Awesome Things I Have Seen In Israel

10 PM Israeli time.

It's late, I'm tired, the Jerusalem post is not going up today! Instead you are getting a list of some of the awesome things I have seen in Israel that I either didn't have the camera for or couldn't get it out in time. So no photo evidence, you'll have to take my word for it.

-A group of 11- or 12-year-old girls walking to school in their uniforms: navy blue skirt, pink blouse. And all of them with pink backpacks! (Makes me miss my Girl Scouts).

-A girl in her 20s riding a gorgeous turquoise blue retro-style pedal bike on the beach promenade, wearing a turquoise beach cover-up to match.

-A guy pulling up to the beach on a scooter (in flip-flops, of course) with his Chihuahua riding along in between his feet.

-High tension, relatively new-looking power lines that have the old green glass insulators instead of ceramics.

-Crazy-ass motorcycle and scooter drivers by the hundreds. Actually, crazy driving aplenty.

-At least two guys dropping trou in public to change out of swim trunks into...well, into what I'm not to sure. I'm pretty sure I saw one of them just wrap a beach towel around his naked waist and get in his car to drive home.

-A sunset beach dance party with a DJ. Which would be normal, except there were no speakers, everyone had a pair of wireless headphone. They were clearly all grooving to something, but the rest of us certainly couldn't hear it!

Today was a late day at class; we were there until 7 because we've finally gotten to the troubleshooting portion of class. The instructors set three different things on each machine to wrong/bad values or settings, and we had to figure out what they were. Unfortunately, the machines weren't at perfect (or even good) calibration before, so my team kept finding something that was wrong...and then being told "oh, that's good, but that's not one of the things we changed." Argh! Hopefully as the week goes along and we dial things in, we'll be finding less unintentionally wrong things in troubleshooting.

Tonight's excitement was doing laundry in the tub. Since the trip is more than a week long, work will pay for me to send my laundry out, but it's pretty expensive through the hotel and I don't exactly want to waste time and try to go find a laundromat. At the end of last week,  I sent out 3 pairs of pants, 7 shirts, and a pair of pjs, and it was about $100. That's without having unders or socks washed - those cost 11 NIS per pair to be washed (the exchange rate is somewhere around $1 to 3.5-4 NIS, so about $3.50 each to wash a pair of socks!) which easily would have added another $75 to the laundry bill. I think work would have choked on that. I brought some single-use detergent packets with me, so the tub it was!

Tomorrow is more troubleshooting in class, and then work is taking us all out to dinner tomorrow night. At which point I will be halfway through my trip - can't believe how quickly it is going!