Lately, my wife Jody and I have spent a lot of time getting in touch with old friends via Facebook. It started when I received a friend request from Larry. Larry and I were best buddies growing up. But after I moved away, we fell out of touch. I’ve looked for him from time to time via Google but never found any contact information. It had been 20 years since I last spoke with him. But through the wonder of social networking, we’re back in contact.

Larry connected me to another high school friend who connected me to a college colleague. It’s been a blast.

And it got Jody and I thinking: What if there had been a Facebook when we were teenagers some 30+ years ago. The whole concept of “getting back in touch” with old friends as we are doing now simply wouldn’t exist. We’d be connected from the start and would stay that way (unless we were "unfriended" for some unforgivable offense).

As we shared status updates, we’d always know what achievements the high school jock had attained, or what type of relationship an old flame was in (undoubtedly “it’s complicated”).

That’s just one of the differences between us old fogeys and the “digital natives” - a term from the book Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society - to describe young people born after 1980 for whom the Internet was already a given by the time they hit surfing age.

Lev Grossman at Time Magazine wrote a funny piece this week that echoes what I’m saying. He lists a number of reasons why social networking tools such as Facebook are even better for “digital immigrants,” as Palfrey refers to us, who didn’t grow up with social networking. Among his conclusions:

1. We’re no longer bitter about high school. Digital natives may be “hung up on any number of petty slights,” Grossman says, but when a person who insulted us way back when asks to friend us today, we say sure. Because we’re bigger than that now.

2. Facebook isn’t just a social network; it’s a business network. Sure, LinkedIn may “officially” be the professional social media tool, but it’s Facebook, with its 175 million users (and counting), where we make most of our work connections.

3. Facebook lets you share pictures of your children. Digital natives may be snapping shots of friends at school or the beach, but we’re just kvelling by posting albums of our grand kids.

4. Facebook means you don’t have to remember e-mail addresses. Just log on and search. You never have to leave the walled garden.

5. We’re more careful about our privacy. You won’t see us posting half-clothed drunken pictures of ourselves at a fraternity party that may lead to a potential employer, looking to vett a job candidate via Google, to disqualify us without even getting to the interview.

Indeed, the relationship to privacy is probably the biggest difference between digital immigrants and natives, the latter of whom have no problem living their lives entirely in public.

For example, my teenager daughter Merav last night bemoaned the fact that her grandparents asked about her new boyfriend. “That’s my private business,” she wailed. “They have no right going there.”

“But you posted it all in your status for everyone to see!” I countered. She stormed out of the room.

Now, in a controversial move that had the blogosphere up in arms this week, Facebook tried to quietly change its Terms of Service to so that if a member quits the site, his or her content will no longer be deleted.

The newly added clause read:

“The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook service: Prohibited conduct, user content, your privacy practices [and] gift credits,” among other types of data.

Facebook probably had no alternative: Once you post content, everyone else can see it and, as a result, it now becomes “owned” by the public. An example, from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a blog post defending the change:

“When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message.”

Not much of an apology, the blogosphere complained, and even The New York Times picked up the story.

In the end, the power of crowd won the day. Yesterday morning, every member’s Facebook home page included the following prominently placed message:

“Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.”

The drama is undoubtedly not over yet, but round one goes to The People.

Nevertheless, none of this is likely to change the way people use Facebook. Most younger Facebook users don’t care and it won’t be long before they’re out of school and in the mainstream. The Berkman Center’s Palfrey points out, going back to the job interview example, that soon “employers are going to be digital natives themselves and [will] be a lot more lenient about what tattoos [i.e., those incriminating photos] may still show up.”

Even as a relative newcomer to Facebook, I’m not going to complain because I get so much out of the system. If I ask a business question, I immediately get a slew of responses. If I post that I’ve caught a cold (like I did this week), in come the condolences from around the world (a phenomena that goes a long way to helping span the wide divide between Israel and "the old country").

And when I want to get in touch with an old friend, like Larry, there’s nothing to compare. I’m living my life in public too. It’s just one more way the digital generation gap is blurring.

Click here to read the full interview with Palfrey.

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This article appeared earlier this week on the AIMGroup.com website where I blog about interactive media, social networking, online video and classified advertising.

My wife Jody has been in the States for the last two weeks to celebrate her father’s 70th birthday, leaving me a “single parent” back in Israel. I’m pretty good at handling the day-to-day activities at home, taking care of the kids, keeping the house running. Except in one area.

The kitchen.

Frankly, I’m a total nincompoop when it comes to cooking. I imagine that if I lived alone with no family, I’d be the take out king. Chinese one night, falafel or schwarma the next. There’s no lack of fast food these days in Jerusalem. We even have our choice of upscale sushi bars.

But I have three growing kids who need a well-balanced meal, and money for eating out every night isn’t exactly flowing like Dead Sea water. So before Jody left, she made me a two-week schedule of meals along with a detailed shopping list.

The meals on the list were pretty simple. There was macaroni and cheese, pasta with cheese, grilled cheese toasts, burritos with cheese, lasagna with (you guessed it) cheese.

Actually, there wasn’t anything on the list that didn’t involve flour and cheese, except for one night when I was supposed to make “orange soup” with sweet potatoes, carrots and pumpkin. But it was a long day and I had two intense deadlines that were going to take me easily past midnight. So we ordered pizza instead...with extra cheese.

All of the starch was supposed to be balanced with a nice green salad. Emphasis on the “supposed to” part. I finally got around to cutting up some veggies at the end of the first week and then only when everyone was so constipated we could barely move.

There was also what I fondly like to call the Day of Disasters. It started when 17-year-old Amir and I were putting away the groceries. A large jar of oatmeal was perched just a tad too close to the edge of the pantry.

It crashed to the ground spewing glass and oats everywhere. I thought about scooping up the flakes into a new jar but I was worried that they might be too “crunchy.”

Then when I was carrying a bottle of olive oil to the table to dress the salad, it too slipped out of my hands, landing on a dinner plate and splattering all over 10-year-old Aviv’s pants. The bottle, thankfully, didn’t break, but the plate did.

Next, we sat down to what turned out to be a highly unusual dinner. Merav, our 15-year-old vegetarian daughter was eating out at a friend’s house, so I decided to treat the boys to some meat. At the store, a bag of what looked like meat-stuffed raviolis looked tempting. And a real change – no cheese this time!

I brought it home and heated it up, just like the instructions on the package said, then served the ravioli to my little carnivores. But something just didn’t seem right about it. The meaty dumplings looked forlorn on the plates. Maybe they needed some sort of sauce?

That’s when I realized it. These were kneidelach, meant to be served in soup not on their own. Everyone chuckled, Aviv came to my defense saying they were delicious, but I felt defeated.

As if it couldn’t get any worse, here was the coup de coup de grâce (or in our case the coup de glida): The case of the ice cream. Earlier in the day, we had bought a small carton of Ben & Jerry’s butter pecan. It’s our tradition that when we buy a decadent dessert, we always take a sample as soon as we get home.

Amir was the first in. He pulled off the top. The protective seal was open. He peeked inside. A large chunk was missing. He called down to Merav’s room – had she somehow sneaked in and snagged a bite while we were still bringing up groceries from the car?

No, she said. Same question to Aviv. “There’s ice cream?” he exclaimed.

Someone apparently had opened the ice cream in the store, scooped out a large spoonful, and put it back in the freezer. Both Amir and I instantly felt sick to our stomachs. We wondered if we had been poisoned.

Clearly this all was a conspiracy, a plot hatched in some evil fiend’s mind to make us miss Jody or, when we eventually told her the story, to compel her to take pity on us, rush back from her trip and cook up a nice pot of tofu and broccoli.

Ultimately we decided not tell Jody about our fortnight of eating badly…at least not immediately. Better she enjoys her time in the States fondly thinking of us as an independent and resourceful brood rather than a collection of culinarily-challenged cranks.

And truth be told, we survived just fine. No one was rushed to the emergency room or came down with rickets.

Jody returned last night. Jet lag may delay our departure from kitchen duty another day or so, but it won’t be long before we’re back to “normal life” and the boss is in charge again.

Welcome back sweetie. We’re glad your home!

And oh yes, when you go shopping next week, don’t forget to check the ice cream!

I’ve been "unfriended" by my 15-year-old daughter. No, I don’t mean she’s stopped talking to me. But Merav and I are no longer friends on Facebook.

The ostensible reason? We grounded her. She accepted her punishment but, in retribution, she blocked me access to her profile. That means no more status updates, no photo albums from the latest school trip tagging her friends, no private messaging.

Oh yes, she unfriended my wife Jody too.

Now, you might say that communicating via Facebook is the ultimate dehumanization of the parent-child relationship. It was bad enough when we started instant messaging each other in the same house. But I’ve come to rely on reading Merav’s status line to know how she’s feeling.

Did she have a good day at school? Is she brogus with a friend? Did she enjoy last night’s movie? It’s all updated in near real time, whether at home or school. Pretty much wherever there’s a WiFi connection. Check out this BBC parody of what happens when the borders between reality and Facebook blur too much.

Jody took a more sanguine approach. “A teenager needs her independence. She shouldn’t have her parents watching her every move online,” she said.

Maybe. But did Merav have to be so glib about it? She practically danced around the room when she informed me of my demotion.

Apparently, I’m not alone in the friend/unfriend conundrum. The New York Times this week ran a piece about the subject. Author Douglas Quenqua delineates the different types of unfriendings, from the impersonal – removing a contact you made a party, for example, but whom you can no longer remember – to the vindictive (like Merav).

It’s probably a good idea to weed out old Facebook connections from time to time. That must have been what was behind a recent Burger King promotion, called “The Whopper Sacrifice,” where the hamburger chain offered a free Whopper to anyone who severed bonds with 10 of their friends.

Burger King says that the viral promotion contributed to the ending of nearly 234,000 friendships before it was shut down after Facebook informed the company that it was violating the site’s Terms of Service by sending notifications letting the unlucky unfriended know that they been dumped for a sandwich. (Facebook doesn’t email you when you’ve been unfriended; you have to find out more serendipitously.)

The entire campaign struck me as terribly cynical but nevertheless deliciously amusing.

I’ve found Facebook invaluable in finding old friends. After I missed my 30th high school reunion, group photos from the event started popping up from old classmates who were similarly Facebook addicted. It was a blast.

Riding on that high, I began plugging in names of people with whom I’d spent time as a child. One search was for a dear friend Jennifer. But when I searched for her, I found two entries. Neither had a picture. So I friended them both.

Only one accepted my offer, which allowed me to see her previously private profile. She was born in 1974. Unfortunately, I was already friends with Jennifer in 1974, and I’m pretty sure she wasn’t a newborn at the time. Click, a logical unfriending.

Sometimes, though, you put out a friend request and the person doesn’t respond. You start to wonder why. Did the person just not see the email asking him or her to confirm? Or was there some hidden animosity that led the person to refuse. I reached out to several colleagues with whom I’d had nasty fallings out years ago. I hoped that maybe the informal chatty Facebook culture would break the ice. I still haven’t heard from them.

For the uninitiated, all this may sound like a huge time suck. It can certainly be that way if you don’t manage your inclinations with enough tough self-love. But ignoring it means missing out on what has become this century’s biggest social phenomenon.

Just consider the numbers. More than one in five of the entire Internet population has been to Facebook. That’s the number from ComScore, which reported that in December 2008, 222 million people visited the site, or 22 percent of the total Internet audience, clocking up a staggering 80 billion monthly page views. That’s up over 120 percent from the same month in 2007.

Another study – this one in the U.K. – reported that more than half of employers found that new hires expected to use social networking sites like Facebook at work. Accordingly, 46 percent of employers allow their workers to use Facebook at any time, 31 percent limited use to certain times, and only 23 percent blocked it entirely.

Facebook, of course isn’t the only social media site which is changing the landscape of communication. Twitter, which I’ve written about before, has well over 4 million users who spend good chunks of their day “tweeting” 140 character or less micro-blog posts about everything from what to order at Café Aroma to the latest technology news (I find both Twitter and Facebook to be invaluable sources of industry news and I justify my time on them as “doing research”).

One of my favorite new sites is called TweetWasters. It’s singular purpose: To calculate how much time you spend on Twitter and then present you with a cynical comment on how non-existent your social life must be.

The service adds up how many tweets you’ve posted, broadly estimates that you spend 30 seconds composing each, and spits out the total number of hours you’ve "wasted" on Twitter.

I entered a couple of my Twitter friends into TweetWasters. One had spent 15 hours to date on Twitter. Another a whopping 2.38 days, to which TweetWasters proclaimed “Um, you are aware there is a real world out there right?”

I’m not that bad off (TweetWaster cynically commented that “My grandmother uses Twitter more than you do”), but I do value my online friends. Which is why it’s been such a blow to lose my daughter’s Web companionship.

I’ve asked her several times to reconsider. Her response: “You’re not my friend, you’re my father.”

Well, I suppose I can’t argue with that. And I can still see her status updates on her Gmail chat and Skype. At least until I go and blab about it publicly and she blocks me there.

Ooops.

I shouldn’t be so crazy over a store. After all, it’s just a large rectangular space whose sole purpose is to sell me expensive stuff I may or may not need. But this store, full of shiny toys, mesmerizing images and deliriously happy shoppers, is something else entirely. And it’s a welcome break from all the news from the Gaza front.

I’m talking, of course, about the first Apple Store in Israel, which opened late last month. Located in the upscale Ramat Aviv Mall, just north of Tel Aviv and down the street from Tel Aviv University, this Apple Store sports the usual mix of state-of-the-art Macintosh computers (with enormous 30-inch cinema displays), the latest iPods (but sadly no iPhone yet – for that we’ll have to wait another 6 months, according to the latest gossip), plus a wall full of accessories in every size and style. The back of the shop hosts Apple’s user-friendly “Genius Bar” where visitors can get free advice and answers to all their Apple conundrums.

The opening of an Apple Store in Israel is a big deal for Mac fanboi’s – like me - in the Holy Land. For my first 10 years of professional computing, I owned a Mac (a little black and white Mac SE with a 40 MB hard drive – today I have 10x that in RAM alone). I used Macs at work and, one time, in front of a class of 100 multimedia students whom I was teaching, I proudly pronounced myself a “Mac Bigot.”

Yet, when I came to Israel, I had no choice but to go PC. In 1995, there was no hi-tech Apple Store and precious few Macs at all in the country. Yedda, the only company in Jerusalem that sold Apple products, was dour, its products ridiculously overpriced.

At the same time, Apple was floundering worldwide, losing ground to the significantly improved Windows 95 operating system. I reluctantly bought a cheap PC clone and for the next 10 years toiled in the Microsoft Diaspora.

2 years ago, though, when my IBM laptop’s hard drive failed, I decided the time was ripe to go back to Mac.

You see, by this time Apple, under the leadership of the triumphant Steve Jobs, had turned around. iPods were on their way to becoming ubiquitous, in turn spurring growing sales of desktop and laptop Macs. MacBooks are now the #1 laptops on college campuses in the U.S., and the iMac is so way cool it still turns heads when visitors come to my office. I was hooked.

There was one niggling problem: In Israel, Yedda was still in charge and despite Apple’s resurgence, they had long since closed the Jerusalem store. If you needed a repair, you had to truck out to an industrial park in Rosh Ha’ayin, over an hour a way from just about anywhere in the country.

I had the unfortunate occasion to pay a visit there once when my daughter’s iPod went on the fritz. The establishment consisted of a small, windowless waiting room and a single under-staffed counter. The entrance was via a loading deck and through a freight elevator.

Now, customers with an Apple problem can take their machine to the brand new Apple Store in Ramat Aviv. It’s still a schlep from Jerusalem, but it’s significantly more pleasant.

Apple’s Israeli turn-around stems from the purchase last year of the Apple license for Israel by iDigital, a company backed by a professional venture capital team including Chemi Peres, Israeli president Shimon Peres’s son. iDigital has clearly invested in aesthetics and customer service.

All of which is good news. Israel has a lot of things going for it – history, identity, falafel – but customer service was never part of the package. I’ve written about that here and here and here.

The employees at the Apple Store, by contrast, are cheerful, helpful and seem to genuinely enjoy what they’re doing. During my visit, I watched as one staffer demonstrated how to use the latest version of iMovie, Apple’s video editing software. The looks on the faces of the customers were priceless. They couldn’t believe how easy it was to use. The employee was clearly relishing the power to impress.

That Israel can support a genuine Apple Store, which is so far above and beyond the typical buying experience in Israel of surly clerks and no exchange/no refund policies, is good news for the entire nation. Granted, something as mundane as buying a new computer is certainly not on the same level as draining the swamps and establishing kibbutzim…or waging a bloody struggle against Hamas for that matter. But it demonstrates that Israel has the potential to win at least one war – the struggle for the consumer’s heart.

I’ll admit that when I first heard about Twitter, I thought it was the most ridiculous thing in the world. As a journalist and a long time blogger, I take pride in crafting a well thought out story, with a beginning, middle and end, and a common theme running throughout.

So the idea of “micro-blogging” in bursts of no more than 140 characters at a time, as you do on Twitter, seemed to me to be entirely untenable. How could a serious writer work under such artificially composed constraints? Who would read such hastily shot off drivel?

Well, apparently a lot of people. Including me now.

Against all my better instincts, I’ve become a Twitter addict. In the age of Web 2.0, the new definition of addiction has become “someone who presses the refresh button on his or her browser more than 20 times an hour.” Guilty as charged. Twitter now has 2 million users. That's an audience that online media properties of all types need to take note of - and get twittering themselves.

Twitter is part of an overall trend towards providing web users with a constant stream of updated information. A blog – the rage of the last 5 years – seems positively passé today. When you post a “tweet,” as they’re called, you’re likely to receive a comment in return not in hours (as on an “old fashioned” website or email list) but in minutes, sometimes even seconds.

In the U.S., you can set Twitter to send a whole stream of discussion to your cell phone as SMS messages. I tried that for a while; the service is free. At first, the tens of messages I received a day made me feel important. “Look how many SMS’s I’m getting. I must be popular!” Eventually all the checking, reading and deleting got to be too much and I shut if off.

Whether via SMS or on the web, this instant gratification is like a drug. You want more so you post more. There are Twitterphiles who update their status every hour…or less. One person I follow got stuck in the airport while returning home; he tweeted his status in real time. “Plane delayed 30 minutes.” “Visiting the bookstore now.” “Finally pre-boarding business class.”

There’s even a category called the “Twitter novel” where a few new media pioneers are writing a book in real time, posting in 140 character snippets and receiving fast feedback.

Twitter seems to be divided into two classes. Users who post every little detail about their lives (“3:00 AM, finally going to sleep,” “Which flavor of ice cream should I buy?”), and serious users who upload valuable insights and links to web pages of serious interest (TechCrunch, GigaOm).

My Twitter posts have included both. I have asked questions and received feedback that have helped me position my new startup. I learned about web applications provider Zoho though a post from one Twitter member I “follow” sent to another (I wasn’t even in the conversation). On the other hand, I have also tweeted about my enthusiasm for the new season of Heroes (the latter resulted in a flame by a disappointed fan) and who has the best ice coffee (hint: it’s not Starbucks).

It’s not just Twitter, of course, that’s changing the face of web interaction. Social networking services of all kinds allow you to update your status and broadcast it to your friends. I can track my daughter’s moods from what she posts on Facebook. One time she wrote “I hate her!” I instant messaged her. “Who do you hate?” “Don’t ask me,” she quickly replied, “or I’ll ‘de-friend’ you.”

Facebook, in particular, is also a godsend for finding old friends. I have re-connected with people I knew from high school, college and various projects I’ve been involved with over the years. LinkedIn, a business-focused social network, is even better for finding out what old colleagues are now up to. Other services include Dopplr (for reporting where you’re traveling) and Tumblr (for quickly tossing online a stream of the pictures, videos or websites you’re looking at).

On both Facebook and LinkedIn, there are “groups” that allow you to mass message other participants – I’m a member of “Jerusalem Web Professionals,” ”Six Degrees of Jewish Separation,” “Guerrilla Marketing Tips for Small Businesses,” “Israel High-Tech” (which boasts an impressive 3,500 members), and “Cool Jew: The Ultimate Guide for Every Member of the Tribe,” among others. When I put together my indie music podcast, I use my MySpace ID to contact the bands.

With all the information flowing this way and that, you’d think that the noise pollution on the web would have reached unbearable heights. At what point do you have to ask, “Who really cares what I’m doing at every hours of the day?”

An article last month by Clive Thompson in the New York Times suggests that people do care.

Thompson says that social scientists have given the sort of incessant online contact that Twitter and Facebook engender a name: “ambient awareness.” It is, Thomson writes, “very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye.”

Thompson goes on. Each little update is insignificant on its own. “But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating.”

Twitter can even be seen as a partial solution to social isolation. Robert Putnam, in his book “Bowling Alone” describes a world in which the mobile workforce requires people to travel more frequently for work, leaving friends and family behind. Ambient intimacy becomes a way to “feel less alone.” And the kind of “weak ties” you have on social networks can actually help you solve problems more efficiently.

Thompson continues: “If you’re looking for a job and ask your friends, they won’t be much help; they’re too similar to you, and thus probably won’t have any leads that you don’t already have yourself. Remote acquaintances will be much more useful, because they’re farther afield, yet still socially intimate enough to want to help you out.”

So far, I’m enjoying the new world of ambient intimacy. But I’m always looking for more friends ☺ If you’d like to join me, my Twitter address is http://twitter.com/brianblum.

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This article originally appeared on the AimGroup.com site where I blog about trends and developments in all things interactive media - check it out: www.AimGroup.com.

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Other social networking resources you might enjoy:

15 Things You Should Never Do on Facebook
Twitter Facts
The 7 Twitter Types

Warning: the following column is a bit risqué. Continue on at your own risk!

My wife Jody and I recently decided to buy a new bed. After 20 years sleeping on the same mattress, we thought it was time to upgrade. We had our eye on a bed from an Israeli company called Hollandia that slides up and down so you can adjust how you sleep (head and legs slightly raised) and also sit up in bed to read more comfortably.

But the main feature of the bed is the mattress, made from Tempur, a type of “memory foam” that conforms to your body and is supposed to help with back problems while providing a truly luxurious sleep. The saleswoman at the store boasted that it was developed by NASA and was used for the beds in space. In the U.S. it’s sold under the brand name Tempur-Pedic.

It was pricey for sure but we felt that since one spends 1/3 or more of the day in bed and what with our 20th wedding anniversary coming up, we had the right to a little pampering. We ordered the bed and waited for delivery.

At just about the same time I discovered an innocuous little website called Thisisby.us. The site allows authors to submit articles, then readers comment and rank them. The site splits advertising revenues with the highest ranked articles.

The top article the day I looked at the site was entitled “Tempur-Pedic beds and sex do not mix.”

Huh?

The paragraph that concerned me most went like this: “Having sex in our bed is very, very difficult. You need to have well laid out plans, several backups, and a safety line in case of emergencies.” The article continued on, explaining that sex on a memory foam mattress is like “making love on quicksand” and that it takes “more effort and energy that could be used for other more pleasurable things.” The foam also heats up which makes for a sweatier session.

I won’t go into any further details, but the article had a whopping 31,340 views, 54 comments and 120 votes. A quick check on Google revealed 272,000 results on the keywords “Tempur” and “sex.” That’s a lot of discussion for a topic a few minutes before I didn’t know even existed.

A quick peruse revealed that most people felt that memory foam did indeed impede their sex life while a small minority like “Mike P” on the ApartmentTherapy blog responded that “sex is better with this mattress…and so is the sleeping afterwards.”

Now, relying on comments from Internet forums isn’t always the best way to go about making an important and expensive decision. Fortunately, we had friends who had also bought a Tempur bed from Hollandia. The question was: how would we ask them about such an intimate issue?

Jody had no problem. She jumped right in and got a straightforward if slightly embarrassed answer from the wife. A few hours later, the husband called us while we were in the car. We put him on the speakerphone. “So you want to know about our sex life?” he asked and then laughed. He was very forthcoming.

Perhaps a little too forthcoming.

“Would you like to try it out?” he asked “We’ll be away this weekend.”

We declined. That seemed a little too weird.

We called up our salesperson. We told her that we were uncomfortable having a discussion with someone who was essentially a perfect stranger, but we had to ask. “Don’t worry,” she replied after hearing our plight. “With Israelis, there’s no such thing as a private question. Believe me, if there was a problem, I would have heard about it.”

We went back into the store. We bounced around on the bed in as many positions as we could get away with without alerting store security. We lay down on mattresses with different depths. We were very methodical.

In the end, we decided to go through with the purchase and buy the bed. If it didn’t work out, our salesperson reassured us, we could swap the mattress for something more traditional. “We want satisfied customers,” she quipped.

We’ve had the bed about a couple of months now. It’s a little squishy but not too hot. I don’t sleep particularly better but my back doesn’t hurt as much. As for the sex, well…after a whole article talking frankly about the subject, did you really expect me to kiss and tell in the end? Suffice it to say that a couple of our friends are already asking when they can give it a try!

The thing that will stick with me the most from our recent 12-day safari in Tanzania is the dirt. An ever-present coat of red dust settles over the entire countryside and soaks into everything – the tasteful khaki safari clothes we bought that are not supposed to display such discoloration, the insides of your shoes all the way down to the toes of the socks, even your nose – when you blow, it comes out crusty and tinged with black.

The dirt is a small price to pay, however, to experience the magic of Africa – at least the rarified colonial version of the continent that makes up the bulk of the average Western tourist’s safari vacation.

To be sure, this is not the Africa of the Masai tribal villagers who still live in mud and corrugated shacks the way their grandparents undoubtedly did and can be seen along the sides of every road, always walking (public transportation is nearly non-existent in rural Tanzania, and if it was, it’s doubtful the locals could afford it).

A full-fledged African safari is, by contrast, exclusively for visitors – most Tanzanians have never even visited one of the country’s numerous national parks and conservation areas – and the accommodations range from simple tented camps (essentially a big zippered canvass tent with a bed and porta-potty) to more full featured lodges and private plantations that are taken straight from “Out of Africa” (if you’re worried about being perceived as a pampered foreigner taking advantage of the locals, keep in mind that you're supporting Tanzania’s economy which relies heavily on tourism).

Tanzania is probably Africa’s premiere safari destination (though not necessarily the best known – that award goes to Kenya). The country offers a wide range of landscapes and animals; its people are modest and accommodating (the welcoming cry of “Jambo!" is infectious), the service is consistently exemplary and the parks meticulously clean (all trash must removed from the park, a refreshing change from Israel’s garbage strewn outdoor attractions).

Our family of five flew into Kilimanjaro International Airport – a stunning way to start the vacation with the famous year-round snow of Mount Kilimanjaro peeking through the tops of the clouds. From there we met up with my inlaws and spent our first night at the relaxing Kigongoni Lodge just outside the bustling town of Arusha, headquarters to the tens of safari operators that trowel northern Tanzania.

We took a great Shabbat afternoon walk past coffee and banana trees where we learned that there are actually six types of bananas grown in Tanzania including sweet red ones - delicious - and another variety just used to make “banana wine” (apparently an acquired taste and not served to foreigners). We ended our walk with a visit to a bustling marketplace (the Tanzanian version of Mahane Yehuda), which was thankfully far off the regular tourist circuit.

Hotels in northern Tanzania typically consist of individual “huts” connected by lit pathways. Beds with mosquito nets can be found in most. In many facilities, you must be “escorted” to your unit after nightfall by a staff member who checks for game animals who may have wandered onto the hotel grounds.

Our itinerary covered four parks and seven facilities in just under two weeks. We drove north, practically to the Kenyan border, then flew back to Arusha for our return trip home.  Never dull, it was physically exhausting – our excellent tour guide and driver Joshua (from Unique Safaris) pushed us to get up at 5:30 AM, eat breakfast and be on the road most days by 6:30. One day, we arose at 4:00 AM for a hot air balloon ride. We wouldn’t return until 6:00 PM at night when we’d take a quick shower before dinner and an early bedtime before heading out again in the morning.

Tarangire National Park

We kicked off our trip in Tarangire National Park, a 2-hour drive from Arusha. Tarangire is known for its elephants, but we also saw a multitude of giraffes, gazelles, antelopes, warthogs (which we jokingly nicknamed “Hogwarts”), literally thousands of wildebeest and zebra, tens of exotic birds (including our favorite, the bright blue Superb Starling), not to mention even a few lions.

The park is filled with tall grass for the animals to feed on, small bushes (I guess that’s why they call it “the bush”), exotic Baobab trees (which look like they’re upside down with their “roots” sticking up) as well as indigenous “sausage” trees which feature a thick hanging fruit that resembles a fat hot dog (the fruit itself tastes awful).

We spent our two nights in Tarangire at the Kikoti Safari Camp which has each of its units raised up on stilts (to prevent animals from coming up to your door, we wondered?). When we arrived we were met by staff members bearing warmed wet wash cloths and glasses of passion fruit juice (a nice touch after a dirty day of driving). There was a performance of traditional Masai dance the first night we were there.

Lake Manyara

From Tarangire we continued to Lake Manyara, a very different landscape with thick forests filled with baboons (the largest concentration in the world) and tree climbing lions (we didn’t see any). A large alkaline soda lake dominates the view with its thousands of pink flamingos and yellow-billed storks. There is also a fresh water pool filled with over a hundred hippos. Hippos are one of the strangest creatures I’ve ever seen – enormously ugly and fast – even with their stubby legs they can outrun a person…and they will if you get between them and the water (hippos are the single largest cause of death among Tanzanian villagers, we were told).

We stayed one night at the Kirumuru Tented Lodge and another at the Plantation Lodge, the latter of which consists of a number of large private houses situated around a grassy lawn (the lodge reminded me of a Israeli kibbutz guest house - albeit much tonier).

Our dinner was typical of those we ate in Africa: hot bread and butter, a fresh salad, creamed soup (we had pumpkin, fennel and broccoli during the course of our trip), a main course (we opted for either fish or pasta) and dessert (the banana flan was pungent, but creative).

Lunches were plentiful but less successful: our hotels packed us up with to-go boxes which somehow consisted of, among other delicacies, identical cheese sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off, a hard boiled egg, some fruit, and (if we were lucky) a Cadbury chocolate bar.

Ngorongoro Crater

From Lake Manyara we continued on to our third park – the 8600 square kilometer Ngorongoro Crater and conservation area – which is where we witnessed our most dramatic animal moment: a very rare “kill” where a female lion sprinted into a vast herd of wildebeest and took down a young animal amidst a storm of dirt and dust from the fleeing herd.

Speaking of dirt again: in Tanzania’s national parks, there is no such thing as a paved road. The official reason is that it would disturb the ecological balance. In reality, it’s probably that it would be too expensive to pave and maintain such an extensive network. The result is that you absolutely need a 4-wheel drive vehicle to navigate your safari, and even then it’s an intensely bumpy ride with dust being kicked up at every turn. Our comfortable 8-seater had an open roof for optimal picture taking. It’s also a blast to stand on the seat while riding through the vast bush.

We spent two nights at the Ngorongoro Sopa Lodge (where we found two large buffaloes camped outside our room) before continuing on to the world-famous Serengeti Plain.

Serengeti

The 14,763 square kilometer Serengeti looks the most like what you’d expect from Africa with flat vistas going on for hundreds of kilometers broken up only by volcanic rock croppings called “kopjes” which sprout up like mini-oasis’s. It was at one of these kopjes where we found our next amazing lion spotting – a large male chomping down on the bones from a recent kill, his paws and jaws still red with blood. Our guide drove in off road for a closer look: we couldn’t have been more than 2 meters from this (hopefully) satisfied king of the jungle.

The Serengeti is filled with large game animals: we found a coalition of young male cheetahs, the “usual” elephants, zebra and giraffes, plus some scary crocodiles along the banks of the Mara River. There were babies everywhere. The park is also the site of the annual wildebeest migration where more than a million animals make the seasonal journey to fresh pasture in the north, then the south, after the biannual rains (although not in August when we visited).

We divided our 3 nights in the Serengeti between the Mbuzi Mawe tented camp (where we were warned to lock our tents as the local baboon population has learned how to unzip them – Jody came face to face with a crafty monkey one morning!) and the more sparse Buffalo Springs camp which, in addition to the porta-potties mentioned above, had outdoor showers supplied by a hot water “bladder” (you open a valve and water flows; when it runs out, you refill the bladder).

So what was the best part of the vacation? The animals? The accommodations? Neither. It was the fact that we were entirely cut off from the world. There were no phones in the rooms, cellular coverage was spotty, Wi-Fi to check email non-existent. Israeli Prime Minister Olmert could have resigned (oh wait, he did that already) and we wouldn’t have known it. That allowed us to concentrate fully on the amazing experience.

In a hectic world, that was the greatest pleasure.

Getting there…

It takes 12 hours to fly from Israel to Kilimanjaro, frustrating given that a direct flight would be no more than 5. The itinerary on Ethiopian Airlines winds its way first to Addis Ababa (a short 3.5 hour night flight), then requires a 4 hour layover in the airport’s awful transit lounge (hard plastic chairs and not enough of them) before flying to Nairobi and waiting on the ground for an hour until continuing on to Tanzania.

We found tickets for $975 per person earlier this year, but depending on availability and soaring oil prices, fares could be double that.

U.S. visitors can fly via Amsterdam which has direct connections to Kilimanjaro International Airport several times a week, or via Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city, which is served by many of the larger airlines such as British Air which connects to Dar from London.

We brought only carry on luggage – the Addis airport is notorious for losing bags – which was a challenge: Ethiopian Airlines has one of the lowest carry on limits of any airline – a paltry 7 kilos (15 pounds). But traveling light is a pleasure when you’re never in the same place for more than 2 nights. And most accommodations offer laundry service.

For the last several months, I’ve been seeing a lovely Chilean woman named Anchela. Now before you get all up in arms, it’s purely platonic. Anchela is my Alexander Technique therapist.

As part of the tikkun for my new office chair (see my previous post here), I’ve started a regimen to address my aching back. Developed by Frederick Matthias Alexander at the end of the 19th Century, the technique aims to improve posture and relieve back pain by recognizing and overcoming “reactive, habitual limitations in movement and thinking.”

Alexander was a Shakespearean orator who developed problems with losing his voice. After doctors told him there was no physical cause, he observed himself in the mirror where he realized he was needlessly stiffening his whole body in preparation to recite or speak. He noted that other individuals experiencing voice problems would tighten the muscles of the upper torso, especially the neck; he suggested that this pattern of tensing would rotate the head backwards and downwards in relationship to the spine and disrupt efficient overall body alignment. It took 8 years for Alexander to solve his own voice problems. He then applied his technique to a variety of posture and back related problems.

Alexander was as interested in changes in perception as he was in physical treatment. My sessions with Anchela include both bodywork done while lying on a table and instructions on how to stand up and sit down.

My Alexander Technique lessons come under the umbrella of Maccabi Tivi, the alternative health care branch of our local HMO. Set in a dank downtown Jerusalem mall, the Macabi Tivi office is a sanctuary, a breath of incense-scented air, flickering candles and soft Windham Hills-tinged music piped in through the ubiquitous stereo that permeates the entire space. The center offers acupuncture, chiropractic treatment, herbs, nutrition consulting and more. And it’s cheap. 10 sessions with Anchela cost me a little over $200.

The Alexander Technique stresses “lengthening” the body. The exercises and treatment are all about stretching and developing better posture. Lying on the table, Anchela pulls at my feet, dangles my arms and swivels my neck. It’s like a massage but gentler. And all the while we talk.

I have learned over the months that Anchela met her Israeli husband while he was backpacking in South America and followed him here. She doesn’t have the kindest words for post-army Israelis on tiyul. “They don’t stop and see the scenery,” Anchela told me one time. “It’s like they’re always rushing to get to the top of a mountain so they can plant the Israeli flag there and then rush back down again.”

I also learned that Anchela lives in the suburb of Modi’in, has a 17 year old son who studies at the Omaniyot arts school in Jerusalem, a 12 year old daughter who just celebrated her bat mitzvah, and that she doesn’t like snow (now there’s something we have in common). And that Anchela is Spanish for Angela.

That’s what’s great about going to the doctor in Israel. It’s so casual, much more so than in North America. In addition to our personal chats, Anchela comes dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. The waiting area is scattered with chairs in no particular order. Anastasia, the Russian-born staffer at the front desk has a caustic wit and heaven forbid you should be late.

There’s also something about the medical experience in Israel that emphasizes how much of a melting pot this part of the world is. A Chilean therapist treating an immigrant from California taking direction from a tough Russian, that’s got to account for something.

Anchela and I speak in English – her Hebrew is fluent, mine not so (but getting there). Even so, I don’t always understand what she’s saying. “Keep your hips loose. Don’t fall into your chest. Keep your neck back and your head up,” she says encouragingly. How do you keep your neck back and your head up at the same time? It’s like walking and chewing gum. Chevy Chase used to make fun of Gerald Ford on Saturday Night Live that way. I nod and pretend I understand what she’s talking about.

During our last visit, I was distracted by some issues at work. I had to think up a response for a software development problem we were having at the company. Lying on the table, I was more taciturn than usual when Anchela burst out, “You’re doing great. Better than ever!”

I told her my mind was elsewhere. “Maybe that’s what you need,” she said. “Now let your arms be free, no resistance, just let them hang.” I complied with a little more gusto, having received such high praise.

Next week will be my last session with Anchela. I’ve used up the annual allotment of treatments that the HMO provides. Am I cured? Not quite, though my back no longer aches and my chair has become more friend than foe.

I’ll miss Anchela. I’ll miss our chats and her soft voice, but most of all I’ll miss my new friend.

My wife Jody and I try to go out for a date night once a week. Sometimes we slip to once every two or three weeks. So when we do get out, we want to make sure it’s good.

Regular readers will know we’re big fans of sushi. So when we heard that our favorite sushi bar had opened a new branch just a few minutes drive from our home, we hastened to give it a try.

We knew something was wrong when we arrived. There were no tables and chairs in the restaurant. Was this a new twist on trendy – the standing room only establishment? We asked at the counter.

“Sorry, we’re only open for take out this week,” the friendly proprietress told us. It was a few days before the Passover holiday, and they were cleaning out their hametz – the leavened bread forbidden during the seven days of Pesach.

Now, a sushi bar doesn’t serve bread per se, but rice is one of the grains classified as kitniyot, “legumes” that appear similar enough to the main prohibited foods that the Rabbis forbade them on Pesach as well.

I was sorely disappointed. I had my heart set on a satisfying sushi meal and it seemed a shame to leave empty handed. Jody had an alternative proposal. “Why don’t we do take out and eat it in a park?” she suggested.

I was hesitant. I had imagined a sumptuous sit down meal with sake and miso soup for an opening course. After some back and forth discussion, I eventually acceded and we ordered some tuna sashimi, sea bass maki and a unique sushi sandwich with sesame seed peppered rice arranged on three sides and a special sauce doused liberally on top.

We took our sushi and headed for nearby San Simon Park. We parked ourselves under a tree, took out our chopsticks and dug in.

Little did we know we were doing exactly what scientists say a long married couple ought to in order to rekindle the romantic love that brought them together in the first place.

In an article by Tara Parker-Pope entitled “Reinventing Date Night for Long-Married Couples” appearing in the New York Times on February 12, 2008, Parker-Pope argues that “simply spending quality time together is probably not enough to prevent a relationship from getting stale.”

“Rather than visiting the same familiar haunts,” Parker-Pope writes, “couples need to tailor their date nights around new and different activities that they both enjoy.” Parker-Pope cites Arthur Agron, a professor of social psychology at the State University of New York: “The goal is to find ways to keep injecting novelty in the relationship. The activity can be as simple as trying a new restaurant or something a little more thrilling, like taking an art class or going to an amusement park.”

Or having sushi on a sunset picnic dinner in a local park.

Reinventing date night is not just new age pseudo-psychology. It’s based on serious brain science. New experiences activate the brain’s reward system, flooding it with dopamine and norepinephrine. “These are the same brain circuits that are ignited in early romantic love, a time of exhilaration and obsessive thoughts about a new partner,” Parker-Pope writes.

“We don’t really know what’s going on in the brain,” comments anthropologist Helen E. Fisher of Rutgers University. “It seems that as you trigger and amp up this reward system in the brain that is associated with romantic love, it’s reasonable to suggest that it’s enabling you to feel more romantic love.”

Experiments prove out the theory. In one study, researchers recruited 53 middle-aged couples. Using standard questionnaires, the researchers measured the couples’ relationship quality and then randomly assigned them to one of three groups.

The first group was instructed to spend 90 minutes a week doing familiar and pleasant activities like dining out or going to a movie. Couples in the second group were told to spend their 90 minutes on “exciting” activities that that the couple didn’t usually do, like attending a concert, hiking or dancing. The third group was not assigned any particular activity.

After 10 weeks, the couples again took tests to gauge the quality of their relationships. Those who had undertaken the “exciting” date, Parker-Pope writes, showed a significantly greater increase in marital satisfaction over the “pleasant” date night group.

Our own experience was similar. As we sat under that tree in the park, thoroughly enjoying our elegant take out meal as a warm Jerusalem breeze fluttered around us and the sun slowly sank between the almond trees, both Jody and I commented on how romantic our evening had become. “Much better than sitting in a loud, crowded restaurant,” Jody said to me as we held hands and watched mothers pushing strollers around the park and dogs romping with their owners.

“You don’t have to swing from the chandeliers,” Dr. Fisher told Parker-Pope. “Just go to a new part of town, take a drive in the country or better yet, don’t make plans at all and see what happens to you.”

Which, however inadvertently our night started out, is exactly what we did.

A Japanese company contacted me by email a couple of weeks ago expressing interest in the new startup I’m in the process of launching. The company, which was representing a large Internet Service Provider based in Osaka, wanted to explore possibilities for collaboration.

I was needless to say quite excited. This was the first time a potential partner had contacted me about my new company, a fact made even more significant given that we’ve done no publicity whatsoever. The Japanese company apparently had learned about me from a conference to which I’d applied (and was turned down from).

I wrote back immediately asking for more information. The Japanese company thanked me for my prompt response and suggested that we set up a meeting for the following week. Two representatives from the company would fly to Israel specifically to meet with me. Wow! My head was swelling with thoughts of where this lucky break could lead.

In order to impress my new suitors I scrambled to build a sample website for the company demonstrating our technology. It ought to be in Japanese, I thought, to demonstrate that our software supports Kanji characters.

The only problem was that I don’t speak Japanese. No worries. A few years ago, I tried to start a company called Onago which was to build web and mobile services for “on the go” travelers, hence the oh-so-clever name. I had assembled a technology dream team, but alas, the timing for the company couldn’t be worse – it was mid-2000 and the dot.com bubble had just burst and no one could raise money. We quietly shelved our plans and I took another job.

When we were doing an Internet name search for Onago, we came across a Japanese site of the same name (but without the .com suffix). I also knew that Onago was a kind of sushi. So, needing Japanese text for my current business, I paid a visit to Onago.jp.

The site was a little strange, such that I could tell given that I didn’t understand a word that was written. It appeared to be a teenager’s blog. There were strands of what looked like poetry, lots of little hearts, and a recipe for preparing fish (complete with pictures).

That seemed innocuous enough for me. Throwing caution to the wind, and with still no idea of what I was reading, I copied several lines of Japanese characters from the site and pasted them into mine. In a few minutes I’d finished creating a web page for the Japanese company that had contacted me. I then sent them the URL of this new demo site and waited for their delighted response.

Unlike the previous day, I didn’t hear back immediately this time. Another day passed and then another. I became concerned. Had I done something wrong? Was the seemingly harmless text I’d blindly copied in fact been offensive? Had I unwittingly expropriated content from a pornography site and caused my suitors to lose face such that they were now assiduously avoiding me?

I should have known better. How many times have I castigated Israelis attempting (and I use the term loosely) to translate ads from Hebrew into what can best be described as pidgin English.

I typed “translate Japanese to English” into Google. A number of translation services came up on the list, including “Google Translate.” Duh…how could I have been so obtuse? I hurriedly pasted the text I’d used into the translation engine. The result was baffling. It read:

Garden of the holy. Also use the last!
We are introduced.
The same fixture
Garden dish made of the holy

I have been told that Japanese is a language based on metaphors. What did “Garden of the holy” mean? Could “We are introduced” be a code name for a dating site? What would be the implications of two things having “the same fixture?” My mind raced.

In desperation, I sent the text to my brother who lived in Japan for 5 years and speaks a decent Japanese (he had been traveling when I first needed the Japanese text). I also asked him to look at the Onago.jp website.

“I can’t figure this site out at all,” he wrote back. “Lord it’s strange. It looks kind of like a Facebook type of thing, but it could also be porn or maybe wife swapping. It’s pretty cheesy and a bit risky. Myself, I’d probably stay away.”

Oh boy…My fears heightened, I went back to Onago.jp myself and started digging deeper. I clicked some of the links. They all went to another site called Special Ribbon which had pages of pictures of women. I clicked one. Oh no…it was a very fat woman wearing a thong. Another click and there was an obese woman in her underwear. Another click. No underwear at all.

Did “Onago” have undesirable connotations going beyond fish?

After a week, I finally broke down and wrote to the Japanese again. Were we still meeting, I asked? The response came immediately. “Of course. See you on Friday.”

We had a very productive meeting. My presentation was flawless and the Japanese seemed impressed. At one point, the Japanese characters I’d copied appeared on the screen. The Japanese moved closer. “Ah,” said one of the Japanese, gazing intently at my site. “That means ‘Hi everyone!’” Everyone laughed, though mine was more a sigh of relief than a guffaw.

Nevertheless, the whole incident reminded me of a famous example from the automotive industry (which has since been proven to be an urban legend but is instructive nonetheless). Chevrolet had done what they thought was a comprehensive name search when they came up with the Nova. It apparently wasn’t enough. The name translated into Spanish as “no go,” about the worse appellation you could think of for a new car.

In the story, Chevy learned its lesson the hard way. I got off more easily. Now I’m working on a follow up site, also in Japanese. But this time, I’m getting a translator!

I’m generally not one to shy away from adventure. I’ll be the first to travel to exotic locations like India and Egypt. 20 years ago I jumped out of an airplane. But there was something about SCUBA diving that freaked me out. After all, human beings can’t naturally breathe under water. So the idea of submerging even just a paltry few meters with only a flimsy air tube separating me from imminent drowning led to great discomfort if not outright fear.

At the same time, I felt like SCUBA diving is something I ought to do. Many of my friends swear by it. An introductory dive, they reassured me, where an instructor accompanies you every step of the way, is not in any way dangerous.

So, on a recent trip to Eilat, I decided to take the plunge. The whole family, actually. It was a typically warm Eilati December day when we headed over to the Red Sea Sports Club to give it the old college try. The following is a primer for any other chicken littles deciding to go all the way.

The dive process actually can be divided into two parts: suiting up and the dive itself. Getting into our wet suits would prove to be the most difficult part of the entire experience.

I’d be generous in calling the wet suit a tight fit. The suit is so form fitting that the only way to get it on is to wiggle around in a hot shower while pouring buckets of liquid soap up and down your legs and arms as you struggle to pull the darn thing over surprisingly bulbous limbs.

The scene was vaguely tragic-comical as the entire Blum family tugged and grunted in the communal shower, standing, sitting and panting heavily. It took us 20 minutes, but we were ultimately successful. Then there was another surprise waiting for us to complete the getting dressed part of the dive: weights. Our instructors tied a belt with virtual barbells around our waists, strapped on a backpack with a heavy air tank and instructed us to walk across the road to the sea.

We must have been some sight – strutting like stiff penguins in our form fitting suits as if we were lugging a walrus across the heavily trafficked highway leading to the Egyptian border.

Eventually we got to the water and climbed in, holding on to the fence that leads to the Coral Beach diving area. We were given our masks, told to spit into and rinse them to keep them from steaming up (mine did anyway) and given last minute instructions on what to do if you accidentally smile while submerged (water gets into the mask which you can exhume by pressing the top of the mask and blowing out with your nose). We were reminded how to “pop” our ears as we descended and taught various hand signals that our instructors would use to guide our dives (up, down, spin like a top…OK I made the last one up).

We had now reached the point of no return. Still, I had a hard time shaking my apprehensions. What if I had a panic attack and couldn’t breathe? What if I opened my mouth too wide and I swallowed water instead of air? What if they’d neglected to fill my oxygen tank all the way and I found myself sucking on nothing (never mind the fact that the tank holds a full 2 hours of air, more than enough for our brief introduction).

But there was no time to contemplate further. My dive instructor nearly pushed me under and then there I was floating and breathing and being pulled down, deeper and deeper.

Well, not that deep. The introductory dive doesn’t go very far out or down – no more than about 5 meters. Still there was plenty to look at – brightly colored clown fish, some lovely striped lion fish, a couple of big blue parrot fish, multi-colored anemones plus plenty of yellow and orange coral waving in the still water with little white eels poking their heads out. It was all absolutely charming and enough to give a good impression of what a full-fledged dive is all about.

We stayed down about 25 minutes before returning to our starting point then trudging out to the shore and back across the road where we were faced with the equally laborious task of removing our wet suits. All told, the entire dive experience lasted just under two hours.

I’d like to be able to tell you that I felt like my friends under the water – free, weightless and at peace. Maybe that comes with time – and space. During the introductory dive, you’re never alone; your guide holds your hand – literally - pointing out interesting fish, and does most of the propulsion for you. Not that I’m complaining. For a first timer, a little help was greatly welcomed.

After the dive, I asked the family if they’d like to do another one. The kids answered with an immediate yes. I was less sure. I hadn’t shaken off my fears entirely. And then there was that wet suit to contend with. But I was certainly glad we’d tried. It was worthwhile experience if not entirely SCUBAduper.

After the fourth litter, we started to reconsider whether to continue our inadvertent role of playing birthing hospital to a family of incestuous rodents.

14-year-old Merav has had hamsters for a year and a half now. We started with just one, a male, but Merav felt he’d be lonely, so we got him a companion, a female. We thought it would be educational to have little hamster babies. And so it was the first time. Merav went positively ga-ga when Mazie the mother started squeezing out these tiny pink little peanut shaped critters. The babies, blind and unable to crawl, let alone walk, squirmed and nursed and were as adorable as little rodents can be.

When Mazie started to eat the runts, however, Merav had a different reaction. “How can she do that?” Merav implored, finding fur and bones in the cage one morning. But that too was an education in the vicissitudes of hamster life.

The surviving babies grew and ran on the wheel, climbed the monkey bars and kicked their food onto the rug in Merav’s room. The more hamsters there were, the more pungent the smell. But everything was still so educational

Then came the second litter. We’re not sure who mated with whom. Baby hamsters become sexually mature in only a few months. The result is a fact of life, but the thought of mother and child “doing it,” as Merav so diminutively put it, was nevertheless not a little bit “icky.”

Shortly thereafter, the mother died. It was undoubtedly from old age (hamsters only live a couple of years and she was fully grown when we’d bought her). Merav was nevertheless choked up and we gave the hamster mom a short funeral before burying her in a flower pot.

Regardless of mom’s departure, the hamster cage was getting full. Fortunately, our local pet store has a policy of buying back baby hamsters for a few shekels. Merav reluctantly parted with some of the older ones from the first litter but wasn’t able to tell which of the remaining babies were males and which were females.

Not surprisingly, a third litter followed. By this time, the incestuous predilections of hamsters were clear and it was all we could do to keep up with their unholy unions, and take more hamsters to the pet store. Our educational process was starting to resemble the Israeli school system: overcrowded and rife with discipline problems.

The more hamsters we had, the more aggressive they became. One day, Merav returned from school to find one of the smaller hamsters with an injured foot. He’d gotten in a tussle with one of his older siblings (or was it a parent?) and was now bleeding and limping around the cage. Merav insisted we call a veterinarian, but I protested: what could a vet do for a broken hamster paw – apply a little hamster cast perhaps?

The next day, the other hamsters had decapitated their injured peer and eaten most of his body.

That was the last straw for Merav. “A year and a half is enough,” she said. She would get rid of all of them.

Bad news was waiting for us: the pet store was all full up. Not only were they not paying, they weren’t taking any new hamsters at all. Merav was in a panic “What am I going to do?” she asked. “Another baby is going to get hurt.”

She called several pet stores until she found one on the other side of town that would take four – but only the young ones. The six-month-old adults were already too “elderly.” Merav brought in the hamsters to the store and we said a not particularly tearful goodbye.

But what would we do with the remaining three? “We could feed them to Bob’s snakes,” I suggested not entirely in jest. Bob already buys frozen mice to feed to his pets; a live hamster would be a real delicacy.

“Abba, that’s disgusting!” Merav replied curtly, visibly offended that I would even think of such a thing.

“Well, we could set them free,” I offered.

“No!” Merav shrieked. “They wouldn’t last an hour. They’d get eaten by cats.”

“We could let them go in the Jerusalem Forest. There are no cats there.” (Well, not many, I thought.)

Merav pondered about that for a while. We debated the pros and cons of freeing pets into the wild. While they probably wouldn’t survive long, they might really enjoy their brief moments of freedom beyond the cage.

The hamsters’ savior came in the form of a phone call from our friend Naomi. She would take them. She had little kids who would enjoy watching the hamsters play. But only the girl hamsters. Naomi wasn’t interested in opening her own breeding facility. Fortunately, the babies had grown up enough to be able to distinguish which sex was which.

That left Merav with one male who is now living a life of solitary confinement. We figure his days as one of the “old men” are numbered anyway. No need to shorten them with a trip to the great outdoors.

If you’re thinking of getting hamsters to entertain or educate your kids, just keep in mind it’s not for the squeamish. Birth, death, even murder – in our hamster education, we’ve seen it all.

On our recent trip to my brother’s wedding, we stopped off in New York before heading to California. We had three days and three kids who had never spent any time in Manhattan before. We packed it in and had a great time. Here’s some of what we did:

Bike Riding in Central Park

Entirely man-made, Central Park is strikingly beautiful and, because it’s mostly flat, superb for bike riding. If you go on a Sunday, the park’s roads are closed off to vehicular traffic, creating a haven for bikers and joggers. You can circle the entire perimeter of the park on two wheels in about an hour and a half at a leisurely pace.

We were lucky that our day in Central Park was clear and warm. However, that also meant that the bike rental shop, near the boathouse, was completely sold out of bikes when we arrived just after noon. We found a shop a 20-minute walk away called Pedal Pushers at 2nd Avenue and 69th Street that was well supplied and very friendly. Our bike ride was cited by most of our family as one of the high points of the trip. The only tricky part was riding in traffic the few blocks from Pedal Pushers to and from the park.

Pedal Pushers
1306 Second Ave (@E 69th St)
(212) 288-5592 or toll free (877) 257-9437
http://pedalpusherbikeshop.com
$5.99 per hour (up to $24.99 for a day). Helmets an extra $3.99 each.

Ellis Island and the Tenement Museum

My grandfather and his sisters came through Ellis Island in the early 1900s, so a visit to this gateway to the U.S. was a historical education for our kids. The island is now a museum run by the National Park Service. It has a good audio tour and a number of rooms with relics from the 60 or so years from 1892 to 1954 the island was operational. More than 12 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island during that time. The tour was more interesting for our older kids – 9-year-old Aviv got a bit bored and frustrated near the end of the hour and a half walk through.

You get to Ellis Island on the Statue Cruises boat from Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan and it includes a free stopover to view the Statue of Liberty – there’s an audio tour there too. The boat leaves every half hour, so you can stop over for thirty minutes at Lady Liberty and hop back on. A scheduling tip: the lines for the boat (which includes a tight security check akin to getting on a plane) can get long midday, so arrive early.

We followed up our historical New York experience with a fascinating visit to the lesser-known Tenement Museum which is located on Orchard Street Street in New York’s Lower East Side. The museum (which must be booked in advance) currently runs three tours – “Getting By,” “Piecing it Together” and the “Confino Living History Tour” – all of which lead groups of 20 or so people on a one-hour walk through a restored tenement building. A personable guide tells the stories of how immigrants lived in the early part of the 20th Century. Although the tour tries to present a variety of nationalities, a look at the list of residents in the building shows mostly Jewish names and a spreadsheet showing working hours indicates that a good 2/3 didn’t work on Saturdays.

For us, the visit was important because my grandfather and his sisters lived on Orchard Street – maybe in that very same building. It’s fascinating to retrace their first steps in a new country.

Ellis Island
(212) 363-3200
Open daily 9:15 AM to 5:00 PM. Closed Dec. 25. Extended hours in the summer
No entrance fee, but the Statue Cruises ferry costs $11.50 for adults, $4.50 for kids ages 3 to 17. Boats leave Battery Park in Manhattan every 30 minutes on the half hour.
www.ellisisland.com

Tenement Museum
108 Orchard Street at Delancey
Advanced reservations highly recommended: call (866) 811-4111 or book online at http://www.tenement.org. Same day tours can be reserved after 11:00 AM. Tours run every 40 minutes from 1:00 PM until 5:00 PM.
Single tour ticket prices: $17 adults, $13 students. There are discounts for booking multiple tours.

Paley Center for Media (formerly The Museum of Television and Radio)

I have wanted to visit the Museum of Television and Radio for 15 years, ever since I missed one of the crucial concluding episodes of that classic angst written TV drama thirtysomething, the one where Michael finally quits and tells evil boss Miles Drentell that “it doesn’t always have to be the best, but it has to be yours.”

The Paley Center for Media (as its now been renamed) is not a museum in the conventional sense. You start off in a room filled with computers attached to a massive database of some 120,000 TV shows. You pick up to 2 shows, then are ushered into another room filled with cubicle-sized watching stations. You type in your show number and it instantly appears on the screen in front of you. For parents, this is an opportunity to wax nostalgic (I also watched an episode of my favorite kids show, The Banana Splits). Amir watched episodes of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Aviv viewed Goosebumps and an animated video Tin Tin. Everyone was in boob tube heaven.

Paley Center for Media.
25 West 52 Street
(212) 621-6600
Open Tuesday – Sunday noon to 6:00 PM, Thursday until 8:00 PM.
$10 adults, $8 students, $5 for children under 13.
http://www.mtr.org/

The American Museum of Natural History

New York’s Natural History Museum is considered to be the best of its kind. A massive structure along Central Park, the museum contains exhibits on everything from geology to human evolution. The dinosaur room, with its huge reconstructed dinosaur skeletons is a perennial kid-friendly favorite.

For our family though, it was the Hayden Planetarium that scored top marks. Maybe it was because our kids had never been to a planetarium before, but they were utterly fascinated. The show, narrated by Robert Redford, chronicles the creation of stars, planets and the universe itself through “cosmic collisions,” past present and future. The entire planetarium shakes as a meteor hits earth, stunning NASA imagery shows the violent face of our sun. As we were exiting the show, Amir turned to me and said “it was too short.” That’s high praise from a teenager.

Outside the planetarium are additional exhibits showing a timeline of events since the Big Bang and the relative sizes and distances from Earth of various celestial bodies. The show runs every half hour from 10:30 AM until 4:30 PM (Wednesday starting at 11:00 AM) and Friday until 7:00 PM.

American Museum of Natural History
Main Entrance: 79th Street at Central Park West
(212) 313-7278
Open 10:00 AM – 5:45 PM
General Admission $19 adults, $12.50 children. With planetarium $26 adults, $17 children
http://www.amnh.org/

Broadway

No trip to New York would be complete without a Broadway show and we indulged this expensive passion with the family friendly musical Hairspray. Rather than pay full price, we had two options: stand in line at the TKTS half price ticket booth in Times Square and hope that a show we wanted to see had tickets available that day, or buy them online before we took off.

We opted for the latter. Do a Google search for the show you want and add “discount tickets” – you’ll come up with several different organizations selling orchestra and mezzanine tickets for around $50 each. Hairspray was available through Playbill (the site requires play seekers to sign up for a free membership and receive daily emails before Playbill will open up the pearly half price gates).

After a show, visit the three floor M&Ms World headquarters in Times Square for some chocolately fun. You’ll never believe how many shapes, sizes and flavors M&Ms come in!

M&M’s World
1600 Broadway
(212) 295-3850
http://www.mymms.com/service/locations.asp

The Millburn Hotel

When does a hotel become an attraction of its own? When it’s ranked 2nd for “Top Ten Family Friendly Hotels” in the authoritative guide “New York with Kids.” What that means in practical terms is that the hotel has a decent if not extensive lending library of kid-oriented DVDs and provides free access to PlayStation II video game consoles in the room (there’s also cable with HBO and wireless Internet access).

The upshot for my wife Jody and me was that we were able to leave the kids in the hotel by themselves happily playing games and watching videos while we treated ourselves to a gourmet meal at Le Marais, a kosher French steakhouse in midtown Manhattan. When you travel with kids, you don’t get a lot of alone time with your spouse. Our night out, courtesy of the Millburn, was worth every penny of Manhattan’s notorious high hotel rates.

Millburn Hotel
242 West 76th Street (between West End and Broadway)
(212) 362-1006 or toll free (800) 833-9622
Suites and individual rooms available; our one bedroom suite ran $369 a night plus tax and local hotel fees.
http://www.milburnhotel.com/

Madras Mahal Indian Restaurant

On Lexington Avenue, between 26th and 27th Streets, there are no less than 5 Indian vegetarian restaurants, two of them even being kosher. Our kids love Indian food (see my column on eTested – Restaurant Reviews) and at lunch time, several of the restaurants on this block offer all you can eat buffets. Madras Mahal, the kosher establishment where we ate, charged just $8.95 each for a sumptuous meal consisting of Indian bread, dosa (a lentil-rice filled crepe), several curries, rice, a bean soup and rice pudding for dessert. Everyone was satiated and our pocket books weren’t drained.

Madras Mahal
104 Lexington Ave
(212) 684-4010
Buffet open 11:30 AM to 3:00 PM daily
http://madrasmahal.tripod.com

The Empire State Building

No visit to New York would be complete without a trip up to the top of the Empire State Building. We were warned that the lines would be long as there were separate queues to buy tickets, go through security and wait for the next elevator, but when we arrived at 9:00 AM, the waits were relatively short and we were up on the 86th floor in short order.

We ordered a couple of audio tours where Joe the Taxi Driver explained what we were looking at – helpful if you’re not a native. A tip: the audio headset has jacks for two headphones – bring your own and more than one person can share a headset at the same time.

As you’re waiting in line, various Empire State Building barkers will try to sell you on the optional “Skyride” motion simulator. Don’t be taken in. We were, and it was a waste of time and money at best, and a nauseating jolt of a ride for some in our party. It’s expensive and the only time during our trip we felt we had truly overspent unnecessarily.

Empire State Building
350 Fifth Avenue between 33rd and 34th Streets
(212) 736-3100
Open 8:00 AM to 2:00 AM (last elevators go up at 1:45 AM)
$18 adults, $13 Youth (12-17), $12 child (6-11)
http://www.esbnyc.com/

A year ago my wife Jody and I attended a wine festival at the Israel Museum. It was the same night as katyusha rockets started to rain down on Haifa as the Second Lebanon War kicked into high gear. The experience was surreal – here we were hopping from winery to winery, sniffing and sipping and sloshing our way through the latest Merlot and Cabernet blends, while a mere 2 hour drive away, our fellow citizens were cowering in bomb shelters.

This year we went back to the wine festival and the northern front was quiet. All those existential questions of whether we should or could be enjoying ourselves in the midst of the war were no longer relevant. The atmosphere was more like a festive garden party. So Jody and I celebrated by doing what we should have done last year, but couldn’t quite bring ourselves to: we got totally plastered.

We weren’t alone. As we staggered between booths offering tastes from the Tishbi, Binyamina, Yatir, Golan, Carmel and Teva wineries (the show attracts the best of both mainstream and boutique shops) I remarked to Jody that the staff who work here must really enjoy their job: all the customers are so happy. And that giddiness only increases as the evening wears on. By the end of the night, we would-be wine connoisseurs were as tipsy as a ladder missing a rung.

The wine festival had moved this year to the Billy Rose Art Garden, a large gravel strewn square dotted with oversized outdoor artwork. Entrance was NIS 50 ($8.50) with each person receiving a pretty wine glass which he or she totes from winery to winery refilling at will. This year our favorite was a Cabernet from the Kadesh-Barnea winery, along with a couple of Gewürztraminers which Jody particularly enjoyed.

Now, for Jody and me, getting drunk is definitely out of the norm. In high school, I was a freak (or a geek, choose your epithet) at least by teenage drinking standards: a near teetotaler in a mid-70s landscape when alcohol flowed like the oil that fueled the gas guzzlers that got us there. Maybe it was my form of rebellion not to party. That good clean lifestyle has served me well over the years but every once in awhile I suppose it’s OK to let your hair down (just don’t tell the kids).

About two hours into the revelry at the Israel Museum, with guests weaving in and out, brushing up against each other inappropriately and dancing to the live jazz that was playing on a central stage, it occurred to Jody and me that if we were going to drive home we needed to sober up. Not accustomed to being anything but sober, this was a new experience. How long would it take for our blood alcohol levels to settle down to a point where it was safe to take to the road, we wondered?

The wine festival had conveniently provided a “chill out” area full of white couches, white beanbag chairs and low white tables on white mats. We found a couple of open spots and collapsed, hoping that time and a little stargazing would temper the wobbly effects of the wine. Three men sitting near us started to flirt with Jody (this tends to happen even when she’s not drunk…)

“What’s up with your husband?” one asked as I lay somberly on my beanbag watching the clouds move past so that the stars appeared to be soaring like airplanes through the muggy night sky.

“You want a peanut?” another asked Jody, holding out a bag.

“No thanks,” Jody answered.

“They’re kosher,” the man assured Jody.

“What about him?” asked his friend. “Does he want some nuts?”

I managed a smile and a shrug without lifting my head.

Now you might think that a wine festival where most of the guests have to drive to get there might have set up a free coffee stand near the exit, but no, there was only more wine and a solitary booth selling sushi. Caffeinated sushi, now there’s a novel idea. Kind of like that Buzz Beer from TV’s The Drew Carey Show.

After about an hour of detoxifying, I finally felt competent enough to drive home. I resolved to drive very slowly and give everyone else the right of way. I would break for a pedestrian a mile off.

I’m happy to say we made it home safe and sound. Perhaps we should have grabbed a cab and picked up the car later. Or assigned one of us to be the designated driver (though what’s the fun of going to a wine festival if only one of you can drink?)

War could still break out – the news the next morning reported on the latest Syrian maneuvers on the border with the Golan Heights. But for one night, we let a little wine tasting work its magic over us. After all, in a country that’s constantly stressed out waiting for the next attack, what could be more “normal” than getting totally plastered every once in awhile.

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The audio version of this article (completely sober, I promise) can be found here.

One of the benefits of working from home is that you can take time off whenever you want, as long as you get your work done, of course. For me, my one consistent break has been a weekly trip to our local falafel stand with my friend Bob. To my exceedingly good fortune, we have what in my opinion is the best falafel in Israel a short 5-minute walk from our respective houses.

Now, falafel is a highly subjective taste and most Israelis will swear by their neighborhood joint. But Falafel Oved on Jerusalem’s Derech Bethlehem in Baka has a few things going for it that make the experience truly outstanding. There’s always a line for ordering, which means that the falafel balls are usually fresh out of the oil. There’s nothing as disappointing as old, cold or soggy falafel balls and Falafel Oved delivers the hot and crispy variety 90% of the time.

Falafel Oved’s other big secret is a garlic sauce that is liberally applied along with humous, harif (hot sauce) and tehina. While a lot of falafel restaurants can make good balls, the garlic sauce elevates Falafel Oved’s concoctions to another plane of existence. Yes, I know I’m laying it on thick, but wrapped up in a soft Arabic-style laffa, it’s just that good.

Of course, the real reason Bob and I make our weekly pilgrimage to Falafel Oved is not really for the falafel but the conversation. Bob and I will talk about everything under the sun – from shul gossip to why our kids hate school, which are the best anti-depression pills to whether God exists and if so, what She thinks we should do about Hamas and the Gaza Strip. In the middle of a day that is otherwise defined by long hours staring at a computer screen, alone without the company of annoying work colleagues to come knocking at the cubicle door to distract me at inappropriate times, our weekly falafel date cannot be underestimated.

On occasion, Bob and I have experimented with other locations. When we heard that a branch of the Ra’anana yuppie falafel chain Falafel Bis had come to our neighborhood, we resolved to give them a chance. Bis’s claim to fame is flavored falafel balls – there’s green with a cilantro, petrazilla and parsley flavor; red which includes chili and hot sauce in a Mexican style; and yellow which symbolizes extra garlic with a slight onion-y tang. The idea is good, but the execution disappoints. The falafel balls themselves are crispy on the outside but mere mush inside. You want your falafel to have a little fight in them, not melt in your mouth.

Bis, which is located on Ben Zakai Street in the Katamon neighborhood, is also too much of a fast food operation for my taste, just not as heimish as Falafel Oved which is run by two scrawny ultra-Orthodox guys who’ve plastered the walls with photos of Rabbis (mystical master Rav Kadouri is a favorite) and kabbalistic faith healers, set up boxes for donation to various charities (there were 11 at my last count), give away CDs with religious lectures, and often play Sephardic cantorial music while you sit in the two wobbly tables on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant.

Bis, on the other hand has clean tile walls done up in alternating blocks of red, white and black and no quasi-spiritual paraphernalia. It does have one thing going for it that Falafel Oved doesn’t – fried garlic bread strips, dripping in oil and artery-hardening calories and free for the taking. You can pile them in a pita or eat them on the side. Afterwards, you feel like crap but it almost makes up for the less than stellar quality of the falafel itself.

Bob had long held that the best falafel in town was at Shlomo Falafel in Jerusalem’s Bucharian Quarter. It’s owned by relatives of his wife. One week we drove across town to give it a shot. The verdict: the balls were better but we found the overall gastronomic experience lacking. No garlic sauce, only a rather plain cabbage salad and not even any humous! Bob’s family favorite was no more.

Falafel is one of the constants of my life in the Middle East. I’ve eaten all over the country and had quite presentable meals in Haifa, Ramat HaSharon, Beersheva and beyond. During our family’s recent trip to Egypt, we got to know the falafel there as well. The Egyptians make a flatter, more oblong ball and put only 2-3 of them in a very small pita (at 25 cents a sandwich, it’s kind of like the White Castle of North Africa). Surprisingly they serve it with potato chips rather than French fries as is usually the case in Israel. We found them quite tasty, but upon our return to Israel, a visit to Falafel Oved confirmed that our local supplier still remained king.

Do Bob and I ever consider branching out to something more exotic, say a burger or a plate of pasta? Nah…that would defeat the down and dirty experience of indulging in Israel’s quintessential national fast food and feeling somehow patriotic while stuffing our guts. And besides, that garlic sauce is just to die for.

Falafel Oved is located just north of Yehuda Street on Derech Bethlehem, between the dry cleaner and the Frankfurter old age home. There’s no phone, no take out and no reservations. Get in line like the rest of us suckers and prepare to indulge. Falafel in a pita runs 11 shekels, in a laffa it’s NIS 15. Bring your own napkins!

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