Working Girl

It’s Thursday. That means day 6 of this whole adventure, day 4 of work and day 1 of weekend. Yes, Israel works on a slightly different, a little bit more religious friendly schedule than we do at home. Work is Sunday through Thursday and play is Thursday night until Sunday morning when its back to work again. Speaking of work… where to start? As most of you already know (and like I said before) I’m working for a wedding dress designer named Galit Levi. I started work at 8am on Monday morning and literally was put to work at 8:02 hand sewing “Chrystalim” beads to a wedding dress, along with lace flowers, and “diamonds” galore. I have done more hand sewing in the last four days at work than I have in my whole life, which is good because it will be a really good learning experience on that end. The people that I work with are great for the most part. A few speak English and the others, mostly Russian Babushka implants are trying to learn, which has been the cause for many hysterics in the sewing room. My favorite of the Russian ladies is Marina, who is trying to hard to learn English because she says she gets jealous when everyone else can talk to me and she can’t. She is really a riot trying to learn with her odd Hebrew/Russian accents asking “You do chave boyfrend?” (see ta, it’s not only the nail ladies) and “we be like femily soon”. We are teaching eachother our respective languages so we can talk to eachother in the next few months. For the first few days, we had a really sweet lady working with us who was teaching me everything and knew English really well because she just got married to someone from New Jersey (who she’s known for a whopping two months!) but unfortunately she was fired for some reason – it’s a very interesting group dynamic. The others are basically either just business women, real Israeli ballbusters who mean business, or my new ally at work, a 20 something year old who shares a lot in common with me. Everyone works really hard and I have not had a minute at work when I don’t have a task to finish five minutes ago, it’s quite hectic. So yesterday, we had some visitors in the office filming for something or another, some mystery that we are not allowed to know about, but the moral of this story is that I might, one day be on Israeli TV sewing my little fingers off and being talked about as “that girl that came all the way to Israel to do a Stag (internship).”
Other than working, I really haven’t done anything too exciting yet as I have been coming home and passing out by 10pm at the latest out of exhaustion. I am going to Jerusalem tomorrow for Shabbat and to spend some quality time with one of my favorite Israeli families- Hila and the rest of the Cohen family. I can’t wait to get back there and experience another Shabbat in the old city, obviously the best place to celebrate.
I think I am about to fall face first onto my keyboard. Ani Ayefa (hello, Hebrew word of the day- “I’m tired”). I will add to this update soon when I have more excitement to share.
Hope all is well on the homefront. Shabbat Shalom
Xoxo
Dani

Cribs: Israel Edition

for all parties interested and to stop the nagging to see this:

http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=9CcuXDdq0YdQ

my room mates made that when they were trying to fill my room. So now you know where I live, down to the plastic wrap drawers!
enjoy

Slikha, At Medaberet Anglit? (Excuse me, Do you speak english?)

Today’s Scoreboard:

Total Kilometers walked wayyy too many

Total times “Do you Speak English” was asked to random strangers on the street: probably about 65 (but who’s counting?)

Total cell phone plans organized: 0

Total busses taken to get pretty much nowhere throughout the day: 6

Total Schwarmas/ Falafels eaten so far: 0

Totally wiped out….

So today brought on one adventure after another. I didn’t really go out this morning with a plan, other than to find where I have to go for work tomorrow morning bright and early, at 8 am (which I did!) and to get a cell phone for the next three months. One out of two ain’t bad. The building where my office is is right across the street from the ocean, not a bad place to take a lunch break. You can tell that the area is where all the fashion headquarters are that are in Tel Aviv just by the number of people smoking outside of the office buildings, probably thinking they are the coolest thing to hit Israel since sliced Matzah. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see what else is around there and what the area is like. Other than that, I did a substantial amount of walking/wandering/not knowing where I was this afternoon which was really nice, just to see what’s up in Tel Aviv. I have never really had time to explore this area because I have always been on such a tight schedule. I did have to find out where I was occasionally so I didn’t wander into some unknown territory and just to make sure I was somewhat wandering correctly so when it came to asking people on the street, for the most part, everyone was really nice and helpful, including one girl who pulled out her cell phone and looked up a map of the buses online from her phone, and basically walked with me to the bus stop. Speaking of buses, the last bus I took was playing The Beatles and a little old man next to me was singing along, half in Hebrew and half in English- it was definitely a culture clash! I’m making in an early night tonight so that I am not a zombie for my early wake-up call of 6:30.

Oh! And as for the Hebrew word of the day, it comes with a story, of course. On my first bus ride this morning, I pulled out my handy dandy Hebrew-english dictionary to read about bus and transportation terminology, knowing I would probably need it soon enough. The first page I opened up to offered this:

ISRAELI SOLDIERS:

Israeli Soldiers’ main means of transport throughout the country is Egged, the national bus line. When traveling by bus in Israel, you’ll encounter many olive-green uniformed men and women, all carrying one type of machine gun or another. If a rifle blocks your path, don’t be afraid to say:

“Slikha, ata yakhol (at yekhola) lahaziz et harove, bevakasha?”

In english, “Pardon me, could you move that gun?”

Oyyy Vey, only in Israel.

Shalom from the home(land)

So, here I am. Another three months in another foreign country, doing more strangely foreign things, eating stranger foreign foods than I am used to, and meeting new people (you guessed it, foreign ones!) For those of you who don't know, I am not just being irresponsible and traveling around the world having forgotten about school completely, I am here doing an internship with a wedding dress designer named Galit Levi, apparently one of the top ones here- it seems I pick them well! (if you are interested, galitlevi.com- but don't be scared, as mom likes to say, it looks like lingerie!) Anyways, after a LONG two days or so of traveling to get here, taking up residence on a less than comfortable couch for 6 hours in London Heathrow Airport- just long enough to get back into the British swing of things, then leave again- I arrived safely to my new residence- ISRAEL! I knew it wouldn't be long until I was back here and this time it's for longer than three weeks, it's for three months! If you would have asked me last summer when I was here if I would come back for a longer period of time SO soon though, I probably would have laughed, thought about it a little longer, than answered “anything can happen.” So, it happened, I’m here.

I am living in a great apartment with two great girls, one American and on Canadian, in an area called Ramat Aviv, right next to Tel Aviv University and about 15 minutes from downtown on a bus. So far, from what I've seen in my extremely jetlagged day here, it's a really cute, but quiet area with a little strip mall, lots of trees and parks and a huge amount of adorable families. It’s actually pretty modern looking around here and apparently, a pretty well to do area. Since it is Shabbat (the Sabbath, day of rest, whatever you want to call it) everything, and I do mean everything, is shut down, minus two cafes and one tiny little corner store. No buses, barely any cars, and lots of families playing outside in the parks and riding bikes and just relaxing together, a very new concept to me since I don't even think that on Sundays, America remotely shuts down or relaxes. So far, everyone seems so much more laid-back and everything has slowed down dramatically- but this is just on the Sabbath. I’m sure I will quickly find out that this is not the case during the week when I start working early on Monday Morning.

Since I have only been here for about a day and a half, I am trying to get over jetlag but not doing much on top of that- slept late, unpacked (Shocker!), hung around the apartment, went for a walk to the “mall”, sat in the park for hours and just read and people watched (my favorite hobby of all) and now, I’m back to relaxing at home. Tomorrow will bring a trip downtown to take care of some cell phone and food shopping business and of course, some time just to get back to one of my favorite places in Israel. I can already tell that it will be different to be a resident here as opposed to a tourist, and I’m sure my biggest obstacle will be the language- my first words in the country were “Sorry, I don’t speak Hebrew” when someone asked me for directions. At least I look like I know what I am doing… I think?

Hopefully, I will keep this more updated than I did with my Danidoeslondon blog, but I can’t make any promises of daily updates, I’m sure my life will not be so exciting that I need to share every detail of it to the wonderful world wide web.

Don’t forget, keep me posted on life wherever you are, I think it’s only fair, don’t you? I don’t have a cell phone yet but I have a feeling Skype will become my new best friend in the next three months, so don’t hesitate on that one.

I hope all is well with everyone at home (and wherever else you might find yourself).

Shalom in the home(land)

Dani

p.s… just so you can learn right along with me…

HEBREW PHRASE OF THE DAY:

I’d like to buy…. Ani Rotse (rotsa) Liknot.... (fill in the blank)

(that’s an important one, obviously :))