Imagine this is your finger

Friday, November 17th, 2006

YouTube & Google Video are like all the rage nowadays, so we like decided to be like cool and hip, and like uploaded some clips. Here is one from our collection.

Tags: fishing
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Weirdo Ads

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

Our temporary residence in Israel has given us a chance to immerse into the depths of the Russian-Israeli culture. Here is what the average “Russi” sees in his every-day newspaper:

“SALE! SALE! SALE! Happy Rosh haShana! 1 kg of Ham 28.90 shekel”

Next to the optimistic newspaper title “Success”, an ad that colorfully reads “ABORTION” and reassures in small print below “Best Gynecologists”

Ambulance Yakov
FREE BURIALS
(for non-Jews in caskets & clothes)

We would send it to the “Tonight Show”, but doubt that Jay would appreciate the subtlety of Russian humor.

Tags: culture, funny
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In Limbo

Sunday, October 29th, 2006

Scary to think so, but today it is exactly one year from the day the first snow came to Boston, and we set out to circle the world. For those of you who know our route so far, also know that we’ve failed in our plan to finish the trip in a year and now are barely on our second continent. I thought about summarizing the past year by posting its highlights, but soon realized it was impossible – way too long of a list. Instead, I suggest you take a look at this page. It has thumbnails from every place that we’ve been to and to me it’s like an hors devoirs platter. SmugMug changes them every time you load the page and, even though I can recognize the link by its name, I still wait for the random choice of “hors devoirs” to load.

Our route in South America – coming to your screens straight from my 11 year old sister’s bedroom wall.

We are now in Israel, where we are stuck in limbo – by far not done with our trip, but are yet to start its next leg. Between my painting and Shurik’s Hebrew lessons, we managed to squeeze in an adventure or two.
( more… )

Tags: extreme, underwater
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Baby Talk

Friday, October 6th, 2006

I’m all jealous of the first words that my friends’ babies are saying. But I just realized my “baby” is uttering his first words as well, in Hebrew. I was taking off my contacts, when Shurik asked half in Hebrew, half in Spanish “How do you say contact lenses?” I replied, and proceeded to ask in Hebrew:
-”How many camera lenses do you have?”
-”I have 4 lenses,” he said. “One of them is a gefilte-fish ear.” (i.e. fish-eye)

And here’s another one:
-”Let’s go to table,” Shurik says to me in Hebrew one night.
-”Table?”
-”It’s the only piece of furniture I know how to say.”

Tags: funny
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Two Minutes

Friday, September 29th, 2006

It might sound banal, but I’ll still say it:
You never know when you are meant to leave this earth. Taking loved ones for granted is the biggest mistake you can make.

Couples fight. We, as a couple, fight mostly about stupid things which we don’t even remember half way through the fight. Today we fought as well about something stupid. I came back from class where my tyrant of a teacher finally gave me an approving nod, the first one in a month, and I was anxious to tell Shurik. I played the scene over and over in my mind, and, when I entered my grandfather’s office where Shurik was putting some internet to good use, I was met with a sour face. From there, long story short, my mood was ruined as well, and, pissed, I grabbed my portfolio and stormed out. Steaming, I moved through the park like a bulldozer walking the same road I take almost every day. I know almost to the dot how much time it takes to get to and from the office and even how long it would take to get to the Winery intersection, that I was about two minutes from, when I heard a sort of an enormously loud clap in a clap that made me buckle. When I looked up, all I saw was tall flames and black smoke. I was unharmed, probably too far away from the explosion, but my hands were still shaking and when I dialed Shurik my mind had trouble forming a sentence.

Shurik came running and we walked around the affected area to my grandmother’s house to hear on the news what was it all really about. We walked in silence, when a thought made me stop short. Right after storming out, I had to stop. My glasses, which I normally don’t even wear, had fingerprints on them. My hands were busy with the heavy portfolio, so to clean them, I found an empty spot on the side of the street, put the portfolio down, and began rubbing the lenses with my shirt. The fabric was rough and uneven so I probably scratched more then cleaned. The whole thing must have taken me about two minutes.

P.S.
One man died, the one in the car, and other six got hurt. Among them a nine year old. It was not a terrorist act this time, it was an assassination of a Ramli man who the police knew all too well.

Tags: relathionships
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Chavo?z

Thursday, August 17th, 2006

I’m sitting in NY. Yes! in NY. At my mother’s PC and dreading the last few posts that I’m sort off supposed to write to document the end of our South American experience.

I left you in Manaus, at the end of our five day journey up the Amazon, but what came after that completely and utterly frustrated me with this continent and even though the next few weeks included an awesome six day hike to a table top mountain, Sloth (the animal, not the sin), and petting river dolphins, the troubles that intertwined leave me here, back in the States, if only for two weeks, tired, angry, and with burning desire to reeducate some South Americans on the current events in the Middle East.

Tags: festival
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Up the Amazon in a Hammock Jungle

Saturday, July 22nd, 2006

This is insane! Even for us… It is exactly what I expected, but nonetheless it’s nuts. The cargo boat is the usual size around here, about 16m x 4m (50ft by 15ft), as big as a spacious living-room. However, it is set up for about 200 hammocks that hang literally on top of each other. It is a fabric maze of all colors of the rainbow, impossible to walk through in a straight line. A jungle, that’s what it is. The Brazilian jungle on my left and right, and another, floating, in the middle. The only difference is that in this fabric jungle the bugs don’t bite as much and those hanging from these vines are less likely to drop a coconut on your head.

The boat was to leave around 7pm, but we got here a good twelve hours beforehand to snag the good spots. Nevertheless, my first thought was, “Great. No more room for us,” but a local woman showed us how it’s done, and in no time we were looking at our “beds” swinging not too far away from a pile of old life jackets. Satisfied, we left the boat to run some errands. There were snacks and water to buy, backpacks to pack, and another round of shots to be administered – doctor’s orders. For the past few days I have been sick as a dog, sweating like a pig, and, after running around town, I wanted to be shot like a race horse with a broken leg. I felt a bit melodramatic. Ever since we got off the freezing night-bus that brought us to Belem, I have been running a fever. Alex finally looked down my throat with a flashlight and said, “Alright. We are going to the hospital NOW.” Apparently my airway was about to close up. In the hospital the doctor was quick to give her diagnosis and suggest a treatment even before I finished describing my symptoms. “You’ll have to get a shot,” she said. “In the butt. Well, actually two – one in the butt and another in the vein. Well, technically four: three intravenous and one in the behind.” Splendid. Dreading the hospital by this time, we’d done some shopping first and, as I was getting worse and worse in the heat, made our way there.

By now, my fever was gone and my throat cleared up, allowing me to swallow food without pain, but my stomach and back were still giving me trouble, so I agreed to the shots. Unfortunately, this time two factors were against me. First, there was no room for me to lie down for the shot in the butt, as today, a Monday, everybody who failed to be cured by Sunday’s prier in church were brought to the hospital, so we had to do it standing up. Not a good idea. Second, this time the shot, painful as it is on its own, was administered not by a cute and careful male nurse, who managed to insert the needle with a minimum amount of pain, but a middle-aged female nurse passing by in a hurry. She jammed the needle in my butt cheek without so much as a warning. For a few minutes I couldn’t walk, and a sympathetic doctor walking past said, “Hurt, didn’t it? Well yeah. She sort of does that …” She bit her lip and made a stabbing motion to illustrate her point. “Yeah,” I thought. “That she does.” I limped back to the hostel and lay on the couch in the bums-up position, at least having some fun freaking people out when they asked what happened. “I got stabbed in the ass,” I would say, and hold a dramatic pause, watching their eyes widen and mouths drop open. “With a needle. By a doctor,” I would add eventually. Ha-ha.

Tags: people
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Trucking Along

Friday, July 14th, 2006

The reason for the next four days was this quote “… on epic 4WD-journey to Parque Nacional dos Lencois Maranhenses you’ll roll past sand dunes and splash through creeks, ducking palms as the untouched landscape unfolds around you.” “The best part is getting there,” Shurik was very excited about this. I went along. I would be lying if I said I was completely uninterested how this will turn out.

Tags: architecture, festival
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Jeri

Sunday, July 9th, 2006

From one beach town to the next. From Pipa to Jericoacoara. I don’t like it here. I finally understand what it means for a place to have the right vibe, and this place just doesn’t have it. The beach is dirty and the sand buggies are expensive to rent. We finally did team up with two Italians, Paulo and Ricardo, and went riding to the remote beaches and lagoons, but that just resulted in a vicious sand-fly attack that kept me scratching for days.

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Happy Anniversary to Us!

Tuesday, July 4th, 2006

If we were in Boston today, we probably would have had a sushi party like last year. We would have had a house full of friends toasting to us, and at night the whole happy slightly buzzed bunch would have accompanied us to the shores of Charles River to watch the fireworks.

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