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.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Even the Negev has had flooding!\u00a0 Sadly the houses here are not designed to cope with such massive amounts of water and lots of people have suffered flooding.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Poor bloke.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0singing about our favourite things.\u00a0On the contrary, here we sing songs about how much we love rain and clouds, no more “rain rain go away…”.\u00a0 But it would have been a lot easier for the country to cope if it had been a tad more gradual.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 I.e. remembering to heat the water before a shower or washing up.\u00a0 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].\u00a0\u00a0Its unbelievable how quickly the temperature has dropped… from sunbathing weather to hat and boots weather.\u00a0Madness.<\/p>\n
And it’s not just the rain that pours here.\u00a0 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.\u00a0Thanks darling.\u00a0So that should hopefully be my serving of Israeli ailments for a while.\u00a0Sadly 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\u00a0all the action in that house and we are still watching love blooming between him and his older woman, Leah-leh.\u00a0I had to explain to the Rabbi’s family\u00a0that new olim spend their first few years here getting sick, til we become hardy Israelis.\u00a0 Indeed I popped in this morning to check on\u00a0his 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<\/em> contagious bug which\u00a0many\u00a0of\u00a0our olim friends have suffered –\u00a0they are all fine.<\/p>\n Thank goodness, as we would have felt a bit bad passing on a nasty bug to a family with 11 children…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 The … <\/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":[],"class_list":["post-608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aliyah"],"yoast_head":"\n