Did you know that 50 qassams fell on Sderot yesterday?

Zakhlav

One day our friends took us to a little bar up in the mountains to taste the famous zakhlav. It smells cinnamon and looks like thick milk.

The name comes from an Arabic expression and means fox testicules, it's made out of the roots of the flower you see above. If you take a closer look at the roots you'll undersatnd why...

The powder obtained from these roots is mixed with boiled water and sweetend with orange flower and rose water. It's not bad, I'll have to try it again. It sounds really cool to tell your friends you just had a cup of hot zakhlav...

I also found out googleing that the drink can restore a man's virility and passion... If you are bored with your husbands girls, bring him up in the mountains close to Beth Shemesh, have him order a glass of zakhlav ( don't tell him he's ordering fox testicules) and your life will change!

According to Wikpedia the drink was popular in England in the 17th and 18 th century.

Different queueing

Every country has its "spécialité" and in Israel it seems to be the queueing... In our hebrew book we have 3 chapters treating the subject with sentences like " I was here before you" or "how am I supposed to understand in which direction your are queueing when your are standing like this" During my journey in Israel I had dinner with some friends and I brought up the subject. Katarina then told me something that made me giggle.
In her post office they just installed a queue ticket system, that is quite smart I think, no-one can sneak in before you and you can realx until it's your turn. Well, it seemed to her as if the Israelis did,'t really rely on their new machine. She didn't even have the time to put her foot inside the office before 20 people yelled - Take a ticket!! You have to take a ticket !!( Sepharadis like to repeat twice the same sentence) When she pressed the bottom and got her number everyone shouted - Which number did you get, which number? Just to be sure the machine wouldn't give number 28 after number 11. They then explained who was before her and who was after.
I have noticed that people tend to stand very close to you at the airport and then just slide past when you bend to pick up your bag to check it in.
I'll practice that at my local post-office or why not at the supermarket so I will be fit for Israeli queueing in July...

Summa summarum

back in France again.
We really wanted to find an apartement or house this time. Finally we didn't, -but- we now know for sure where we want to start living. There a plenty of great places in the Center and Sharon area and prices varies a lot. After much thinking we have decided to start in Ramat Poleg. We cannot afford to buy or rent a house there, only an appartement, but have decided that it's the perfect place for the children to start their new life, after a year when they speak perfect hebrew we will see where we will move...
We have always dreamt of living close to the sea, this is our chance to try.
We had 10 wonderful days, I will tell you more later on, I have to unpack now.

Amazing

What rain can do... We are driving around between Tel Aviv and Natanya, looking for a nice place to rent, we haven't found anything yet, prices are going up and it's difficult to imagine how much money we're going to earn and how much we will be able to spend on a rent.

Thanks to some wonderful friends we had a fantastic break in the mountains, between Jerusalem and Bet Shemesh, and I took some nice pictures. As you can see there are more than sand here.

Off we go...

If you repeat a lie often enough it will come true, that's probably why mum keeps on repeating
- Anyway, you're not going to stay for a long time in Israel because the children will NOT do their militaryservice !
I don't have the energy to explain so I just hum and change subject.

We're leaving in a few hours, I cross my fingers there is no strike today.

The descendants of Aaron

I read this very interesting article (JP) today and I would like to share it with you all, here it is:


The Book of Exodus specifies that the male descendants of Aaron, the brother of Moses, should constitute the Jewish priesthood - the kohanim - "for all time." Jewish tradition holds that the status of kohen has been faithfully passed from father to son for more than 3,300 years. In 1997 the world was amazed to learn that the old Bible story had found new and very persuasive scientific support.
Seemingly out of the blue, a group of genetics researchers announced that they had evidence to support that story. The group, led by Israeli researcher Dr. Karl Skorecki, himself a kohen, reported that the evidence was in the DNA of one of the 46 chromosomes that each kohen carries. Skorecki realized that Y chromosomes, which confer male sex, are passed down, just as the status of kohen is, from father to son. And like all chromosomes, the Y always displays a pattern of mutations called a "haplotype" that varies across family groups, and therefore can be used to trace descent. Thus, any haplotypes that were on Aaron's Y chromosome ought to appear with only minor changes in all of his descendants, including modern kohanim if they were in fact Aaron's offspring. In other words, kohanim should share a common genetic signature.
And so they do. A distinctive haplotype, now known as the "kohen modal haplotype," was found in 45 percent-61% of Ashkenazi kohanim, 56%-69% of Sephardi kohanim and 10%-15% of other male Jews. The haplotype is estimated to be between 2,100 and 3,250 years old, a time range that includes the biblical period.

One day

my head is going to explode, I wonder how much thoughts and questionmarks a brain can store...

This trip will do us good. We want to be sure where we want to live and where we are going to work, that's all. When people ask me if I have a job, if I speek Hebrew or if we have found a flat and I answer NO-NO-NO, they look at me as if I've escaped from the closest psychiatric clinic. In the morning when the cildren are showing up in the bedroom doorway I feel panic for a few seconds but then I calm down and repeat to myself that life is an adventure even after 35...

My son said yesterday that he felt so sorry for the French. When I asked why he answered; because they are born in France and have nowhere else to go, they will have to stay here until they die...

The best strikers in the world!!!!!

Yes, we're going to Israel on Thursday. This time we didn't choose Air France, we haven't forgotten the last time when we spent 8 hours at the Airport because of the AF cabincrew strike. We we're lucky because they didn't cancel our flight and we didn't even complain about the nasty cabincrew who kept repeating they were tired.

Almost 1000 euros for the plane ticket and we were treated like sh*t!

This time we were smarter ( we thought ) reserving with another company, but that was without counting on the staff working at the Airport.

They'll be on strike the whole week. Some planes will be cancelled and some won't.

Every week someone's on strike and it always affects ME! It's like if I would lock my neighbour in and prevent him from working beacause my boss doesn't want to give me a pay raise. I really don't see the connection between me and their problems. EVERY week someone's on strike, Taxi drivers blocked whole Paris ( my husband was stuck in is car for 3 hours) last week, The week before Air France was on strike and the week before that the school teachers...

I'm really fed up, I think I'll go out and jump on a frog to chill out.

A funny trip...

I've worked close to Disneyland today. Going there in the morning is calm and normal but after a day of hard work it's pretty strange to travel back into Paris with Minnie Mouse kissing Goofy with passion, tired parents wearing hats with Piglets ears, trying to calm down Tinker Bell and Dart Vador who are still so excited they're screaming in chinese, Russian, or even worse; Dutch. Must be close to what you "get" after eating a magic mushroom...

Disney is really enchanting, it's a pity it's not a country. How wonderful it would be to live in a place where mice help you with the washing-up, where you immediatley can tell the difference from good and evil and where there is always a happy end!

Did you feed your Jnoun today?

Aren't you afraid of Jnouns? That's because you've never heard of them. My husbands grandmother learned me everything about jnouns and told me always to be on my guard...

Jnouns are living beeings in your house that can be very mean if you don't feed them with nuts, almonds etc. You should put pistachios ( they love that) in corners so that they can eat them daily.

Jnouns can bring illness or steal things, make you slip on the floor, make a hole in the tablecloth etc, etc. To be honest I think I have one in my washing machine because I keep on losing socks. I really should feed mine...

If you want to scare them you should use colors like green, red or orange, they hate those colours. Grandma told me she used to dress up the dolls in green and red so that the jnouns wouldn't enter the childrens bedroom.

The copmany where my husband work was founded by a Tunisian and the colors on the logo are green and orange in order to scare the jnouns away, of course the official reason is different. The other day My husband got the question why they had chosen these colors on the logo from a big French client, he answered; - To keep the jnouns away and immediately went on talking about how the green colour affects our mind in a positive way.

His colleaugues had some difficult minutes hiding their laughter but the man didn't ask what the jnoun was.