If you can hear my voice, clap twice

When I came home over break, I confirmed my farily-well founded suspicions that I'd gained some weight while in Israel. Now since I have very little expertise in estimating weight gain or loss, I thought I'd picked up twice as much as I actually wound up picking up. Oh, and a point of interest: who was the first to comment? I walk into Rivka's class: ".גדעון, אתה השמנת"; "Um, hi Rivka." But why am I telling you this? Because the story of one time I certainly gained weight is good, and it leads into a few interesting Israeliisms. Or maybe a few if we count the one above.

We arrived in Haifa in the middle of December, which was also known by its slightly more significant date of about ten days before the start of the month of Tevet. In other words, the week before Chanukah. Naturally we checked out the shuk (not just because this was the first time we could really get food in the shuk, but also because the Haifa shuk is not off-limits like--of course--Mahane Yehuda was--is--oops). In the course of walking around finding whose clementines were 10 agurot cheaper per kilo, I discovered a place called the Ariel Bakery (מאפיית אריאל) right in the marketplace. I tried their bread--and then their sufganyot (סופגניות). And then went to get some carrots and came back for another sufganya. And also when it was time to leave: another.

Every time I came back to the shuk during Chanukah (meaning for the next week, and I came about three times), I'd get a sufganya at the beginning and another one at the end and do whatever buying of healthy materials was necessary in between. This, of course, was probably-small physical but large mental weight gain (at least after I figured out what was going on).

That first time, before I left I walked down to the end just because I wanted to see how far the shuk went. By Machane Yehuda standards it's a pretty nothing shuk, so it didn't take long. At the end, almost at the final stall, I saw something funny. A woman was sitting in a low chair with twelve barrels in front of her arranged into three rows of four. I don't remember what was in the row closest to her but in the middle row were four barrels of fish. Just fish pieces, in ice: heads, middles, tails, cut up, whole, everything. And so of course under them in the net four barrels were those small, tasteless, chewy, individually-wrapped candies...

Pardon my French as I switch languages:

".אז אני אמרתי לה: "רק רציתי להגיד לך שנגרם לי לחייך לראות דגים על יד ממתקים...
"?והיא עונה במבטא רוסית עבה: "נו

".לא, סתם רציתי להגיד לך"
"?נו, אז מה"
"...כלום"
"?אז מה רצית לאמר"
".לא, אין דבר...ביי"

I'll try to translate, though beware that her facial epression and tone can be conveyed through the Hebrew without any description and that it's very hard to capture exactly what this is in the English. And that I'm not going to translate untranslatable words.

...so I say to her, "I just wanted to tell you that it made me smile to see fish next to candies."
She answers in this thick Russian accent [totally monotonously, with disinterest bordering on hostility]: "Nu?"
"No, stam, I [just] wanted to tell you."
"Nu, so what?"
"Nothing..."
"So what did you want to say?"
"No, never mind...bye."

So those are a few examples of stam Israeliisms. Now for a few incendiary ones.

At home we always do two or three brewings of tea. Wissotsky Tea, seemingly the national tea of Israel, can be dunked into a cup and taken out 10 seconds later and the color will be the right color (the taste is still nonexistant, but that won't change). But there's still enough flavor/color

left for a second brewing. So when my driver one day, Shlomi, found a tea bag on a paper towel on the counter and asked me why it was there, and after I told him, he came back with: "?מה, אתה פרסי"--"What, are you Persian?" Later, when I went into the smaller room of the station to read and listen to something besides VH1 or MTV or whatever other low-quality American TV imports they get here, and it crescendoed a little, he came out with: ".אה, אתה באמת הומו"--"Wow, what a homo."

They drivers also tend to laugh at calls for "general weakness", mostly corresponding to MADA code 001 "מחלת מבוגר" (adult-sickness). One patient I had lived in a youth village just south of Haifa and was burping the whole way from his closed, stuffy house to Rambam Hospital. Afterwards I asked Yaniv, my driver, how someone could get that much air to burp out and he said, as if to answer the question: "...עזוב, עזוב אותו...קיבוצ'ניקים"--"Forget him...kibbutznikim..."