Aliyah Blog 41: 1/2 Yr Check-In & Shopping Habits

by tostien · March 23, 2025

Article Outline:

Introduction
What I’ve accomplished so far
What I still haven’t accomplished
Aliyah Benefits
Change in Shopping Habit #1 – Earbuds
Change in Shopping Habit #2 – Sneakers
Change in Shopping Habit #3 – Going to a Mall for … anything
Please comment

All Diary Entries Here

Government and Bureaucracy
10. Oct 8, 2024: Driver’s License
11. Oct 13, 2024: Packages. (חבילות.)
13. Oct 30, 2024: Bureaucracies and Stories
19. Nov 28, 2024: Taxation for Americans
22. Dec 23, 2024: Doctors & “Choleh Chadash”
27. Jan 23, 2025: Healthcare in Israel
32. Feb 5, 2025: How To Hire the Wrong Person
33. Feb 10, 2025: Quest to Pay My Taxes

Politics & Thought
12. Oct 25, 2024: October Sun and the Jew
16. Nov 17, 2024: Where People Look Like Me
17. Nov 19, 2024: Jewish Identity and Outlook
21. Dec 11, 2024: Let Freedom Ring
38. Mar 6, 2025: Talking in Quiet Peace

Travel and Trips
08. Sept 25, 2024: Jerusalem Concert
14. Nov 2, 2024: The Kindness of Strangers
20. Dec 5, 2024: Tel Aviv Art Museum
23. Dec 29, 2024: The West Bank. (Shomron)
26. Jan 18, 2025: Dead Sea Beer and Ice Cream
28. Jan 26, 2025: Yarkon River Judaism, Tel Aviv
30. Jan 31, 2025: My Son Visits and we Travel
35. Feb 20, 2025: Mitzpe Ramon Stars, Ein Avdat

Introduction

It feels like about three months, maybe, though it’s now March. I’m here this long without seeing my friends from America? The weather has gone from the 90s with huge differences in how it feels with the sun overheard verses shade … to the most beautiful and pleasant winter from October to March, save for an extremely cold week in February where it made it down to 34 degrees at night – and in the 90s in mid-march then back down to the 50s and 60s. We have tile outside our house which you can do around here because water doesn’t freeze in the cracks. That being said, when it rains, unlike with decks that have spacing, the water pools and you have to make sure there’s path for flow.

What I’ve accomplished so far

Bought a house, bought two cars, enrolled all the kids in school, got all the kids to go to school, car insurance, home insurance, mortgage, installed light fixtures, redid a bathroom, built a cat house, installed a cat door, planted trees, study Hebrew with a tutor 5 or 6 times a week since September, found a gym, found another gym, figured out that blue/white paint means you have to pay, visited Yerushalyim, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and other cities … went on some great hikes, seen some great nature under the stars and up atop a mountain, seen 2000 year old ruins, and wrote the longest run-on sentence of my life without a predicate.

What I still haven’t accomplished

The American grill still hasn’t been converted to work with propane here, I still do not have a business bank account and so can’t pay my business taxes, my work schedule with American hours is still kind of haphazard. I’m realizing that if you move to another country where you’re not licensed for anything and don’t speak the language … you’re going to have a very difficult time finding a job so I’m very thankful that I can do the same business from here, thanks to Covid and everyone moving online for meetings.

I still feel a bit lost regarding communications in new places. I can go to Kesefet for ice cream and say / understand everything in Hebrew. Went to a sushi place recently and I was lost again and refuse to have them speak English to me or I’ll never learn. I think my wife has finally transferred her therapy license? There are plenty more places in the country I want to visit though I have time.

Aliyah Benefits

House purchase benefit … turned out not to be worth it. It was a better deal to purchase the home as a regular Israeli first time home buyer. They keep changing the tax rates so by the time anyone reading this has this issue, it may be different.

Car purchase … for the used car, it made no difference to get lower taxes. For the new car, it made some difference.

Money for moving here / money for each kid … that’s helpful. It helps offset the costs of moving and having to start over with a lot of items.

Ulpan classes (learning Hebrew) … if you move here young and without a job or retired, I can see it being a great idea. Trying to raise a family, work, and go to Ulpan is just way too intense. It’s a full-time commitment. I pay privately for a tutor which … is more realistic for us.

Change in Shopping Habit #1 – Earbuds

$15 earbuds from AliExpress – I’d never buy that cheap in America where I needed amazing Active Noise Canceling … and I’d never have bought from Ali Express. These things are big enough to take out a deer before it hits your car.

Bose: if it breaks, they fix it for free. One of my kids lost one of the earbuds. Replaced with Sony because it had a feature I wanted and I didn’t want to spend that much again.

Sony: if it breaks, too bad. Try to change a battery … I wrote about that earlier. Waited for my son to bring me the kit to change it and I tore a cable. Read all the instructions first. They really don’t want you to change the battery. Fine. I’m not buying a Sony product again … which I said after buying a mini-Disc player that couldn’t copy anything digitally back in 2002. At least it was over 20 years before I forgot and bought a Sony product again.

Boseus: In Israel I spent $15 on a pair of earbuds from Alixpress … they’d have cost more from Amazon who wouldn’t ship them here anyway. Why didn’t I buy super amazing earbuds again? Well, I don’t really need really good active noise cancelling here. Things just aren’t LOUD everywhere. I don’t hear ice cream trucks outside my office – houses are concrete – and you don’t want to stick a pencil in your ear to avoid the gym music in this country. There’s no need to spend so much on earbuds. Maybe I’m just less materialistic because getting material things takes more effort.

Downside: they took almost two months to arrive from the Netherlands! The bass response is terrible … though the case is big enough to throw at a car driving on Shabbos and so some hefty damage. (It’s a joke.)

Change in Shopping Habit #2 – Sneakers

To the left: $205 Nike sneakers at Foot Locker, Israel; To the right: $1040 Sneakers at the American Dream Mall in New Jersey … have to know where to shop. Which are more overpriced is debatable.

I’m not, what you call, a “sneaker” person, or as they say around here … “na’alei sport” … sports shoes. Outdoor activities are more intense here – at least the ones I do. I am, however, remembering words more and more. [Things are sinking in … “chatif chelbon” is a “protein bar” … first time I heard that, it wouldn’t stay in my head. Haven’t found any decently priced here – Costco spoiled me.]

Anyway (m’kol mikreh), back to ordinary purchases … I bought shoes before I came to Israel because anything I could do in America, I did. Here, online shopping isn’t what it is in America … Amazon isn’t two day shipping. It’s actually pretty good … two to three week shipping … then returns are difficult and I forgot how many products from Amazon just aren’t good. I went through about four or five purchases and returns with Amazon to find the right size and style of shoe I wanted and each pair came in a day, maybe two. Shoes generally cost me about $60 … maybe $80.

Here, I went to shoe stores … my shopping experience has been “reset” without instant Amazon and Costco. It’s off to “normal” stores.

They do know American sizes here (they’re on all the boxes with UK and European sizes, just like America). They didn’t have my size of much in one store … the stores are smaller here. In general, all stores are smaller. It’s about $120+ for sneakers here! I can’t stand malls so it was off to the shopping center. I walked into a Foot Locker which was just like America … and I remembered why I hadn’t been in a Foot Locker since I was maybe 12 years old. It was about $200 for sneakers here! Crazy prices in Israel! America can have crazier.

Then I went to a second store in the same shopping center … prices were more out of control … $150+ for some really sweet hiking boots. Not spending that. At least not yet – I’m not ready for that.

Ready to give up and then, in true Israeli style, I’m looking around just to see what’s in this shopping center and there’s a third shoe store. This one looked like a Burlington Coat Factory with only shoes … lined up on the wall, by size, no boxes. A nice young Arab woman helped me out.

I bought these sneaker-sandal crossover things ($55) which on Amazon costs $73 – I looked it up before my purchase. Seems you just need to know where and how to look … which, being new here is a struggle. It’s like you need a mentor. In my case it’s my Hebrew teacher who told me where to shop. Meanwhile, she learns all sorts of interesting things about religious Jews, American Jews, and weird things like, “people had this idea that we should answer the phone with “ahoy, hoy”.

Seems you can also spend as much on shoes in Israel in America, if you want to. The prices might not actually be that different … maybe 10 to 20% more here. I’ve just been bargain shopping my whole life. Footlocker … yech.

Change in Shopping Habit #3 – Going to a Mall for … anything

This is a silly little story / annoyance though it typifies the sort of “every day” thing that comes with moving to another country and figuring out not that big of differences in culture that are difficult as a newb.

Gyms around here have this odd habit of being in office buildings and come in all sorts of quality … and you have to look up to find them. After getting a parking ticket by the old one and not agreeing to pay them more to park, I found a new and much nicer gym for less money and three-hour free parking. Sounds great until you have to figure out how to get there.

The mall has kosher pre-prepared food for Shabbos in the lobby on Fridays … upstairs were local fruits. There are stores like this too. Fun part of being in Israel.

I use Waze … and Waze takes me to the right address. I go to the parking garage under the building and the American parking attendant tells me nope, the parking for the gym isn’t in the gym building. Things like this don’t surprise me anymore. (Incidentally, someone once told me what to type into Waze to find his store, rather than use an address.)

Parking is at the mall. I hate malls. First, you drive in a circle around the mall and find the barely labeled entrance to the garage under the mall. They ask you if you have a gun because if you do, your background check has been completed, and you have a card to get in without any search. I don’t so the routine is “open the trunk” and listen to the car beep because someone is walking close to it. Finally figured out how to turn off all the beeping – beeping is not a feature. I’m more likely to hit another car with the beep than without because it’s so distracting. The automatic turning off of the engine when you stop – can be turned off as well. In the United States, you can’t do that on cars (you can do it each time you enter the car – not permanently) because it’s how car manufacturers meet efficiency requirements.

Then you take a parking ticket. Then you find a parking spot in an underground maze with spots which are too narrow, though the green/red light above each spot so you can find an open one is quite nice. Then you take stairs that … don’t exit anywhere. Then you go back down. Then you can’t enter the garage again the way you drive in. Then … you get the idea. Should I want to just give up and join a gym with plenty of parking right in front America-style, it’s $110/month!

Outdoor escalator @ the mall – which was running when it was raining and off when it was sunny.

Okay, eventually I’ve figured out how to get out of parking garage roughly in the direction of the right office building with the gym … which has curse words on the wall in English outside the unisex locker room… “ready to kick patoot” … etc. For all the transgender nonsense in America, you’d never seen a unisex locker room. (At this gym, however, they have large shower rooms with plenty of room to sit and change.) In Japan these fancy businessmen wore button down shirts that said female dog above the pocket. That was a brand there.

I figured out how to get my parking validated … and … go through security to enter the mall and then … have to pay each time when I leave the parking garage. I ask for help at the gym … they say ask for help in the garage. I do that … I end up calling them every time I leave the garage and my ticket doesn’t open the gate. They let me out.

Then I had the bright idea – put your ticket into the payment machine before exiting the mall. Now when I exit, the gate opens. Why this works and not putting my ticket in the machine at the gate? <shrug>

Finally, I have the system down after a “harrowing” few weeks and I’m a person with a good sense of direction. Now, half the time the guards at the gate wave me through (do they recognize me?) and going back into the mall, a half-hearted attempt to put my phone outside of the metal detector is fine … if the guard is even awake.

Guess when you can walk in and out of the mall without security, you’ve made it.

Aliyah Blog 41: 1/2 Yr Check-In & Shopping Habits

Introduction

What I’ve accomplished so far

What I still haven’t accomplished

Aliyah Benefits

Change in Shopping Habit #1 – Earbuds

Change in Shopping Habit #2 – Sneakers

Change in Shopping Habit #3 – Going to a Mall for … anything

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