We are here!

We arrived in Israel safe and sound.

Our last two visits to Israel were focused more on the northern end of the country. This visit we are in Ashkelon , a beach town south of Tel Aviv. 

There are tons of tall apartment buildings by the shore. Our day was punctuated by the sounds of building construction. Our son told us that often builds are partially completed and some residents moved in while the rest of the building gets noisily completed 

Today my husband and I had a small adventure. We wanted to buy transit cards. You can easily refill the cards in any corner grocery. However only certain places carry the cards themselves. Our son was at work so we walked the forty or so minutes to the Ashkelon Central Bus Station. 

The streets are lined with trees.

At first glance you might think that with so many long boulevards with rotaries at the intersections that walking would be difficult. But there are clearly marked crosswalks and the law is that walkers have the right of way. Amazingly, the drivers all stop when they see a pedestrian attempting to cross the road. 

The bus station is in an older section of town. The station will soon be replaced by a snazzy new one. Meanwhile we used the old station. We found the ticket office but alas it had closed for the day soon after noon.

We went over to the transit card top up machines.  In the very best bossy Israeli way strangers were helping one another navigate the machines. The bus station was filled with people for whom Hebrew was a really new language. Despite the language barriers people were genuinely helpful to one another.

We found out that the cellphone store sold the transit cards. Yes, they are supposed to be given out for free but the official store is closed and the only place to get the cards is at the cellphone store that is selling them for twenty shekels a piece. We bought the cards and then went to the top up machines to put value on our cards so we could use them. As we finished an Ethiopian son with his elderly mother asked us for help getting the transit card. Between a little bit of Hebrew, a little bit of French and some. n miming we were able to direct the couple to the cellphone store.

We looked for the place to catch the bus back to our son's apartment. We asked some bus patrons if we were in the right place but they only spoke Russian. 

We figured out the correct place to pick up the bus back to our son's apartment. There seems to be an understanding that most people here are having trouble with Hebrew. 

Tonight we went to a Russian market to buy some bread and some cheese. They were selling a bright red cheese called Pesto cheese. I asked the clerk what the coloring agent was. The clerk  asked a customer to translate my question into Russian. The customer's Hebrew was pretty weak but it was good enough to translate my American accented Hebrew into Russian. 

The clerk thought that the cheese was colored with beets. My son looked the cheese up and the red comes from tomatoes and red peppers. It's delicious. I suppose that one way to deal with the fact that so few people share a language (In addition to the Ethiopians and the Russians there were a significant number of migrant workers from every corner of the world in Ashkelon.) would be to be cranky at the complications of trying to communicate with so little language in common. Instead there is a kind of good natured acceptance that people are communicating as best as they could.

Only in Israel would a sukkah be decorated with graphics of green tinsel and Christmas stars .

My son's apartment looks towards the sea.

The sky is endlessly  beautiful.