Our new home is wonderful, sort-of. It's on the third floor, but in Israel they call it the second floor because the first floor is not counted as a floor. In the US it would be called a 2bed/1bath. In Israel it's called a 3-room apartment. The bathroom consists of a bathtub with shower and a sink, and the toilet is in its own private room -- hence the term "water closet."
From the second bedroom and the kitchen we have a view of the Mediterranean and the Haifa port. As much as I love water, David actually enjoys looking out the window more. He keeps track of everything going on at the dock: how many ships are in, if they are unloading, which direction they come in and leave... Oy. When we first moved in David commented we would be able to watch the bombs coming in from both Hamas and Hezbollah. I was like, "Cool! Oh wait, not cool."
The apartment does have its problems, they're called really bad leaks. These are not small drip-at-the-sink leaks, these are seep-through-the-wall leaks. Every time we take a shower a huge pond forms in the bathroom and we cannot find where the water is coming from. Another leak is in the kitchen. Whenever we turn on the kitchen faucet, water somehow seeps onto the counter. Then today, the drain under the sink came undone and we have to capture the waste water in a bucket.
Here's the other thing, most Israel windows don't have screens in the American sense. They have black-out screens that are nice when in comes to sleeping in pitch black. But they don't have open-the-window-and-keep-the-bugs-and-birds-out screens. I asked the landlord about opening windows in the summer and he said open the windows. I questioned him further about birds and bugs flying in, and he said Israeli birds know not to fly in the apartments. We'll see about that. I've heard from other sources that opening windows lets in mosquitos and it is terrible.
So what we did -- which was stupid and we immediately regretted it -- instead of taking the bucket full of water that drained through the broken pipe in the sink and pouring it down the toilet or tub, we threw it out the window. We forgot that people hang their freshly-washed clothes on clotheslines outside the screeen-less windows and realized we dumped dirty waste water on the laundry of the people who live below us. If they come storming up the stairs and pounding on our door, we're denying everything.
With the problem of the broken drain in the sink, I happened to notice that the water line to the house is causally draped along the outside wall below our kitchen window. It is black plastic tubing that vibrates every time you turn on the faucet.
At our temporary quarters at regular intervals during the day, we heard some kind of tune being played. We eventually realized instead of a buzzer or yelling, it was a call to the boys at the Haredi school to come in from recess. Although we are in the same neighborhood, we are far away from the Haredi and don't see them so much. Now, however, on Friday evenings we can hear something that sounds like a combination of a shofar and siren that apparently reminds everyone that Shabbat has started. It could also be a Muslim call for prayer, but since it only sounds on Friday at sunset, we're pretty sure its the signal to light the candles.
David keeps telling me I need to blog about the police. In the United States, when a cop flashes their lights it means to pull over. The Israeli police drive around with their lights consistently flashing. People just ignore it. I don't know what cops do when they want you to pull over. I did see a cop behind a motor vehicle that had stopped in the street to let someone out at the mall -- the someone had difficulty walking. The cop had a megaphone or something and was shouting at the car to move.
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