It's been a while since I posted anything here, and I got told off for it a couple of evenings ago when a French friend of mine, Noel, turned up back in Jerusalem. Check out his blog if you want to see why some of us love it so much here, he has pics of his new home in Jerusalem (and also of the new baby that prevented him coming straight to the bar on arrival back here).
OK, so there's been a lot going down during the gap since my last post. There were the Israeli elections for a start. Nobody knew who to vote for, they're all so used to having Ariel Sharon take control and there wasn't - really wasn't - any good option to replace him. So they hid their heads in the sand, and I'm told (and can fully believe) that this is absolutely not standard behaviour at election time. I sat in Mike's the night before the election and watched as one Israeli after another came in and burst out with 'The election is tomorrow and nobody is talking about it!' - but this was literally the night before. The one thing everyone could agree over was that it was important to vote. They just didn't know who to vote for.
The day after the election I met someone who failed to vote (because he didn't know who to vote for). You need to remember there are only 6 million people in Israel, and - given that it's a youthful country - that means there are probably around 3.5 million voters here. So individual voting patterns actually matter, and the guy who didn't vote was practically giving himself the sackcloth and ashes treatment over his failure. I said something soothing about Olmert's record as Mayor of Jerusalem - a lot of people here appreciate what he did for the city during his 5 year stint - but you could tell it wasn't helping much. There must be a lot of Israelis quietly promising themselves never to skip out on an election again; the turnout was spectacularly low, and the winner was the one party most people I met agreed they didn't want.
What else went down? Sickness - Denise's, Mike's, my own. I've seen the inside of more Israeli hospitals over the last few weeks... mostly through Denise, because I didn't know Mike had been hospitalized until after he was released. I did notice he was missing - he's someone you'd notice is missing - but when I asked, nobody else knew where he was either. Must've been sudden, is all. My own issue was mouth-related; I literally burned away most of my lower gum doing something it distinctly says not to do on the TCP bottle in an attempt to cure a relatively minor infection, and spent Pesach chewing bloodily on matza through a haze of painkillers as a result. Note: I don't recommend it.
Pesach, by the way, is the closest thing I've seen here to Christmas, inasmuch as the entire country closes down for a fortnight. It would've been nicer if I'd realised this was going to happen; I didn't, and it was only through sheer luck that I found out the day before the country shut down and not the day after. Keren came to my rescue with most of my March paypacket at incredibly short notice, for which I'm both grateful and guilty. Without her intervention, I'd have had nothing to buy painkillers with :-
Denise got us both invited to a seder, which I'm also very grateful for, having since discovered that it's all anybody talks about for the next two days! We went to a religious household, and the young couple who hosted us were kind enough to spend some time explaining the proceedings to me and pretend not to notice when I bled on my matza. I became vaguely useful to them when their kitchen set on fire; apparently they needed a non-Jew to put out the flames. I still haven't figured that one out; it wasn't like Shabbat, there was food actively being cooked at the time. But there are rules for everything in Judaism... 613 commandments rather than the 10 the Christian West (think we) know about, or the 7 that Judaism says non-Jews actually need to live by.
Half Israel goes for a proper holiday following the seder, and Denise - after umming and aahing over it for a few days, because she really has not been well - booked herself a last-minute flight to Paris. So I've had the flat to myself for the last week, which made it possible to put everything I own to soak in the bath, and the weather was even good enough to let me dry most of it. Pretty much everything winter-related - jackets, duvet, blankets, scarves, gloves - is now in storage as a result. Cue today's rain, but hey, at least it's warm rain!
And then there was the second, and this time lethal, bombing of Felafel Rosh Ha`ir over in Tel Aviv. Probably not the last we'll see in Israel this summer; I'm not the first to notice that suicide bombers only attack on sunny days.
