Sorry for the lack of updates for a while. It appears that the Venetians, while some of the wealthiest people in the world, have yet to understand the concept of wireless internet. They jet around in their billion-dollar yachts, and yet there is not a wireless hotspot in all of Venice. Grrr.
Anyway, I’ll put up some pictures from Venice later. It’s somewhat frustrating to upload to both here and facebook with stolen intermittent wireless from the old orthodox people next door. We’re going to get our own ethernet and then use the wireless router we already have, but we haven’t gotten around to it yet.
We arrived on Sunday and moved into our apartment immediately. Our landlady is this adorable old French woman, very much like my host mom in Strasbourg. We arrived early in the morning (like 6:00) and we didn’t want to wake her, so we hung around the little convenience store in the building for an hour. Meanwhile, the guy who runs the store gave us coffee and little cakes while we were waiting. Then we went up to Mme Cohen’s apartment, where she promptly scolded us for not coming up sooner and made us breakfast. We were speaking to her only in French, which considering we hadn’t slept in 36 hours was pretty damn good. We were both relieved that our French was still good enough to converse like that.
Then Mme Cohen took us up to our apartment, and it’s gorgeous! Everything’s very modern, with marble countertops in the kitchen and pretty tile in all the rooms. The only drawback is that the kitchen is kosher, and the milk side is much smaller than the meat side. Apparently, vegetarianism isn’t too big in Israel. But we went out and bought some more pots and pans for the milk side, so we should be fine on the cooking front. The other thing about the apartment that wasn’t great is that the previous tenants had a cat, so everything was coated in a fine layer of cat hair. I mean, even the coffee table had little kitty footprints on it. Since I’m allergic to cats, that equals not breathing for me. So we spent the whole first morning moving furniture around and cleaning the place. But as we’re slowly washing everything in here, my allergies are getting better and better.
The other problem we’ve been having is also animal-related: mosquitoes. We left our windows open at night to keep cool, and now I have about forty bug bites all over my body. I actually look like I have chicken pox. (I wonder if I should offer to play with people’s kids for a hundred shekels an hour. Now there’s an interesting plan…) Anyway, we got one of those things that you plug into the wall and it emits some sort of bug repellent, so we should be better for the future. But ick!
Anyway, we love our apartment. It’s big and light and pretty, and it’s ours. It’s just so exciting to finally have our own home. After four years of dorms, it’s really nice to be able to live in an actual apartment. And after living in separate dorm rooms, it’s wonderful to be living together. And it turns out that we really do live together well. We split up the housework so incredibly naturally, I wouldn’t have believed it. And we’ve been having so much fun cooking together. So far we’ve done: pasta with Josh’s homemade sauce, goat cheese omelettes, and French toast. The breakfast-for-dinner thing was Josh’s idea, and I think it’s really great. Breakfast food is some of my favorite, but we never have time to actually make it in the morning. Speaking of breakfast, though, we’ve been sitting down to eat breakfast every day, which I think is really important and awesome.
We’re also slowly figuring out other things about the city, like where to go grocery shopping. We went to the shouk today with another HUC student to get fruit and vegetables and stuff. It’s a lot like the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, only smaller, and they sell food instead of carpets and stuff. But the produce is so much fresher there than at the supermarket, and it’s an adventure to shop there. The only drawback is that it’s a fifteen or twenty minute walk, which can get old after a while. But right now we’re not busy, and it’s so much fun it doesn’t matter.
After we went to the shouk, we invited Josh (Josh Knoble, the other student we went with) over for lunch. It was the first time we’ve entertained in our new home, so that was a lot of fun. Also, Josh K is a really interesting person. He’s becoming a rabbi after going to West Point and serving seven years in the army. So we were listening to him talk about his time in Iraq and Afghanistan, which was fascinating. He’s obviously really smart, and he’s got a unique outlook on a lot of things. I’m sure we’ll hang out with him more over this year.
Anyway, time to go… ha! There’s nothing I have to do! It’s a cool feeling, for right now anyway. Pretty soon I’m going to start getting antsy, but then I’ll just write and take photos and enroll in cool classes. But right now, it feels great to just be able to chill and enjoy being a newlywed in our new home.
Kisses,
Mirah
So you might say life is interesting here. Of course, everyone adapts differently to living in a stressful environment. Not that it's that stressful; it's just high energy. But anyway, my adaptation mechanism is to think of living in Jerusalem as an adventure and get all excited about it. So I do things like run to the window to get photos of the helicopter. I think that's pretty functional, don't you?
After a couple of hours sampling the best wines in the country, we headed back to the center of town for some coffee and a light meal to wash down the wine. The only hysterical part was that, en route to the coffee shop, someone demonstrated a major point from our Student Health Educator (SHE) skits from Amherst: do not tell embarrassing stories about yourself in a party situation, since you may not be able to gauge how embarrassing the story really is until it’s too late. Thankfully, that person was neither Mirah nor myself. However, we look forward to cracking the periodic joke – hopefully just between the two of us, to be nice – since the legend of “Pampers” from the SHE skits lives on.
And here's our bedroom, complete with an email-checking Josh. The bed is really two mattresses on a really creaky frame, but we're working on the creaking part. Josh has this whole plan to prop up the middle of the bed so it doesn't sag... I hope it works, because it's really freakin' annoying. 
