Blogs from Israel, Middle East - page 152

How I found Kees...I spent a day checking out Jerusalem then caught a bus to Tel Aviv, on the way who should I see biking along the road but Kees in his bright green Makarewa T-shirt. But the bus driver wouldn't stop. When I arrived in the city I had a feed then biked back to the motorway, found myself a comfy spot near the on ramp to the city, and kicked back reading for a couple of hours. By the time Kees came along it was dark. Tel Aviv is a great mixture of western modernity with Middle Eastern parts. We spent that evening down by the sea enjoying some of the free open air concerts with some new, and old, couch surfing friends. The next day dawned bright and hot so we went for ... read more

I love the hot weather here. Summer is my favorite season, and we are enjoying an extended summer. In our hometown of Tacoma, Washington, the first three days of October saw high temperatures of 61, 56, and 55 degrees Fahrenheit. The rainy season has begun, the weather service has already issued snow advisories for the Cascade passes, and our daughter Kate is shopping for a winter coat. Over the same time period, our highs were 97, 97, and 90 degrees Fahrenheit. We dress in shorts and t-shirts. It does get a bit warm in late afternoon, so we stay indoors. Mornings and evenings are lovely, and we sit outdoors at the table on the patio. It looks like when our friends in Tacoma are snowboarding, we’ll be snowbirding. The hot weather means that many plants that ... read more

Several people have emailed to ask what research I’ve been doing and will be doing on my sabbatical here in Haifa. In this entry, I’ll try to answer that question in only a few paragraphs. I proposed coming to Haifa originally for two projects, one on post-wildfire habitat restoration with the Israeli National Park Service and one on pollination biology of a mimetic orchid with pollination biologist Amots Dafni at the University of Haifa. The wildfire project was designed to take advantage of the almost simultaneously ignited fires from last summer’s war with Hezbollah--every Katusha rocket that hit northern Israel created a “controlled burn,” and the National Park Service proposed to establish paired plots inside and outside of 75 burns of different sizes across the northern Israel landscape. Unfortunately, the set-up was not funded, so I ... read more

Ok, so I’m crazy. This I know. But get this: I’ve decided to do another random, crazy event because well….that’s me. I’ve joined the “Jewish Princess? Odyssey”. What in the world is that you may be asking yourself? Especially when you picture me and all my very non Jewish Princess ways. I’m that girl that rolls out of bed, wears practically no makeup, makes sex remarks like a guy and is a firefighter for god’s sakes. I’m definitely no princess. But with the tongue-in-cheek name, it actually is an event that when I explain it, you could actually picture in your head “Yes, Jessi is just that weird and random to do that.” I digress. Here we go: I will be fund raising a God-awful amount of money in order to participate in the desert “trek” ... read more

11 AM I am a worrier. At home I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and start mulling over things—work or finances usually—and can’t get back to sleep. I thought it would be different here. A few bumps getting settled and then we’re essentially on a year-long vacation, right? What’s to worry about? Early on, Betsy and I decided that we were going to homeschool Zach. Why not public school? Well, naturally, there was the language problem: Zach doesn’t know Hebrew. But more important, we had heard horror stories about the Israeli public school system. Expatriates reported that discipline is lax and the culture is extremely violent. Students are disrespectful and won’t listen to teachers. Bullying is common and tolerated—both of students and teachers! Students even assault teachers in the classroom. (We’d heard ... read more