It never rains, just pours…
If you have been following the news you might know that Israel (particularly the North) is currently receiving most of it’s annual rainfall in just one weekend. Our house is feeling rather like Noahs Ark at the moment, but thankfully without the animals (save the cat that sought refuge in Jojo’s buggy yesterday afternoon). The sky has been a fierce grey/purple colour since early shabbat morning and we have seen the most amazing tropical lightening and thunder – like I have never known Israel to have. Even the Negev has had flooding! Sadly the houses here are not designed to cope with such massive amounts of water and lots of people have suffered flooding. The Rabbi living over our heads spent a rather bleak shabbat afternoon mopping water from his balcony trying to ensure it wouldn’t flood our house. Poor bloke.
Jojo made his way into our room several times during the night to announce the “RAIN! RAIN!” I think he finds the whole concept very exciting. He didn’t seem too scared though, despite the crashingly loud thunder, so thankfully we didn’t have to start singing about our favourite things. On the contrary, here we sing songs about how much we love rain and clouds, no more “rain rain go away…”. But it would have been a lot easier for the country to cope if it had been a tad more gradual.
Luckily we are blessed with a house that’s pretty toasty (most of the houses here are freezing even in not-so-cold weather) we just have to get to grips with living with a “dud” – water immersion. I.e. remembering to heat the water before a shower or washing up. Of course being british we are used to having hot water 24/7 so this is all new to us [pause to shoo 10 millionth cat out of garden, I know they want shelter but in this country cats are essentially vermin]. Its unbelievable how quickly the temperature has dropped… from sunbathing weather to hat and boots weather. Madness.
And it’s not just the rain that pours here. Disease is also rampant. Following my tonsilitis (and nits) I received several enormous insect bites on one arm (yes, in December) and on shabbat I had the pleasure of contracting a very unpleasant stomach bug from Husband. Thanks darling. So that should hopefully be my serving of Israeli ailments for a while. Sadly Husband was unable to join me for friday night dinner at the Rabbi’s, but there was no way I was going to rob Jojo of his favourite hangout just to keep him company! Jojo loves all the action in that house and we are still watching love blooming between him and his older woman, Leah-leh. I had to explain to the Rabbi’s family that new olim spend their first few years here getting sick, til we become hardy Israelis. Indeed I popped in this morning to check on his roof-leak situation (we have had water dripping in our bedroom from the buildup on their enormous balcony) and it seems despite this being a horribly contagious bug which many of our olim friends have suffered – they are all fine.
Thank goodness, as we would have felt a bit bad passing on a nasty bug to a family with 11 children…