I am finally writing this blog after nearly two months of:

• What will this break in my career do to me?
• Let’s eat pita falafel for lunch and dinner
• I will surely do the laundry today
• Let’s get to Season 3 of Arrow so that we can watch the Flash-Arrow crossover

I still have a ton of utensils to wash and cook for the day. But all that can wait.

Settling down in Tel Aviv took two weeks. And we found our way to the shuk (market) on Day 2 because our luggage did not make it to Tel Aviv with us. I found that forced shopping within a tight budget was not exciting. Especially when you are out dressed in your host’s t-shirt and boxers.

Soon after, it was time for house hunting. House hunting in Tel Aviv was just as treacherous as it is anywhere else in the world, just the added misery of the websites being in Hebrew and Google Translate providing comedic relief. One Mr Wolf was looking for a tenant for his house on Peace Street. Zeev, a common name in Israel means wolf and I did not bother looking for what the name of the street in Hebrew really meant.

The reality of living in Israel does not hit you once you land. I realised what it meant to live here when a prospective landlady joked while mentioning that the bedroom was all concrete and comes in handy considering the recent war. She was referring to the 50-day war that had just ended. We did not rent that house, but when I moved in to my current residence, I did find out where the nearest bomb shelter is located. For those in Tel Aviv, the siren indicting that you rush to your nearest bomb shelter gives you a buffer of 90 seconds to make that dash. I was also informed by a 13-year-old that those who stay very close to Gaza do not have that luxury. “You hear the siren and you just sit in your home hoping it won’t come fall on your house,” he said.