sarah in nyc

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 w...

 Some vacations are about adventure. Some vacations are about experiencing new things. This vacation has an entirely different agenda. It is about the familiar-- in both senses of the word. We are hanging out with family and revisiting things we have done during other trips to Santa Barbara. The other day we went on the walk that began on the suburban street where we are staying and then takes a right turn down a steep hill.  We walked past the side yards and driveways of a couple of houses until we were someplace quite wonderful.  On one side of us there were meadows and on the other a hillside and views of the mountains.  Horses!  The landscape was so picturesque that it looked almost fake. We walked back up the hill to suburbia. 

We keep kosher. We eat well, really well, but there are some quintessential American experiences that we have not taken part in. McDonald’s food has not been part of our lives. Neither my kids , nor I have ever had a Happy Meal. McDonald’s has been in Israel for a while. Not all of the stores are kosher. When in Teveria, we passed a kosher McDonalds, but we weren’t hungry. Most of the McDonald’s we passed weren’t kosher. We were told that the airport had kosher McDonald’s. My kids and I decided to send the last of our shekels getting kosher Happy Meals. Clearly, we weren’t the only people who felt the same way. The line was long. service was slow. My kids had hands- full of agorot, left over from other trips to Israel. I’m sure the cashier was thrilled to count out the dozens of coins. I’m sure the people standing behind them on line were even more thrilled. At long last the three of us shared out two Happy Meals. My kids ( aged 15 and 22) were thrilled with their Smurf toys....

One of our favorite websites is www.engrish.com .  It is a compilation of terrible English, mostly from what they call “The Far Yeast” , but from the rest of the world , as well. We learned about the site through my daughter’s study of Chinese. For a while we were truly obsessed with the site. We even spent lots of time speaking Engrish. If I am in a foul mood, my kids will often sit me down at the site. usually, within several minutes we are all screaming with laughter. The site has gotten us into mangled English.  Here is some that we collected on our trip to Israel. We also love how product names in other languages might not mean the same as they do in English.