Of Meat and Milk

Hello All!

My apologies for not updating as regularly as I had originally intended.....and for falling off the face of the planet at times.

Where to begin? So much to say....so little mental organization.

WORK
Well, in my last update, I left off saying how I was in love with the place for the first 15 minutes, then soon found out what kibbutz life is really like, and spent a certain amount of time panicking and wanting to leave as soon as possible. Things have since calmed down, and I've come to terms with what I'm doing here, which is a good thing. All my 'romantic' notions of working outside, tilling the land and whatnot, were soon squelched when the job given me was.........working 3 km down the road at a resort in the restaurant, called the Holiday Village. People who come to stay at the Sea of Galilee need a place to stay, and food to eat. So, basically, this is what I do: wake up at 6.40 am, get picked up along with 4 other volunteers in a van and driven down the road to work, where our shift starts at 7 am. For those of you who know me, at all......you can imagine how torturous this is for me. Anyway......breakfast is buffet-style, and we spend the first 2 hours clearing people's plates from the table, wiping those tables, and resetting them as well, then we spend the following 6 hours, or until about 2.30 pm, cleaning. CLEANING!!!! WHAT THE?!?!?! Tables, chairs, sweeping, mopping, drying the floors, polishing silverware and dinner glasses, setting the tables for dinner, and whatever odd jobs the bosses can find to keep us perpetually occupied. Oh gosh. This was a far cry from what I was hoping for, but hey, they've made my bed, and now I'm gonna toss and turn all night til I have no option but to sleep in it. The restaurant is pretty kosher, so we have "meat" silverware for lunch and dinner, and "milk" silverware for the morning....which are stored separately and can never be mixed up. At first all their little rules were confusing as all get-out, but now that I'm used to them....I don't even think twice. Every day at work is pretty much the same, and to make light of the situation, I have come to label myself a walking "routine machine". Our two female bosses, who speak very little English, are always yelling at us to do something we're already in the process of taking care of. BUT......on the bright side... my coworkers are great. I work with a bunch of local Israelis and people from our kibbutz, and a few volunteers (two from South Africa, one from Chile, and one from England), and together, being rather on the outside of things, we have a lot of fun. We're kind of in this sucky job together, trying to make the best of it. Maybe we spend a little too much time laughing and goofing off......but hey, you gotta make it through the day somehow. Another perk is the free food. We get half-hour breaks (which is almost enough time for me to finish a meal) for breakfast and lunch, and it's all-you-can-eat, which is just my style for chowing down. Plus, we can take home leftovers from lunch to eat for dinner.

The only thing I really miss is..............you guessed it. BACON!!!! (care package, anyone?????)



FREE TIME
So, work ends at 2.30 or thereabouts, and we get a ride back to the kibbutz. It's actually kinda nice cuz we get the whole afternoon off, to enjoy the sunshine and warm (now getting hotter) weather. Usually I'm so tired from those early morning work days that I come home and take a nap from about 3 til 5 or so, with the door open so I can hear the breeze blowing in the palm trees right outside our door. Or, we go to the beach to work on trying to become a less severe shade of pale, read, or, as I've taken up lately, and quite accidentally, sudoku. There's not much here that provides any sort of mental stimulation, which I miss, so you do what you gotta do. The weather is consistenly beautiful, no rain, and getting hotter.....so that's just swell in my book. There's a one-storey building called the volunteer's clubhouse (wow, thanks, Ranger Rick, for that dubbing), where they have a big flat-screen TV, a kitchen, and a room with the one and only desktop computer available to about 25 volunteers......hence, my lack of communication, since it's 1. always in use and 2. I can't sit down and get stuff done when I know others are waiting to use the machine, so I don't even take the time anymore to go check my messages (ooops, did I just write that?). I think I check the internet about 2 times weekly.......but I've found a friend on the kibbutz who'se not a volunteer who lets me use the wireless internet in their room.....ergo, this update you haven't been waiting for. The nice thing about all this time off in the afternoons is.....you can do whatever you want. The other thing about all this time off is.......1. there's not much to do.....napping, beach, reading.....sure, but those aren't really activity activities....you know? which leads me to point number 2: people get bored, easily, and there's a lot of alcohol and drug use amongst the kibbutz people and the volunteers. We have a pub on the kibbutz that is quite popular, especially on Thursday nights, when a dj comes and they turn the place into a discotheque and we dance til 4 in the morning. But also, people are constantly buying beer and vodka and whatever else they can spend their few hard-earned shekels on. People come home from work and just get wasted. Doesn't matter if it's 5 in the afternoon or 8 pm or 2 am, fridges are stocked with booze. Also, the drugs.......two of my friends are stoners. I hang out with these guys about 3 times a week, after my daily nap. They invite me over to sit on their porch, and they drink beer (always offering me some, and me always declining), after half an hour or so of just chilling, we head in to their room, where they close the door, and start their druggy business. Bongs, pipes, lines.....these guys do it all. I've learned more about drugs in these past few weeks than I ever thought possible. I think they do/have access to pretty much everything except heroin. One day Jaron, the German guy, crushed up some pink prescription medicine and snorted 6 lines of it in a row. They get their stuff from locals and then pass it on to other volunteers who are looking to get high. And all this before supper time. I always have a line running through my head as I laugh at the situation: "Hash.....it's what's for dinner". I've been offered everything under the sun multiple times, and always decline, of course. Wow. I can't believe I just spent all that space talking about drugs. What was the topic of this section? Free time? Yep.....sounds about right. Anyway, you get the picture. There are enough people who don't get drunk and high all the time, but I try to hang out with everyone.....as usual. I crave variety.

ACCOMODATION
There are three buildings where they stick us volunteers, called blocks (how very reminiscent of prison/concentration camp life), Blocks A, B and C, (I'm in Block B), each block has 5 rooms, each room has either 1 or 2 people. I have a roommate, the girl from London whom I also work with. Each block has a bathroom with 1 shower and toilet for all the inhabitants of said block at the end of the building. Our rooms have a very, very narrow bed for each person (narrow as in, about one-and-a-half of me can fit comfortably in it), an AC unit (thank goodness....that will come in handy soon, I hear), and other basic yet sufficient furnishings, such as closet, mini fridge, bed-side table (wow, did anyone want to know this? when do I shut up?). We take turns cleaning the community bathroom, which has recently become invaded by ants. We also wake up to bed bugs, spiders, and geckos on our walls, on our table surfaces, and flattened under us in bed. I'm perpetually covered in itchy red welts everywhere from various insecty things attacking me whilst I slumber.


MISCELLANEOUS
I have a kibbutz friend who has a bike, so every so often I try to borrow it and get off the kibbutz and ride around the sea along the hills....it's quite beautiful. There's also a fellowship that meets at a neighboring kibbutz about 10 minutes down the road that I attend with some other like-minded volunteers every Sunday evening. The kibbutz guys are quite assertive/aggressive and within my first 2 weeks of being here, I learned quickly how to dodge being hit on. I think I've almost mastered that technique....but I don't want to get too cocky in my ice-queenish ways and jinx it. The food is abundant and delicious, my tan is coming along slowly but surely, and I've really started to make a few good friends here (a whole lotta acquaintances, or hang-out buddies, and a few good friends - really, what more do you need?). I have no phone, and there's a public one at the Mickey Mouse Ranger Rick Volunteer's Club that I really should go check out and pass along that number so perhaps my parents could hear my voice every so often.


Ok, enough already? Did anyone make it down to the very bottom....or are you all just scrolling? Either way, life has settled down now, and I'm anticipating the hotness to come. It's hard to believe I've been here a month. It's even harder to imagine that I still have a few months left here Haha. JK. One of my favorite parts of the day is talking with the elderly German tourists who come to eat breakfast at the Holiday Village....they don't expect to find anyone speaking German to them, and it makes their day.


Well, there's always more to tell, but I'll save that for another time. I hope this *blog* finds you all doing well, enjoying life, and easing your way into summer. Please, please, PLEASE stay in touch, even though I've proven myself insufficient at that same task.

All the best!


[insert favorite Irish blessing here],

Kristen



PS. I just realized I don't need to sign my own blog, how lame....but what's done is done, and now I'm clicking the 'publish post' button, so.......there's no pretending this never happened. Let it be known I haven't outgrown my dorkyness....not by a long shot, my dear friends! Toodles!