Read about our travels and studies during our year living in Jerusalem!
Saturday, August 26, 2006
Apartment Secured!
Jenny and I are happy to report that we have signed a lease for an apartment for this year. The price, location, and characteristics (which you can see a little of from the pics) are all good and we are happy to have it secured. It's located in the Katamon neighborhood on Bilu street, about a ten minute walk south to Pardes and even closer to Emek Refaim, which is a popular strip of restaurants and stores. Katamon is known to house many English speakers and students.
From the outside view you can see our place on the 3rd and top level. The next picture is of the main room, which is curved and you can actually see the outside of it in the previous pic. The deck was one of the main selling points of this place, and for those of you who plan on visiting us this year, I look forward to sharing a beer with you while overlooking the Jerusalem skyline.
The hardest part about the process was that the contract was in Hebrew; of which we speak very little, let alone Hebrew legal nomenclature. We had three resources here in Israel (including two attorneys) that were able to read the contract for us and report on its fairness. All three of them told us that the contract was super pro-landlord, worded ambiguously in several areas that we should be concerned about, and generally written poorly - not to mention that we were being required to pay a very high security deposit AND a promissory note. When we tried raising some of our concerns to the landlord, Itamar, his reply was consistently, "well, no. that's not what that section means. if you are uncomfortable than you shouldn't take the apartment." - typical Israeli in our opinion! Well, after waivering back and forth for several days and hearing all of the conflicting opinions, we decided to sit down with Itamar and hash out some of our concerns in person. He seemed to understand and made some handwritten changes to the contract we ended up signing. There still are some reasons for us to be concerned, but I think we may just take out a whole crapload of insurance to cover ourselves just in case!
We have posted a link on the right side of our home page to our Flickr account. Click on the pictures to go to the website where we will be posting all of our shots from our year in Israel. We plan to group them by month - so hopefully you can navigate easily.
So far we have just taken some random shots around the city - once we get settled in our place for the year and start taking more trips, we hope to have more to share.
Yesterday, we finally ventured a bit outside the main city of Jerusalem to the nearby Malcha shopping mall to see "Superman Returns". The mall was similar in some ways to a large American mall - 4 or 5 levels with all types of stores - clothing, shoes, camping, cosmetics - and a huge food court with both American and Israeli chains of fast food, ice cream, etc. But of course there were differences too - we had to go through security to get in (metal detector and a bag search) and many of the store signs are in Hebrew, English or Hebrew & English. I sort of wondered if Israelis think it's odd that so much of their commercialism is in English - tons of American/English & European brands, lots of English is used everywhere, etc. Of course its fun for us to see familiar things, but we were almost disappointed not to find more "Israel" brands - it's just all mixed up here. Oh, and when trying to find the movie theatre, I noticed a sign with an arrow to a shelter - many buildings here, especially more modern ones, have specific areas for bomb shelters - so that was an instant reminder that we were in Israel.
The movie theater was fairly small and they had assigned seats - which we learned is common here in Israel. A couple sitting near us was shocked to hear that American movie theaters didn't have assigned seating since they said that there would be fist fighting if they didn't have it here... I thought that was interesting to think that American society is actually more civilized in this way?! Also, there was a lot of commotion during the movie - people talking and stuff - not sure if it was just our crowd or if it is just more common here to not just sit and be quiet - sort of like in our ulpan!? The movie was in English with Hebrew subtitles - so nice to just be able to sit back and enjoy the movie. And there is a break in the middle of the movie here - they just stop it and turn on the lights and everyone gets up and goes and buys more food and then comes back. Nice if you have to go to the bathroom, but sort of annoying if you are really into the movie.
When we left the theatre around 9, we figured the mall would be quieting down, but it was totally the opposite. There were tons of people everywhere, the food court was packed and all of the stores were open and showed no sign of closing anytime soon. Totally different to experience this on a random Wednesday night. Of course, it being summer, we weren't as surprised to see more kids and families, but by the time we left after 10, it was still packed and hopping - guess it's the place to hang out :)
Hello! Sorry it has been a few days since we last posted, but the good news is that we think we found an apartment! We are still talking with the potential landlord and trying to work on a lease contract, so we still have some work to do, but we are getting closer! Once it is more finalized, we will post pictures and tell you all about it.
Today, we wanted to write a bit about our experience in the Hebrew Ulpan we have been taking since we arrived. "Ulpan" usually refers to modern (as opposed to biblical) Hebrew classes - generally focussed mostly on conversational skills. Our ulpan is called "Beit Ha'am" and is located in the heart of Jerusalem at the Gerard Behar Center, about a 5 minute walk from our "August" apartment. We are in our 3rd week of classes, which meet Sunday through Thursday, 8am to 12:30pm (with a break from 10-10:30). This ulpan (there are several throughout the city of Jerusalem) is fairly informal - anyone can take classes (you don't have to have a BA or be in Israeli or speak any other languages), you can begin classes at any time (although they recommend starting as close to the first of the month as you can), and you pay for the time you plan to spend at the school and then you leave when you want. As we completed an ulpan class last year in Chicago, we luckily didn't have to start at the beginning - which was a very good thing considering that when we arrived on August 1st we learned that if you had not already pre-registered for the beginning level, there was no room for you! I was quite relieved that we weren't in that position since I'm not sure if any other ulpans started this late in the summer and Pardes had told us pre-registration was not required. Anyway, we were told to join a beginning class that had started in July and therefore was about 1/3 to 1/2 way through the first level, Alef. Luckily, the level and pace of the class seemed about right ... and so we quickly jumped right in!
Needlesstoday, this classroom environment has been very different to any we have experienced in the U.S. First off, it is EXTREMELY informal. People seem to come in and out as they please throughout the morning and show up and leave class when they want. Of course there is a group of us that arrives on time everyday, that sits relatively quitely and tries to listen to the teacher and to participate in the class, and that returns from break ontime and stays until the end of the class, but we are definitely in the minority! Many students feel at liberty to talk throughout the class and to joke-off. We think part of this is related to the fact that this type of class doesn't really "count" for anything - although we have homework and some tests, we don't think that anyone has to "pass" out of alef level (although we're not sure if there is some type of standard for employers who want a certain level of Hebrew language to be achieved before they will allow you to work here). But you might think that if people were paying for this class and devoting 4 hours a day to learn Hebrew that they would want to pay attention, but that isn't necessary the case here.
The make-up of the class is also interesting - I'd say about half of the 25-30 students (not that they all show up everyday!) are either visiting tourists/students or new immigrants from the U.S., Canada, Russia, Mexico and parts of Europe and that the other half are Israelis who speak Arabic (not sure whether to call them Arab Israelis or Palesitinians or just Israelis). Among the students, English, Russian, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, Finnish and French are spoken as first languages.
Many of the Arab speaking students are quite young - like 18, 19 - and many make up the "goof-off" contingency. We are curious if perhaps this class is just something that their parents are making them do over the summer so that they can ultimately have an easier time finding jobs ... or if maybe they are bored since Hebrew is a lot like Arabic and maybe they don't need the repetition ... but we really are confused exactly why they are here.
The other half is also quite diverse - and ages range from 20s to 50s. We think we are the only ones who are in Israel to study Judaism - and people actually find this almost odd - and ask us why would we do that? Which is a question we received all the time in the U.S., but we were surprised to hear it here until we recalled (as we had realized when we visited Israel 9 years ago) that for many Israelis, living in Israel has nothing to do with Judaism, or any religion for that matter. They are Isralis just like we are Americans - period. Others in this group are scholars who are working on PhDs and are around for the summer to learn some Hebrew and work on their research. There are also several "new immigrants" who are learning Hebrew in order to ultimately find work and set-up their lives in Israel. If you are not aware, new immigrants are constantly arriving in Israel - it is very common - and the government will actually pay for Alef (first) level ulpan (and maybe Bet/second level too) just to get you on your feet. The government is relatively helpful towards new immigrants - also giving them a monthly stipend and helping with housing and all sorts of other things.
Overall, it is quite an entertaining group - many different accents and personalities! It's funny that when we learn a new word, everyone wants to know what it is in their language, and so I am actually recalling much of my Spanish vocabulary!
To share in our ulpan experience, click on the video below:
Anyway, we are chuggling along in our book, called " Hebrew from the Beginning," and trying hard to get as much out of the class even with the disruptions. As our main goal is just to become as familiar with the language as possible in order to aid in our text studies that we will begin in September, we found that some of the "Evrit B'Rachov" (Hebrew of the Street) that we are learning isn't as applicable for us. It is actually quite possible to survive in Jerusalem without speaking Hebrew on the streets - almost everyone knows English and many signs and menus are in English as well - as compared to Madrid and Paris as I recall. But of course we are hoping to pick up conversation skills along the way, and it is fun and interesting to try to learn some of the slang - much of which is actually arabic!
For now though, we are learning many verbs - the whole organization system is much more complex than other languages and certainly harder than Spanish! - and trying to retain some vocabulary. Pardes has already emailed us a Hebrew placement exam that we must submit by the end of the month and will be used to place us in our classes. Interestingly though, the email from Pardes specifically stated that for beginners, the entire exam would seem quite difficult and it was okay if we couldn't answer much if any of the questions ... so hard to know how much (if any!?) of the modern Hebrew will ultimately help with our studies ... for now we will enjoy the couple weeks we have left!
One last video of us showing the center where the ulpan is located to get a bit more perspective :) Enjoy!
Hi All - Our week of Hebrew classes went well, and although we took some time to try out some cafes, to see Max's cousins who are staying in Jerusalem for a wedding and to walk around the city a bit more, we are overall quite burdened by the apartment search. We have seen some places that were just unacceptable and/or very expensive and otherwise, we are having a hard time finding postings for furnished places in the neighborhoods nearby Pardes that are available for the school year.
We are in the proccess of contacting family friends and relatives who might be able to assist, and we are contining to check all the websites and listings.
Anyway, just wanted to let you know that we are mostly preoccupied with this, but we hope to post more soon about our Ulpan and our exploration of the city.
Hello - We had a pretty good first Shabbat here in Jerusalem. We tried out a conservative service on Friday night and then headed to HUC (Nicki's school!) for Saturday morning services. Both seemed to be very similar to their respective services in the US - both rabbis spoke English, the books were the same and the services seemed tailored to American immigrants and/or visitors. And now we are back into the swing of the work week - weird to begin on Sunday!? Ulpan is going just fine - we even both passed our first exam :)
Overall, after just about a week here, although we are enjoying the process of trying to figure out everything on our own in a new place (where to shop, where to eat, where to live, etc.), we are also a bit lonely. We are anxious for September to come so that we can connect with our community at Pardes and to meet other students. And of course we are enjoying each other's company, but it's hard not knowing anyone else ... it's making this month more challenging and unique than we believe the rest of our year will likely be.
On that note, we wanted to let you all know the best ways to be in touch - as we miss you! Of course, email works well, and we are supposed to have internet set up in our temporary apartment in the next day or so.
PHONES:
We both have Israeli cell phones. We would love to hear from you although we know it can be expensive. We are also trying to set up a 1-800 calling card number that you can call toll-free from the US and that will bill us for the time - more on that soon.
When dialing from the US: Jenny - 011-972-52-580-8782 Max - 011-972-52-899-8066
Just remember that we are 8 hours ahead of CST :) The best times to catch us are in the morning in the US.
We also have a phone in our temporary apartment for August. Usually, calling landlines in Israel is cheaper than cell phones, so if you want to try calling that, the number is 011-972-02-623-6484. We are the only ones who have access to this land line, so if we are home, one of us will answer! Of course, we will try to call too.
INSTANT MESSENGER
When online, it is VERY easy for us to talk over IM - so if you have an AOL screen name, please use it. (You can also get one for free online). We will be using Jenny's IM name, which is Jenns55. Please messege us to let us know your names - we will try to have iChat on when we are home and using our computer so we can chat with you. And if you have a MAC - we can talk just as easily as you probably know, so hopefully this will be a nice inexpensive way to hear your voices.
We are still looking into skype and will follow-up as soon as we figure out how/if we can use this.
We moved into our August apartment yesterday morning on Tisha B'av. Upon our arrival, the cute couple whom we are renting from had brought us fresh fruit, honey, flat bread, oil and juices! Our apartment is located at 29 Hamadregot, in the neighborhood of Nachla'ot, which is just northwest of city center and about a 15 min walk from where we had been staying. Within several streets, it seems that thousands of people are living - apartments are all on top of one another and many of the streets (including sections of ours) don't even allow cars, only paths for people to access their homes. The majority of the neighborhood is built from a white stone, which seems to make-up much of the architecture of the city.
After 2 quite stressful days of searching, we were thrilled to find an apartment nearby our ulpan. And compared to many apartments we looked at, this one was luckily larger and somewhat nicer. We seemed to find that apartments in Jerusalem on average are much more rundown and outdated than those in Chicago (and sometimes even more expensive to rent!). In some ways, during our apartment search, we were shocked at how old the furniture was and how rundown the appliances were. Many units did not have full kitchens (no stoves or ovens) or real beds (only pull out high risers) and many literally seemed to be falling apart at the seems.
Our goal was to find something for August in the areas nearby our ulpan (which is located near city center in Jerusalem), so that we could be close to the old city and to our classes. This way, if we decide to move further south closer to Pardes for the school year, we will still have had the opportunity to live right in the center of Jerusalem. However, we became very worried that we wouldn't be able to find anything suitable that wouldn't cost us tons of money in these areas. Part of the problem was that since we were only interested in renting for August, the prices went up considerably. Mostly though, the quality was just really poor, which as materialistic as it sounds, was really a challenge for us. What was interesting though, was that for all apartments we looked at, the owners were very proud of their properties - almost to a point that we wondered if we were really seeing what they were seeing. It seems that living in Jerusalem is enough for many of these residents, and that many of the standards of US living are just not possible here. Of course, there are modernized and newly built apartments too, but just not the majority and not the ones that were available for rent.
Our apartment has a full kitchen, full bathroom and even a real bed!! The furniture is mostly older or from IKEA and there is no A/C, but overall, it will do for the month. We even managed to negotiate the price a bit, so we feel that this was really the best deal for us upon such short notice. If you would like a tour, please click on the link below:
After getting settled-in, we decided to make our first trip to the Old City to visit the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall. Our apartment is about a 25-30 minute walk from the walls of the old city. Just to note, the streets of Jerusalem do not seem to have any order about them - they are all curved, they all change names many times, and they are almost all at an incline. So, what may look like a quick walk on the map actually takes longer than expected because we usually get lost at least once and we end up hiking up and down hill quite a bit. Needlesstosay, we are getting our exercise and we are sure to never leave without our good old Streetwise map of Jerusalem! The old city was about as we remembered, lots of tunnel streets packed with shops and lots of people walking to get to the wall. ( Just for reference, the wall is recognized as the only remainder of the outside wall that stood around the 2nd Temple, build in about 530 BCE.) The areas around and next to the Wall were filled with people praying ... and on such a mourning day as Tisha B'av, which is the day we mourn the destruction of the temples as well as other sad times in Jewish history, there were many literally shedding tears at the Wall. It was an interesting experience. Mostly, I just sat and wondered that if there is a God, whether he/she can really be reached more effectively at the Wall than anywhere else - of course, many believe the answer to this question is yes, and their devotion to prayer was inspriring and broadening to say the least.
This morning, after a somewhat restless first night, we were first awoken to the very loud honking of a car, literally right outside our window. We sort-of shrugged and tried to go back to sleep, although of course the honking just continued. (As a side note, the street noises are very loud here - seems much worse than Chicago, NY or Madrid - guess that's just part of driving in Israel!) Anyway, the next thing we knew, there was a man making an announcement on a loud speaker from the street, saying "BOKER TOV (good morning) - and then a lot of Hebrew we couldn't understand, followed by a series of numbers. For all we knew, we could have been being summoned out of our apartment or the message could have been a warning of some type ... it was a bit worrisome not to understand. So Max quickly got up and went out to our porch to see if any of our new neighbors spoke English. Luckily, one did and she relayed that the fuss had been about an illegally parked car on our street that was blocking traffic. The woman who had honked incessantly earlier had called the police. And the policeman had been speaking about the car - reading the license plate number - so that the owner could move it. We both kind of just laughed at the ruckus ... and we thought the cops were tough on parking in Chicago!
We spent our morning at the main Shuk (market) in the city in order to shop for Shabbat and begin to stock our kitchen. On a Friday morning, the market streets were crowded with all types of shoppers. We were amazed at the variety of fruits, veggies, nuts, cheeses, meats, fish, spices, olives and more that lined the many streets. And the prices on may items were really inexpensive - like we got 2 beautiful peppers for just under 2 sheckels - which is like 40 cents!! And we bought onions, garlic, cheese, challah, a bottle of wine, a bottle of olive oil and some other extras all for much less than in the states. Of course, there was very little prepared food, everything was sold from scratch, so we will surely be cooking more! There are also grocery stores too, where we picked up juice and pop and pasta sauce, but the market was really a neat experience!
Now we are off to prepare for Shabbat - we plan to visit a conservative synagogue for services - thought we would keep it as simple as possible and stick with something that should be familiar!
Things took a turn for the brighter this evening as we just found ourselves a place to stay for the month of August. We have been living in a temporary studio unit (at 41 King George) for the past several nights but will be kicked out tomorrow morning. Luckily, this new place came through right in the nick of time. Here's a photo of our current view from the temporary apt:
This is looking northwest from King George Street toward Yeshurun synagogue and Shumue Hanagid Street. Ben Yehuda street - which is closed to traffic and is infamous for its many shops and cafes - is a few blocks north of this intersection.
Anyway, after we get settled in tomorrow, we plan on taking a tour of the old city, the wall, etc. - should be pretty cool on t'sha b'av. Also, I plan to take a video of the place which we'll be in during August, look for that post in the next couple of days.
Jerusalem is a busy and hot place, and we're definitely learning something new every day.
We're studing for the year in Israel - to visit the website of our school, click on the link below.
We also got married on June 18, 2006! To see our pictures, click on the link below.
