A Day of Rest

Most of Israel -- shops, businesses, buses, people -- shuts down at 3pm on Friday and starts up again sometime after sunset on Saturday.  Thank goodness, so far life has been hard here and a day of rest is definitely needed.  Driving is allowed on the Sabbath but various  side streets may be closed off.  In more secular cities like Tel Aviv and yes, even working-class Haifa, some restaurants do remain open.  Because of the large Arab population in Haifa, it is the only city in Israel where the buses are allowed to run on the Sabbath.  However, for some reason, the buses stop around 5 pm Friday evening then resume later that night at 11 pm.  We've stopped trying to understand the logic here.

If you want to go to Friday evening services you either catch the bus and arrive over an hour early and hope for a ride home, or catch a taxi, or walk.  It is safe to walk at night and it would be possible to walk home from shul but not to shul.  Much of Haifa is built along a mountain side and for us going to shul would be an uphill climb all the way for probably an hour or more.  Going home downhill would be a lot easier.  What's more, Haifa has walkways and shortcuts with stairs to pass up and down through the city.  They are quite hidden, but once found make for a pleasant walk.  Since we've started shul, we've been reluctant to try and find our way home by foot in the dark.  We probably wouldn't be able to find the walkways and have to follow the road making the trek considerably longer in the cold and wet.

I always pictured Israel as a desert, probably because the only pictures I ever saw were of Jerusalem and the Dead Sea.  Haifa is not a desert and actually gets quite a bit of rain, at least in the winter.  As is true of all Mediterranean climates, it only rains in winter, and is hot and dry all summer.  It has been cloudy and raining for the past five days, complete with some thunder, lightning, and a bit of hail.  The thunder reverberates from the mountain and the sea: it sounds wonderful.  It will rain hard for 10 minutes or so, shower for another fifteen, stop for awhile then start up again.  It's been raining so much, moss is growing on some of the rooftops and there are puddles on the sidewalk and street.  Cars go by and splash you.  Daytime temperature runs in the low sixties, and on cold days stays in the 50's -- that's Fahrenheit, not Centigrade, if it were in Centigrade the temperature would be around 15 degrees and sound really, really cold.  Nighttime Haifa temperatures might dip down into the 40's; the higher up the mountain, of course, the colder it gets.

Nevertheless, fifties and wet is cold enough, making walking home from shul in this type of weather is undesirable.

After a day of doing a whole bunch of nothing, people are out and about going everywhere Saturday night -- even the malls are open until 10:30 pm.

It's kind of nice is to walk around Saturday evening.  Our temporary quarters are situated where a lot of Haredi (super-duper ultra orthodox) live, and after their traditional Havdalah ceremony, they go walking around too.  The Havdalah ceremony includes smelling fragrant spices.  Well, that fragrance -- a combination of cloves, cinnamon and maybe orange -- sort of lingers on the Haredi and they smell wonderful.

On Sunday work and business begins as usual. Sunday here is like Monday everywhere else.  For David and I, our days of running around on the bus trying to figure out banks, immigration bureaucracy, paying rent, finding an apartment, and how to manage are over.  Well, all that isn't over, we're just going to have to fit it in after Ulpan.  On Sunday, Ulpan -- the school that will teach us Hebrew and help integrate us into society -- officially begins.