Israeli Living: Part 2
In the previous post about Israeli living I did a few weeks ago (which you can read about here if you missed it), I talked about how the bedroom in my and the doctor's apartment doubles as a safe room, the lack of bathtubs in Israel, and manually controlling the dud (aka the water heater). In the second and final installation of Israeli Living, I'm going to talk about some more general apartment oddities as well as some of the strange things that exist in the apartment we call home.
General
Three things that seem to be in short supply in Israel are closets, window screens, and paint.
In the various apartments we visited when we were apartment hunting, closets were nowhere to be found. No front hall closet to hold your shoes and jackets. No linen closet for, well, linens. Not even a closet in the bedroom for your clothes. Instead, what you typically find as the only form of storage is a massive wardrobe, likely spanning the length and height of a whole wall, that is so much more than the 4-drawer dressers that I'm used to.
Window screens are also hard to come by, which, in a country that has loads of insects, screams 'Never ever open your windows!' Also, don't ever brush up against a wall or you'll get covered in white dust from the paint primer that was never covered in a real coat of paint. When I asked a local friend about this she laughed and said "That's so Israeli."
Our Place
In addition to the above mentioned oddities, our apartment also features some extra strange stuff that we haven't seen elsewhere.
I've already spoken about our lack of oven and the sloped ceiling in the New Apartment post. Here are two pictures from that post showcasing the latter. On the low end, the height is around 3 feet, while the other end of the room goes up to 11 feet. Given that the doctor is well over 6 feet, this makes half the upstairs space basically unusable to him. He had started counting the number of times he hit his head, but stopped after reaching 40 times within the first two months.
The apartment building itself also features some differences from Canadian living. One thing that you'd notice immediately is that the building is what you could call open concept, in that it's not sealed off from the outdoors. It reminds me of some of the hotels in Mexico I've stayed in, but without the tropical vacation feel. In Canada, this is a completely foreign concept due to my favourite season: winter. But when you live somewhere where it's always warm, protections such as walls are not always necessary.
Another strange feature of the building is that each apartment unit has a doorbell by the front door. Doorbells in and of themselves are not weird, but until this point I had never lived in an apartment building that had a doorbell. Most buildings instead use a buzzer system located on the main floor that's connected to a phone. With apartment units being so close together, a doorbell ringing down the hall can easily be heard in our apartment. Additionally, the switches for the lights in the hallways are nearly indistinguishable from the doorbells, meaning that it is highly likely that you will ring someone's doorbell at 4 in the morning when you're coming back from a night out in search of some light so that you don't happen to step on a creepy crawly critter that may be in the hallway since, you know, the hallway is open to the outdoors.
I hope you enjoyed this two-part series on some of the strange run-ins that the doctor and I have had related to Israeli living.
General
Three things that seem to be in short supply in Israel are closets, window screens, and paint.
In the various apartments we visited when we were apartment hunting, closets were nowhere to be found. No front hall closet to hold your shoes and jackets. No linen closet for, well, linens. Not even a closet in the bedroom for your clothes. Instead, what you typically find as the only form of storage is a massive wardrobe, likely spanning the length and height of a whole wall, that is so much more than the 4-drawer dressers that I'm used to.
Window screens are also hard to come by, which, in a country that has loads of insects, screams 'Never ever open your windows!' Also, don't ever brush up against a wall or you'll get covered in white dust from the paint primer that was never covered in a real coat of paint. When I asked a local friend about this she laughed and said "That's so Israeli."
Our Place
In addition to the above mentioned oddities, our apartment also features some extra strange stuff that we haven't seen elsewhere.
I've already spoken about our lack of oven and the sloped ceiling in the New Apartment post. Here are two pictures from that post showcasing the latter. On the low end, the height is around 3 feet, while the other end of the room goes up to 11 feet. Given that the doctor is well over 6 feet, this makes half the upstairs space basically unusable to him. He had started counting the number of times he hit his head, but stopped after reaching 40 times within the first two months.
The apartment building itself also features some differences from Canadian living. One thing that you'd notice immediately is that the building is what you could call open concept, in that it's not sealed off from the outdoors. It reminds me of some of the hotels in Mexico I've stayed in, but without the tropical vacation feel. In Canada, this is a completely foreign concept due to my favourite season: winter. But when you live somewhere where it's always warm, protections such as walls are not always necessary.
Another strange feature of the building is that each apartment unit has a doorbell by the front door. Doorbells in and of themselves are not weird, but until this point I had never lived in an apartment building that had a doorbell. Most buildings instead use a buzzer system located on the main floor that's connected to a phone. With apartment units being so close together, a doorbell ringing down the hall can easily be heard in our apartment. Additionally, the switches for the lights in the hallways are nearly indistinguishable from the doorbells, meaning that it is highly likely that you will ring someone's doorbell at 4 in the morning when you're coming back from a night out in search of some light so that you don't happen to step on a creepy crawly critter that may be in the hallway since, you know, the hallway is open to the outdoors.
I hope you enjoyed this two-part series on some of the strange run-ins that the doctor and I have had related to Israeli living.
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