Thursday, July 31, 2008

What makes a house a home?

Well here it is - the much anticipated post on our new house.
We live in one of two on-campus housing communities, called Hasbrouck Apartments. I'm not 100% sure, how you pronounce it, but thus far I've been saying Hass-brook, and no one has corrected me, so let's just stay with that.
The housing community consists of around 40 townhouses (or as they are called in Hebrew - "train houses"), set up in a semi-circle. There are cement paths leading from the road to each of the individual houses, and grass all around. Right now there are a lot of little plastic cart toys all around, I guess once the school year starts, and people will come back from vacation there will be a lot of kids playing around. Just above the complex, there is a golf course, and since we're at the edge of the complex, we can actually see it from our living room window. Since Ithaca is in the middle of no-where, and we're at the edge of Ithaca, the "life in the country factor" is very strong. When night time comes, you can see all the stars in the sky. During the day, there are wild animals of all kinds. Needless to say, there are squirrels and raccoons, but also deer and bunny-rabbits. Two days ago Uri when on his first jog almost stepped on a bunny and also saw a beaver.
The house itself in nice. It will take some work to make it a home. I think our apartment in Tel-Aviv was just so nice, it's hard to compete. The main difference is that while there are ceilings were relatively high, here they are relatively low. If you compare the two, and figure in Uri's size, it makes this apartment seem kind of small. The top of Uri's head is about 10 cm from the ceiling.
Slowly but surely, it will come around. I started with the bathroom, since from all the rooms, it got me down the most. My bourgeois-self kicked in and gave the solution: Nothing can't be fixed with a little bit of money. I bought a match set of towels, bath rug and shower curtain with the thought that if I put beautiful thing in there, it will take my eyes off of the things I hate. Guess what? It worked!
There is of course the kitchen. This was mainly taken care of by Uri's lucky find on Craig's List. We bought almost everything anyone could need in a kitchen Yesterday we already cooked ourselves dinner, and I even made a sort of cake. I had no recipe, but all I wanted to do was make some sort of cake-like dough and stick lots of fresh blueberries in it. The oven is a little strange. It's gas. We'll have to see how that works.

That's all for now. Next time: We're shopping 'till we're dropping!

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

I just flew in to Ithaca - and, boy are, my arms tired!

Highlights of our flight:
  • 747-400 filled with 2 groups of teenagers: one group American, on the way back from summer camp in Israel, the second Israeli, on the way to the US for summer camp
  • Bad weather in NY caused a backup of landings at JFK. 41 planes waiting in the air.
  • Ours didn't have enough fuel to wait that long in the air, so we flew to Hartford CT, to re-fuel at Bradley Airport.
    Notice: the word International is not in the airports name. ie - we were not allowed to get off the plane.
  • It started to rain in Hartford. Apparently, you don't fuel airplanes during lightning storms. We waited for the storm to pass.
  • Remember those kids? Instead of dimming the lights (Israel time was around 2300), the crew decided to give them fruit juice.
  • We made it out of the terminal at JFK at around 8 pm local time, and headed for the car rental agency, only to discover a line about 10 people long. We got the car just before 11 pm.
We started driving, Ithaca bound. We new we had no intentions to make it all the way, but at least get started, and find a motel on the way. A bit before the Poconos we felt like there was no more driving in us. We headed into a town, and there it was: a "Whole Foods" parking lot just before us, and the motel nowhere in sight. Can you guess what we did?

Yes - we slept in the car.

It really wasn't that bad. I mean, because of the problems at Budget, they gave us an SUV, so there was plenty of room. And we had pillows and a blanket that Uri carried on board from home (in a vacuum sealed bag, the sized reduced by like 50%, very cool).
The sun woke us up at 5:30 am. Or, more precisely, it woke Tamar up at 4:00 am, and she managed to go back to sleep, but my the time 5:00 rolled around, there was no more of that. She started to move the car in the lot, to see when the supermarket opens, Uri woke up and we hit the road.

We ate breakfast at a cute diner, got our first taste of the US when, together, we couldn't finish one order of pancakes, and continued. We made it into Ithaca at around 10 am.
More about that next time.

Friday, July 18, 2008

Starting our blog

Moving to a different country and all, we decided to enter the blogasphere to facilitate making the world a little smaller, thus bridging the span of the Atlantic Ocean just a bit.

The first order of the day was finding a name for the blog. Among the finalists were:
  • As American as apple pie
  • The j-files (a reference to our j visa status, not to our religion)
and:
  • The Princess Diaries
However, once the current name came up, there was really no more arguing. For those of you not following stupid movies coming out of Hollywood these days, it's a reference to Adam Sandler's new movie "You Don't Mess with the Zohan". It was, of course, Uri's idea. Tamar sited all the reasons it might bot be a good idea, but - again - there was no arguing. Hopefully when the time comes to name our kids, Uri will be less enthusiastic choosing such silly names.

As we said, this is where you'll be able to read all about what's up with us.
Without committing to anything, we hope we'll be able to tell you all about:
  • food we're cooking
  • resaurants we eat in
  • TV we watch
  • games we play
  • places we visit
  • people we meet
  • the exotic nature of the North American culture