You don’t realise how close you came to not getting a post from me today.
Last night, Bernice and I were eating dinner at 8:15 when I suddenly blurted out: “Good grief! It’s Monday today!” Bernice, having been married to me for 51 years, immediately realised the significance, and offered me encouragement: “Well, you’re not going to bed early tonight then, are you?” I then felt obliged to point out that, since she must always read and approve my post pre-publication, nor was she.
Which explains why this post was written in a mad rush, starting just over 10 hours before publication, and finished in a record time of 40 minutes, which, by my reckoning, is a composition speed of over 35 words a minute.
I left you last week in mid-air – literally, as we winged our way to Portugal. So let me pick up from there. We landed only 15 minutes behind schedule, but then had to wait an inordinate amount of time for our luggage to come through. This was followed by picking up the rental car, which sounds easy, but, as we found out on our last trip, can have unexpected complications. When I checked out prices for this trip, it soon became clear that renting from a company with offices in the airport, while very convenient, is also very much more expensive. After some discussion, we decided that we would use the company we ended up using last time, whose offices are a 12-minute drive from the airport by shuttle bus.
When we reached the pick-up point for the shuttle bus, we found a couple of English businessmen in front of us, who explained that the bus had just left, and that the driver had told them that another bus would be along very soon. We all agreed that there was no other bus, and that the same driver would return in 25 minutes, which he indeed did. By the time he returned, the four of us had been joined by another four couples. Having checked our names, the driver announced that he had room only for the principal driver in each pair. He would take these and he would then return for the partners while the principal drivers started the paperwork.
After some argument, discussion and translation, everyone accepted this plan, and so I left Bernice waiting outside the airport. When we arrived at the office, the driver assigned us numbered tickets from a machine. He was kind enough to promote me to number 4, having asked me how old I was and awarding me priority status. We were then invited to scan a Q-code on the wall and start the paperwork independently. This went well until I reached the section asking for my address, which I completed as follows:
Country of residence: Israel
City: Ma’ale Adumim
County: [Since Israel has no counties, and nothing equivalent, I left this field blank]
District: [Since I was far from sure what this referred to, I left it blank]
Address: 14, Hashminit Street
When I pressed Next, I was of course informed that I had left one or more mandatory fields blank, so I returned to the two problem fields. Under County, I clicked the dropdown, which proved to be empty. I then tried Jerusalem, Central, Ma’ale Adumim (with, then without, an apostrophe, and with one and then two ‘m’s in the middle of Adumim). No success. I then went over to one of the clerks who was processing another customer and explained that I was not able to proceed until I provided information that did not exist. “Well,” he asked me, “what region do you live in? Is it in Haifa, or the Mercaz, or what?” At a subliminal level, something about this last question seemed odd, but I was becoming too enraged to explore it further.
Eventually, the clerk told me to leave the form, and it would be sorted out when I sat with a clerk later. Indeed, a few minutes later, my number was called, and I sat down with the same clerk I had spoken to earlier. Just then Bernice arrived – which was just as well, because the form also wanted to know my identification number, and, although I had filled in my Israeli ID number, I knew that they would almost certainly only accept my passport, which Bernice was holding.
When it came to District, the clerk established from me that we lived near Jerusalem, entered something on the form and then turned his screen to show me. “You see!” he said triumphantly. I read the word Yerushalayim. “So, you’re telling me,” I said, “that I am supposed to guess that your program thinks Ma’ale Adumim is in the non-existent district of Jerusalem, and then I am supposed to guess that I have to enter an English transliteration of the Hebrew name for Jerusalem. Sorry, I know you didn’t write the program, but…” The clerk agreed that he and his colleagues often discussed how the program’s requirements are incompatible with the political geography of many countries around the world, From that point on, we were the best of friends. When he was finishing the registration process, I said to him: “So, tell me: you know the Hebrew name for Jerusalem, and you know that the centre is the mercaz in Hebrew. Is this just something you’ve picked up from your work here, registering Israeli drivers?” “No,” he answered, with a shy smile, “my grandparents are actually Jewish…but” he added apologetically, “I’m afraid I don’t practice anything.”
It transpired that he had spent much of his childhood in New Jersey, and had made many Jewish friends there, which also explained why his English was so good, as I told him. He was kind enough to ask how I had acquired my excellent English, but by that stage I was too tired to take offence.
The upshot of all this was that we drove away from the car rental office about 90 minutes later than we had hoped. Then, an hour into our drive, for the first time ever in Portugal, we took a wrong turning – or, more accurately, missed a right turning – , adding 45 minutes to our drive. The result of all this was that we arrived at 00:15 (Portuguese time), after an 18-hour door-to-door journey. The lovely thing about our arrival (apart from the fact of the arrival itself) was that we were greeted very warmly by Micha’el, who we expected, Lua, the dog, who appeared to remember us and wagged her tail furiously, and, as an unexpected bonus, a not-having-the-best-of-nights Ollie, who made Bernice’s day, nay, her month, by happily going straight into her arms for a cuddle, a position from which he has scarcely strayed in the ensuing week.
The following morning, Tslil and Tao greeted us no less warmly, and it was all systems go from first thing in the morning. This first week has flown by, filled with nothing very special at all, just the usual round of daily routine, starting with our regular big first shopping expedition, In this case, Bernice is sure that the young cashier at the supermarket will be dining out for weeks on the story of the people who bought so much more stuff than he has ever rung up for a single customer, and then produced a second trolley just as full.
Unfortunately, both Tao and Ollie had been ill before we arrived, with colds and viruses and all the usual wintry things. They have both been a bit up and down for the whole week, but we have still had a lot of time for games and songs and stories, bath-time and playing, puppet shows and shared meals.
The one dramatic highlight is that, in the last two days, monosyllabic Ollie, whose single schwa note (like the sound of the ‘e’ in the word ‘taken’) I mentioned several weeks ago, has discovered diversity. He suddenly said “Hi” when one of us came back yesterday, and today, when we went to the supermarket with Tao, leaving Ollie behind, we had a string of both “Bye-bye’s” and then, on our return, “Hi’s”. It is very exciting to be here to witness this watershed moment firsthand, although it’s fair to say that Ollie seems considerably less excited about it than some of the rest of us.
What there doesn’t seem to have been time for this week, inexplicably, is photographs. In addition, it seemed a little unfair to photograph boys with streaming noses and highly-coloured cheeks. I hope that the coming week will bring full recovery, a chance for photos (which I will send privately to those interested, as I explained a few weeks ago) and more of the same.
Until then, and now that Bernice has read and approved the post, I will let her go to sleep and wish you, in Israel, a happy national holiday for municipal elections.