David and I got a late start since I didn’t get out of bed until around noon. I feel like I deserved it considering how many consecutive hours I had been awake! We were planning to be really productive and take care of as much of my immediate post-aliyah bureaucracy stuff as possible. We rushed into Jerusalem to make it to the bank so I could open an account which I needed before my meeting with the Absorption Ministry on the following Wednesday. The banks hold really strange hours here with a 3 + hour lunch break and sometimes they don’t even reopen after lunch. The post office (which I needed to get a random form to sign up for health insurance) has similarly strange hours so we really wanted to get going before they closed up for lunch. Of course things couldn’t continue being as easy as they had been for the first 24 hours, and within less than 5 minutes I was informed that I had rushed for nothing and couldn’t open a bank account due to the fact that I had made aliyah barely 24 hours ago and wasn’t yet in the “system”. The silver lining to that experience was that the guy was surprisingly nice and I was able to get by all by myself while David was parking the car. I have a hard time speaking Hebrew in front of people with whom I usually speak English so it was very empowering to be alone and have to deal with a situation with foreign vocabulary and succeed.
We didn’t give up and went straight to the post office which was thankfully directly across the street. My new neighborhood is a fantastic little microcosm with many bank branches, restaurants, a gym, grocery stores, and its own post office so I never need to leave the main area to take care of a majority of my needs. We had to stand in line to have the postal bank stamp a piece of paper saying which provider of the socialized health care I was choosing for my free first year coverage. It was surprisingly painless. I realized that the woman started addressing David (who’s Hebrew is infinitely better than mine) rather than me and for the first time I noticed that things like that are going to be some of the largest obstacles I will have picking up the language. When someone doesn’t look right at me and focus the conversation on me I tend to space out just enough to get confused. When they direct their conversation to me and fully engage me I am able to understand completely and really work on my ability to fully communicate in Hebrew. I asked David not to speak for me anymore unless I really need help. He is wonderfully understanding and I think he’s going to be a big help when it comes to my absorption here. We had some time to kill before the health care center opened from THEIR lunch break so we went to lunch. I had one of my all-time favorite sandwiches: tuna, lettuce, and tomato on a whole-wheat bagel. I start salivating just thinking about it. Yes I am sick and food obsessed, but deep down who isn’t?
After lunch we headed to the health center to sign me up. The lady was really nice, but I got a bit concerned when I had to fill out a prior medical history sheet and could not understand one thing. David was there to help me translate and he also had no idea what most of the things meant. The most disconcerting thing was the lady’s attitude: if I don’t know what it is, I don’t have it. I guess it makes plenty of sense considering most of the things on the list seemed serious, but at the time I was a little concerned that my future health care clinic receptionist didn’t even know what the diseases were. I am very glad David was there because I would have freaked out if I was alone and didn’t understand!!
We were supposed to meet up with a friend who was in town with her army unit but she wasn’t going to be available for an hour or two so we went to the mall to run some errands and waste time. The most productive thing we did was to buy my favorite childhood book, The Golden Compass, in Hebrew. I have the English copy with me so I could read it again before the movie comes out and I figured that it was a perfect way to work on my Hebrew especially since I already know the story.
It started getting late and the friend still wasn’t available so we decided to just head home. I was about to crash big time and wouldn’t have been much fun to hang out with anyway. On the way we got a call from one of David’s best friends from childhood. We decided to have dinner with her and her husband (also one of David’s childhood friends). A few hours later we met up at the grocery store to get supplies. We ended up making a gigantic stir-fry that took over and hour to make and even longer to eat. It was a really really lovely evening. I think there’s a lot to be said about spending time in the kitchen with friends. It’s also so much more satisfying to eat food that you prepared and know that you did a good job. It was really nice to sit with friends our age and do “grown-up” things. It is something I really enjoyed about living on my own in Austin. No matter how old you are and how much freedom your parents give you, its still not the same as truly being on your own and blazing your own path through things…even if it is as simple as what vegetables to put in a stir fry. We ended up staying until almost midnight. We’d been there for four hours and it felt like barely 2. I think that’s how you know you’ve had a good evening: When it’s over because it’s late but you feel like it has only begun and don’t want it to end. Fortunately for David and me it wasn’t quite over yet. When we got home we started to read. I sat and read out loud to him and we worked through the translation together. It was really tedious and we only got through about 5 or 6 pages in over an hour but it was still a really great feeling and by the end my speed and accuracy of pronunciation had greatly improved.
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