Smells.

Today my roommate and I were discussing the American sense of smell. You know, how Americans are always the ones who think foreign people are smelly. Americans are the ones on the Metro in Paris loudly making comments about how much French people smell, the ones wandering around the streets of Prague or St Petersburg with their noses scrunched up, saying in pathetic attempts at a whisper, “Oh dear….”

Well, Israel is no different. There have been a few times—okay, MANY times—in Israel when I’ve been on the bus or in a crowd, and someone smells like what can only be described as a walking fart. In fairness, there’s a severe water shortage in this country (and visiting/immigrant Americans alone have probably contributed more than their fair share to that with our obsession with showering…), and deodorant is relatively expensive. Just to give you an idea, deodorant costs about 35 shekels. To put that in perspective, that’s 10% of your monthly salary if you are a soldier (not a lone soldier). When you put it like that, buying deodorant doesn’t really seem worthwhile.

Anyway, my roommate and I were quietly wondering to ourselves if, coming from a country that seems to be obsessed with not smelling bad, maybe we were the only ones who noticed the sharp, sour scent that was coming from one of our neighbors on the bus. And that got me thinking….

How bad must people have smelled back in like Elizabethan England, when you maybe took a couple baths a year…if that. And then I started imagining Americans being transported back in time to various points in history. I can just imagine a fat guy in a football jersey and baseball cap, wandering around the Tower of London in 1599, tucking his nose and mouth under his shirt and gagging. Then I imagine a top Chicago lawyer in a business suit and a Bluetooth headset wandering around the filthy streets of medieval Paris, wrinkling his nose and saying, “[*sound of suppressed vomiting*] I’m going to have to call you back…ugh, it feels like someone shit in my nose….” And throughout every period in history I imagine girls from my high school running around, squawking, “OMG eeeew eeew eeew!!!!!!!”


Anyway, my bizarre train of thought was interrupted when a group of arsim-in-training got on the bus, and with them came a foul odor. It is the sort of odor one would expect if a bunch of people were walking around covered in fresh diarrhea. That is really, no exaggeration, what these guys smelled like.

And I just lost it. I started laughing so hard that I thought I was going to pee myself. I was laughing so hard that I actually started crying. People turned and looked at me, and I couldn’t stop. After about five minutes I got a grip on myself, but then I smelled it again….and lost it for another ten.





On a completely unrelated note…..the other day I saw an orthodox guy throw trash on the ground. I said to him in Hebrew, “Hey, are you just going to leave that there?!” And he turned around, looked at me, and told me to shut up. And then he just kept walking on.

I wish I could have thought fast enough, that I could have responded with something about how he’s a hypocrite for being orthodox and calling this the holy land, and then turning right around and throwing his shit on the ground of G-d’s own country. Instead though, I was just so shocked at being told to shut up that I just did exactly as he told me to do…


Sometimes though…I feel like Jews are the biggest hypocrites in the world.