Swirling Thoughts #108 - how do you like your eggs?

A long way from Shoprite
Outside every makolet I’ve ever been to in Israel is a playground. As in, kids – go play while mommy shops. Or, kids, take 5 shekels, buy yourself a treat and wait outside in the park while mommy shops. And that’s really how it goes.

If an Israeli goose lays a golden egg, will it be clean? I doubt it.
The order form for a local delivery service for groceries offers eggs by the tray.
30 eggs, clean – 42 NIS
30 eggs, little dirty – 36 NIS
It seems weird – who would order dirty eggs? Until you realize the default here is ‘little dirty.’ What’s weird to me is that effort is made to stamp every single egg but not to clean them. My mother in law asked which ones I order. I get mine from the makolet. Where there is no choice. They are all ‘little dirty.’ But easy to carry since my kids are playing in the park.

Black gold!
Ten shekel tamerhindi paste from the shuk + an equal amount of sugar = oot! Tart, authentic, bursting with flavor oot.

I can’t complain about the winter
Convincing the kids it will be cold and they’ll need their winter coat is difficult when said cold days are interspersed with sunshiney days of 70° or more.

It’s not so much that I’m looking for messages in the minutia of daily existence as it is that sometimes the messages seem to find me.
When I drive to the supermarket and my car barely fits in the parking spot I get the message. My car should be smaller. When I can’t bag my groceries fast enough I get the message. I am buying too much nearly see-through foil, paper towels and plastic cutlery.

Messages which require decoding are often received late
When I spoke to the Ministry of Health about why they hadn’t responded to my email I was scolded – it seems email correspondences in English need to be sent for translation which takes one month. Scolding woman told me this in perfect English so I asked if she herself could read my email to which she scolded, “It doesn’t matter if I can read it. If you send the email in English expect to wait one month for the translation.”

Luckily I live with an ulpan grad
Yesterday as I was struggling through a note from school with pictures of bugs on it (I figured it had something to do with science OR that there were kinim (lice) in the class), Asher (now an ulpan graduate!) walked over and offered to help. He quickly scanned the note and then told me Becky will be having a petting zoo with her science class on Tuesday. Before I could figure out which Tuesday, Becky walked in. “We had a petting zoo TODAY!”