Week’s end absurdities – 3/11

I’ve decided that on every weekend from now on I will publish a brief list of some of the most ridiculous things I’ve seen, heard or smelled over the past week. Things that don’t warrant an entire post but encapsulate the eccentric world that is Israeli society.

-Monday: I was struggling to carry a six-pack of two-liter bottles of water, some religious-ish teenage "mean girls" decided to block the entrance to the store I was exiting from.

-Tuesday: After a sleepover at my friend Liat's, I arrived home in the morning to find I was locked out by my roommate's girlfriend.

-Tuesday evening: I chatted with Pamela Anderson outside a south Tel Aviv vegan restaurant. Need I say more?

-Wednesday: My parents arrived for a visit! And I, unsurprisingly, was able to get us lost in their rental car, causing the trip from their hotel to my apartment to take 45 minutes rather than 15. I was quite happy, however, that I got to drive said rental car for three hours the following day, from Mitzpe Ramon back to Jerusalem.

-Wednesday evening: A package arrived for me after I was already out to dinner with my parents, Ravid and company, around an hour after the scheduled window that the deliveryman had promised me. When I arrived home, I found that the package was not the mini vacuum cleaner that I had ordered, but a crappy, portable space heater.

-Thursday: Near the ledge of the Mitzpe Ramon crater, a dude in Bronx getup was rapping quite uninhibitedly to a song beating rather audibly out of his oblong, red mp3 music-playing device.

-Friday: After eating dinner with my parents and seeing them off to their hotel, I settled into my room to get some work done, exactly when my 19-year-old decided to have a couple extremely loud female friends over. Obviously having consumed too much Pepsi Max (and water), I walked out to use the bathroom and they started laughing at me. Dumbfounded, I said, "What??" and then one responded, "Nothing," and started cracking up even more. I guess I'm just not cool enough to be in a room with 19-year-old un-college-educated native Israelis.

And now that they left to go drink elsewhere, time to get some work done. Shabbat Shalom!

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This entry is cross-posted on Sharon's original "Sacred and Insane" blog. You can reach Sharon at sharon@sharonudasin.com, or follow her on Twitter.