The Balloon Battalion

Was watching "Rome" and heard the most enchanting line. Caesar says this to his wife, who has just woken from a terrible dream:
“I was about to wake you…wherever you were, you were not enjoying yourself.”
Sounds like something I should say to my roommate when she's screaming in her sleep



Today we were talking about the IDF’s surveillance balloons over the Gaza Strip that were recently replaced by an apparently inferior system. Of course the idea of an observation balloon made me think of World War I, and I imagined German men with pointy helmets standing on zeppelins overlooking the Gaza Strip. Or maybe man with a ridiculously high top hat and a monocle would be drinking a glass of wine from a flamboyantly-colored hot air balloon type thing floating over the Gaza Strip. “What an awesome army we would have,” I thought to myself, combining this idea with my idea of starting a Robin Hood Battalion.

We got to talking about possible reasons why the IDF replaced their observation balloons, and one guy offered, “Maybe it got to be too dangerous…cos they’re easy to see and if you shoot them down then the soldier dies or gets captured.”

This statement is the epitome of an “Ulpan Moment.”

An “Ulpan Moment” is at least a daily occurrence here in government-provided Hebrew lessons. It’s when someone makes a statement in Hebrew that is entirely incomprehensible because of bad Hebrew, or is confusing because of bizarre idioms that don’t translate well from the speaker’s native language (in which case fellow native speakers will nod their heads in complete agreement), or (in this case) when someone makes a completely ridiculous statement in Hebrew, so ridiculous that everyone else shrugs off the statement thinking that they simply didn’t understand what was said.
An “Ulpan Moment” consists of one such statement, followed by an awkward pause in the class discussion as everyone tries to figure out how to understand what was said, followed by the teacher trying to move things along by saying, “Eeehhhhh…b’seeeeeder…..” (In American: “Uh…okayyyyy….”)

I got really excited because I kind of assumed that as much as I wanted the IDF to have a badass hot air balloon unit, I figured that no smart army would put 19 year old Israelis on a hot air balloon over the Gaza Strip. But now maybe there was hope? So I asked the teacher, “Wait, there are people on the balloons?!”

The teacher’s response was “Mah pitom?!” which (for those of you who don’t speak Hebrew) translates to “What suddenly?” It’s one of those phrases that I understand how to use, but which I can’t understand WHY you would ever think to say it. What do “What” and “Suddenly” have to do with this situation?

Anyway, I asked if my fellow student was correct in suggesting that they actually put people on these balloons over the Gaza Strip. And it was at that point that she actually registered what was said, and her face just completely crumpled in laughter. She pointed at me and another student who is going to the army soon and advised us to join the balloon unit/battalion/whatever when we join the army so that we can go for balloon rides over the Gaza Strip. Then someone suggested that there was a special paratroopers unit that jumped off these hot air balloons rather than airplanes, and everyone was just dying with laughter. But I guess you kind of had to be there…