Maybe I should start off with the following anecdote that I think explains a lot about the topic at hand: My friend Michael was interviewing for a job with a local outfit – as is typical here, a start-up. This company has come up with some kind of metering device that, if I understand it correctly (no sure thing!), detects the amount of water in sewer pipes. For our purposes, it doesn‘t matter if you or I understand it exactly. The point is that they are trying to penetrate the American market big time, and that’s where my friend comes in. This was one of the few times when an Israeli company wouldn’t prefer to hire some hot-shot kid right out of the I.D.F., as opposed to Michael, even though he has ten times the knowledge and experience as the other guy. If nothing else, the men running the company figured out real quick that they needed someone who could chew the fat with the middle-age American engineers and officials who would be deciding whether to purchase a few of these meters on a trial basis. And that someone definitely was not going to be some twenty-two year old Israeli with passable English. If they wanted to talk to Americans, they’d better find an American.

Michael is an American from the mid-west. Michael is a 100%, genuine, certified, official good ol’ boy, complete with an impressive waist line and accent, the exact person you’d want to connect with similar folks back in Duluth or Des Moines. The job interviews were going well, and then an important question: “Do you watch the Super Bowl?” “Sure.” Continue reading →

It wasn’t always “this way.” Long, long ago when Barbara and I were DINKS(NM) – double income, no kids (no mortgage), we did a certain amount of traveling, and we did it on our own. The idea of going on an organized tour would have been the last thing on my mind. Even when we had fairly serious mishaps along the way – like having to travel around Spain in a stick shift car, which neither of us knew how to drive, became part of the adventure, the narrative we relate to friends today. Whatever happened, it was all good, at least in hindsight. Today? That’s a different story entirely.

These days, I am more than willing to let somebody else do all the planning: the itinerary, the accommodations, especially the part that deals with when and where we’re going to eat. Plus, if all goes well, I enjoy going around with other like-minded people. Yet, I am cognizant of the limitations of this approach, sometimes especially so. For instance, our day in Rome, Friday Sept 16. Continue reading →

“Sushi tonight!” That might be a good idea, but it wouldn’t be such a big deal lots of places I know where kosher sushi is there for the asking. Not in Jerusalem or thereabouts; there’s even a branch of Sushi Rehavia right here in Ma’ale Adumim. Not in Tel Aviv. When Tina and David lived on Ibn Gabirol St., we used to walk across Nordau to Nini Hachi, one of the finest kosher restaurants in Israel. Even when we were living in The Exile, sushi was easy to come by, at least in Teaneck. My sense is that if you are more than an hour’s drive from some kosher sashimi or a plate of pad thai, something is radically wrong. Continue reading →

Barbara and I have this on-going in-joke about her birthday: that every four years the American government throws her a big birthday bash. If you realize that her BD is on January 20, the point of our little joke becomes clear. This year not marked not only a presidential inauguration and the opening of a partly new road between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, it was also for Barbara a BIG BIRTHDAY, one that called for some sort of celebration. Continue reading →

I find it hard to believe, but it’s apparently true: there are hotels in Las Vegas – several of them, in fact – bigger, way bigger than the Costa Diadema. Some of them so big they could possibly tuck the entire population of Efrat in their rooms, without anybody having to sleep on a love seat in the lobby or a blackjack table in the casino. Nonetheless, I’m going to stick with my preferred description of the ship we were sailing on: a huge Las Vegas hotel turned on its side, floating in the water.

On Wed. Sept, 14, the ship was sailing at its normal steady pace from Palma de Mallorca to Cagliari, the port city of Sardinia. The actual distance is 556 km. (346 miles), which means you could fly from one to the other in less than one hour (plus all the time in the airport!). By boat? Let’s just say that the ship left the one port at 1AM Wednesday morning (when we were all fast asleep) and arrived at the other port at 8AM Thursday morning (when we were having breakfast – with a whole day in between). The moral here is that this is not the way to travel if you’re in a hurry. Continue reading →

If it were you growing herbs on a rooftop of a building, would you consider your enterprise as agricultural or industrial? And then, why would it matter? (Third question: When are we returning to our cruise on the Costa Diadema? We will be back on board the ship, on its way to Sardinia, very soon. Do not worry!)

One of the places that Shelley Brinn, the proprietor of Tour Adumim, likes to take people to is a rooftop garden in Mishor Adumim, the industrial area close by to where we live. She was organizing a small group of residents and tourists to visit this place one recent afternoon, and why not? Continue reading →

Mallorca, Minorca, Formentera, and Ibiza. We’re now a few years past 1957, at which time I was a junior at DeWitt Clinton H.S. in The Bronx. All of us were preparing for the regents exam in Spanish, assiduously poring over the Barron’s review book, which managed to condense three years of study into one yellow covered volume. Vocabulary, verb forms, grammar, idioms, questions about Spanish culture and other items of interest. How else would I have come to know about the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega? And then there were the Balearic Islands. For reasons I still do not understand, I was convinced that they were going to ask me to name the individual islands in this chain. And so, for days on end I went around repeating to myself Mallorca, Minorca, Formentera, and Ibiza, Mallorca, Minorca, Formentera, and Ibiza, until you could wake me at 3AM and ask me, What are the names of the Balearic Islands?, and I would repeat in singsong, Mallorca, Minorca, Formentera, and Ibiza. Much to my surprise, they did not ask me about the Balearic Islands. I did muddle through the exam, and to this day I can still recite the names of the four principal Balearic Islands – which never seemed of any great importance in my life, except that the very ship I was on, the Costa Diadema, was now on its way (full speed ahead) to Mallorca – definitely a long way from E. 208 St. in The Bronx. Continue reading →

I could have if I wanted to, but I didn’t. There were plenty of opportunities for me to take a sneak preview of the ship we would be sailing on, the Costa Diadema. Plenty of on-line promotional material from the company: all about the ship, how big it is, how many decks, how many people can it fit, where it sails to, and the like. Plus…..in this day and age in which you can post anything (except undressed people) on YouTube, there are any number of videos taken by folks on the ship. So I could have done that, check out what a typical cabin looks like, the restaurants, the casino, the spa. But I asked myself the existential question: What good would it do me to know two weeks in advance? The answer I came up with was None At All. The promotional material from the AACI to entice us to sign up had a picture of the enormous vessel with more amenities than I would ever find the time or reason to use. The rest would wait until we arrived at the dock in Barcelona, which we finally did after the cable car ride, which I wrote about in a previous post – in the unlikely event that you don’t remember! Continue reading →