col parit

So…the work in the pizza place? Kinda fun. Towards the later hours there were a lot of drunken Americans and Israelis. I’ve realized that Americans can be total asswipes. One guy came in and was speaking loudly in English as if we behind the counter couldn’t hear him, calling the place ghetto and saying that it better be good. It was really awesome them when they ordered and I responded in perfect English. The look on their faces? Priceless. During a particularly busy time, an American teenager (like 18…clearly here for post-high school yeshiva year in Israel) called me over like he had some cool secret to share. I thought, “Oh great…..” and then he says very furtively and as if he is just the coolest guy in town, “Hey, maybe you hook us up with some pizza?” Oh man….Americans….

Now drunken Israelis….this is interesting to me. The ones I saw were very flamboyant. Like, not like drunken Americans which are annoying as hell, but extremely entertaining. Acting as though everything were just WONDERFUL! “I’ll take a slice of pizza!” cheered one Israeli drunkard, flinging his hands into the air to effect, and then handing us a credit card. My coworker informed him that there is a minimum limit on credit card purchases, and without missing a beat the drunken Israeli flung his hands into the air again as if nothing had changed and cheerily shouted, “Then I’ll take TWO slices of pizza!”

Working in an environment with a lot of Hebrew was very bizarre. I realized that before ordering, a lot of people will kind of talk through their choices out loud, most of which I didn’t understand. Also, as the night wore on, it got increasingly difficult to understand Hebrew cos I simply started getting tired. And holy fuck did I get a lot of practice in Hebrew. Even if I had wanted to break down and speak Hebrew to the people I now work with, I wouldn’t have been able to. They have extremely limited English. Like, they can’t even really speak English to the costumers—a customer will order in English and they respond in Hebrew or broken Heblish: “B’seder, az you want pitriyot?” Like pretty much everything in my life, this makes me think of the army, and this work experience (whether or not it lasts), even for this one night, really made me feel more confident about my Hebrew and about how I’ll be able to work in a Hebrew-speaking environment come July. That’s not to say that I understood everything, or that I didn’t have to ask customers to repeat their orders in Hebrew, but I was quite pleased that I was able to actually function and even joke around in Hebrew. And holy crap did I get a lot of practice in Hebrew numbers last night!


The one problem is that this job wants people working late…to the point where there are no busses. And this gives me three concerns: 1) As of Sunday my roommate will be back from vacation, and it wouldn’t fair for me to wake her up by walking in the door at 4.30 am very frequently. If it were an apartment with separate bedrooms, it’d be different. But it’s not. 2) I have ulpan early in the morning. 3) When I was walking home at 3.15 am last night (or this morning), it was maybe the scariest thing ever.
So what I’m going to try to do is to negotiate into only having to work extremely late on Saturday and Thursdays (when my roommate isn’t in our room), and then the rest of the time just working until reasonably late. If that isn’t feasible then I guess I wouldn’t be able to work there…which would be sad, cos it’s actually rather pleasant.

The walk is like an hour and 15 minutes or so, depending on how quickly you go. It was actually rather pleasant while I was still in the center of town. The streets were quiet except for a few taxis and the occasional person, but I still felt safe for the most part. But then as I got closer and closer to where I live, I got increasingly uncomfortable. Not only were the streets pretty much deserted for the most part since we were far from the center of town, but also….I live in East Jerusalem, and I don’t want to be racist or anything but we’re surrounded by Arabs. Arabs of the angry variety (our immediate neighbors include the hometowns of, if I’m not mistaken, all of the bulldozer terrorists). Actually, I don’t think it’s racist to fear someone who would willingly admit that they don’t wish you will (to put it lightly). Anyway, while I’m perfectly happy living where I’m living and even walking around my neighborhood by myself well after dark (aka 10 pm), there’s something just terrifying about walking around it all by myself at like 4 in the morning.

Still though, it’s better than LA. Back home you couldn’t pay me even a million dollars to get me to walk outside in our neighborhood after dark, even at only 9 pm.

The worst part of all of this was that I kept thinking to myself that if something happened to me, no one would notice. This is a thought that frequently bothers me here in Israel, not just when I’m walking around East Jerusalem by myself in the middle of the night. What I mean is that, while I do have friends, it would be a while before my absence would become cause for concern or panic. And as much as I hate to admit it, it would probably take equally as long for me to become concerned or panicked over their absence.

This was the nice thing about living at home. Okay, so maybe moms are paranoid, but isn’t there something comforting about knowing that someone is waiting up for you at home? Or if they’re not really waiting up for you, at least when they wake up in the morning they’ll wonder if you made it back safely, and they’ll go to see? Here though, I feel like I could go at least a week without someone thinking that my absence was by my own choice.

So I’ve come up with yet another reason to look forward to being the in army: someone will always be waiting up at night for me. Okay, not in the literal sense. What I mean is this: my understanding is that if you don’t show up on time to army shit, you get in trouble. If you want to take a leave of absence (like vacation or whatever), you have to ask and get it approved. So if (here’s your cue to say, “G-d forbid!”) something were to happen to me, people would immediately notice that I hadn’t shown up to work or whatever. Whereas here in ulpan, I could be dead for at least a week without anyone realizing it.

Anyway, so around 4.20 in the morning I was like a block and a half away from my building when the first Muslim call to prayer of the day went off. On one level this should have been comforting, and I should have taken it as a sign that the worst was over, that it was morning, and there’s nothing scary about morning. But on another level, it was still pitch black, the streets were still abandoned, and I was still walking alone surrounded by hills that had the green glow of mosques. So now you add onto this the creepiness of wailing Arabic echoing across the hills late at night, and you got yourself a heart attack.

So I hurried towards my building, and in the last few yards I had to pass a creepy, bush-covered staircase. And as I hurried past, there was a loud, creepy cough. Followed by silence. Followed by more throat clearing. At that point, I just sprinting the last couple yards and THANK G-D the guard wasn’t watching basketball and immediately buzzed me in…..

On a completely unrelated note, yesterday as I was walking around town I walked past a shop, and I heard “Hatikvah” blasting from their speakers but thought nothing of it…until I realized the words weren’t the same. Instead of talking about a Jewish land and all that jazz, this Hatikvah was advertising that everything in the store was only 99 agorot—which is like a quarter in American currency. I thought I was going to die laughing, and even tried to record it to share on this blog….but by the time I got my video camera on my cell phone ready, the song had switched to a familiar Hasidic tune, again boasting that everything in the store was only 99 agorot.

I love this country. Does the US use this advertising method?

COL. PARIT. SHEKEL VAHETZI. SHEKEL VAHETZI. SHEKEL VAHETZI. COL. PARIT. SHEKEL VAHETZI. SHEKEL VAHETZI. SHEKEL VAHETZI.