Almost a month now!

Yes, as the title so boldly states, I’ve been here nearly a month now. So far it doesn’t seem so bad…maybe the whole three moths will go without any bigger meltdown (and here I don’t mean the weather). Which is, in my opinion, starting to cool down or then I’m getting used to the constant heat. This bizarrely happened at the same time as Israel went to winter time and turned the clock an hour back. Of course the country couldn’t change at the same time as the whole other Europe. So I went to the post to send some cards one hour and 15min too early, thanks for that! But the post woman felt sorry for me and took the cards even when the post office wasn’t open – that’s what I call customer service! After this incident I had lot of time at the Ericsson office to myself since no one else was at work yet. I have to go to the Ericsson office every two week or so since I can’t get a full remote access to the Ericsson intranet and I can’t therefore clean up my Outlook. Talk about mister Murphy’s law..

We had a long weekend as the Israelis celebrated the Yom Kippur. Or I don’t know if you can call it a celebration since you are meant to do some ‘self research’ and you aren’t allowed to drive a car or eat out that day. But lucky for us that Tel Aviv and Hertzlia are some what more liberal areas as my gay co-worker expressed it. But no car for a day no biggie. I went for a walk on the beach for 2½ hours. I don’t want to imagine what a Yom Kippur day would be like in a religious part of the country since even here in the tolerant part there were hardly any people on the beach compared to a normal day when it’s almost hard to walk on there.

I was also at the gym with some locals. Now there’s something that I don’t want to experience again any time soon. They have the air conditioning as well as the TV at maximum. From TV some local music, not that into it, and the air conditioning at below 20 degrees. It’s the same as in the office, the locals put the air conditioning to 15-17 degrees and then they run away. Now that’s something what we in Finland call ‘suoraa vittuilua’. Absolutely no sense in the whole thing. But back to the gym.. There were three locals: an older lady, Flavio Briatore look-alike and his personal trainer. After few moments there came another man and his trainer. They didn’t get the stepper to work and in no time the whole gym was trying to jump start the poor machine. This also typical to Israelis – they are always ready for some ‘balganza’ as they call it here. Everybody is very eager to take part in some fumble even when they don’t have any idea of the possible problem or the solution. But the whole point of this nonsense is that thanks to the air conditioning I have had a soar neck for a week now.

I have added a little task for all, even for the possible foreign readers :) In the part ‘Pieni tehvänpoikanen’ there is a excel sheet of different products that I have bought here so far and their price. The column 2 is the size of the bought product, column 3 is the price per unit (liter/kilo) and in columns 4 to 6 are the prices in Finland, Israel and hopefully German too. I’m not saying that you need to rush to the store on this very minute but if you buy some of these products keep the check and send me the information of you shopping’s. All information will be handled confidently! :D