-festooned beach umbrella, and two chairs from one of the Ethiopian "Beach-Umbrellas-Chairs-and-
We, quite literally for possibly the first time ever, had it made in the shade.
And so we passed the most pleasant, brain-free afternoon sunning ourselves on the beach, people-watching, flipping through magazines, and guzzling down water, puncuated by brief trips down into the water to float in the gentle waves. Well, Mom started to do so immediately, but I had one last hurdle. I had excitedly (excitedly!) bought a neon-yellow inner-tube at one of the many beach-sundries shops crowded alongside all the waterfront hotels and restaraunts, but in order to use it, I had to blow it up first. And I think we all know that using a hand pump is cheating (well, I told myself that after we couldn't find one in the shop) even though the tube was surprisingly larger than it had seemed when it was all folded-up in its packaging. So I spent what seemed like an eternity blowing that neon [Grandpa--don't read this next word to Nana, okay?] fucker up. By the final stretch I felt like I was hyperventilating, my cheeks were sore from pushing all the air into that tiny little valve, and Iwas ruing the decision to ever buy the thing in the first place. . . but let me tell you all something:
Once I took it out into the water?
TOTALLY WORTH IT!
I can't imagine anything more beta-state inducingly pleasurable than bobbing around in that yellow tube, far enough to be lifted up in the gentle waves, but close enough to paddle to shore. Facing the sand, I was surrounded by my fellow bathers--hot-doggin' teenage boys heaving nerf footballs at each other, elderly ladies wearing flowery bathing caps, teenage couples taking advantage of neck-high water to do a little oceanic heavy-petting (Don't think I didn't see you, Israeli teenagers! For shame!), and tons of ecstatic Israeli (and French and several other nationalites of) children (some being toted further out by parents, some wearing inflateable water wings around their tan little biceps, and some astride wake boards and blow-up rafts--but, when I turned out to sea, all I could see was ocean water stretching all the way to the horizon, dotted only with the distant white outline of a yacht and the very tip of a sailboat's mast.
So, obviously, I took the opportunity to pee in the ocean.
August 14th: Its 4:00 in the afternoon on Friday here, so we're about an hour away from the beginning of Shabat (yeah, officially it starts at sundown, but 5:00 is when all the shops shut down so the people who run them can go home in time for sundown). The streets are emptying out, but earlier today, from about noon onward, all the sidewalks in our neighborhood (just south of the city center) were clogged with people, strollers, dogs, and these funny electric stand-up scooters (sort of like a razor scooter, but with a motor and a battery. No seat, but you can zip along at a pretty good clip, faster than a bike, slower than a mo-ped. I don't know where people get them, but there are tons of them, and they're always zooming past in the bike lanes and, alarmingly, on the sidewalks. I need to get someone to let me try theirs' because it looks like fun! ) as people enjoyed the first day of the weekend (Thursday night=Friday Night, Fri and Sat=Sat and Sun) and did last minute errands before shabat.
The dog and I woke up early for a relaxed morning (Mom, on the other hand, shockingly slept until 11:20 after taking two Advil PMS the night before. She only woke up because the dog hopped up and started licking her face) beginning with a walk while it was still relatively cool, around 7-8 am, and followed by chill-time on the couch while I followed up on a bunch of apartment listings online). Then Mom and I joined the fray on the street ourselves and went to the grocery store in Dizengoff mall to buy food for tomorrow (almost no restaraunts remain open on shabbat, except for a few owned and operated by gentiles. Even hotel dining rooms make cold food the night before so that the staff can do as little work as possible on saturday itself). The grocery store was crowded with people buying their own shabat provisions, sort of like how the Jewel gets on Christmas Eve and the day before Thanksgiving (except here it's like this every week, I guess!). We bought supplies for a picnic lunch to take to the beach tomorrow, and yoinked one of the dozens of warm, sweet smelling loaves of challah bread resting on bread racks in the bakery department (challah was in almost every grocery cart we saw!).
I'm going to see some apartments on Sunday with two different rental agents, so I'm looking forward to that, especially since I've begun to accrue house-wares and linens for my new place ("and getting such good bargains," please imagine me saying in Nana's voice).
Nothing much else to report. We had awesome schwarma and falafel for dinner last night (Mom agreed that the Israeli way of adding a handful of french fries to both sandwiches is a brilliant idea, and that laffa (sort of like nan, really pillowy Iraqi flatbread, and the diameter of a burritto tortilla) is way superior to pita as the bread of choice. We ate at an outside table with Michael, who was very dissapointed to be denied any turkey schwarma and, as is his wont, barked at every dog that passed by on the sidewalk in spite of our admonitions not too. Yeah, I have to work on that--I've started to carry around his spray bottle to squirt him when I say no, and it's definitely helping. There are many, many dogs in Tel Aviv, and about half of them walk around without a leash, just trotting by their owners side, or meandering up and down the block while staying within whistle's distance of their owners, or trailing several feet behind their owners in the case of the most aged, grey dogs. Obviously, Michael is not capable of such good behavior, and dissaproves mightily of dogs walking near him without leashes
One last thing: we discovered Israeli-style lemonade (called lee-mo-nah-NAH), which is made with fresh-squeezed lemon juice, a tiny bit of sugar, crushed or shaved ice, and lots of pulverized fresh mint. It is green and it is DELICIOUS.
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