What is this "Celsius" ?

1) Every single time anyone talks about the financial crisis, specifically the financial crisis back in the United States, I feel like a fucking refugee. I feel like the Americans in my class get sympathetic looks or even smug looks from the others whenever the subject comes up on the news we’re listening to in Hebrew. I wanna be like, “Oh yeah, cos things are just going swimmingly wherever the fuck you’re from.” Especially when we get the look from the Russians….

2) Today I finally took out the last bit of American money in my wallet. Even throughout my 4 ½ months here last time I always kept a dollar or so in my wallet. Why? I think I may have already brought it up, but I’ll explain again: the day after I got to Israel last time, I took my American money out. But then the first time I opened my wallet in Israel after that, I nearly had a heart attack. I thought, “Oh my G-d, I have no money!” Because, let’s face it, shekels look like Monopoly money. I thought I was walking around hundreds of Monopoly notes, which is great if I want to buy Boardwalk or Park Place, but is pretty worthless if I want things like food. So to quell my fears I took to putting either a 20 dollar bill or a one dollar bill in my wallet, so that when I opened it I saw green and my brain got the idea that I had money, and I wouldn’t panic.

But now that I’m a resident of Israel with all rights and responsibilities (besides the right to vote…still have to wait two months to get that right….meaning I’ll miss the elections), I feel that it is time for me to carry exclusively Israeli money when I’m in Israel. I’ve also decided to stop thinking of things in terms of exchange rates. A shekel is a shekel, it isn’t a quarter. And I’m also trying to get the hang of units of measure, like centimeters and kilometers and all that shit. And Celsius. I think that’s going to be the hardest, since shit like centimeters and kilometers and kilograms we had to learn in science class. Of course, I feel spectacularly European and pretentious when I use the metric system, but I guess that can’t be helped… I also feel like I need to call my high school science teachers and be like, “You know that irrelevant shit you taught us a couple years ago? Yeah, turns out that outside of the U.S. it actually IS relevant!”

But Celsius? We didn’t use that in high school science class. This is going to take forever to get the hang of, but here’s my understanding of Celsius so far:

0 Celsius: Warm jacket, gloves and scarf weather.
15 Celsius: Jacket weather.
40 Celsius: Underpants weather.

I think that’s a good base to start from, and hopefully my understanding of Celsius will grow. Either that or maybe come summer time I’ll die from heatstroke because I mistook an underpants-weather forecast on the news for a jacket-weather forecast.

Also, when I read the weather forecast in the news (or rather look at the picture of Israel with numbers next to cities), I feel like reading the numbers with a ridiculous British accent. Or maybe a Swedish accent. I don’t know.


3) So tomorrow (or I guess rather in the wee hours of Monday…) I’m watching the Super Bowl. Sure, doesn’t sound all that new or exciting, seeing as I’ve watched the Super Bowl every year since I’ve been alive, but what makes it exciting this year is that I’m watching it in a bomb shelter.

I don’t think I’ll ever get over the use of a bomb shelter as a social gathering place. I remember my dad said that growing up he had a bomb shelter (or maybe he just lived really close to the neighborhood bomb shelter…?) and he remembers it as this very scary place, and blahblahblah, something about the scary Russians, Cold War, blahblahblah. I know of one family that I knew growing up who had a bomb shelter. They were neighbors, they had a girl in my grade at school and a boy a year older than one of my older brothers. Their bomb shelter was this cold, scary, cement place in their backyard, and I remember on one occasion when I was about 8 or so that bitch of a girl tricked me into going into the bomb shelter, then locked me inside for about an hour or so, leaving me to scream for help and have it just echo…..urgh, it was horrible. So, as you can imagine, even growing up in a country far removed from war, I still find the idea of bomb shelters kind of creepy. And when I don’t think of them as creepy, I think of them as rare, bizarre, unnecessary relics of the Cold War.

Here, however, the bomb shelter is nicer than my bedroom back in LA.

Back on the kibbutz, there was a weekly dance party (sometimes a couple times a week) in the bomb shelter, and I even went down there for a few minutes with some friends on my last birthday. In this building, the bomb shelter is also a place of festivity. It is the nicest room in the building, with comfy chairs, a plasma TV screen (is this SERIOUSLY what the Israeli government is spending on its immigrants? I LOVE YOU, GOVERNMENT OF ISRAEL!!), ping pong tables, an exercise bike, and a bar. Granted, the bar is empty, but the fact that there is a potential alcoholic bar in. a. bomb. shelter. never ceases to amaze me.

So the bomb shelter has become, or us immigrants in this ulpan, THE place to gather to watch movies or have dance parties or do whatever. In fact, the bomb shelter is SO cool that in order to prevent things from being stolen or wrecked, the bomb shelter is kept locked and opened only for specific, planned social events.

I was talking to my mom about our bomb shelter and laughed at how we have to lock it and she, as mothers have a habit of doing, became hysterical. First of all because I said the word “bomb” and second of all because I used the word “shelter” and “locked” in the same sentence. “WELL WHAT IF THERE’S A BOMB??”

Which I guess is a valid point. I mean, G-d forbid and all that.

But if in the very unlikely event that Iran finally decides to bomb us at the same time that my ulpan is having a movie night in our bomb shelter, I can assure you that me and my classmates will have a VERY comfortable nuclear holocaust, complete with popcorn, ping pong, and cable TV.