I know I’m late…

But work has really been taking it out of me.  I have two big posts that I need to write, the one about Tsfat and another about how stable the country is.  I’ve been writing them in my head between trying to get different systems to work.

On the work side I’m getting my deployment system down.  I’ve found a lot of the gotchas, and every time something goes wrong I add it to the checklist.

Unfortunately it’s a fairly long checklist…

Ok, It’s Hot.

I just went upstairs to hang with a person from Europe that is here on the same project, Ina, and I have to admit it is definitely very warm.

104 °F / 40 °C Clear

Sweet.

The Winds of Sharaf

Apparently here in Tel Aviv we have a condition called Sharaf…  These are winds from Africa that come over and blow very hot. I have yet to actually experience this for myself, so I’ll report back when I wander outside.  I need to actually spend some time wandering around in the area near the office-  Lots of restaraunts, and shops.

Sergie, the IT guy here in the Tel Aviv office is coming by ever 20-30 minutes and telling us to drink because he’s worried about us dehydrating.

I would be too, except that the AC is workin’ overtime here in the office…

I’m actually a little cold…

INCOMING!

I owe you all a bit post (or rather several posts) about this weekend because it was such a mind blowing experience, but first daddy’s gotta get paid, so I’d better get a little work done.

Tsfat

I made it to Tsfat.  I’ve been updating the blog by twittermail the entire way, but none of those updates came through.  I’ve checked the configs and they all seem to be fine.  Twitter is getting to the blog ok, but twittermail seems to be borked.

Anyway I’m here in Tsfat, with my wonderful hosts the Jacksons from Denver.  They packed it all in at one point and moved to Tsfat, Israel.  I haven’t asked them yet why they did it.  Being here kinda makes me want to do it too so the answer is, in a way, kind of obvious.

Last night we davened Marrive (evening prayers, done at about 9:30pm or so) at this really interesting sheul down the road.  Everything in Tsfat seems to be just down the road.  The sheul looked to be quite old, in a very interesting building, and full of Chassid.  On our way in Tyrone, my host (pronounced Yeeroneh), said “This is a pretty hardcore sheul, but it should be interesting.  I need to find someone that speaks English though…”  Tyrone was looking for an answer to a question about the Passover search for Chammetz.

We sat down, and Tyrone and I started going through the Siddur looking for an answer to his Chammetz question.  He eventually found it in the form of the wording of one particular prayer.  Satisfied, we waited for Marriv to start.

Afterwards, back at the Jacksons, we decided we needed food, badly.  Everyone was stressed from Pesach prep, so we decided we would go to a place that I think was called “Burger heaven”.  Now at first glance Burger Heaven was a very, very scary place.  I mean I was really hesitant about eating there, but our options were really limited-  It was very late and we were really hungry.  But by that time I’d ceased to care-  I can go without food for days, but when it hits it hits, and about 30 minutes before it hit.

“I’m good.  I’ll have whatever you are having.”  I say.

That turned out to be a friggin’ fantastic chicken sandwich.  I mean, like I’m jonesing on one now, before breakfast.  It was friggin’ awesome.  The chap behind the counter asked me what I wanted on it-  “Tehina and hummus please.”

“You are Israeli!”

“What?”

“Israeli, this is what they want on their sandwich!” he says in his broken, gurgly English, “Hummus and tehina, this is the Israeli way!”

Having pleased him, and acquired my sandwich, I proceeded to inhale it.  I wonder if Burger Heaven is open for breakfast…

Frankfurt(er)

This post was from when I had just arrived in Tel Aviv and was staying at the HORRIBLE Park Plaza:

While I’m waiting for someone to find some clean sheets I figured I would post about my non-adventure in Frankfurt:

Every time I have flown Lufthansa (My long-haul carrier of choice) I have connected in Frankfurt.  Now I don’t particularly like the Frankfurt airport (and neither do the Frankfurtians (Frankfurters?  Sorry, it had to be done)) but I have never been to Frankfurt itself.  Nor have I, in fact, ever really been to Germany.  At least not officially.  Not only have I never been to Germany, but I’ve never been to mainland Europe!   So this trip I had a ten hour layover in Frankfurt between my flight from Denver and my flight to Tel Aviv (The Park Plaza Tel Aviv SUCKS).  So I decided that I’d go visit.

Now growing up Jewish, the son of first generation Canadians, and my parents being the children of Jews that escaped from Europe just before the holocaust, I had a wariness of Germany.  Not so much “Germans”, since all of the Germans I’d ever met had been quite pleasant, but Germany itself had taken a lot of flack in my house growing up.  If my grandfather had known I owned (for a brief time) a Volkswagen eurovan he’d have rolled over in his grave. So it is not without a little irony that the first country I ever visit in Europe (excluding England because it’s more of an island, and maintains it’s own currency) was Germany.

Ok, so I have ten hours in Frankfurt.  HOW am I going to fit it all in?  I mean, how hard could it be to waste ten hours in Frankfurt? The answer turns out to be that it actually is really difficult to find ten hours of crap to do in Frankfurt, if you exclude drinking. It’s especially hard when I’m lugging around my laptop bag (roller, not shoulder) and my back is a bit tweaked.

I talked on the flight to a charming man who works at the Max Planck Institute as a neurobiologist.  He didn’t say much, but when I mentioned I needed to spill ten hours he was delighted to tell me how wonderful Frankfurt is.  So we talk about how to get there, and it turns out there is actually a train station in the airport, and it only takes 15 minutes to get to the Frankfurt main station!

So off the plane, and the first obstacle is to find German customs and immigration.  Now Frankfurt airport is a rats nest.  If you take this escalator you go to the next level.  But if you take that escalator, you go down two levels.  I’ve decided that the Frankfurt airport isn’t so much about knowing where stuff is, but knowing the shortcuts.  Eventually I find Germany passport control.

Immigration didn’t even bat an eyelash.  In fact they didn’t even look at me long enough to make sure I looked like my passport photo.  ”Thunk”, “Thunk” goes the stamp and I am officially granted a short stay in Germany.   Down to levels of stairs and I find the train station.  Only two platforms.  One going east, one west. Not much of an option.  It isn’t hard to figure out which platform to get on-  It’s the one with all the people waiting for a train.  A very friendly German man walked me through using the ticket machine, and I join the other travelers waiting to go to “Frankfurt MAIN”. Once I arrived, I see the full splendor of a real European train station, and some really cool trains…

[to be continued]

Papers Please…

Ok, so apparently Israeli police are on the highest state of alert ever for a Passover.  I read that in the Jerusalem Post (a rag, but still an English language paper).  I am happy about this.

I’m actually going to F-off tonight to a place called Tsfat, which is basically a sort of ultra-orthodox Kaballah hippy commune.  the people I’m going to stay with are delightful, and I’m really excited about it.

“I don’t know what kind of stress level you generally have,” says Tyrone, my host-to-be on the phone, “but here in Tsfat…  Well, let’s just say if Tel Aviv has a stress level of 8/10 Tsfat is a 2.  Things move slowly here.”

So considering I’ve had maybe 10-15 hours sleep in the last several days I’m really looking forward to things moving a little more slowly.

Apparently there is a big artist community there, and several galleries.  That’s why I’m leaving tonight, so I have all of Friday to dork around.  Once Friday night hits there ain’t nothin’ gonna happen in Tsfat till Sunday at sundown except eating, and praying.

It’s the little things

That burn my ass.

I would write about something interesting that’s happened to me here, but not much has-  Well, I talked to a few cabbies.  Basically every small thing I do turns into a huge mess.  For example-  I just want to upgrade the software on these switches, but it turns out that this is just not working properly.

Now like every good engineer my first instinct is to blame the equipment, but I know myself too well-  I’m missing one small, tiny piece of the puzzle that is preventing me from going back to the hotel and passing out.  This is why my installs take so long-  It’s the little stupid stuff that should take 20 minutes that takes 5 hours.

Addiction

I don’t know why I’m talking about this now, but for a long time I couldn’t stop drinking this horrible coffee by International Foods.  The stuff really is full of sugar and other crap.  Nasty junk.  But I couldn’t really give it up.  It was the cause of a lot of arguments about my weight with an ex girlfriend.  I wanted her to cook a little more “lean”, her response was that I drank 400 or so calories of that junk per day, why should she make an effort to cut down on caloric intake?

She was right, of course, my attitude was that I get to pick where and when I intake my calories and if I wanted to drink that crap I would.  But the truth is I really didn’t like the stuff.  I did like the taste, and the texture-  I really looked forward to it in the morning.

Horrible stuff.  It took me years to really give it up.

William Gibson once wrote about a moment in a movie star’s life where she had just recovered from a brutal addiction to drugs.  I think it was in his book Count Zero.  Anyway, the moment has to do with her being in one of her many homes, a home she thought that only her and her assistant knew about.  A place of refuge for her.  One afternoon she enters her private bath, in the master suite, and finds a packet of the drug, a pharmaceutical.

She panics.  It takes every force of her will to crack open the packet, and spill the contents into the toilet.  Afterwards, as she watches the brown powder spiral into the rush of water she…

A month ago I got a sample of International Foods French Vanilla coffee in the mail.  One dose.  It sat on my counter for two weeks while I tried to decide what to do with it.  Finally I poured the contents into the kitchen sink, and as I ran the garb-o-rator I…

“…felt an overwhelming urge to lick [her|my] fingers.”

Run Forest, Run!

Woke up, still hated the Park Plaza Tel Aviv, so I went down and checked out.

“You are checking out?  You are supposed to be with us until the 30′th…”

“When I arrived yesterday the sheets were dirty.  I came down yesterday at 2:30pm to ask for them to be changed.  When I returned to my room at 9:00pm the room had not been cleaned and the bed was as I had left it.  It took two and a half hours and five phone calls to get someone to replace the linen.  I’m done with this place.”

He didn’t argue, he just said “Very sorry, sir” and that was that.  I am now at the Renaissance  which is a nicer hotel by a factor of about 100!

Before all that, however, I went for a run.  I got an hour and ten minutes in, and felt great.  I was very fast, which I attribute to my living at 5300 feet, and Tel Aviv being 3 feet above sea level.  Tomorrow I go for a swim-  I brought my swim training gear, and I’m really looking forward to it!