Today I embarked on an epic journey (ok, mom, so it wasn’t really epic…how about ambitious??) to visit Ulpan Gordon – a Hebrew language school in Tel Aviv. Until today, I was completely convinced that this school was fabricated by a strange Israeli man who likes to play cruel jokes on American women. The reason for my speculation is based on my repeated attempts to contact this particular institution.
Being the diligent over-achiever that I am, over the past several months I have called the school, emailed the school, Googled the school, and employed various other helpful stalking techniques (mostly learned in my doctorate program when trying to solicit information from participants and committee members), yet never actual received a response.
Finally in Tel Aviv in-person, the school can hide from me no more! I looked up the address and using Google maps found that it was only 2 miles away from my hostel. No problem…or so I thought.
Now here is where the situation gets interesting. For starters, I do find it fascinating that in Israel I feel like walking two miles, one way, is no big deal. Never would I say to myself in San Francisco, “hmm…it will require four miles of walking to run this errand, but I’ll just get right on it!”
Second, Israel presents a strange issue of relativity for me. As most people who know me are aware, I broke my ankle very badly seven years ago and have had exactly six surgeries to repair it, the most recent of which was just this past October. However, as I was reminded immediately upon beginning my walk, in Israel, it doesn’t really matter if there is a 10% chance that during my four-mile walk I might fall down and break my ankle, because there is a 90% chance that I will die of heat stroke. And quite frankly, when every ounce of liquid in your body is sweating out of you and you can’t seem to drink fast enough to maintain equilibrium, and every few seconds you consider taking off all of your clothes and lying down to die next to a shady tree, you really don’t consider whether or not your ankle hurts.
My conclusion is that Tel Aviv in the summer is really good for my ankle, although perhaps not so great for my health overall.
Oh, back to the point for a minute - I survived the walk and did actually find the school! It is a real place and I survived all four miles, but I hear August is supposed to get even hotter…
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