I almost died today. Or felt like it. In my head, parking a few km down the mountain to start my usual Saturday 20-24km run would mean my run would be flat.

The run was beautiful, looping around trails in the mountains outside Jerusalem, near Givat Yearim and Kesalon:

Problem was, it wasn't flat. Not even a little bit.

During all those yellow/orange/red sections - so, like, an hour+ - I was kicking myself for not making gazpacho yesterday. It would have tasted amazing post-run (although, let's face it, my running socks probably would have tasted amazing provided they were chilled first). I had stocked up on extra veggies at the market especially with this recipe in mind. I made it once before, and it's lovely. Granted, my recipe looks a bit different from the published recipe on Epicurious.com, in that I entirely ignore the quantities (do people really measure out vegetable amounts in recipes?!). Like most recipes, I tend to use them as guidelines, rather than hard-and-fast rules. I'm by no means a seasoned chef, but I know my way around the kitchen enough to feel confident tweaking recipes even if I've never followed them before - it's just a matter of knowing which things you can change or substitute (# of garlic cloves) and which things are best left alone (flour:sugar:egg ratios in baking). Of course, if a recipe involves yeast, the only thing I change is adding the instruction "hold your breath and pray."

Well, after a fantastic banana-pear-yogurt-milk-flax-peanut butter smoothie (thankfully I did not have to eat my socks), I set to work making the gazpacho I spent 7 brutal miles drooling over.

First things first:

Because cooking isn't cooking without a glass of wine.
Please note the still-wet bottles from my water belt. I have an amazing transition time in my running-drinking biathlon.


One of my favorite things about living in Israel is the plethora of amazing fresh produce. Cucumbers here have FLAVOR. Plus, you don't have to peel them, because their skins aren't made of wax. And, it's cheap - peppers right now are about 4 shekels/kilo, which works out to about $1/kilo, which works out to 45c/pound. So many conversions, so little time.

Ingredients all assembled, I set to chopping. And chopping. Like I said, I didn't measure anything, I just made sure I had room left in the bowl for the liquid ingredients and that all the colors were in a nice proportion. Final count: 2 peppers (one yellow, one orange), 3 tomatoes, 3 cucs, a handful of cilantro, 2 little red onions, one hot pepper, cumin, pepper, homemade chicken stock, the remainder of the bottle of white wine vinegar, a 3-second pour of olive oil, one liter tomato juice, juice from half a lemon. Plus, the mashed garlic-salt-egg concoction (with 3 cloves and sea salt) and breadcrumbs to thicken.

  Before:                                            

                      
After:

It's now merrily chilling, and unless we eat during the Germany-Argentina game, it will be dinner. Unless Ron gets to it first, I already had to keep his nose out of the bowl once!

Motivation

Well, obviously I haven't posted in a while. I think my "Israel is funny" angle just isn't motivating me enough to post regularly. I mean, if I'm supposed to be acclimating, I can't be fixated on the differences between here and the States, otherwise I won't be making a complete transition to my life here. So, I'm going to try a new angle - to just write about MY life here, simple as that. I hope to emphasize the "only in Israel" aspects of my experiences, but also use this blog as an outlet to vent, complain, brag, babble aimlessly, whatever. So, with that, I've got a post percolating in the ol' noggin that should make its way here in the next day or two :)

Another milestone passed:

I passed through airport security, the Delta ticket counter, the next round of airport security, and Duty Free - all in Hebrew :)

Headlines to die for.

The driving habits of Israelis could fill up an entire blog by itself. I would have enough material for a daily blog if I just recounted the traffic-law violations I saw on a daily basis. Scratch that, forget traffic-law violations, just common-sense violations would suffice. Turn signals? Turning left from the left-hand turn lane and not three lanes over? Driving right, passing left? Driving at a constant speed without randomly throwing on the emergency brake and coming to a complete stop in the middle of the road? Forget it, such things do not exist here.

Apparently, the powers that be have apparently caught on to the erratic driving tendencies of Israeli drivers. Right now there is an advertising campaign urging people not to do anything but drive while they're behind the wheel. On the radio, you'll hear a "common" situation, and until a couple of weeks ago, this would be followed by the sound of a crash, followed by a very solemn voice urging the driver not to do such things. The worst one was a father calling home to say goodnight to his young daughter before she went to bed, only to have her hear an accident and cry futilely "Abba... Abba?!" into the phone. The crash sound has recently disappeared, probably because of the cringe-factor.

I'll admit, some of these situations aren't specific to Israel. Especially the whole texting/talking on the cell phone bit. And I'm sure elsewhere, people fiddle with their GPS systems, their kids' movies, the radio, turn around to calm a screaming child, look at a map, or read the newspaper.

Wait... rewind... what?!

Yes, one "common" situation here in Israel is for people to catch up on their daily news whilst driving. I have seen it, from bus drivers of PUBLIC buses (Egged, are you listening? I don't see "certain death or bodily harm" listed under that "services" menu). I mean, are red lights seriously that boring? This in a country where the news comes on every radio station every hour - and some every half-hour. NOTHING has happened that will change your life since you last hear the news. Shocking, I know, but it's true.

Now, we have to work on a campaign to explain the difference between the gas pedal and the brake pedal.

If it's not water, it's not worth saving.

Daylight saving whaaaa?

In the States, for about three weeks before the clocks get sprung forward or felled back, every media source feels it's their sole duty to warn the public about the catastrophe that will occur if they fail to change their clocks before they go to bed. It's printed in calendars, like a major holiday.

Here, I was told exactly once, yesterday, by my BF's mother, that clocks get changed tonight. I have listened intently to the news, confident that I can understand enough Hebrew to discern whether or not someone is talking about a clock, time, losing an hour of sleep (yes, that phrase is important enough to me to understand), etc. Zip, zero, zip, efes. And yet, there's this really annoying ad for saving water that comes on about every ten seconds. Save the Kineret, people, we don't care what time it is!

Maybe the problem is that they don't schedule the clock-changing for Friday night - that is, the night before Shabbat. I remember, growing up, that the reminders for daylight saving time were printed in huge bold letters on the church bulletins the week before, so that come Sunday, no one would be an hour early and stand lonesome in the sanctuary with their own thoughts and tired kids, or even worse, be an hour late and completely miss what God had to say that week. If the synagogues had a stake in this whole time-saving business, perhaps we'd hear more about it so as to avoid any ill-timed prayers.

A sampling.

Some photos from my recent past.

From Life in Israel

Floods in the mountains outside J'lem. This is normally bone-dry, and I run here a lot.

From Life in Israe

Carmel mountains.

From Life in Israel

Orchids

From Life in Israel

Unknown flower

From Life in Israel

View from the Carmel

From Life in Israel

Judean hills

From Life in Israel

Oasis

From Life in Israel

Kennedy Memorial

From Life in Israel

Who's who?
(Ok, not taken in Israel, but in NYC's Chinatown. Never mind :)

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.