Where am I again?

Today it's the tail end of the sharav, the hot wind that blows periodically across this region from the Arabian peninsula, carrying dust and sand and sucking the moisture out of all living things. Yesterday morning I hurried out for a walk at 7:30, before it hit full bore, and even then came back parched with a dusty feeling in the throat. The sky turns hazy yellow and visibility withers. You get inside and close things up.

One upside to the sharav for me is that it reminds me where I am. It's surprising how easy it is to forget, some days. Some days I spend the bulk of my day ...like now, online, especially since I telecommute to my old job, essentially. The virtual world creates more connections, true, but it also makes it easy to stay in our own little silos. Here, I don't have to do a whole lot to assimilate. Since we moved here, my main interaction with non-English-speaking locals has consisted of 15-second conversations with supermarket employees, checking in with preschool teachers and the occasional visit to a doctor's office. No wonder my Hebrew is still pretty bad.

Once you know your way around any neighborhood or valley or region, you can usually get in your car and drive from A to B without too much interfering. Maybe you're listening to your own CDs. You get in a zone. The scenery becomes comfortable; your eyes pick out the relevant details and you stop noticing other things that used to seem strange. You could be anywhere, daydreaming.

It's not all like that... I mean, we--I--do get out. There was the two days spent in the hospital where Noa was born, in an ultra-Orthodox community near Tel Aviv. That was definitely Somewhere Else. We also see Israeli friends, we tool around, I have a Hebrew tutor. Our food is labeled in Hebrew. I catch parts of the national news on TV and listen to Galgalatz (Army radio, the most popular station).

But, on some level, I sort of feel like the old Chinese lady who lives in San Francisco and reads Chinese newspapers and cooks her favorite dishes at home and has Chinese friends. It's natural, I guess. Most of us, when we have a choice, don't change all that much. We all want to feel at home.