Nippy morning, Beer Sheva

So this morning when I hit the streets of my desert metropolis I actually wished I had put on a hoodie or something. It actually felt a bit cold, which obviously means it wasn't very cold, maybe around 18 degrees Celsius, but still. When the sun comes up it will probably be in the lower 30's, again, but the nights and mornings are slowly getting cooler. Then again they are predicting high 30'es again toward the end of the week, but the unusually heat for this time of year is not what has the people buzzing, but rather the draught, as Israel suffers from a chronic water deficit problem. Lake Kineret (The Sea of Galilee) is Israel's biggest water reserve, and this and others need to be replenished by rain. And it doesn't rain.....Beer Sheva hasn't seen rain in six months.

Flowery drill instructor in in action

Other than that I had a productive day yesterday, even though I overslept. So I went to Ulpan to encounter another subgroup of conjugations for irregular verbs in future tense. Our drill instructor, sorry, teacher Ronit was in a splendid mood and didn't raise her voice once, not even when I arrived 2 hours late. After that I made pasta and sausages for me and Quentin, ate, cleaned the kitchen AND the stove, my room and the floors. I then worked out (the belly is going away!), went to Shul for Mincha and listened in on a lecture and following heated quarrel about the private versus public reading of The Schmah prayer, went to the Rabbi for Gemara studies and discussed reward and punishment, and then sat down to write a blog post. About the great Russian influx to Israel. in the 90's And got stuck. And the piece became half a novel, and I realized I simply new too little about the subject to make something worthwhile of it. So it gets to bide its time in the drafts list until I know what to do with it. Some time I'll try writing something about the ethnic interplay here in the Merkaz, instead of going for the big picture.

Meanwhile, life is good and, this morning, like ever now and again, it dawns on me: I'm in Israel! It's not simply a question of religion. I like the country, simply put. Maybe it's still the novelty of it, we'll se what happens when I start working and move out of the sheltered existence that is Merkaz Klita Yeelim. Time for class. I'm leaving you with a picture of the coolest lighter I ever seen. A facsimile of the Palestinian Post (currently Jerusalem Post) of May 14, 1948.