Making Aliyah: Learning the ropes

This is the third entry in a series of Aliyah Stories by Darrell Ginsberg. To catch up, read his first entry The Landing followed by A new home in an old home.

I decided to make a trip to the grocery store to get some food and see about getting a phone to call home . I walked over to the Joseph Meyerhof Mini-Mall/Retirement Home and the store owners were quick to pull me into their stores, give me tea, and tell me stories of their late-uncles who also came to Israel from the old-country. Joseph Meyerhof mini-mall was similar to the old country only with futuristic prices. The city had placed the retirement home in the middle of mini-mall three years after the mini-mall opened since the supermarket lines moved too quickly and there was too little haggling over prices to comply with Israeli Municipal Buy-laws. The people from the retirement home were happy to be giving back and after some time felt comfortable enough with the locale to have naps in the aisles of the stores.
 
I visited the cell phone store first. The workers were all H&O models moonlighting as cell phone saleswomen possibly for the free texting services they received. I negotiated myself a cheap handset and an expensive date for later that evening.

They were desperate to make a sale and receive a free meal. My new date, Miri, informed me that an Israeli bank account is required to give me a phone number and initialize the phone. So I went over to the bank where I had my first encounter with the Israeli banking system which is modeled after my mother's Piggy Bank System. You are forced to put money in, get no interest in return and need to beg, plead and eventually throw temper tantrums promising to use the funds to buy books to get any money out.

The bank teller informed me that the law requires a cell phone number to get a bank account and to go back to phone store and demand a number. I quickly was reminded that Joseph Heller's original name for Yossarian was Yossi and Catch-22 was originally titled Shopping for Shoes in Yafo, but the name was changed due to political pressure on the publishers. 

So I went back to the cell phone store where, after some flirting and assurances of Canadian citizenship, Miri gave me 3 of the 10 digits of my phone number. I returned to the bank where based on my 3 cell phone digits I negotiated 4 of the 9 digits of my bank account number. I returned to the cell phone office where she gave me 2 more digits and demanded I get more numbers of my bank account and shave before dinner that night. I traveled bank and forth 4 times till I finally received a full phone number. However, by this time the bank had already been opened for almost 2 hours and was closed till the following week. 
 
I purchased a falafel, a fan and a long distance phone card. I phoned my mother who had spent the 26 hours since my departure curled up in my bed having the best sleep she'd had in years. I returned to my room, began to unpack, turned on my fan (which to this day has yet to be turned off) and prepared for my date with the cell phone worker/B-class model who insisted that I call her since her 'phone bill is way too expensive.' 
 
The next day I made my way via Egged bus to my first Ulpan classes at the Technion. Rumor had it that the bus routes in Haifa were designed accidentally by the autistic daughter of Haifa's Deputy Mayor. In giving her a project to occupy the cute but compulsive 7-year old while he worked on drafting bus routes, he gave her a map of the city and some crayons. She patiently and neurotically traced every street on the Haifa City map placing random numbers haphazardly onto the map. The following morning, the Deputy Mayor inadvertently brought her colored map to the Egged Bus Route Planning Committee meeting. 

He was too embarrassed to admit his mistake and his co-workers on the council were too embarrassed to admit they all suffered from Genetic Jewish Colorblindness and couldn't grasp the map which looked strikingly similar to Jackson Pollack’s abstract expression classic No. 5 1948; so the bus routes were finalized. As such buses ran in an incomprehensible web of turns, twists, and honks across every street in the city, including 3 routes that go the opposite way down one-way streets. This was the first time I had seen buses performing 3-point turns as part of their planned routes.
 
I fell asleep on the three-kilometer 45-minute bus ride and awoke to my head banging off the Plexiglas window as the bus raced over the Technion's faultily engineered speed bumps.
 
I fell off the bus and endeavored to hobble to my class. The Technion, as a strictly science-based institution, had placed the Faculty of Humanities at the furthest point from the main bus stop. Like all buildings in Haifa, the Technion is located precariously on the edge of a cliff, so one required repelling gear to reach the Ulpan class. After removing my harness, I limped to the classroom proceeded to throw the first jab at what would become my 4 year heavyweight prize fight with the Hebrew language.

The Ulpan teacher was a former army drill sergeant who decided that the tears of new immigrants tasted better in her homemade Chulent than the tears of soldiers and thus became an Ulpan teacher.

My Ulpan classmates were an eclectic bunch comprised of 11 nationalities and zero eligible women. During the first class we read a passage on acid rain and its effects on global warning. The following day we read a passage on greenhouse gases. On our third day we read a passage on sulfur pollution and its consequences on Mediterranean sea life. I began leaving Ulpan class dejected not only with my inability to learn Hebrew but also with the ominous state of the environment.

After a month in Ulpan I could confidently converse in Hebrew citing many of Al Gore's Oscar-winning arguments, but couldn't yet order a glass of tap water with ice. I was getting increasingly worried that the polar ice caps would melt before I could properly conjugate a passive tense verb. I was beginning to feel lonely and was wondering if they also supplied free tuna sandwiches in the Departures Hall of Ben Gurion Airport.