Early Days in Israel

Israel is hot.  Very hot.  Africa hot.  According to the weather forecast, later in the week may be a bit cooler.

Today was my first day of Hebrew studies.  I studied for about 6 hours.  I'm in the advanced level, which sounds impressive, but you realize how far you have to go if I am advanced.  I cannot yet read a 'real' newspaper (as opposed to the kind published for people just learning Hebrew) and I only get about 50% comprehension when I listen to the television.  I'm not sure I'll achieve my goal of being completely fluent, but I'll try.

Speaking of Israeli TV, its difficult to put into words how bad it is.  I guess on the plus side, you don't have to be good looking or, quite frankly, have recently taken a shower, in order to be on TV.  The talking heads and 'hosts' seem to be people that have rolled out of bed onto a television set. 

In fairness, it's mostly the men.  The women are dressed nicely.    The weather guy on channel 10--I kid you not--was wearing jeans and a purple golf shirt to night.  On another channel, there's a show called 'Nightclub', which is actually a bunch of people sitting around making fun of the news.  And, it's funny.  One of the guys is wearing a t-shirt that looks like its been on him for days.  And comb your hair?  Why?  Again, the woman look put-together.  This is actually a pattern you seen on the street as well. 

Some random comments:  the smoking situation is improving if you are a non-smoker.  There's essentially no smoking in restaurants, the airport, and other public places.  But, the rate of smoking is much higher here than in the States...everyone is smoking outside...If you are paying attention, you see that more and more restaurants are 'kosher mehadrin' meaning the absolute strictest level of kashrut.  I've blogged about this before:  either you are kosher or you're not--it's like being pregnant.  Mehadrin means 'beautify' and the idea is to 'beautify' kashrut by keeping the strictest possible form of it.  So, when there is a choice between a more lenient form of kashrut and a more stringent form of kashrut, you choose the more stringent form.  More on this later.