No Milk Today and Not Much Else

I’m so naive. After the splendidly long holiday weekend I genuinely expected to be able to shop as usual on Sunday afternoon. Wrong. I stepped into the kibbutz store only to be greeted by mostly empty shelves. I thought I had been transported back in time to the Soviet Union. There were no tomatoes, no bananas and no bread. Two people were arguing over the last bunch of grapes. And of course, there was almost no milk. There’s almost none in the whole country.

It seems that Israel’s cows have gone on strike in support of the airport workers. Or maybe it’s the other way around. In any case, you can’t fly into or out of the country and you can’t drink a glass of milk while you’re here. What the airport workers grievances are I cannot say, although I suppose they revolve around money, but the cows are said to be aggrieved by the heat.

I don’t know about you, but I’m nonplussed. Summer here is always hot. If you look up the definition of “hot” in Webster’s Dictionary you’ll see it’s defined as “summer in Israel.” This can’t come as a surprise to the cows. As far as I know, they haven’t just emigrated from Finland. But somehow August was so hot that they stopped giving milk in September. This must be bovine logic.

The thing is, it stopped being really hot and humid three weeks ago. So why is there a milk shortage now? How big a lead-time could there be? I would have expected the stuff on the shelves to be slightly fresher than that. Like I said, I’m naïve. It couldn’t possibly be that the milk monopolies are holding back the supply to raise the prices for the holidays. That would be inconceivable.

Snapshots Not a Snap

As you can probably see, I have at long last bought a camera. I’ve taken a first few pictures of my house so I can show my dear ones in the States how I’m living, in the process adorning this page with a picture of my back door.

It’s a simple, little camera of the point-and-shoot variety (a Canon A1100) and not at all expensive. It takes lovely pictures to my untrained eye. But whenever I buy anything I feel slightly sick afterward. The more expensive it was, the sicker I feel. I suspect my husband of blessed memory had some nefarious operant conditioning performed on me while I slept because otherwise I can’t explain this. I used to love to shop.

But that is nothing compared to the sheer terror that awaits when you get the camera home and open the box. Then you have to contend with finding where the batteries go, how to open the place where they go, insert the memory card and figure out what all those little buttons with the unintelligible symbols instead of actual words do. And heaven help you if you press the wrong one. At least the instructions were mercifully in blessed English. Of course, in the olden days you just had to know how to load the film.

Oddly enough, the hardest part was transferring the pictures to the computer. I say “oddly” because I work with computers all day long and I’m not afraid of them and I’m not mystified by them. I actually like them. But try as I might I could not get the computer to recognize the camera. Two phone calls to the service department of the camera store were not much help. Then in desperation I rang my friend, Drora, who’s a wiz with all things technical. “Use the USB port at the back of the computer instead of the front,” was her advice. Presto, it worked like a charm.

I plan to illustrate these pages with my photos in the fullness of time. For the present, I’m still a little shaken and suffering from technoshock. It will pass. I will learn how to use all this stuff. But my question for the universe is this: why is nothing ever easy?

First the Retail, Then the Therapy

When I first came to Israel I thought shopping here was a blood sport. You could walk into a department store, and despite the evidence of personnel milling around, you could not get one of them to wait on you and take your money. Sometimes you could throw an object – this is the blood sport part – and hit one of them hard enough to draw attention, then you’d get down on your knees and spread your money out before you and maybe, maybe you’d leave the store with the desired purchase.

After all that, heaven alone could help you if there was a problem with the object and you wanted to return it. Not only would the store not take it back and not give you your money, it would deny ever selling it to you. But I have a receipt! “Anybody can forge a piece of paper.”

The commercial culture did a 180 about a decade or so ago. Now you cannot walk from one end of a store to the other without having to stop every few yards to scrape off the accumulated sales clerks you have clinging to you. The cosmetics departments are the worst. If you’re caught giving even a passing glance at any of the displays, an eager Russian woman will tackle you to the floor and won’t let you up until you hear all the things that are on sale. “Buy one concealer, get 10 free!” I still have 10 from last year, I plead.

Of course, the modern world has provided the perfect solution when something really needs to be bought: online shopping. It’s hassle-free, or relatively so, your purchase arrives at your door and you don’t get battered in the process. The only thing you have to worry about is identity theft.

Take Me to the Fair

The kibbutz as an organization tries its best to make life convenient and commodious. One way it does this is to bring in suppliers of goods and services for the members to buy at discount prices. This saves the need to shlep to town and pay full market price while making it possible to survive on a meager kibbutz budget. Every couple of months the dining hall becomes the scene of a clothing or shoe fair, and sometimes there’s something like jewelry or Tupperware.

They usually give you enough advanced warning to consider your options. Do I really need another pair of purple Crocs? But this Thursday I was caught unawares. I walked in to visit my mailbox and there was a display of big-ticket items: refrigerators, dishwashers, microwaves, LCD televisions. I was stunned. You mean we can buy this stuff?

As it happens, my tv is not so old. Why do I say that? Because I can remember buying it. So it can’t be more than 11 or 12, but it has been showing signs of fatigue. A year and a half ago I actually had to send it away for repair, leaving me to cope with separation anxiety for a full week. Now it shows symptoms of jaundice when I turn it on although this usually disappears after an hour or so. Given this and the fact that beautiful flat-screens have lately achieved affordability, I had decided to buy one probably next summer.

What should I do? Wait as I had planned and hunt around the stores until I find the best tv and negotiate the price/installation/delivery fees by myself, or take the kibbutz-negotiated deal now? Of course I opted for now. I don’t yet know when it will be delivered, but I am already anticipating the hours of couch-potato heaven in front of my new, big LCD. I just hope there’ll be something worth watching.

Coughing Up the Cash

I flipped through the weekend newspaper this morning until I came to my favorite feature, the shopping page. It shows thumbnail pictures with short descriptions of new stuff that has reached the local stores and can be had for a price. Two things caught my eye: a black plywood – plywood! – chair for 18,000 shekels and a cup and saucer for over 400 shekels.

Excuse me? Can I have read this rightly? In this time of economic melt-down complete with weeping and gnashing of teeth, what space alien from the planet Bizarro would charge these prices for these entirely common objects? And who would buy them?

Let me say plainly: I have nothing against rich people. If they want to fork over large sums of money on an opulent life style, I wish them joy. I just resent seeing them exploited by anyone who would take such sums for plywood. On the other hand, it strikes me that I could be missing the boat. I could make a papier mache table to go with the chair and sell that for, I don't know, 20,000 shekels. I could be sitting on a gold mine.

Clearly, I've been on the kibbutz too long. Simple life, simple house. Carefree. I'm out of touch with the fashionable world. Economic crisis or no, life must go on and people must be chic. I just want to know when plywood became chic. What's next, MDF Nouveau?