Hey all; So congrats to Laurie from Hackensack who was the first to correctly identify our goofy message in the Zurich Airport Terminal A Kids play room guestbook. So the boys slept through the night last night, so did ariela which left me with the responsibility of lying awake and processing the day (actually ariela tells me that after I finally dozed off she woke up and did forty five minutes of yoga, probably a better use of insomnia time than going over the events of the day). So here's what I had to process of our first day. The big thing for me was speaking Hebrew again. I hadn't realized how much I missed speaking Hebrew. The fact of people speaking Hebrew in parks and on the streets is always amazing to me and I love getting to do it too. I don't know why I get such a kick out of learning odd Hebrew words but I do. We took Lev and Benjy to a little park not far from our house. There we met a little boy and girl with their caretaker. We told Benjy how to introduce himself in Hebrew and he found a likely set of candidates and went over though he was stumped once he had done that, so we came over to provide some back up and ended up chatting. The little boy told us that his family was going to Eilat for a few days. I asked if he was going to swim in the sea. He told me that he didn't know how to swim but that he could 'litzlol,' which it turns out mean dive. Now I know the word for dive is. Today, I told everybody that we were going to dive into life in Jerusalem, so as to cement litzlol in my mind. I mistook the little boy and girl for the children of the woman who was looking after them. She said they weren't her kids she was just looking after them for their "imahot" mothers. I would have gotten this in english no problem but for some reason in a second language you always make things more complicated so I tried to ask if they were cousins. The little boy straightened me out, though saying, no she's my sister and we have two mothers and a father.
Another story about language in the park. We were getting ready to leave. Ariela suggested that we go get popsicles (the heat here is pretty intense, it's over 30 every day). I said to the boys "yalla, bo nelechu liknot glida." Let's go get some ice cream, then I corrected myself and said to Benjy, "I don't know how you say popsicle in Hebrew." A man who was doing sudoku while his daughters played, smiled and asked me what word I didn't know. I told him and he filled in the gap. Kerach (literally ice) we started chatting, where are you from etc. We mentioned we'd been through switzerland on the way to Israel and he told me he had family there. "They have big problems, so may arabs are coming there. There, everywhere. They want to throw us in the sea. Since the time of Abraham. " A nice guy, three sweet girls, happy to provide a newcomer with the word for popsicle.
"They're all the same," he told me.
I said that I didn't think so, but it was clear I wasn't going to change his mind.
We said goodbye and went off to get our "kerach"
To complete the Hebrew lesson for today and to return to my theme of the other day, haumbatiah haamoka, that's The Deep Bath.