Bezeq (internet provider) texted me – they text me a lot. Companies of all kinds text me and most of them aren’t worth the time translate. Seems this one was.

Called customer service, pressed the number for service in English, and used their automated phone system to get our internet turned back on immediately. We then have three days to pay our bill which I did in the same call.

That went surprisingly smoothly … as long as you don’t count the “they cut off our internet” part of the story and add “I know how I’m going to start my next diary entry” to the story.

Another time we had problems with the internet connection and when I called the sent a link via text message to click on which shared my phone camera with them so they could see my cable layout and boxes up in my internet cabinet place.

Internet Speed Brakes

I bet if they had WiFi 2,000 years ago they’d of used less stone . . .

Misspelling intentional.

A day before they disconnected the internet, our speeds were very slow … 30 kb/sec rather than 800 kb/sec. Okay, our internet is back up … why is it still slow? Why are the repeaters connecting all backwards and inside out?

The network switch I inherited from the old owner died killing all my wired connections, so everything connected wirelessly. I’m surprised it worked at all through the kryptonite blocking walls in Israeli houses.

Surely there’s a building material that can withstand nuclear blasts and allow a WiFi signal to pass through. That’d be a good invention.

Quick trip to a computer store in a very religious neighborhood where stores are often on the first floor of apartment buildings … this one being closed from 2pm to 5pm because I guess that’s the time to learn Torah? Being a computer store, the owner thoughtfully put direction signs around the back to the parking lot with a few stores … where a lady was none too pleased to see me “taking pictures” of the sign on the laundromat.

“I’m translating signs with my phone! Let me show you what you can do with this smartphone!” She wasn’t impressed and said I was being recorded by a security camera. Meh. I’m not here to steal your laundry. I’m trying to buy a router.

Bank fees are broken

My bank sent me a text…. about $35 in fees last month. No idea why. About $3 in interest because my balance momentarily went below $0 which the banks like and Israel considers normal.

Then I realized: What are my bills like? Apparently, I don’t pay my cable bill. I go on Route 6 … toll road … probably two or three times a month and yet I have never seen a statement or know what the charges are. Have I been paying for it?

Electric bill? I assume I’m paying it because I still have electricity in the house – though it goes out about once every two weeks, usually for very short amounts of time.

Gas bill? Yes – we order a new propone tank and switch to the other one whenever one is empty. Property taxes? Yes – those go on our American credit card.

Everything else … <shrug> Hard to follow sometimes even on the American card and even in English … sometimes the transliterations are just that bad. Here are some:

Phenix Elemantary
Noy Hasade
Clal Tel
Cal
Farmacy Moeirin
Phamm Modien
Aroma Mistype Ramon

Those are all real including the last one. No, really. The two before that are for “pharmacies” and the M-word is actually “Modiin” which is spelled another few ways on more lines in my credit card statement.

“Pheonix elementary” is actually horse lessons in a nice secular residential neighborhood with the Tel Aviv skyline not far away. I walked around the neighborhood one day waiting for my daughter … there’s a nice shul there which has me confused about what it means to be secular around here. That’s for later.

Land use is interesting here … apartment buildings up against large fields as you can see in the background of the picture. Organic fruit is grown on a not-organically placed farm, next a city, next a community, next to a wall, next to a whatever. There are sudden shifts between city and rural … not the gradual shifts in America where high-density city to rural is a slow roll. This means if you want your vegetables to be grown nearby, there’s a farm for that. Live in a city and want to go horseback riding, there’s a horse for that.

Property tax … you get some off as a new oleh (immigrant) … thought the amount differs by region. The regions are named after the parts of the land where each of the 12 tribes lived … they function kind of like counties.

My Diet is Broken

In America I started using a calorie counting app and lost 25 lbs and kept it off with a permanent diet change. How many calories per serving? What is a serving? How many do I really eat? It’s like the imperial system for food.

Came to Israel and they mark foods logically … calories per 100 grams rather than calories per semi-arbitrary value. Problem is … I’m not used to this system and haven’t “relearned” calories in a very different diet here and I’ve gained weight.

Food is also just so much better here. Hard to eat ultra processed snack foods anymore and I like the super sour yogurt now which was inedible when I arrived. They even put it in ice cream.

Fuel Efficiency Break from Tracking

I sponsor kiddush every time I get all my email accounts to Inbox 0.
I squeeze my toothpaste from the back.
I fill my gas tank when it’s 1/4 full.
Heck, I even (used to) track my calorie intake and exercise.

(Like most successful marriages, my wife is the opposite with thousands of unread emails, and all the rest.)

It was overwhelming enough to fill my gas tank in Hebrew. Without full service it’s overwhelming anyway. (I miss full service – required- in New Jersey.)

After about nine months, I’m actually setting the trip meter in my car and monitoring “kilometers per liter”. Now I see “12 km/L” and know that’s about “28 mi/gal” … neither of which are great measurements – we should be measuring the inverse so it’s linear instead of logarithmic.

You can notice a few things from my car’s console –

1) my wife last filled up the tank because the trip distance hasn’t been reset;
2) I’m stopped when taking this picture because it says “i-stop”;
3) you could have figured that more easily by looking at the speedometer;
4) I use my turn signal before I turn or just to fake the guy out behind me;
5) the only measurement you can make not metric is temperature – because I would have changed the rest by now if I could have. Even Japanese car makers allow you to defer to the better system of temperature measurement, outside of a laboratory.

(Just want to point out: despite not calculating miles per gallon for half a year, I never paused squeezing the toothpaste from the back like a mensch.)

The trees broke the air

Chometz burning – much smaller ordeal around here than in the ‘old country’ where we had dumpsters, music, and 1000 people in a long line. (Ah, wait for lag b’omer though…)

Funny thing happened on a day in early May … amazing weather from mid-October to the first week of May. There was one real cold week in February where all the kids except mine canceled their horseback riding when the 50s was too cold for them. We had a few days in the 90s though for the most part, had barely used heat or air conditioning for half a year.

Then one day it was in the 60s and the next morning … the strangest thing … high winds like a low-pressure cold front was coming through only it was hot front.

The temperature rapidly increased into the 80s in a matter of maybe an hour or two and soon after … high winds, hot burst of air … forest fires. Major roads were closed and dividers bulldozed so cars could turn around and escape.

The air was unbreathable – worst I’ve ever experienced – worse than Montana when the Canadians sent down their smoke from their fires. The soot and ash were like Mt. Vesuvius only it wasn’t nearly like that. We kept all the windows closed and fans in the air systems on to filter air. Left a coating on everything outside – here’s what our chair looked like:

That was as a hose-down-the cars sort of day. There are a lot of those days here and a lot more particulate matter to go around, though the air itself is much cleaner. In ‘the old country’ the sky was grey more often than blue and the rain and lack of particulate matter in the air kept the cars clean. Sure, there’d be guys wearing nothing but shorts shining their cars, parked in front of my house for some reason … here, it’s a quick hose down every few weeks or after a fire storm.

Went to shul in the morning and people are coughing and seem to be … okay with that and going about their business. It was alright if you breathed in through your nose and out through your mouth only … which is hard to do when you’re praying, it turns out.

Fire Broke Yom Ha’atzmaut

Apparently Yom haZichoron (holocaust remembrance day) and Yom Ha’atzmaut (independence day) are big deals around here. Trying to do anything the day before independence day here is like trying to get something done on July 3rd in America.

Funny thing about electric vehicles … no battery under the hood. It’s hidden somewhere and through the magic of searching the internet, turns out there’s a button you press to reconnect the 12V battery that starts the car. It automatically disconnects when it’s not maintaining a charge … which is good because you never need to jumpstart. You press a button. It’s bad because … you can’t replace it yourself so it was off to the garage … staffed with Arabs before Yom Ha’atzmaut because the Jews aren’t working … and I knew more about the functionality than they did. Then an owner came and said take it to the dealership … which is closed for days.

We brought it in when it reopened and had to fight with them to leave the car there rather than come back the next day with two drivers. When we went to pick up the car, the guy said he didn’t have it. So … we pointed to it. He handed us the key and off we went. No paperwork – nada.

Everything is closed on Yom Ha’atzmaut

Museums are open and free. Stores, it turns out, are not allowed to be open unless, it seems, they’re serving food. We drove to Tzvat – still trying to get to the artist colony – and other than fast food and bakeries there were two artist stalls open, one alcohol/art store with no one staffing it, and a lot of buildings for rent or sale. Nice weather … nice walk though not the lively place that I remember. We’re still trying!

I’m very haredi on the concept of, “don’t add another sad day to the calendar.” We have Tisha B’av for holocaust remembrance, or, as the Rabbinute (Israeli Rabbis) wanted to do – have it on an existing fast day like Teves 10 when kids are in school and can learn about it. Having said that, I do see the logic of having holocaust remembrance right before independence day … there’s a Jewish concept of starting with sadness and ending with happiness like we do in the Passover seder. Independence day is the joy after the pain.

Compare to the United States where Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks zt”l says the biggest problem with America’s independence is that it comes with a “Bill of Rights” rather than a “Bill of Rights and Responsibilities”. American ethos is: “I’m free, now bug off”. Israel ethos is much more, in my experience, of a collective – people care about one another and people have a shared responsibility to each other.

My BBQ Grill is broken

Finally found someone to convert my American gas grill to Israel propane grill … right after the fires so it’s covered in fire droppings.

He opens it up … screws are corroded – one wasn’t doing anything – many of the metal pieces were like flaked metal leaves (some I had even replaced once) … lookey here … there’s a nice hole across the bottom right side.

Asher yotzer.

The grill was about 15 years old … high quality Weber thing, so I thought. Could have used that space in the lift for other things. Sigh. If I never moved it …

The Weather is NOT Broken

It’s May. The weather is alternating now between “hot, beautiful in the late afternoon” and “beautiful.” Until May … it was plain beautiful almost every day of the month, save for a cold week in February.

Not related, though amusing – Duolingo (app to learn languages) got cute and keeps giving me the sentence:

הבמאי עובד רק במאי (“Ha-b’mai raq oveid b’Mai”)

… which means, “The director only works in May” because the word for director and May are the same in Hebrew. I’m still waiting for my opportunity to use the word “director” in public.

It’s hard to be depressed here when the weather is so nice – 34 degrees is the lowest it ever got and explains how there is outdoor tile. Ice doesn’t freeze and cause cracks to form. I don’t miss the cracks in the pavement all over the old country – we came from the land of the ice and snow … I don’t miss frigid winters, ice, and the whole deal. I do miss skiing though apparently there’s a bunch of countries around here I can go to … I hear people go to Georgia and Bulgaria and places like that with nice and inexpensive skiing.

In exchange for hot summers, to have beautiful weather from October to May … seems so worth it. (Mental note: in August reread this and see if I still agree.)

Electronics are Broken

Earbuds are about the same price here as America – there’s 18% tax on everything though apparently, it’s illegal to advertise the pre-tax price so you don’t “feel” it. You can find all the same electronics here as in America … just not as much variety.

Needed to replace a Chromebook … ordered one from Amazon and it didn’t work. Sent it back through the post office and got a refund in about three weeks. Then went to buy a computer here … where they don’t sell Chromebooks … and … Windows is so annoying. Put Linux on it … new issue with the keyboard … Sigh. Chromebooks are simple and work. Best thing for just internet and word processing.

Phone broken … they sell Chinese brands here in addition to others. I won’t buy Chinese. The government is evil. The phones, by the way, are sold in a supermarket!

(Mental note: Probably shouldn’t call things a ‘mental note’ after writing them down.)

The Entire Aliyah Diary

Arrival

01. Aug 19, 2024: Preparation In America
02. Aug 25, 2024: First Few Days
03. Aug 29, 2024: Moving In
62. July 17, 2025: I MADE IT

Cultural Adjustment Fun

Cultural Adjustment Difficulties

On The Roads

Shopping

11. Oct 13, 2024: Packages. (חבילות.)
34. Feb 17, 2025: Finding Obscure Things
41. Mar 23, 2025: New Shopping Habits
44. Apr 6, 2025: Pesach Shopping & Osher Ad

Government and Bureaucracy

Politics and Thought

Travel: South Israel

Travel: Central/North Israel

Travel: From Israel to …

54. June 4, 2025: Marseille and Avignon

Aliyah Blog 51: Fire Holidays (Lag B’Omer) – Patently Jewish

May 19, 2025

[…] have an exceptional tolerance for breathing in smoke. There were rows of fires like this with ash all over and I could barely breathe with a jacket […]
Aliyah Blog 61: Bring it to Israel for Us? – Patently Jewish

July 13, 2025

[…] Filtering for Kids37. Mar 3, 2025: Technical Difficulties40. Mar 17, 2025: Holiday Loneliness49. May 13, 2025: It’s Broken.58. June 22, 2025: Army Draft Notice59. Jun 29, 2025: 12 Day […]
Aliyah Blog 62: I MADE IT. – Patently Jewish

July 17, 2025

[…] Filtering for Kids37. Mar 3, 2025: Technical Difficulties40. Mar 17, 2025: Holiday Loneliness49. May 13, 2025: It’s Broken.58. June 22, 2025: Army Draft Notice59. Jun 29, 2025: 12 Day War61. Jul 13, 2025: Bring it to Israel […]