The First Year

Cooking in Israel

Israel is a wonderful country, but very different to Germany. Though I thought I totally knew what I was getting into, I soon learned that everything is different here.

The following funny incident happened:

One day, I was cooking on my small gas stove while I was talking to my dad on the phone via video. Suddenly the fire went out on the burner and I couldn’t switch it back on, and it was the same thing with the second burner.

“Abba, the gas went out, I think something is broken here!” I told my dad. He laughed and asked with a smile: “Anat, what do you think? Where is the gas coming from?” I was a bit surprised. “Well, from the wall, like electricity.” He kept laughing and asked:” And where does the wall get it from?” I became a bit mad, obviously he was making fun of me. “I don’t know, from the pipeline that leads from the factory to each house?” I said, already a bit grumpy.

In Germany, gas is a rare thing, normally people don’t use it. In my home we actually did have gas, but I was hardly using it.

So he said: “In Israel, people have their own gas balloon in front of the house and when it’s empty you need to call the gas delivery company so they can exchange it for you.”

Today most of the houses have a room where the janitor takes care of the exchange of those gas balloons. It was not the case here, because I was living in an old building.

I couldn’t believe what he said: “Are you serious, there are gas balloons in front of every house and they don’t blow up every other day? How can this be?”

He told me to follow the hose that went from my apartment outside. He was telling the truth, there were several gas balloons around the building and each apartment was connected with one of them through a hose. How come, I had never seen this?

The system seems to work because until today, I have never heard of a house being blown up by one of those gas balloons.

Even an over engaged student like me could enjoy her life from time to time. The best times were always, when my friends visited me during my first year in this new country. They understand why I left Germany to find myself and what I was looking for in Tel Aviv at the age of 31.

Laura, my best friend, came to visit me for the first time a couple of months after I moved. But she didn’t arrive on a regular night, but the first night of Purim.

Purim is a jewish holiday where we celebrate that a long time ago, someone tricked another person by putting on a costume.

The tradition that is left today is that for a week straight, every person, at least in Tel Aviv, puts on a costume on one of those days or all of them, no matter what age or what job they work at and we love it.

So the night I picked her up it was not only her first time ever in Israel, but also this special night where the city looks like a magical place with fairies, gangsters and everything you might think of. She couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw what was going on on the streets of Tel Aviv. After having this first impression of Tel Aviv, she was even a bit disappointed when she visited me the second time in November the same year. But it is still Tel Aviv and the white city does what she does best: make people fall in love with her.

A couple of months after her visit, I asked her if she could imagine moving here. She thought for a while and then said: “It obviously is a great city, the people, the beach and of course the food. For me though it is too far away from everything I know, from everything that I call home.” She put in words what was only a feeling for me then. I didn’t know what it would be, I didn´t know if I would find a job here or if I would ever find love. But I knew, this is everything that I call home.

The months went by and I built my life from scratch. The sun was shining and going out and dating was finally fun again. A whole new world to explore.

Was this home? But what is home? Is home a feeling or a place? Or is home a person? I see home as a combination of all these things. Home is the city where I live, where I am wandering the streets and have never seen everything. Home is my boyfriend who I love coming home to. Home is my dog, home is the air I breathe. Home is the country I live in, where I can feel free. But home is also my mother, our home in Munich and the place where I grew up. I can call myself lucky, that I have more than one place or person I can call home. The most important place I call home is within myself. I went through tough moments of feeling alone and abandoned. In all of those moments only one question was important: Do you want to be here? Yes, it was always yes and it never changed. Little did I know that the really hard times were still to come. But Israel would not be Israel if even in the hardest times, she sends you help when you expect it the least.

Love and Light

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