Say It in Hebrew

“Ha-METZ.”
[Foods that are not kosher-for-Passover.]

Well, I feel, ridiculously, a little like CindyLou Who, deprived of her Christmas tree.

Imagine walking into your local Kroger’s and discovering that half of the store is under wraps; anything made with leavening is hiding–the bread aisle and half the frozen food aisle, for starters. It looks like Dr. Atkins’s people have spent a gleeful night in your market, hiding all the good stuff.

Here, in supermarkets and stores this week, everything that is not KLP (kosher le Pesach) has been covered up behind giant swaths of paper marked with the three Hebrew letters that spell “hametz.” You can’t buy any of it this week, no matter how much you may want to; I was tempted to peek under the paper, but I figured the kosher police would have detained me noisily at the checkout counter with any contraband items. This is one of the most vivid (to me) practical examples of the connection between the state and religion. Imagine the state dictating what you can or can’t sell, in a market in the U.S. (Oh, right, I forgot about all those Blue Laws still on the books.)

Last night, as we walked by the local Domino’s Pizza outpost, I felt the first twinges that Something Was Not Right: although the Domino’s guys were scurrying in and out of their small take-out store, the windows were covered inside, from top to bottom, with plain sheets. Still, I was naively shocked to see the half the market covered, later. Even in the Russian market, hametz products were still buried under paper, but you can still buy bacon. Go figure.

Well, it’s very simple, I thought, I’ll just make bread! However, it turns out that we have a grand total of approximately 5 cups of flour remaining for the rest of the week. (Flour is hametz, too; no chance of buying it.)

Still, I can’t get too upset about it; we are visitors, here, after all, and are not Jewish, so it’s not as though we have any right to complain. According to this article in the Jerusalem Post, abstaining from bread during Passover is a matter of identity and tradition, for Jews.

Ok, ok, it’s only a week. Bring on the matzo.

“Le-kah-MAH zman ya-FEH ko-KHOH shel kar-TEES zeh?”
“How long is this ticket good for?”

Haifa to Akko to Rehovot: Part III

Last Thursday morning, we checked out of the hotel around 9:00 am, and wandered around for a while, trying to decide what to have (and where to go) for breakfast. At that hour, we saw few fellow tourists in old city streets of Akko, but we did fall in with one group of Italians on their way to the port. They were mostly middle-aged or older, and wore sensible shoes and waist packs. They walked delicately over the cobblestones, like Rocky Mountain bighorns out for a snack on the mountainside. Some, like us, were in snack mode: in an old courtyard, many of them strayed from their loud tour guide and instead swarmed in a corner around a man selling pomegranate juice from a cart. “Shalosh shkelim,” (three shekels) the vendor said, and then frowned as a woman dangled a hundred-shekel note. If she was hoping to make change from the pile of coins that people were tossing to him, she was nuts.

The last we saw of the Italians, they were filing into the Templars’ Tunnel entrance; a few minutes later, in the port, we bumped into them again, as they emerged from the tunnel exit, blinking like bats.

We wandered briefly through the market, in its maze of small, covered, winding lanes, looking for breakfast. I lingered in front of the Arab bakery’s pans of pastries, with their symmetrical, neat slices, but we were evidently hunting and gathering something more substantial. Back near the Citadel, a cafe with a hand-lettered sign in Hebrew, English, and Arabic advertised omelets, hummus, chicken, and shishlik. This cafe was just next door to the tall, curved flight of stairs leading to the El-Jazzar Mosque; to the left of the mosque entrance, two cafes and two shops extended down the street. The cafe where we sat down for breakfast was the only one open, so far, and the walkway running down the length of the street (between the shops and the mosque, and the Citadel wall) was empty.

We ordered omelets and coffee that was much stronger than any I have ever tasted. It was Turkish coffee, served in a small glass, without milk. It looked like it had been lifted from the bottom of the Mississippi, like melted dark chocolate. This stuff made a Starbucks espresso look like rosewater. It tasted lemony, or what a lemon might taste like if you tossed it into Krakatoa. My husband liked it; after a sip, I did not.

Omelets made with chopped parsley arrived, and we ate breakfast, watching as the cafe next door and the stores began to open for business. A rather young army troop walked in, without weapons, and sat down on one of the low walls of the Citadel, listening to their leader speak. They looked as though they were on a field trip; the girls adjusted their sunglasses, and the boys elbowed each other. Soon, whole groups of schoolchildren were tromping down the street with a noisy determination that impressed the army troop.

We finished breakfast, listening to the men sitting under the ledge of the cafe’s kitchen, as they switched from Hebrew to Arabic, depending on who walked by and shouted a greeting. To me, Arabic sounds as though it’s attempting to use every last vowel that the Hebrew language is discarding, in print. (Most Hebrew text, including some newspapers, is printed without the vowel marks.) Hebrew is sprinkled, however, with Arabic words, and many Israelis use Arabic slang: sababa and achla (“lovely”), and hamseen (“heat wave”), for example.

Since we were next door to the El-Jazzar Mosque, we bought tickets and went in through the courtyard,

“Huh, they have no security,” my husband remarked…and then we found this extremely, ironically, and–it must be said–bleakly funny.

The courtyard was in bright bloom; in the center lay the mosque, whose outer white walls were painted with geometric designs. We carefully removed our shoes at the entrance of the mosque. I had brought a scarf for my head. Inside, the mosque was empty and hushed, covered with carpets of intricate design; a small niche indicated the direction of Mecca. Two wooden planks, raised off of the ground by bricks, ran out of the mosque entrance and to a small domed kiosk in the courtyard: the cold-drinks stand.

After breakfast, we went around the Citadel wall, to find the entrance to the underground Crusader city, and discovered the source of the tourists: six buses were already lined up in the parking lot of the Citadel, and another stream of schoolkids parted around us like fish, as we walked to the ticket booth.

The ticket to the Crusader city includes an audio guide, as well as entrance to the Templars’ Tunnel and the Okashi Museum. The underground Crusader city isn’t entirely underground; it’s a vast, damp, dim complex below street level, with some halls that lead out into the sunlight.

The success of the high-tech audio guide in illuminating your visit to the Crusader city relies on your ability to follow the often-misplaced or missing “arrow” signs and numbered signs, which correspond to numbered entries in the audio guide. Arrive at location #1, punch in #1 in the audio guide, and–in theory–you get five minutes of history written in such a dry tone that you want to smack the device, to see if that will electrify the commentary, or if you can get anything else on the thing, such as a Kentucky Derby broadcast.

We managed to keep track of the signs until we reached #8, one of the Knights’ Halls, and emerged at the other end, facing a sign for #21. There went the twelfth century.

Much of the Crusader city, while interesting and painstakingly preserved, read like a postmodern novel: rooms upon rooms upon other rooms, upon hallways leading into other hallways. And so on. None of the rooms had any decoration or objects inside, so you had to rely on your imagination to supply the missing elements, as you listened to the audio-guide historian. Still, I found it difficult to picture a Round Table in the Knights’ Halls.

One of the more interesting details in the Crusader city lay near the end of the tour, right before you stepped out the door and into the none-too-twelfth-century Souvenir Shop. (The Souvenir Shop was cleverly unavoidable: to continue the tour, you had to proceed through the tiny shop, dodging the shopkeepers’ offers of a special deal on jewelry, and make it to the back door, which would be opened for you only with extreme reluctance after determining that, not only had you not made a purchase, you hadn’t even really looked!)

In any case, this detail, part of a Crusader’s tombstone, is located right before you exit the tour; the tombstone is about the size and shape of a cookie sheet, and contains a Latin inscription surrounding the long linear figure of a man knelt in prayer, looking upwards. You can touch the inscription–there’s nothing protecting it against (or for) anyone.

We next tackled the Templars Tunnel, which runs east-west from the Templar Fortress to the port. The entrance sign to the Tunnel is hand-painted and propped against a wagon. The brochure (in seven languages) notes that the Templars, who first settled in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount, were a military/monastic order under papal patronage. They attended to European pilgrims to the Holy Land, and built in Akko in the second half of the twelfth century. Their tunnel was accidentally discovered in 1994 when a woman living in an apartment above the tunnel complained of a blocked sewer. The tunnel is 350 cool, slightly breezy meters long, traversable via a wide wooden bridge; water gurgles gently on either side of the bridge. Three giant pumps rise up at the exit to the tunnel, reminding you that, prior to 1994, it was not a pretty sight.

The last item on the entrance ticket was the Okashi Museum. The night before, we had walked by the museum, but I only remembered seeing a red, white, and black sign for it.

“Why,” I wondered aloud, as we walked back around the Citadel wall, “would Akko have a Japanese art museum?”

My husband stopped in his tracks. “What?” he asked.

“The Okashi Museum,” I said. “What gives?” We had arrived in front of the museum door. “Some big Japanese donor or something?”

“He’s an Israeli artist,” my husband said, (“Avsalom Okashi!”) and then tried to reassure me that he was laughing with me, rather than at me.

“I’m sure I’m not the only tourist to make that mistake,” I grumbled, as we walked around the small museum. The paintings were striking: some abstract, and some evocative of Akko’s old city…where Okashi, one of the most significant Israeli artists, lived and maintained his studio.

“How modernist!” my husband nudged me, looking at the paintings. “How very Eastern!”

As we left, trying to suppress our enthusiasm, the museum docent peered at us with a frown, from behind her desk.

For lunch, we went back to the harbor side of the city, near the statue of the giant whale. We had more hummus, pita, and–this time–eggplant dip. After lunch, we decided that we had reached our sightseeing limit, and, with a quick pass through the market, left the city on foot.

The market was a maze of spice stalls, rows of cheap baby shoes next to crates of shrimp (which we never see here, since they’re not kosher), and shops with longsleeved abayas for women (and other Islamic apparel).

After discovering that it was a long walk back to the train station, and we had forgotten where to turn, we hailed a taxi, and made it onto the 3:16pm train back to Rehovot….but only after being delayed at the station entrance, where the guard goes through our bags and passports with infuriating precision, while other people breeze by with bags.

There’s no place like home.

“DO-ar eks-PRESS.”
“Special delivery.”

Chametz refers to any food that contains leavening, or contraband Passover food. For the past week, most stores have been getting rid of their bread and pasta like crazy–or they can sell the chametz to a non-Jew and then buy it back after Passover.

You say you really want your usual Friday-morning fresh baguette? Sorry! When in Rome…eat matzo. Or pita. (Technically, if the bread rises/falls/bakes within eighteen minutes, it’s considered ok. I think this explains the pita loophole.)

But while the pasta aisle may shrink to a baffling speck of its original glory, the kosher-for-Pesach cookie section suddenly blossoms, as compensation.

To this non-Jew, Passover means macaroons. It looks like a virtual coconut cookie festival: blue-and-white cardboard boxes of plastic-wrapped cookies replace the usual non-Kosher-for-Pesach offerings in stores and bakeries practically overnight. (Ok, not just macaroons, but other cookies appear.)

Macaroons, apparently, are amenable to kosher-for-Pesach preparations because they have so few ingredients (coconut, egg whites, sugar). But simplicity makes a lovely canvas for creativity: chocolate-drizzled macaroons, jam-stuffed macaroons, square (!) macaroons, macaroons masquerading as lunettes. Rows and rows of them!

My enthusiasm, here, overlooks the more obvious culinary aspect of Passover (the seder), and the larger religious meaning of Passover, of course, although I intend no disrespect. Still, one Jewish writer I read characterized the holiday thus: “They tried to fight us; we won; let’s eat.”

“Ha-EEM yesh muh-ko-MOT luh-ha-EH-rev?”
“Are there any seats for tonight?”

Haifa, Part II (to Akko)

Wednesday morning, we walked down to the Greg Cafe for a scaled-down version of the typical Israeli breakfast: salad and a grilled cheese sandwich. (As big as an Irish or English breakfast, the full-blown Israeli breakfast differs from these other two culinary heavyweights in its balanced approach: eggs, tomato-and-cucumber salad, cheese, toast, and jam.)

Outside, in the open space between the ampitheater and the park, a team was setting up a giant “Red Bull” energy drink tent and a stage. A sign went up (along with Israeli and Technion flags) proclaiming the third annual “TechnoRosh” (or “TechnoHead”) competition, sponsored by one “Dr. Bob” and IBM.

My husband went off to talk math with his host for the day, and I wandered around campus. Merchants worldwide recognize the potential of a capitve audience; thus, the walkway up to the bookstore looked like any campus on “Poster Sale” day, lined with vendors of used books, arts and crafts, clothes, and pottery, setting up for a day of student shopping. The largest crowd, however, was gathered around the booth of a man selling artisan olive oil.

You can roam freely around campus, but guards are posted at the entrances to buildings; they check the bags of everyone who enters. The Technion student union was evidently constructed before people really worried about terrorism on campus; now, the terraced outdoor seating at the union is fenced off. You can still sit outside, but you’re looking through a high wire fence. As I sat and read, the TechnoHead preparations were heating up, back near the park: a van arrived, and unloaded carts of sound equipment for the DJ who would provide the soundtrack for the four hours of competition. Teams arrived and began setting up their robots. Two girls wearing “Red Bull” visors (and carrying backpacks with the same logo) walked around and passed out free “Red Bull” samples. Fortunately, they never made it over to me; I later shuddered at the thought of just how much of that stuff must have fueled the competitors’ long nights with equations and robot parts. A highly-caffeinated scientist is a scary sight, much like a non-caffeinated writer.

Because it was so hot, I gave up on the idea of taking a taxi back to Carmel Center, and settled in with a book (Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-Stop Cafe) in the shade, at the student union. When I finished the book, and walked back to the Greg Cafe for lunch, the TechnoHead competition was already underway. Over two hundred students were sitting in the park, watching, as teams put their robots through their paces, onstage. The robots’ obstacle course was simple: a nine-foot-square pool of water, between about four feet of flat pressboard on either side. All the robots had to do was traverse, in a straight line, the first flat section, the water, and the other flat section. The most difficult part of the course was the water hazard; many robots met a watery end in the plexiglass pool, after an otherwise stellar start. One robot (trailing long wires like the trappings of an Easter bonnet) shot across the first flat part, only to nosedive into the pool, as the team fiddled wildly with their remote robot-control. Zap! Another entry, however, named “Mechanical Jesus”, ingeniously slapped down a giant, decidedly low-tech cardboard foot (attached to the robot’s main frame), and then stepped humbly across the water.

When they marched onto stage with their small missile, the team from the Aerodynamics Department caused the judges to back up their judging table rather hastily from the robot zone. With little fanfare, this team simply shot their robot from one end of the course to the other; what they lacked in creativity, they made up for in muscle. The last robot I saw looked like something out of a Three Stooges episode; it resembled an extending boxing glove (the kind with an extending arm like a kiddie-gate), which you stretch across the room to bop your opponent in the nose. This team’s robot didn’t deliver much of a punch, but it did make it entirely across the stage.

Later that afternoon, we took the train a few more stops north to Akko, where we would spend the night. We (ok, I) had reserved a room in the only hotel/motel/hostel inside the old city walls, assuming that this would give us a different sense of the city than if we stayed in the ritzy hotel a mile south of Akko.

We took a taxi from the train station into the old city; the driver instantly knew which hostel we were talking about, and drove as though he were in a time trial for the Indy 500. I could tell when we hit the old city: that’s when the one-lane road became even narrower, and more bumpy. The other half of the road (where a lane in the opposite direction would be) was barricaded off, for construction. After a series of sharp turns, we ended up in front of the hostel, on a quiet street with writing mostly in Arabic. We tugged on the door of the hostel as the taxi drove off, but it was locked. Across the street, two men got up and started to come over; a woman wearing a chador hurried past, behind them.

One of the men motioned with his hand at us. He looked no more threatening than, say, our grocer, but I realized then that I was fairly paranoid about being an American in a largely-Arabic town. In more ways than one, I had a lot of baggage.

All the man was trying to tell us was to ring the bell for service. All I could think of was that my accent marked me as a citizen of the world’s most-disliked country. My logical capacities (which were knocking faintly, but I wasn’t answering) were trying to tell me that I was a) in Israel, not Iran or Jordan; b) spoke at least a small amount of Hebrew; and c) the shekel–not the dollar or English–was the real currency of value, here.

My husband rang the bell. A man’s voice answered in Hebrew, and the hostel owner showed us in. The hostel’s card (with a lifesaving map on the back) claimed “Bed and Breakfast”, but we had known in advance that this was probably a thing of the past. The breakfast room, across from the reception desk, lay behind closed French doors, as dormant as an attic; chairs were stacked upside-down on the tables, and a few cloths were scattered over them.

Our room was up a flight of marble stairs; photographs of a more prosperous era showed a much younger hostel owner, with much more hair, standing proudly in front of a van with the hostel’s name and address painted on it, in English.

The owner opened the door and stood back to let us in. “Very nice,” we murmured, as though we had rehearsed it. He turned on the light in the bathroom/shower. My husband went downstairs to pay, and I reluctantly parted with my passport for two minutes. While I waited, I watched the cigarrette-burn hole in the thin sheet covering the bedspread as though it were going to spread and consume the whole bed, and, perhaps, the room. Soap and heat! I chanted my little mantra. At least it has soap and heat! And then I started on the other one: Location, location, location!

When my husband returned, he glanced at the lights in our room, which were covered in dangly beaded things. “Even the bulbs are veiled!” he said.

We headed out to look for the port, dodging cars on our way along the one half-a-street. There was no point in looking at a map, since the map could not possibly contain all the small streets coursing through old Akko, and there was no way of telling which one we were on, after a while. Eventually, we made it to the port, with its tiny harbor, two restaurants, and statue of a whale. A fisherman sat mending his nets, as we walked by.

As sunset approached, the Muslim call to prayer echoed from the minaret of the El-Jazzar Mosque. (The mosque’s minaret lit up splendidly after sunset, with neon-green lights.) If you’ve never heard this before–as I had not–it’s arresting, and about as different from church bells as you can get. The call is sung by one voice, but, to someone who knows virtually nothing about Islam, it sounds mournful and haunting; it’s punctuated by moments of silence. It’s beautiful, but in a strange and sparse way; for me, it was difficult to hear it without thinking politically. To what extent might liberal Muslims react to church bells in a similar way, if in this way at all?

The Abu Christo Restaurant overlooks the port, with romantic views of waves crashing on the rocks. Even though all the outdoor tables were set, there was not a soul in sight. Above these tables, though, on the second outdoor floor, people were dining. If there was a secret entrance to this part of the restaurant, we couldn’t find it on the port side, and decided to track down the entrance to dinner from the opposite side.

Threading our way through the alleys, between tall narrow buildings where women were talking to each other across the street, from their balconies, we ended up in the Pisan port section; some of Akko’s names reflect the Italian influence, here, from the twelfth-century Genovese merchants who helped propel Akko out of the Crusader era and into the age of Mediterranean trade.

The Insight Guide to Israel notes that the city is one of the world’s oldest seaports. Glassmaking and purple dyes (the word “purple” comes from the name of a sea snail, purpura, from which the dyes were made) were two of Akko’s first specialties. Alexander the Great dropped by Akko in 333 B.C., when it was still a Greek outpost, and Julius Caesar appeared 300 years later, as the first paved road in Roman Judea was being built, from Akko to Antioch. The city was under Arab control from the seventh to the twelfth centuries, when it fell to the Crusaders. During Crusader rule, various orders (the Hospitaller Order of St. John and the Knights Templar, to name two) settled in Akko. You can see the “underground” Crusader city on a self-guided tour (which we did, on Thursday). Akko’s economic peak occurred during the century of Crusader rule; afterwards, it fell into obscurity until the 1700s.

In the mid-eighteenth-century, Akko’s Arab architecture took shape under the Ottoman Pasha Ahmad (aka “El Jazzar”, or “the butcher”). The Pasha built the El Jazzar Mosque and the Citadel, the fortress that surrounds the city.

Since none of the restaurants seemed to be willing to do business, yet, we somehow retraced our steps to old Akko’s lone snack shop and picked up something to stave off hunger for another hour or so.

By the time we had located the entrance to the lofty part of Abu Christo Restaurant (a steep staircase rising up over the water), it was dark. Two boys ran past us with an octopus dangling on a stick, its tentacles slick in the light from a small fire someone had lighted in the street. Another boy, dialing a cell phone with one hand, tried to move his horse back onto the street, with his other hand.

We climbed up the steps to what turned out to be the back entrance of the restaurant. Inside, a party was beginning to mill around a long series of tables. Finally, a waiter wandered over to us with an inquiring look. We pointed outside, where people were dining on the patio, but he shook his head.

“No, sorry, completely booked,” he said cheerfully, waving his hands. “All booked up tonight!”

There went our romantic dinner overlooking the water.

We continued down the street to the Restaurante Galileo, and were the first customers in the barrel-vaulted room. The waiter happily stopped setting up a long table for a party of thirty, and took our mezze (hummus and pita) order. Shortly thereafter, the party of thirty started to arrive, bit by bit. Initially, they all spoke Hebrew. Then, when a blond woman who looked like a model (or who looked like she was trying to be a model) appeared at the door, and sang out in an undeniably American accent, “Hi! We’re here! How are you all?”, they switched into Hebrew-accented English. In tow were an Israeli husband and two little kids. Fortunately, our fish sailed out of the kitchen before any of them ever got around to looking at the menus.

By now, I’ve learned to order almost anything but St. Peter’s Fish, or moshut, which–while a local, tasty fish–is essentially a bone-plucking festival. You end up with a pile of shredded fish, and a pile of bones, and are too exhausted to think about eating anything. Fish also comes in two basic forms: grilled or fried. Either way, it arrives on your plate completely intact, eyes and all; a fillet cut down the center helps, as do the cuts on either side of the fish. But it still requires a fair amount of concentration not to impale your cheek with a fish bone; I was far too fascinated by the American-Israeli family (in which the American blond woman was holding court with lots of dazzle and high-pitched laughter) to concentrate on my fish and fries. While the father pleaded in vain with his kids to stop banging their silverware on the glasses, the mother opened gifts blithely, including a Passover platter for matzo. “Wow, I’ve never even seen one of these!” she shrieked, which led me to posit at least two hypotheses: 1) she must not be Jewish; or 2) she must not get out much.

Whoever she was, she dripped money…and attitude. Her in-laws were clearly in awe of her; the fifteen or so of them preferred to watch her hold forth at the head of the table, from a safe position flanking the sides of the table. They ordered mezze, and ate it as though at a sports match, watching the American In-Law with unmitigated fascination. What were they celebrating? Why was she opening presents? Where was she from?

“That’s strange,” my husband remarked, bringing my attention back to our table. He was looking at the stone wall next to us. “That’s a picture of Koln, Germany.” He peered at it more closely. “It says it’s a woodcut.” We were so baffled by the Restaurante Galileo, with its strange party and German (in Israel?!) decorations, that our heads fairly spun.

Back in the hostel, my husband discovered that our tv received every satellite and radio station known to man, including channel after channel of regional coverage such as TV Venezia, TV Sicilia, and TV Toscana. We also flipped past Al-Jazeera, a Turkish channel, and the BBC, before giving up and going to bed. We had every single channel on the planet plus, probably, some interplanetary ones!

Even Galileo would have gone to bed, too.

“Mah-HOO ha-ma-a-KHAL ha-muh-yoo-KHAD sheh-la-KHEM?”
“What is the specialty of the house?”

Haifa, Part I

The train ride from Rehovot to Binyamina, where you change to take a train to Haifa, lasts about ninety minutes. It’s a lulling trip, which you can sleep through, rocked by the train. From Binyamina to Haifa takes another twenty minutes; by the time we arrived at Hof HaCarmel station in Haifa, my insides had had enough rocking motion for one morning, and I was starting to feel seasick.

Instantly, this was an extremely educational trip for my husband, who learned then that “I need to sit down the second we get off this train” is a polite way of saying “My breakfast is headed for your new shoes.” I got air, breakfast demurred, and his Diadoras were spared. Happily, this episode obviated all thoughts of us (ever) taking a bus, and, instead, we took a taxi to the Technion, where he was giving a talk, later that afternoon.

Driving to the top of Haifa (on Mount Carmel) is a little like driving through Laguna Canyon: the roads winds through scrub brush, while the sea drops away, below. The city is built on three levels: Hof HaCarmel station lies at the foot of the mountain; Hadar HaCarmel, the business district and oldest residential area, lies above; and Carmel Merkaz (central Carmel) occupies the peak (Mount Carmel), with boutiques, museums, and the sea-view promenade. The higher you go up the slope, the higher the price of real estate.

The taxi deposited us in a parking lot at the edge of a giant pedestrian zone in the Technion. To the left was the Amado Building (Mathematics and Architecture) and a huge amphitheater sunken into the hillside; to the right was a grass-lined hillside terraced by shallow waterfalls and pools built into pale rock. Part of this side was shaded by pine groves. It looked like an average campus: students were hurrying by, sprawling on the hillside, or lined up at the ATM. Even though it looked like we had arrived during a passing period between classes, it was pretty quiet; no one was screaming to anyone else from opposite sides of the park. For college students, they looked like pretty mature.

My husband knew his way around the Amado building from a previous visit, but the layout baffled me. We first passed by the Starbucks-sized Brief Café (full of hip-looking students with art portfolios were propped next to their chairs), and then crossed a metal walkway over a space that looked like it had been hastily covered (albeit, say, thirty years ago) with a giant awning, to connect one wing of the building with the other. In the space under the tented part was the long curved wall of the PEKA Gallery of Experimental Art and Architecture.

My husband’s host, a professor in the Math Department, had the only decorated nameplate on the hall, covered with Xeroxed cartoons and stickers from fruit. He welcomed us effusively, and ushered us into his office. The dry-erase board on one wall of his office was full of equations…along with caricatures of a cat, an elephant, and a beagle. He told us the story of how, during the founding days of the Technion, the Amado Family had given the institution money earmarked for a Math Department building. The Math faculty worked in quonset huts, while the real building was taken over by the Architecture school. (“It was a War of Attrition,” the professor said wryly.) Finally, the Amados said, Well, if you’re not going to construct a Math building, give us back the money. The Technion hastily converted part of the building into offices for the Math Department; as the professor put it proudly, “We liberated some rooms for ourselves.” As we left his office and walked by the Brief Cafe again, the professor waved his hand at the architecture students lounging at the tables in classic art-student gear and poses. “It’s good for our students,” (meaning, math students) he said with a smile, “to interact with the more lively art students.”

We walked through the parking lot to the Faculty Union, a two-story building of marble, wood, and chrome, polished to within an inch of its life. The Union, home to visitor housing and the faculty cafeteria, looked like a brand-new country club, or a small, recently-renovated Swiss hotel. We gaped at our room—at the satin-lined bedspreads, at the kitchenette, at the tea-and-coffee arrangement, and at the (satellite-linked) tv.

“This is real marble,” my husband said from inside the bathroom.

We had landed in the Ritz of visiting-scientist-housing. Thank you, Palm Beach supporters of the Technion!

Tearing ourselves away from Russian-language Israeli tv, CNN, Al Jazeera, and French news channels, we made it back to the Amado Building to meet the professor for lunch. With another professor in tow, we walked back to the faculty union, and went up to their dining room, which was as lush as the rest of the building.

After lunch, my husband went back to the Math Department to give his talk, and I went to read in the Greg Cafe, across from the Amado Building. When I opened the most recent issue of the New Yorker (which I’d saved to read on the trip), the first feature article was about the Chudnovsky Brothers, two mathematicians who solved the digital-photography problem facing the Metropolitan Museum of Art and their digital catalogue of the entire “The Unicorn and the Hunt” tapestry. It was a little strange to be on a campus and not be either a student or a teaching assistant.

Later in the afternoon, the professor ordered a taxi for us, and said he hoped he and his wife would be able to join us for dinner. We careened partway down the slope (the Technion is east of Mount Carmel, on a hill of its own), and the taxi deposited us in central Carmel. My husband, exhausted but happy, from a successful talk, devoured a leftover granola bar and chocolate from the depths of my bag, as we prowled around for a place to have coffee.

We passed up the Museum of Japanese Art in favor of the Louis Promenade, which overlooks the north slope of Mount Carmel, and the Haifa Port, far below. Just below the Promenade, in one section, the Baha’i Shrine and Gardens extend partway to the port district. One could be forgiven for mistaking the Baha’i Gardens, with their primly-trimmed topiaries and smooth gravel walkways, for, say, the grounds of the French Consulate. We didn’t see anyone, however, in the gardens, or near the elaborate iron gates at the entrance on the Promenade. Besides the gardens, the most visible Baha’i landmark in Haifa is the gold-domed Shrine of the Bab. Haifa is the world center of the Baha’i faith; its followers, who were proscribed as a sect in Persia and whose leader was executed there in the nineteenth century, view Moses, Christ, Mohammed, and Buddha as divine messengers who all preached a similar philosophy. Baha’i faithful advocate a common world language and religion.

A circular restaurant (a la the Chart House layout) with spectacular views of the port hung over one part of the Promenade; to reach it, you had to climb a flight of stairs. With its elegant interior of glass walls and linen-lined everything, we vetoed it as a dinner option, feeling that our sneakers and t-shirts would be out of place. However, if anyone comes to visit us, we’ll take you here.

We walked around Carmel Center at a slower pace, as the sun went down, hoping to hear from the professor before our stomachs demanded dinner. We stopped at a bakery for burekas, savory filo-dough pastries filled with one kind of vegetable or cheese. Soon afterwards, I spotted an outpost of L’Occitane; alas, at that moment, the professor called to send his regrets for dinner, and we began a restaurant search in earnest.

Casa Italiana was nestled between a McDonald’s and a bagel joint. There was no one inside the tiny restaurant, but the tables were set, the menu posted outside was fantastically reasonable, and we were starving. After we called “Shalom” a few times, a woman in her seventies, with peppery curls, emerged from the kitchen, gave us menus and waited patiently. We ordered pizza and gazed around: Casa Italiana (maximum capacity: 20 patrons) had the requisite dark wooden beams, red-and-white checkered tablecloths, and chianti bottles–plus three framed, yellowing photographs of U.S. Navy aircraft carriers. The woman beamed when I asked about them.

“For forty years, the U.S. navy comes to us!” she said, and rummaged through a drawer under the cash register, which sat at the back of the restaurant, on a bookcase. She brought out three scrapbooks, and paged through them slowly. “The U.S.S. Eisenhower, the U.S.S. Detroit; they all come to us for beer and pizza.” Old postcards, Christmas cards, and photographs flapped in the scrapbook, with notes like, “Thanks for the great pizza!” and “I don’t know if you remember me, but…” The woman points to the attic with a smile and, with a look that says, “Those crazy kids!”, tells me, “They sent us all kinds of souvenirs!”

“Now, though,” she continued, closing the scrapbooks, “they don’t come.” She lifted her shoulders a bit. “Maybe the war in Iraq, maybe politics.” She asks where we’re from; we tell her, and she smiles proudly at the mention of the Technion. When we smell fresh pizza, she goes back to the kitchen.

Our pizza steams out, followed by advice from the proprietress: “Red hot pepper flakes, but they are very hot! Be careful!” She points to the lethal spice bottle on the tabletop. We nod, and skip the peppers.

As we collect the bill and pay, the chef rushes out, wiping his hands on his apron. The chef of this Italian restaurant in Israel greets my husband in Czech.

“Nazdar!” he says. My husband couldn’t look more surprised if his pizza had spoken to him. The chef, a short, white-haired man with bright dark eyes, speaks to my husband excitedly, telling him about how he went to school in Czechoslovakia (Carpacia) as a child.

And that was dinner in Haifa.