{"id":12,"date":"2010-07-27T23:59:56","date_gmt":"2010-07-27T20:59:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mehmehs.com\/aliyah\/?p=12"},"modified":"2013-09-11T09:12:01","modified_gmt":"2013-09-11T07:12:01","slug":"day-2-in-the-big-aliyah-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mehmehs.com\/aliyah\/day-2-in-the-big-aliyah-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Day 2 in The Big Aliyah House"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I don\u2019t get the English.\u00a0 I never have and I probably never will.\u00a0 If you were offered a fabulous free Israeli breakfast with all the trimmings, why would you eat a bowl of imported sugary cereal??? Husband kept nagging at me to hurry up so we could go to the aliyah fair and sort out our lives but they had herring and I am pregnant for goodness sake! And AMAZING salads…. as predicted my son, who has always had a taste for Mediterranean food, was loving the Israeli white cheeses.\u00a0 Ended up stuffing croissants into the nappy bag for brunch.<\/p>\n

We spend the day at the special fair designed for UK aliyah-niks.\u00a0 One day to sort out your finance, healthcare, phone… and such things as newspaper subscriptions.\u00a0 They had even wheeled in Jdate.\u00a0 (I don\u2019t get that \u2013 surely singles make aliyah to get away <\/em>from Jdate??) But we couldn\u2019t complain, it would have taken months to sort all that stuff out on our own so it was nice to have it brought to us.\u00a0 Just a bit difficult to make life-altering decisions on less than 4 hours sleep.\u00a0 I was falling asleep at the Bank Mizrachi stand so decided to go and get a coffee.\u00a0 Big mistake.\u00a0 First one I had for a while in my pregnancy and the combination of caffeine and sugar gave my foetus all the energy it needed to practise kickboxing.\u00a0 Quite difficult to concentrate on financial figures when someone\u2019s having a party inside you.<\/p>\n

After a (reasonably) successful morning where all the stands were helpful, except for the mobile phone companies who, rather than offering incentives to olim like the other services (e.g. free for a month, 10% off, etc) saw us coming \u00a0and as far as they were concerned, we were game fodder.\u00a0 So we have no phone.\u00a0 We may be olim but we know a rip-off when we see one (they do have mobile phone tarrifs in London you know guys).\u00a0 We then get taken to the kotel for a tour.\u00a0 By this time the people with older kids were really struggling, as they don\u2019t just fall asleep in buggies and by now were reaching the really really <\/em>ratty stage.\u00a0 So husband, Jojo and I are practically alone on the tour.\u00a0 Luckily one of the shuls has a nice big armchair, perfect for the big of belly, so I collapse into it, only to have the tour cut short because no one else was coping.\u00a0 Bummer.<\/p>\n

They put on a special ceremony for us, where we received out teudat zehut, and we could invite family & friends.\u00a0 I have to say it was rather moving (not that I was doing any moving, being a hippo) my cousin thoughtfully grabbed a chair for me and my friend took care of Jojo, who was VERY excited by the whole experience.\u00a0 It was a nice moment, to see people accepted as \u201cIsraelis\u201d knowing as we did that some people had made a big journey\/sacrifice\/general effort to be there.\u00a0 Some people had waited 20 years for the opportunity, come as single mothers or sacrificed good jobs and their entire family.<\/p>\n

I sacrificed my Rangemaster.<\/p>\n

(Don\u2019t laugh \u2013 if you saw it you would understand, its green<\/span> with gold<\/span> knobs on its).<\/p>\n

I was thrilled our families (and one friend) had come along, and after we left them it dawned on me that all of those people had themselves made aliyah, and how much things have changed since they did.\u00a0 We can\u2019t really complain.\u00a0 Yes we were tired and we still had the journey to Karmiel, but I imagine my Yemenite grandmother, coming over in the 20\u2019s, by who-knows-what more of transport, poor, illiterate and most likely with a few kids in tow, had it much much<\/em> worse.\u00a0 In fact so did my mum who made aliyah in the 50\u2019s on a boat where you had you make sure you didn\u2019t throw up in first class.\u00a0 When we went back to the hotel to grab our stuff, my dad turned up, bearing a little cash to get us started and a 3 kilo melon.\u00a0 (when he tried to tell me how heavy his gift was, I laughed at him.\u00a0 He should try carrying that weight around for months and see how he likes it).<\/p>\n

So if you want to see why me, the daughter of an Israeli father and a mother who made aliyah still had to go through this process, read on…………<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don\u2019t get the English.\u00a0 I never have and I probably never will.\u00a0 If you were offered a fabulous free Israeli breakfast with all the trimmings, why would you eat a bowl of imported sugary cereal??? Husband kept nagging at me to hurry up so we could go to the aliyah fair and sort out … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8889,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3,14,9,16,15,10,11,12,19,18,4,13,7,17],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aliyah","tag-aliyah-2","tag-bank-mizrachi","tag-breakfast","tag-ceremony","tag-coffee","tag-english","tag-finance","tag-healthcare","tag-karmiel","tag-kotel","tag-olim","tag-phones","tag-pregnant","tag-teudat-zehut"],"yoast_head":"\nDay 2 in The Big Aliyah House - Diary of an Aliyah-nik<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/mehmehs.com\/aliyah\/day-2-in-the-big-aliyah-house\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Day 2 in The Big Aliyah House - Diary of an Aliyah-nik\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I don\u2019t get the English.\u00a0 I never have and I probably never will.\u00a0 If you were offered a fabulous free Israeli breakfast with all the trimmings, why would you eat a bowl of imported sugary cereal??? 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