Thursday, March 11, 2010

Yeah? Well your mother doesn't make coffee like I do.

It's been a while. I stayed at home from work for the second day in a row today, and I'm to the point where I'm not feeling 100% healtyh but I'm bored outta my mind and restless. So, to the blog!

I'm not feeling particularly insightful today, so I'll just share a funny story that happened not long after I moved here. This incident pretty much explains the Israeli personality and the apparent contradiction between their aggressiveness and their consideration.

There is a monstrous new house going up next door to us. We spend a lot of time staring at this thing, making comments as to what we'd do better, and trying to understand why it's taking so damn long. This last mystery wasn't hard to solve, as there is evidence of workman presence approximately once a week, if that.

Well, about 7 months ago they were working more than today (yes, a year later, the thing still isn't finished). In fact, they would work until the sun would go down, and being as it was summer after the clocks changed, this meant about 8pm. You can imagine how thrilled we were to try to enjoy an al fresco dinner with the sounds of welding and crazy Israeli workman screaming at each other in the background. This wouldn't happen every day, but just often enough to drive us nuts. After a few times of this routine, DBF got fed up and started screaming at them over the fence. Now, this was before I could understand much Hebrew, so to my virgin ears the resulting exchange sounded like they were whipping out the "your mother" insults and threatening a Mossad-type assassination on one another. After a few minutes' screaming, DBF came storming into the house, and started making coffee.

Wait, what? You were just screaming at them, now you're having coffee with them?

Yeah, I told them I'd make them coffee if they'd stop now rather than later.

That's what you were screaming about?

Screaming? Who was screaming?

They spent the next 10 minutes chatting like they'd all known each other for years.

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