Days 4 and 5: Ma'agen Mikha'el Kibbutz

We planned out trip to Israel with the central idea of “People over Places” – that is, our goal would be to visit with as many distant relatives or near relatives as we could to get a sense of life in Israel rather than trying to see  “the sights”.

Certainly one of our most enjoyable times in Israel so far has been the time we spent at Kibbutz Ma’agen Mikha’el. Located along the Mediterranean, halfway between Netanya and Haifa, this well-known kibbutz is the most prosperous and innovative one in Israel. It is unusual in that it is both agricultural and industrial. The heart of its industrial effort is the plastics company Plasson, which produces a wide variety of specialized industrial and consumer plastics and has spun off subsidiaries in a number of countries. In addition to the high tech products of Plasson, the kibbutz is also active in commercial scale fish farming, dairy farming and a variety of plant crops.

We were the guests of a niece of Lise (the niece of Roz’s cousin’s wife – got that?) and her husband Ofer, one of the kibbutz’s officers. They were incredibly welcoming and we arrived at the kibbutz at a particularly special moment – the afternoon of the holiday of Shavuot. This holiday celebrates the receiving of the torah by Moses on Mount Sinai  and the orthodox honor it with all night study sessions of the Torah. The kibbutz takes a much more secular view (in two evenings and one full day, not a kippah was in evidence), celebrating its various agricultural and industrial achievements over the past year. After a good meal in the communal dining hall with its scenic view of the Mediterranean (other Israeli’s we met were surprised that the kibbutz still had a communal dining hall), we moved outside to sit in a large natural amphitheater,  where the various production managers reported on their accomplishment,  youth of various ages put on dance performances and older members of the kibbutz sang songs. This event was followed by an outdoor wine bar with more entertainment. Both events were for the kibbutz itself and not particularly open to outsiders unless they have some connection to the group, so it was special to be there to share it with them.

The next day, Ofer took us on an extended tour of the facilities, showing us the various fish ponds and telling us about the innovations in fish farming  the kibbutz has pioneered. We also had an interesting tour of the Plasson plastics manufacturing facility and the diary farm. We finally finished our day with a dinner of grilled sea bass (from the farm) with their extended family. One of the most endearing aspects of this kibbutz was the fact that most of the children elect to return to the community after their military service or world travels so extended families are together for holidays and most celebrations. Indeed, this kibbutz is in the midst of constructing new housing to accommodate the children of the community who wish to remain part of it. 

Days 3 and 4: Two Common Lies about Israel

Yesterday we had the quintessential Israeli experience – we got overcharged by a guide in Akko. However, at least he was very knowledgeable and thorough so it wasn’t a total loss. Next time I’ll know to negotiate a time and price clearly beforehand (we innocents abroad are so obvious).  Among many other things, we learned that the ruler who built up Akko in the late 18^th century and who successfully defended the city against Napoleon was Jezzar Pasha. He was also the first practitioner of cosmetic surgery. Except in his case he practiced it by cutting off the nose of anyone who he thought looked more handsome than he did. His nickname was “The Butcher”. We also met a member of the Baha’i faith who was one of the individuals involved in the engineering of the Baha’i gardens in Haifa.

Today we made the drive up to Tsefat (also known as Zefat, Tzfat, Safed, and Safat). This is considered one of the four holy cities of Judaism (the others are Jerusalem, Hebron and Tiberias). There are many small and ancient synagogues in this very religious city. Also many art galleries with very nice work. 

Common (non-political) Lies About Israel

1. “Everyone speaks English”. Yah, sure, everyone speaks English except when you stop to ask directions because you are hopelessly lost. A major Israeli government plan seems to be to post non-English speakers to stand around in obscure neighborhoods where there are no road signs and say “No English”

2. “All the road signs are in English”. This is true as long as you never need to leave a major highway where all the signs are indeed in Hebrew, Arabic and English. But once you exit a major highway you are on your own. My rudimentary Hebrew skills are also not up to the fact that there are several rather obscure (at least to me) Hebrew fonts that they insist on using to confuse the classical Hebrew reader.  My advice, rent the GPS unit (or the astrolabe if you are feeling cheap). We have been proceeding on the basis of  “dead reckoning” (loosely defined as the look my wife gives me when I yell “TURN LEFT” at the last possible moment).

I really have learned a lot in Israel. For example,  I never knew that the first printing press in the entire Ottoman Empire was introduced in Tsefat in 1577. I also  never knew that “Tiberias” is Latin for “city without any useful street signs” 

Day 2:In Which Various Israelis Express their Displeasure with Me

Apparently an interesting cultural activity of Israeli youth is to drive around at various times of the night with their car mega-stereos pounding out an earth-shaking beat. Although I was sufficiently exhausted to awake only once, Roz informs me that this was a repeated activity.  I speculate that perhaps it was part of a geologic experiment by the Weizmann Institute since they certainly were recording the earth tremors of the base notes on seismometers in Rehovot.

After a leisurely breakfast and a quick visit to the City Museum of Haifa we catch a city bus up to the top of Mt. Carmel so we can join a tour of the B’hai Gardens.  The gardens are quite amazing, extending virtually all the way down the mountain in 18 plazas (one for each of the original disciples of Baha’ Allah).  Luckily the tour has us walk only down halfway and so we only have to make it down 700 steps.

On our way back to our hotel we spot a demonstration by the Women in Black. This is an Israeli peace group that has expressed its opposition to the Israeli occupation of the territories  by mounting public vigils on Friday afternoons dressed in black. We decide to join them and spend an hour standing with them on the rotary at the intersection of Hagefen St. and Ben Gurion Avenue holding up signs for an end to the occupation . Since this is a mixed area of Jews and Israeli Arabs, our reception is not as negative as it might be and if their translations of what a few drivers have shouted at us is accurate, Yankee fans in Boston have received much worse from Red Sox stalwarts. In any case, our conversations with them about Israeli politics and other topics are most interesting.

Day 1: Lunch with the Relatives

Our arrival in Israel is uneventful except for the fact that security is clearly understaffed and it takes nearly an hour of standing in line to get to a booth to have our passports checked. I use the term "standing" loosely because actually we spend the time aggressively pushing forward so as to avoid being run over by the Russians trying to shove pass us.  Others in line assure me this is unusual (the waiting, not the Russians).  Arriving in a foreign land is always disequilibrating (particularly after 24 hours without any sleep), but we manage to get our rental car and drive through Tel Aviv to Netanya,. There we have a delightful lunch with Roz’s cousin Sally, who is in her 80s but extremely lively and still folk dancing once a week. We are joined by her son Steven and cousins who are visiting from Toronto (Ethel) and England (Doreen).  Sally’s apartment overlooks Netanya’s beautiful long beach. The Mediterranean looks inviting, but we are both beginning to become catatonic from exhaustion and so complete our drive up to Haifa and our hotel. 

Day 0: The Israeli Character

We haven’t left the US yet, but we are already beginning to experience Israeli culture.  Our Israeli friends have generally describe the Israeli character in a number of terms that I will judiciously summarize as “Assertive”. We have our first concrete example of this at Gate 139 Newark airport.  Our flight to Israel appears to consist of about 60% Israelis heading home, 30%  New York Hasidim and 10% “none of the above”. As it gets closer to our flight time a large crowd of mainly Israelis begins to crowd together at the entrance to the boarding gate. The Continental gate agents begin to request that the crowd move back to allow first class, business class and elite mileage passengers to board the aircraft. Not a single person moves back so much as an inch. “Please” the gate agents begin to plead,  “We won’t be able to board the plane until you move back to allow First Class,  Business Class and Elite  passengers  through (they seem to love repeating all the privileged class ticket categories as though to remind the rest of us that we are traveling steerage and should expect no favors from them).  The crowd stands it ground (are these are all Leninists, thinking if the capitalists need to sit first they will have to force their way past us?). Now the agents are tired of cajoling and have moved into threat phase. “You need to move back; no one will board until you move back”. But these are Israelis and they know how to stand their ground (and they also know that the  fool who steps back is simply sacrificing his chance at getting to an unfilled overhead bin). The threats, demands, pleadings all go on for some time until somehow the First Class, Business Class, Elite Status, and Other Plutocrats have managed to push their way through the belligerent clot of humanity and onto the plane.  It is all very amusing, but then I think about those poor Continental gate agents – they must have to repeat this every day!

Our second glimpse at Jewish culture (not sure if this was an Israeli or a New York Hasid) comes on the plane just before take-off. Everyone has been seated except for one Hasidic  gentleman standing in the aisle just before my seat. He hasn’t said anything to anyone, but he is looking around with a worried frown on his face. He wanders off somewhere and the woman in the center seat of the row ahead of me stands and turns to me. “I don’t think that man will sit next to me, any chance we can change seats?” Ah, the light suddenly dawns – an orthodox Jew sitting next to a strange woman – not good. I’m not eager to give up my aisle seat for a center one, but before I make a decision, another orthodox man has arranged for his wife to change seats with the worried guy. Crises solved.

Israel 2010 Getting Ready

Well, I finally am getting ready to travel to Israel. I had been delaying this trip until the Israelis and the Palestinians finally came to recognize each other’s legitimate grievances and sat down together in good faith to negotiate a fair and just settlement.   Well……  although it might not take a genius to figure the likelihood of that happening, it took a wedding invitation from Josh and Diana to move me from this perfectly reasonable stance and I will soon be heading for Israel.

  
     The key question. Why blog at all? The trip to Viet Nam had me going to a country that was quite foreign to most of us and I thought I might have something  new and of interest to say. But Israel, Israel  has been visited by many of us and I doubted that I would have any great new insight or indeed anything intelligent to add to the public discussion. But then I looked at a number of different travel blogs  and that modest requirement didn’t seem to prevent anyone else from clogging the bandwidth. So, perhaps this will be a very brief blog…

My first dilemma. Which kippah  to take. I don’t do very well with the little knit ones that are so much in fashion these days because I don’t have any hair to clip it to. Sticking a pushpin into my skull doesn’t appeal to me, so that one will stay home. The bright purple one with “Bernie’s Bar Mitzvah” emblazoned across the front seemed a bit too assertive. I will, after all, be wearing one as camouflage more or less, so getting it right seems important. It’s a bit late, but I should have ordered the baseball kippah ($2.95 each) from A1 Skullcap company. Oh well…. maybe I will get one in time for the next Red Sox game. 

What I really was looking for was a line of fine art keppot (Chagall’s window,  Monet’s Giverny  paintings, Picasso’s Guernica (well, maybe not Guernica)). What I have finally decided on is my own Andy Warhol kippah (which looks just like a black velour kippah).

My second dilemma. What to pack? My intention was to travel “light”, but after filling the suitcase last night I realized I would  require two Nepalese porters to accompany me – and that is just for the various pills and medicines I’m taking. This aging business is tough. 

Thanksgiving, Hanoi Style

This year the Feldberg Family joined President Obama in declaring an amnesty for some lucky turkey. However, unlike Barack and Michelle, we ate our Thanksgiving dinner on the sidewalk at the corner of Hang Bong and Duong Thanh streets, where a Vietnamese family had set up a grill and a number of low plastic tables, crowded with locals.  We squeezed into a space with Roz, Sarah and Mary perched on the tiny red stools while I, in an attempt to spare my aching knees, sat on a slightly higher blue stool. I was puzzled at being the object of some curious stares by the other diners until I realized I was actually sitting on what they considered a table (think of a guest in your house climbing up on the dining room table to eat – that’s me).  Before I share our Thanksgiving feast with you, however, let me say a few words about food in Vietnam.

We learned a little about the Vietnamese approach to food by taking a cooking class at the Hidden Hanoi center at 137 Nghi Tam, Tay Ho district (crossing the street to get there took all our courage). Our class started with an hour field trip to both the illegal neighborhood  “Moving Market” (so named because it can’t stay open in the same place very long or the authorities come to shut it down) and the larger neighborhood legal market.

Food is very important to the Vietnamese. Indeed they spend a significant portion of the day eating (I think we figured it out as about five small and not-so-small meals a day plus a break for iced coffee at a café). Freshness is highly valued and there are no cooling trays or misting devices here, so everything is brought into the city daily for sale (some items are brought in from the countryside twice daily).  Meat is expected to feel warm to the touch, indicating it is freshly slaughtered and unsold greens are discarded at the end of the day. The fish are swimming before being purchased. We purchased some essentials and headed back to the cooking school where we next met the two other people in our class (a couple of young Australian physicians who insisted their cab driver take a U turn so they wouldn’t have to cross the street!) and then spent a leisurely hour drinking tea with Ms Anh, who explains the philosophy of how flavors are balanced in each meal and how each meal is incomplete if some form of rice is not served.  Then it was off to the kitchen where we were each assigned a task preparing our ingredients and shown the best way to do it. The five of us worked together to prepare the “seafood menu” (a different menu is featured each day of the week). This consisted of green papaya salad, sweet and sour prawns, fresh spring rolls, sour fish soup and, of course, rice. With the assistance of three staff members, we finished in time to consume the efforts of our labors for lunch.

In the states, when someone mentions Vietnamese food, we mainly think of pho (pho  is actually a breakfast food in Vietnam, although it is available and can be consumed all day long). Pho is quite complex with each bowl prepared individually and each preparer creating something unique. But pho is a very (very) small part of the Vietnamese cuisine, which reflects the incredibly varied geographic and climatic regions of the country as well as the ethnic diversity of the population and the season. For example, each banquet and lunch I attended ended with a large bowl of soup and each soup seem to reflect a regional specialty. At our last banquet, the Vietnamese faculty were quite adamant that the soup was a specialty of a village that one of them had come from and was best sampled in that village. What characterizes Vietnamese cuisine is the large variety of  herbs  and fresh leaves that are used  in their varied  dishes. For example, they have a number of different kinds of mint, basil and cilantro and each form is used somewhat differently. They also value contrasting tastes in each dish and so any one dish will have both sweet ingredients and sour ingredients, or spicy ingredients and cooling ingredients. I regret to say that my taste buds have long since lost the discriminating power they once had and I was often unable to discern these subtleties

So what did we have for Thanksgiving? Bia Ha Noi (Ha Noi beer) of course and a selection of the skewers shown below. 

We had choices of salmon, beef, shrimp, snails, corn, fish, potatoes, several types of mushrooms, taro root, tofu, as well as a number of skewers with chunks of unidentified material. It was all very good and since no one around us spoke any English there was no familial discord and, like that First Thanksgiving in Massachusetts, it is amazing how  much can be communicated by  gesticulating and grunting  (like “get off the table, doofus”). 

and, of course