Blogs from Haifa District, Israel, Middle East - page 14

Naturally, there are fruits and vegetables in the market that we don’t see at home. Here are two fruits that were new to us. This fruit is called as annona, אנונה in Hebrew. Elsewhere it goes by cherimoya or custard apple. It grows on a tree, Annona cherimola, that is native to Peru and Ecuador but is now cultivated in other parts of the world, including Israel. The fruit is rough and warty on the outside with a skin about the thickness of that on an avocado. The inside is filled with white flesh that is interspersed with large black seeds. The flesh is almost too sweet, with a flavor a bit like mango and strawberry. According to Wikipedia, Mark Twain described the cherimoya as “deliciousness itself.” We are inclined to agree with him. These shiny ... read more

I like to cook. It’s my responsibility to shop for and prepare our meals. One of my favorite pastimes is to take the bus down to the shouk and stroll among the fruit and vegetable stands, comparing prices and quality. I buy what looks good and bring it back to make dinner. The produce here is amazing—everything is so fresh. And though it has cooled off—it’s been in the low 20’s Celsius (low 70’s Fahrenheit) for the past week or so—the market is still full of summer vegetables: zucchini, eggplants, tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers (red, yellow, and green). One of the surprises for me is how much more creative and enjoyable cooking has become. Part of it is the availability of fresh ingredients, but it’s more than that. At home, I’m surrounded by a lot of ... read more

(As dictated to Betsy.) In school, I’m learning Hebrew and my friends are mostly talking to me in Hebrew but if I don’t understand they talk to me in English. One of my friends talked to my dad and said I’m learning Hebrew really well. I have a tutor named Yuval. He’s really nice and my teacher doesn’t think he’s doing enough. My school teacher wants me to do other stuff with her and not so much with him. My teacher’s making me read a book in Hebrew called “Alexander the Great, the Small" ("אלכסנדר הגדול הקטן"). With Yuval, I’m also learning to conjugate verbs and know colors and numbers, and we have signs on lots of things around the house that I’m learning. I went to a party on a boat for a bat mitzvah ... 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