Tuesday, November 16, 2010

The Benjy mystery

Haven't had time to report the daily do's and dont's in Beer Sheva lately, so here are a few assorted action shots...


The Benjy mystery. After once again deciding to go back to South Africa, Benjy finally left his warmly hated Beer Sheva a week ago. The day after that he was back here again, telling people that he had managed to miss his flight by confusing AM and PM. The next night he managed to miss another flight due to Ethiopian Air demanding twice the ticket prize as when he did the booking The next night, and as far as is understood, he actually got on a plane tho South Africa. Or did he? Rumors that he is hiding out in Tel Aviv abound. Different theories are floated. Someone has managed to get hold of him on his Israeli number. The mystery thickens. Wherever you are Bru, I hope you are having a Joll. We miss you:-)


David Peru and Benjy having a joll...
Shabbes evening. Was spent with Jochanan, his wife and his three kids. Mayanan, his 2 year old daughter, refused to go to sleep and spent the evening as a heat seeking robot, set on serious balagan making. She managed to spill an interesting assortment of liquids, candy and foods on the floor, uncork a can of dill and pouring it out and making figures with it on the kitchen floor (out of sight, only 15 minutes she was very, very quiet), soil herself to the extent that she had to go through three different outfits during the evening like some Britney Spears (Shabbes dress, PJ 1 and PJ 2) and feeding me with different kinds of foods (she loves feeding people, I once had to eat half a pack of cheese doodles, I hate cheese doodles, just to keep her happy). But except for an attention junkie she is also horribly cute and playful, she looks like a bookmark angel with her curly blond hair and blue eyes. It was a fun night, and it made me long for a family of my own.

Shabbes evening 2. Coming back to the apartment I bumped into Quentin outside Davids apartment, where him and David Peru was drinking vodka and chilling. Quentin had spent the evening at the Rabbi and completely ignored my advice to stay off the booze. He was d-r-u-n-k beyond recognition,making strange sounds and communicating via shouts, very happy, no doubt. At one point he leaned over the loft railing to scream something unintelligible to a gan of you Russians passing in the street below. Fortunately they didn't notice it. Some of the Russian kids here has absolutely no sense of humor.  I managed after a while to lure him back home where he promptly went to bed. I then sat down in the kitchen to study some Torah in peace and quiet, but soon gave it up because of the haunting sound coming out through Quentin's locked door, of Quentin lying in bed pretending to be a Ferrari, running the engine and going up and down on the gears through some dreamt up Nürenberg Ring. Wether he was awake or not no one shall never know, as the following day would be one of amnesia. The morning after his room looked like a battlefield and he had a very bad bruise on his right knee and part of his desk was demolished. For reasons best left to the readers imagination he had apparently felt the need to clean his room in somewhere the middle of the night, with slightly disastrous results. Of this cleaning effort he had no recollection when he woke up, alert as a Zombie. Nor of the previously mentioned Ferrari related activities.

Grave-hopping. So yesterday the plan was to get to bed early, a plan that was shattered when the Rabbanit called and asked me and Quentin to come over to the Rabbi's house later to celebrate the latter's birthday. So around 8.30 we went there and I was introduced to a fantastic old Rabbi named Jochanan, who had spent most of his life business traveling, living all over the world, until he and his wife decided to retire in Israel. Born in Holland to a Yemenite father and a Moroccan mother sometime in the 20's. He once had spent 1 day in Stockholm, Lidingö to be exact, in 1957, and he still remembered a few phrases in perfect Swedish. He also remembered that you could take a street car to Lidingö. I informed him that the street cars had been shut down in the late 60's. So we had a really good time, eating and talking and drinking, and when it was time to leave, the Rabbi insisted that we had to go pray at the graves of some of the local Tzaddikim. So we packed into his Huyyndai mini bus and went to the cemetery and prayed at the grave sites of three different local Gdolim. Of course, when we finally got back to the apartment around 1 AM, I couldn't fall asleep. Tossed and turned. My brain was adamant, it kept trying to come up with a great idea for a shoestring budget zombie movie.... Meh! Anyone wants to switch brains with me?

You may well wonder..
Any way that's about it. Time for more Hebrew passive verbs. In hoveh, avar and atid...

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