Israel Vacation, Day 1: I discover something new about myself

My big vacation pans, in case you haven't heard, have been to take a week of sailing classes at the tel aviv marina. At the end of the day, i learned some new things about myself:
1) I get seasick on a sailboat
2) Never eat a big, big breakfast right before you take sailing lessons. This goes double if you get seasick.
3) I burn like dry paper in the sun.

Had to end the lesson because I was so queasy, and was debating whether I wanted another week of this, but on the way home I picked up a box of dramamine (the package says travamine, but the pharmacist assured me it was for vomiting, so it's not a rash medicine or something).

Of course I had visions in my head of cutting the waves, martini in one hand, parrot on my shoulder by the end of the week. Something else I learned--sailing is really hard. You steer with one hand, you pull on a rope (called a "sheet", or a "shit" if you are a hebrew speaker) with the other hand to control the tension of the mainsail, and you have to work those babies. There's a strap on the floor for your feet so you can lean backward over the side to counterbalance the boat when it heels over so far that it feels like you're about to flip it into the ocean and make an enormous ass of yourself. It's not an optional strap either, like a suicide knob on a car; it's pretty much required. You have to really lean back to get any speed on a boat. That's what i learned between turning green and hitting myself in the head with the boom when I inadvertently tacket once or twice. Gal, my teacher, was very kind, though, and told me I got a lot further than most other people do during their first day. And this was after only half a class too! (cut short as it was by seasickness.)

On the positive side, all israeli women wear bikinis at the beach. On the negative side of the positive side, so do their mothers, and their grandmothers.


The apartment is on the second floor, right about the level of the canopy of a large x tree. This tree has waxy, oval leaves, like a rhododendron, and long tendrils of plant matter hang from the branches like spanish moss. When the leaves fall, you can hear them hit the ground.
I sat on the balcony at 3 am, listening to janice joplin blaring from an apartment across the street, watching the last drunk partygoers leave the building, and out of the corner of my eye caught sight of a few birds darting among the trees that line the street. But they were soundless, except for the occasional patter of heavy leaves that they dislodged, hitting the car hoods or sidewalk below. It took me several minutes to realize that they were bats, hunting the street.
The more I watched, the more I saw; they were incredibly acrobatic; dropping down from a branch, rocketing up through a neighboring tree, and pulling a hard turn across the face of the building and off down the street. Occasionally one would make a slow turn and skim across the iron grillwork covering the balcony, and i could see the streetlights glowing through the stretched skin of their wings. They worked the street for as long as I sat there, through janice, through some jazzy pop. Despite the fact that all the windows in the apt were open, there were no bugs or mosquitos, most likely due to the hunting colony passing unnoticed over the partygoers on the sidewalk just one floor below.