Leaving soon

            Okay, it’s about to get sentimental. 

            I’m leaving soon. 

            My final presentation was on Thursday.  I’m officially finished with work at EarlySense.

            And the marathon was yesterday (it went well but more on that soon). 

            Here’s a sneak peak picture to keep you entertained in the meantime. 

            I move out of my apartment in a couple of hours.  Which is crazy, and I'm not entirely ready to leave it behind.  

            Sure, I’m not leaving yet… I have two more weeks until I actually go home, and there are still some adventures on the way. 

            But it’s coming soon… The day where I board the plane back to Toronto with a suitcase stocked full of mud (yes, you heard me right), Bamba and chocolate (with pop rocks) is only two weeks away. 

            Two weeks until I see my family, until conversations start in English, until snow is a normal occurrence and chicken wings are more common than Falafel (for those who have forgotten, I am from Buffalo)…

            From daily conversations with my coworkers over orange juice and cheerios, back to chats over hummus and carrots with my roommates… Back to the same time zone as the majority of my friends and getting behind the wheel of my car instead of fighting for a seat on the train.  Back to class, instead of work (but not for long… the real world is only a few months away).  Back to a world where the military is voluntary instead of a requirement, where kids go to college fresh out of high school and not after 3 years in the military and a trip around the world… where you can drive for days and still not hit another nation’s borders (unless you’re heading North from Buffalo).

            Back to familiarity. 

            I’m not sure whether that’s a good or a bad thing.  Being able to go most places without getting lost… Being able to read every menu or sign you come across… Knowing people around every corner…  

            But it’s not over yet. 

            Heading down South to Eilat (Red Sea area) tonight.  When I get back to Tel Aviv on Friday, I’ll be meeting up with Isa, graduate students and WPI faculty to visit hi-tech companies and some tourist sites for about 9 days. 
            It blows my mind that three months ago, this whole thing, coming here, was just a pipe dream that had been in the works for a while (including that marathon).  But, I guess that’s what life is about.  You make plans, you chase them down, and see where the world takes you while you’re at it. 

Traveling the right way (if there is one)

            Travel is an interesting concept if you think about it.  It makes it easier to scatter a family around the world, and still remain as one.  To make new friends from different cultures and languages and meet them with understanding instead of pain and violence.  To go, go, go until you’ve seen everything your heart could desire and then search for more, because there’s always going to be more. 

            People spend thousands of dollars to fly across the world, and travel around and see ruins of what once was.  And like I said before, how do we even know that it was this spot that mattered?  And after millions of tourists have trod all over it, how can it still matter?  I mean, the Chapel of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem is believed to be where Jesus ascended to heaven.  But, what if you don’t believe that happened?  Then what really happened in that church?  And if you do believe that it happened, how can you be sure of where?  How can anything be certain? 

            Yet, it does matter.  It attracts tourists from all over the world, coming to see a spot that someone deemed to be important.  Trying to grasp an image of what life was thousands of years ago, but is the interpretation correct?  Is there anything similar about the ground we walk on now and the ground they walked on three thousand years ago? 

        Tourists, boarding on and off a bus, observing the past in a way the people of the past probably would never understand.  Capturing photographs of sites that were built a thousand generations before photography was a thing.  Subject to opening and closing hours, subject to safety and violence, subject to when the tour companies offer the place you want to go, or your ability to figure it out yourself. 

            And yet, somehow, I’m starting to realize from being here that tourism is founded on more than the sites (or the food).  It’s the people you meet along the way and the stories they tell (okay, that’s incredibly cliché). 

Hot chili Halva?  What?  Well this would be adventurous…
but I'm not looking to go bankrupt on Halva this week.  

We are one hundred percent making circular
Challah when  I get back home.  

    

            I spent this past weekend in Jerusalem and yeah, I enjoyed getting candy, nuts, dried fruit and Baklava in the Machane Yehuda Market and seeing some sites on the Mount of Olives (unfortunately didn’t get a picture, but the Jewish cemetery is awesome.  There are more than 70,000 graves on that hillside).  But, the best part was all the conversations I had with travellers and locals alike. 

            After finally catching a sherut to Jerusalem (after getting boxed off the first one by a bunch of overeager Israelisà limited number of seats = fight, fight) and meeting Isa and Tami for dinner (yes, it was good despite the olives spread thinly across my sandwich J), I checked into the hostel. 

            I sat down with my laptop in the common area on Thursday night around 9:30, but never got past entering the Wifi password before I struck up conversation with the guy across from me (An American about my age on an around the world trip) and talked straight through to midnight.  Comparing notes on the experience of seeing the world, of seeing Israel.  He was just kind of winging it as he went, spending time with friends he met around the way.  He travelled through Iran and Lebanon, volunteered at a hostel for a month in the West Bank (Ramallah), then was planning to take some time to chill out in Tel Aviv and get some work done for his online business, before heading onto Egypt.

            Essentially, I came across a lot of interesting stories over the weekend, and I won’t bore you with all the details, but it was a collection of people from different countries, different religions on intertwining journeys.  I mean, it’s Jerusalem, so you have the very religious Christians, the very religious Jews, the completely secular (but interested in humanity) tourists, and everything in between. 

            A few noteworthy examples: The American couple on a weekend getaway from their new home in Kuwait, the Dutch soldier on a quick trip to check out Israel, the massive group of American med students on a rotation in Haifa for a month (who remarked that in the United States, most attendings wouldn’t give them the time of day but in Israel, they’re all sitting eating pastries together), the forest ranger from Alberta using his three months off to see as many biblical sites as possible, the nineteen year old from Manitoba taking some time on a kibbutz to figure out his life (and not missing an eye opening opportunity to compare costs of living and salaries between his nation and those of his newfound South American and Chinese friends) or the Argentinan rediscovering his Jewish heritage (after his family got swept up by the Catholicism of his country) by volunteering on a kibbutz outside of Beersheeba…

            I capped the weekend off with hot apple cider (they put a cinnamon stick and freshly cut apple in it here; it’s remarkably delicious) and an egg/tuna sandwich with some of my new friends.  Nick’s the forest ranger from Canada, Alex works on an apple orchard in Illinois (he was shocked by the presentation of his cider) and Alejandra is Argentinan but has lived in Jaffa (south of Tel Aviv) for eight years now.  The guys walked Alejandra and I back to the Sherut stop, none of us ready for the weekend and the conversations to end, and Alejandra told me about moving to Israel, learning Hebrew and volunteering at an orphanage in Bethlehem on the weekends. 

            There’s a child there that she’s grown to love as her own, but the reality is the Palestinians would never let one of their children be adopted by a non-Muslim.  The irony though is that most Palestinians wouldn’t want any of the children in this orphanage (they have disabilities like Down Syndrome). 

            Israel and the West Bank cover 8,000 square miles, together slightly larger than New Jersey, and yet there is a massive dichotomy between the two.  In Israel, mentally disabled adults can serve in the Army.  In Palestine, only 5 of 20 kids in that Bethlehem orphanage are “true” orphans.  The rest have families who either don’t want them or can’t take care of them.  People who are either too ashamed or too poor to handle them.  I’m not saying it’s any different in the United States or in Israel, but I think the stigma of it has definitely faded more in more developed countries.  And that might just be because it’s so much harder to afford associated medical care and other costs in such places. 

            Two sides of a dividing line, with both sides thinking that they’re right and the other is wrong, but with entirely different perspectives of how to run the show.  Does that come from poverty?  Or anger over their treatment? 

            How come the country accepts that these children go to Church every Sunday living in a Catholic orphanage but wouldn’t allow them to leave Palestine for a better life?  Is it fair of me to say that their lives would be better outside of Palestine when I’m talking about an orphanage I’ve never been to, never seen, a culture I am an outsider to? 

              Will that ever change?  Can it change?  

            I think it was Isa who once told me that the Palestinians were considered second class citizens in the Arab world.  And yet, the world still preferred it when Jordan annexed Palestine, not Israel. 

            I talk to a coworker as we prepare to head out.  He’s about to head home on his motorcycle to the settlement he lives on in the West Bank.  I'm here in Israel too… but I board the train bound straight up the coast of the Mediterranean to Herzliya. 

            So many tourists I have met have their opinions about what should be done in Israel, in Palestine, and so do the people who reside there, but what I’m ultimately struck by, are volunteers like Alejandra, who spend every weekend (from Thursday night through Saturday night) away from home trying to give these kids a semblance of a better life, building relationships with them, coming to love them. 

A tale that shouldn’t be speckled with politics, a life that should be allowed—a child loving someone who could be his mother, a woman wanting to fight for a child, but being blatantly aware that it’s not a battle to be won. 

But, the politics are there.  The threat is always there.  None of us ever really know when (or if) the threat will come down on us.  But, it’s an omnipresent cloud, the expectation that the bubble holding everything together will burst eventually, in the way it has so many times before, the expectation that things will change again, more than they have before, a promise that the myriad of civilizations that have belonged in this world will continue, ever changing, always moving forward, onto a new world. 

            And maybe the bubble will burst and things will change for the better.  Maybe the bubble won’t burst.  Maybe that’s our fears and our anxieties talking, us listening too much to the news that paints Israeli in a dangerous light, even though as Americans, we should probably be looking harder at the safety of the cities that we grew up in, that we will be raising our children in.  

            Maybe appreciation comes in many forms too.  Appreciation for what we have, for the stability Israel has been able to achieve, the way the Palestinians have begun to work in the Israeli world, the way the world has changed over the years and yet still managed to encapsulate and display the past. 

            I don’t know to be honest.  I’m just an American looking at the whole argument from the outside, not far from the borders of the West Bank but not inside either.  And maybe that’s a lesson in reality.  If we’re all just looking at the world from the outside, how do we decide when to step in? 

            Catch you later. 

            Thanks. 

Running, religion, history and chicken?

            When I first walked into the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora on the campus of Tel Aviv University, I’ll be honest: I was pretty underwhelmed.  You can either do the museum with a tour guide (which you prearrange) or an audio guide (that you show up and get).  As one person, the tour guide was out of my budget, so I can’t actually speak for how that was.  All I know is that at first, I went through this gallery where they talked about traditional Jewish customs.  You know, Bar mitzvah’s, weddings, the high holidays and so on, and while I appreciated the displays and the effort to depict these concepts, none of it was all that new to me, and they didn’t do it in a way that was attention capturing or anything, and my attention span faded quickly. 

            I was starting to think that the only benefit of having showed up was this chicken which I actually didn't think was a chicken when I first saw it (since when did chickens have that ring around their eyes?), that I found on the lawn of the university on my way in.

            That said there’s a reason the museum still exists (and it’s not the chicken keeping the doors open!).  If it were all bad, it probably would have lost funding by now.  Maybe I’m picky, I don’t know.  But, I do know that there were parts of it that made me want to hand the audio guide back at the desk, walk out of there and track down some good hummus (which really isn’t all that hard to come by in Israel).  Yet, there were other parts that were inspiring, that got the wheels turning in my head.  Quotes lined the walls that spoke to the writer in me, and video exhibits captured my attention. 

            The words of Abba Kovner, a famous Israeli poet who also served in the Haganah and was part of an undercover group which aimed to exact revenge for the Holocaust, are prominent throughout the museum. 

            As you enter into the first exhibits, you find his quote on the wall: “This is the story of a people which was scattered all over the world and yet remained a single family, a nation to which time and time was doomed to destruction and yet out of ruins rose to new life.”  - Abba Kovner

            That’s something you see more than ever in Israel.  At work, there are people born in Russia and the United Kingdom, I’ve met Israelis whose parents are from Syria and Yemen, and others whose families have been in Israel for generations, and yet they’re all Israelis.  The majority of people are Jewish (Although you have Arab Christians and Muslims as well), and even the ones who aren’t Shomer Shabbos, spend the Sabbath having dinner with their families and resting.  That’s something the rest of the world could take note of. 

           

            Determined to prod my way through each exhibit, I powered through.  There were video exhibits capturing the lives of different Jewish communities in Europe.  One I really liked was about Thessaloniki, a city in Greece which maintained a Jewish majority for several centuries.  One quote from the video that I felt encompassed the variety and success of the people there was, “The Jews of Thessaloniki are trained to take any and every job except for that of a Greek priest.”  Another noteworthy portion of the video was when someone asked a seafarer who had stopped in the port of Thessaloniki, what his nationality was.  He said, “I am a Jew”.  He was asked, “And nothing more?”  And responded in the affirmative.  Tinted with a bit of humor, and an accurate depiction of supreme loyalty to the Jewish culture, no matter where in the world they resided, I thought the video did a good job of defining faith, nationality and culture as a whole.    

            The video ended, however, in a note of tragedy.  The speaker said, “I could have been…” several times, and alluded to the Holocaust and the fact that most of the Jewish community in Thessaloniki was wiped out. 

           

            I liked how the museum was able to combine two sides of the story like that, capturing the importance of Judaism to the town and the success of the community, and the devastation that followed, with an understanding of how much this community has endured and yet, how it has simultaneously prevailed.  It all tied back into Abba Kovner’s words, “This is the story of a people…” 

            Moving on from the videos, there was an exhibit including Kovner’s Scrolls of Fire.  It captured the essence of the many pogroms and dangers that had wracked Jewish history from thousands of years ago up through the Holocaust. 

            I’ve been joking with myself that if I learn one thing on every visit to a museum or a historical site, I’m good to go.  

            And I did learn, walking through the exhibits that captured how Judaism had prevailed and fallen in Israel throughout the reins of different cultures and people.  But I also found myself intrigued by the way Kovner wrote and the things he said, reading the majority of Scrolls of Fire while standing there in the museum. 

            On a slightly different note, this quote was posted in the museum (it’s not Kovner):

            “A rabbi whose community does not disagree with him is not really a rabbi and a rabbi who fears his community is not really a man.” -Rabbi Israel Salame

            In Israel, there are a lot of different views on how to practice Judaism.  People interpret things in their own way.  I’ve noticed this in the U.S. too, but here it’s more pronounced.  I mean, take Yom Kippur for instance.  Tons of Jews around the world fast for the whole day, and others observe it in their own way, giving up one thing or fasting for part of the day or not at all.  

            On Saturdays, I’ll go running and I’ll strike up chats with other runners.  Sometimes I’ll ask, “Are there many runners around here?”  And they’ll say, “Yes, but not on Shabbat.” 

            And yet, I have a running buddy here who won’t drive, use his watch or touch a light switch on Shabbat, but he runs, because as he puts it, “It’s relaxing.  When they said not to rush, people weren’t rushing for leisure.  They were rushing for work.”  Granted, he also takes it easy, letting it be a fun activity, not a stressful one, and runs alongside his children and wife.  Last week, while on a 12 mile training run, he gave me a religious history lesson, and explained the vast disparity in different beliefs.  I also found it interesting that a lot of people don’t consider reform Judaism to be “real” Judaism.   It’s kind of like how Catholics can’t take Communion in a Protestant church.  Different beliefs, and yet the similarities abound.  But, yet at the same time, people still seem to accept each other despite it, except for certain political questions that arise as a result.  Can a public pool be open on Shabbat?  Can the Sarona Market in Tel Aviv force a restaurant owner to work on his day of rest?  Should the Ultra-Orthodox be permitted not to work? 

            And that, my friends, is the question.  Or a series of them. 

            Ultimately, everything I’ve experienced here has strengthened my understanding of the world and this (genuinely incredibly safe) country that people literally told me I shouldn’t go to before I came here.  Whether it’s a museum with seemingly dry exhibits in the beginning or a nation’s history and religion that I thought I understood, this country has opened me up to learning how to look beneath the surface, until the simplicity has been erased, complexities revealed. 

            Thanks for reading.  Catch you later.  Back to Jerusalem this coming weekend J

Marathon Preview Day: When Race Day doesn't go as planned… and why that's okay.

           Friday morning was the preview to the Tel Aviv Marathon.  My sponsor for my MQP (work here) picked me up at my apartment at 5:40 a.m. and we headed into Tel Aviv.  I won’t bore you with the details of eating energy gel, hydrating, stretching, etc.  But, at 6:30, it was time to hit the start line. 

            Sometimes, I feel like a fish out of water here.  I don’t speak Hebrew, so I’m not in the “in crowd”, but standing on the start line on Friday, it didn’t actually matter.  English or Hebrew, it’s still the same sport and we’re all runners. 

            I started chatting with a woman at the start line (always first in Hebrew, and then after a second of my blank face and shaking head, the conversation turns to English).  She asked me what distance I was running and what my speed was.  We talked a little bit more about training and where I was from, and then it was time to be off. 

            I may not know Hebrew, but I've been running and competing long enough that I do know what the start of a race looks like (and if all else fails, you just start moving when all the people in front of you do; the hard part?  Now, that's the awards ceremony).  The organizer counted down from five (luckily my numerical vocabulary encompasses that much), and then everyone started shuffling towards the start line. 

            Going in, I had a plan.  Aforementioned running buddy recommended I run the first third at a warm up pace, the middle third a little quicker and the final third at my marathon goal pace.  The whole idea was to shoot for negative splits, a.k.a. get gradually faster throughout the race, not slower. 

            But, that’s never been my strong suit, so I just ran my race (albeit with a wrong turn in there, adding an extra mile) which got into my head a little bit, but I powered through (my last mile was brutal, but surprisingly not the slowest of my race, and I didn’t walk or give up even though as I wanted to).  

            There's a point in a run where you're hot and tired and hurting so much and you don't think you can go forward.  When you're by yourself, it's easy to stop your watch and give up for a couple minutes and then when calculating your splits pretend it didn't happen, but when it's a race, and there's a medal (or trophy) on the line, that's when the training matters, when you wished you had pushed a little harder, given a little more.  Friday was a little different, because it was a race, but it was also meant for training.  It was the dress rehearsal.  If you forget a line in your play, do you get to walk off the stage and stumble through the rest?  If you just give up like that, how do you know that's not going to happen tomorrow when it's the real thing (or in my case, three weeks from now)?  

            As a runner, you learn to ask yourself, "You hurting?" and respond, "Okay, keep going".  You ask yourself, "Are you hot?" and then dump water on your head if that's the case (and it was almost 70 by the end of the race, and let's be real, I don't do well with anything greater than about 60; I was dying.  They were handing out water bottles, which I thought was weird-- what happened to small cups of water?-- but then it got hot and I started pouring the excess water on my head, arms and neck, and let's be honest, it got me through.)  

(Just in case I haven't been clear enough about the amount of palm trees around here)

            As a runner, you feel pain in your joints and muscles and ask yourself if it's time to walk, but what's that going to do?  If I can't finish 23 miles, how the heck am I supposed to finish 26?  You race in a foreign nation, in a different language, but it's still the same thing.  A marathon is still going to be 42 kilometers, even if you think in miles.  The marathon is still in 3 weeks.  And running, it still hurts.  It's still hard.  I'd like to think that if you're in another country, it's easier, but it's still the same world.  It still has it's challenges.  

           That's something I've thought a lot about, because it's easy to think the grass is greener on the other side, but what if a city is built on sand dunes?  Or in the desert?  Where's the grass?  

           I like it here.  The park, the ocean, the people, the food (mostly all things chocolate), but it's definitely different.  I wouldn't call it better or worse, but it's definitely an experience.  

           It’s funny.  You know, I’m in a foreign country, in a huge park, in a city that I’ve scratched the surface in.  And yet, during that run, I kept seeing people I knew or had talked to at least.  My Israeli running buddy (more on him later), who wasn’t racing but training that day, passed me and called my name.  My sponsor who was running the 18k and drove me down, passed me at one point.  Another guy from work looped by a couple of times.  And the woman from the start line greeted me when we crossed paths. 

           The last couple miles got pretty rough.  I missed a water stop because when the volunteers weren't immediately ready with it, I was too stubborn to lose a couple seconds, and sitting here right now writing this, looking at this picture (do you see the "I think I need to cancel my Tel Aviv marathon registration and never do this again" look on my face?), I'm not sure what decision I'd make put in that situation again.  By the time I hit the 34k sign, I was still moving, albeit fully conscious of the fact that if I hadn't made a wrong turn I would have been done by then. 

         When I finally crossed the finish line, it took them a minute to untangle the medals, and I sipped water gratefully, before taking my medal and lying down in the grass until I realized that the Hebrew I was hearing was not announcing runner's finishes but was the awards ceremony.  That was a whole experience in itself because I had no idea what distance or categories they were announcing and I was sure I was going to miss my entrance, but as you can see below, I figured it out somehow (or heard my name).  

         I was a little bummed afterwards since my extra mileage upset my chances of a podium finish for women overall.  I won my age group (Female 20-29).  There's something to be said for long distances and incredibly small races and placed 5th of all women (but only 21 competed in that distance).  But, as you can see below, life could be worse (and now that I’ve come within 2.6 miles of a marathon this month, I can’t be too worried about race day which don't worry, I will not be bailing on).  Plus, my mom always taught me to reframe situations like these.  I still ran really well, maintained a good pace, finished feeling good (well as good as I could, considering the distance) and made the podium.  And for the record, it's not like it was the real marathon (and there, there will be enough people that I won't get confused on the course).  Additionally, I had fun (I think).  

  

          Afterwards, I chatted with some people for a few minutes (as a random aside, one woman told me I seemed like too interesting a person to want to spend my life on something as boring as Six Sigma and also called it something like "the worst thing that you could do to your organization", but she was simultaneously a very nice lady: prime example of Israeli forwardness).  

          Then I caught a taxi to the HaCarmel Market, since I had been wanting to go back since the first time I went but it closes at 4 p.m. during the week and is closed on Saturdays so I hadn't gotten a chance.  I spent way too much money on chocolate Halva and felt slightly guilty about it (I'm warning you now; don't fall into the trap.  If you buy a piece, make it really small… No one needs $17 worth of cake… except, I suppose, me.  And I guess my haggling skills (or lack of trying) could use some work.  

          Finally equipped with way too much Halva, a little bit of Turkish Delight (still not sure how I feel about it), gummies and a bit of other candy, Challah, a pretzel, fruit (dried and fresh) and veggies, I made my way out of the shuk (I still need to try some of that Baklava).  At the edge of the marketplace, I found a ton of preprepared food being sold for Shabbat (that was some awesome rice, beef and potatoes I had for dinner) and then grabbed a cup of Pomegranate juice before heading home.  

          I thought I was going to fall asleep on the train home (but then I would have ended up who knows where just in time for Shabbat to start; don't forget, no public transport on Shabbat).  But, I managed to get back by 1 p.m.  I half considered going somewhere for the rest of the weekend, but especially because I only had an hour before trains stopped, my couch won the ultimate contest (great choice and got some much needed rest and recovery).  

    I'll be back with updates in a couple of days, but until then, have a good run.  Catch you later.