Vote, Cleanliness, a Tiyul, a Friend

First, we (and by "we" I mean my husband) had our first Israeli voting experience.  This is how the elections work in Israel:

1.  You join something.
2.  They send you emails and texts
3.  They tell you to go vote somewhere
4.  You go
5.  There is a selection of slips of paper and you choose one and put it in a box.
6.  You walk out and wonder what just happened and is this 1877?

That's about the size of it.  No idea how this all works.  Of course we learned about the elections in Ulpan - you vote for a party, not a person, but you want to see who they might pick, etc. etc., so maybe that's how you decide what party to vote for.  Or not.  Apparently yesterday's vote was only for people voting for this party.  Maybe.  Or not.

On to our latest property tax bill.  Received yesterday, paid yesterday; we are good citizens.  The bill was accompanied by a flyer about the Modiin Fall Music Festival.  "Fall" being an interesting term for a season that so far has seen 90 degree temps and no rain.  But that's another matter.  On the flip side of the flyer was an ad.  It was a plea to dog owners to clean up after their dogs.  OK, nothing so wrong with that.  But the photo that accompanied the ad was of a dog cleaning up its own....mess.  With a shovel and pail, and a plastic bag.  Standing on its hind legs. 

I'm proud to say that we wrenched ourselves away from our computers this week and went to two tiyulim!  We feel dumb that we've been here for 10 months and have done nothing Israeli.

Well the first was not really a tiyul, it was more of us getting out of the house and going somewhere that is not the Modiin mall, the local grocery store, or the home supply store.  We went to another mall! In Jerusalem!  And we drove there!  And we came back! 

But the next day we went on a real tiyul, since we now consider ourselves expert "getting out of the house" people.

So where did we go?  Up the road!  There is a memorial to the Jews who died in the Zaglembie region of Poland during the Holocaust.  It is all outdoors, a series of garden areas, with the names of all of the families, etc.  Very touching and well done, as are all of the memorials here (and as you can imagine there are lots and lots of them).

Last but not least, I heard from my friend Edson who works for Johns Hopkins in Jordan - he is coming here and we can visit!  He figured it was...um...a lot easier for him to come to Israel than for me to go to Amman.