We had been talking for years about moving here. On and off, we kept wondering why most of our friends are here, and we aren’t. Why we insist on inflicting the harsh Eastern European climate on ourselves. Why we live in a city where A. has nothing to entice and challenge him. Why we keep visiting here, but never stay.

A year ago exactly, at the end of January 2011, as we were riding the bus from Eilat to Jerusalem having just crossed the Egyptian border, with the intention of grabbing our things from a friend’s house and running to the airport to go home, we suddenly made a pact we would put an end to this. A year from now, we vowed, we would move here for good. We started telling everyone we knew, to make it impossible to go back on the decision. We started our preparations… no, that we didn’t do. This we put off. Instead, we traveled. Just talking about the move was enough, just prefacing most of our future tense sentences with “when we move,” or “while we’re still here”. We had a chance to secure visas here in August, then in November, but neither worked out.

Six weeks ago A. had to go to Russia. Things had become critical there, and his presence was needed. There were also the visa troubles to attend to, and that, too, pushed him to the country he was trying, almost, to denounce. It transpired that he had to stay there for an entire month. I went out there for the latter half of it to share this time, and together amid the snow, we said our thorough goodbyes to our friends, which did not bring as much pain as it could have. Soon, thought we, we would never have to see snow again. And soon enough our loved ones would come visit.

Ten days ago we were finally in Vilnius again. There was a daunting task ahead of us: we hadn’t begun our packing, and nothing was to be left in the apartment we were leasing out. Not to mention that we still had no visa. The anticipated frantic scramble led me to escalating hysteria before even the first carton was opened to pile books inside. The house I had accustomed myself to seeing as my refuge, my shelter, was now at a late stage of a decaying disease which was robbing it of its personality, its ourness. Our pictures were removed, and empty frames gaped at me from the walls with embarrassing woodenness. Every meeting with every friend or relative reeked of finality. I had my goodbye roda at capoeira class and did not tear up, though I had fully expected to. This was it. It was snowing non-stop, and I felt as if my heart’s city was cleansing itself of me, covering itself up after our prolonged amorous encounter. We took a train to freezing Minsk and after a measured amount of humiliation returned the same day with passports bearing Israeli visas.

On Wednesday, our physical journey began. We loaded all of our possessions into a minivan. The cat was trembling in his plastic confinement, driven into shock by the tribulations he sensed were ahead. A good eight hours later, we were in a dingy room on the outskirts of Minsk. I dealt with the unreal reality by immersing myself in work. After four hours of sleep we continued on the next leg of the trip, which was the scariest flight I’d ever experienced because it was obviously the scariest thing the cat had ever experienced. On the plane, I read John Green’s new novel, The Fault In Our Stars. By landing-time, the cat was screaming and foaming at the mouth, he had soiled himself and left a deep gash in my hand in his attempt to flee, and I was suddenly crying, either because of the book, his suffering, or the realization that only then began to dawn, that we had left home for good.

Ironically, Welcome Home was the motto of the afternoon. Having cleaned up the poor beast, we were carted to an old and homemade-looking absorption center, where we were cooed over, given coffee, and handed our first papers and some cash. Then followed a cab ride with fellow new Jerusalemites, one of them a slightly jaded-sounding American poet, another – a red-cheeked turtle. Finally, the journey was over. All of them were. It was suddenly clear that the journey, for me, was an end in itself. All of the emotional, physical, and financial investment had led to this point in time, and nothing else. It came as a surprise that after moving here, we also had to live here.

I am sipping hot water now, wrapped in someone’s warm poncho, wearing untied shoes, in a red armchair in the corner of a friend’s house. I spent the morning working on stylist interviews and Turkish Jewish music, while A. was out and people were playing vaguely French tunes on an accordion and the battered organ downstairs. There is work to do and our own apartment to find. There are places to go and people to meet. The cat is fine. Winter’s bleak sunshine is filling the yard. It is exceptionally cold. It is shabbat.

This list is by no means exhaustive. These are all things I do simultaneously with different parts of my job. Employee of the year prize, please.

This point was established by a girl and older man at Tashkent’s train station where we were spending the night on metal chairs and had unwisely left a gap between us, in which the girl unscrupulously plopped down and proceeded to chatter in what sounded like a succession of the same highly irritating syllables to her husband/father/unspecified male liaison until I raised my head groggily from my backpack-in-lap sleep arrangement, which caused her to say cheerfully “Oh sorry, miss, I must have woken you!” – then turn right back to her conversation.

The point was driven home further by the four Muslim Indians we shared a compartment with on the way to Samarkand, who kept speaking about Allah in patronizing, sermon-like voices, and one of whom was prone to talking loudly for 40 to 90-minute stretches at a time. (“Young man, are you Muslim? Christian? Tourist? There are Muslim historic sites where we’re going, I thought you might like to know,” was their only communiqué to us save for offering crisps and “Hello, miss” when we ran into them at said historic site later in the day.)

It was stamped and finalized by the man sitting behind us on the plane home, who for the entire time of boarding kept telling each and every passenger that the plane was not full, so everyone should sit anywhere free, which I took to be a technique to insure a neighbor-free flight, until someone did sit down next to him despite several hints to the effect of underbooking, which turned him round, ostensibly, and he spent the best part of the flight talking to his neighbor loudly in a grating voice while I was operating on very few hours of sleep and being kicked regularly in the small of the back by the neighbor and leaned on by the guy in front.

Not to mention the constant line-cutting and the train rides where we were subjected to televisions blaring Uzbek and Russian series at full volume. Maybe I only take these things so hard when I’m sleep-deprived and experiencing invasions of my physical and sensory personal space. However, there is no explaining away the fact that I did not find life in Uzbekistan comfortable in many ways. It became increasingly obvious that while I may not be a xenophobic European, I certainly am a pampered European who likes her streets paved and lit, and solves any and all problems via Visa cards and internet. Where neither option is available, I am flummoxed.

No amount of beautiful architecture interspersed with picturesque quarters can help me brave the old town of Bukhara at night after a day of rain, for my hipster-European sneakers are ill-suited to sliding in the mud and trying to avoid winding mid-street aryks (irrigation ditches). Food that induces cramps and constant awareness of my entire digestive tract, added to the fact that not a single man and only about a third of the local women look attractive*, plus hordes of small children who turn into beggars at the sight of foreigners, chirping “hilow” and “bonzhor”, and once even following us for two blocks begging in a droning monotone and stroking our arms in a disturbing manner, and I’m sure you’ll be asking how I managed to enjoy any of the trip.

The answer to that lies in the terrain of impressionistic prose, to which I lean when writing about the better things in life (hence, incidentally, the lack of report about Venice; perhaps when I’m there again and not so stunned by the universal beauty of it that I can find something to complain about in the beginning). Most of the things I liked, however, go back to the same: all of it being so very unusual and different.

The insular organization of the cities (slum –> expansive stone square, home to three towering madāris –> slum known as “the old mahala”, i.e. “the old quarter” –> another religious complex –> etc.) is not what I’m used to in my more frequent destinations, where narrow, inbred character and architectural polish are distributed evenly throughout most streets. Not that the slums do not encroach on the immaculate palaces. They establish themselves in the shape of souvenir stalls, punctuating the yard of every mosque and madrasah, as well as their immediate environs. Small wonder, as tourists rarely venture into the slums themselves, prefering the ancient and monumental to the living and breathing.

The life experience is also as different as can be. Twice, a friend and I wandered to a chaikhana with the rather urgent purpose of working each on our respective assignment, and found ourselves instead chugging endless cups of tea, talking and leaning back on the bench, affected by the blissful slow atmosphere of the place, the view of the pond framed by magnificent buildings, and the twang of rubābs from the speakers in the trees overhead. Countless times we bought things or stayed and admired things, or listened to stories we otherwise wouldn’t have, lured in by the Arabian Nights accents and inflections of the locals and turns of phrase like “do not go away, a present for you” after buying a dress, or “half-price for you now, the evening bazaar” (at 5 pm, because at 6 it’s dark and everything closes). In our Soviet childhoods, everything to do with Aladdin and Harun al-Rashid was spoken with the same lilt and set against the same white, sandy, and blue backdrop. I find this very hard to resist, so I listen, gaze, and buy away.

In Uzbekistan, one is constantly amazed at how much can be built from very little. This goes for the food, which, while disagreeing with me and being largely meat-based, is nonetheless varied and interesting, comprised though it is of vegetables, rice, and the ubiquitous flatbread. This goes also for the local handicrafts, most woven or embroidered, mere fabrics and thread blossoming in delicate, intricate, colorful designs which made me stare. I saw an Afghan carpet resembling Native American ones, the pattern only a sparse set of chevron stripes and arrows, but I would have paid dearly for it, such was the aesthetic impact. Luckily, it was in a museum, not a shop, and I didn’t see any knock-offs, though I did look.

The list of other things which impressed me is very long, comprising such things as the strikingly welcoming style of communication at all hours of the day and night, the matter-of-fact kindness, the homes and communal buildings and their surprising similarity, the divine fruit and nuts, the abundance of kittens, the Jewish community, which like everywhere else has merged entirely with its surroundings, adopting all the prominent traits of the local culture and becoming an interesting local blend of Uzbek-faced Jewish people called either variations of Rovshan and Alisher or something deeply archaic and Biblical, who typically consider a medieval poetry recital a wedding reception kind of entertainment on a par with singing and dancing, and night-time readings in Jewish texts led by one of the most charming, most charismatic geniuses I’ve met.

I do not, however, have enough pages left in this notebook, the plane is very shaky (I doubt I’ll be able to read my handwriting after), and the gabber behind me has (temporarily?) shut up, so that’s a sorely needed opportunity to catch up on the work I was in no mood to do in Bukhara.

P.S. When I got up to stretch my legs after writing this, I saw that the young man who’d been leaning on me the entire time was whiling away the time by drawing impeccably even patterns of arches and minarets in his notebook. The unfathomable aesthetic sense of these people! One’s only left to wonder why they dress in pleather, velour, and rhinestone-studded jersey all the time.

*Credit where credit is due: the 1/3 of the women who are beautiful, are so in a stunning, uncompromising way.

As I was getting ready to go, something caught my eye on the TV. It was footage of a plane flying directly into a very tall building. I had no idea what the building was, but I was knowledgeable enough in aerodynamics to know that this was not supposed to be happening. The footage repeated several times, slowed down to give me a chance to study every detail of the fuzzy picture. There were clouds of dust billowing from the building. It was folding into itself. I was being late.

It transpired, however, that I was one of the first to arrive. We sat on chairs arranged in a circle in the attic that would go on to house us, with our bonding, learning, and frustrations, two nights a week, rain or shine, for over a year (and then another year for me, five years later, when I had to repeat the course, having abandoned the hotline in favor of 10th grade exams, and then returned, tired of regretting that choice). We knew none of that yet. We were feeling awkward: two, then three, four people who knew nothing about each other, sitting around waiting. The only common topic we could find was what we had all seen on TV that morning, some having watched more than others.

So we sat there for half an hour, talking about the plane crashing into the building. Some knew more about the event than I did, but I think at that time nobody knew for sure. We thought perhaps war was about to break out. We speculated on whether this had been done on purpose or not. The older members of our incomplete circle explained some things, but I, conscious of being the youngest and wishing to appear clever (my perpetual goal as a teen), did not ask many questions, choosing to pronounce important-sounding opinions instead.

What I learned only weeks later was that one of the people in that circle, a young man who went on to be a good friend of mine, a crush even, was in fact studying to be a firefighter. He was learning all the skills which did not help the men and women who perished saving lives on 09/11, and he was doing it at a school which was, as I discovered, a bus stop away from my parents’ home. He went to the U.S. later for a work and travel program, saying he was sick of fighting fires. I do not know what became of him. I am not sure why this feels important and symbolic, but it does.

The world is small. It is very small and full of coincidences and connections. There is also much evil in the world. That in itself is not frightening. It is as it should be, perhaps. What is frightening, though, is the links that run through everything and everyone, and connect the evil to the good with ties which are impossible to sever. You never know, never can know, who and what will tip the scale that final little bit for the good to pull irreparable evil after it. This is what is scariest to me about 09/11, and I understood or contemplated none of it ten years ago.

“Montag just burned Beatty and I’m scared.” — Fahrenheit 451

“Intriguing. Disturbing. Intriguing. Very disturbing! Long.” — The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

“Make Adrian live, make him live, oh no!” — Overqualified

“Jessica Wakefield is a bitch and needs to be slapped.” — Double Love (Sweet Valley High)

“There is no hope for anyone anywhere and everyone will die.” — The Fixer

“Unfair unfair unfair UNFAAAAIR!” — Vernon God Little

“Unfair unfair unfair UNFAIR RACISTS!” — Arthur and George

“Seriously? In these conditions, you found it possible to invite yourself to their house?” — The Bookseller of Kabul

“How can the author bear them not finding out?” — The Bastard of Istanbul

And so on. In a way these can be said to be the purest and most honest recommendations I can provide for these books, sharing not the product of my intellectual processing, but the actual impact they have on wherever feelings come from — my gut, probably — and can be expected to have on others.

The duality of its interpretations – one seeing it as the poetic story of unconditional love between a boy and his tree, and the other as the darkly faithless portrait of a selfish boy who keeps on taking from a tree that keeps on giving – illustrates some of the longest-running debates of moral philosophy: Is there such a thing as true altruism, and are human beings innately kind and selfless or innately unscrupulous and selfish? (We choose to side – and live – with the former.)

What do you think? I’m afraid I have to subscribe to the latter notion—not of humanity in general, but of this story—, although I generally believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt (and often chide A. for being prone to jumping to a pessimistic conclusion). But in this case I really cannot make a case for the boy. This kind of “user mentality” is repugnant. There is no way for me to see past the boy driving the tree further and further down with his passive-aggressive demands.

The greatest danger of reading this book as the story of a selfless tree which rejoices in giving, therefore, is that with this idea comes a justification of the boy’s behaviour, interpreting it, I guess, as gratitude and acceptance of the tree’s benevolence. This is too much of a price to pay for teaching a child that giving is necessary and enjoyable, which message is, in my view, of lesser priority than that of not abusing kindness and practising gratitude and humility.

If ever I have a child, I believe I will read this book with him, and the character I will emphasize shall not be the mono-dimensional, unequivocally good if overly submissive tree. It will be that of the manipulative ingrate who learns at an early age to emotionally bully kinder people into giving him whatever he wants at great cost to themselves. My message will be both Do Not Be That Boy and Do Not Be That Tree—never let anyone do you such an injustice.

Never tell a dead person they’re dead. They may freak out and there’s no knowing what’ll happen.

Unfortunately, this is an equally great idea for one of those morbid zombie apocalypse novels which have been proliferating like particularly disgusting germs lately. Except that in such a novel the second sentence should read, “they may freak out and we know all too well what’ll happen.”

From what I remember, I started today with several variations on the query “icons move on reboot samsung”. When my phone is rebooted or even connected to the computer and then disconnected from it, all my application icons shuffle around and destroy my carefully thought out placement. Answer: this is normal, nothing can be done except installing an outside launcher. I did and disliked it, so for now the icons are in disarray and I’m trying to tame my OCD tendencies. The next query was “wi fi error android”, because I realized the previous research was costing me lots of money on 3g, as my wi-fi was off and wouldn’t turn back on for some reason. (Yes, I go on line using my phone as soon as I open my eyes in the morning.) Answer: this is not normal but usual, nothing can be done except rebooting the phone (and having all the icons move around).

Later, already at work, I googled “djembe laffe” to see what the rhythm I’m about to learn in a three-day workshop sounded like. It appears that laffe or lafè is better known as “kurubi”. One of the results for that was this. Then I checked ”she’s a boy i knew” to see whether it was a good film. I ended up seeing it, and it was very good and led me to my next query: “glamorous lesbians”, because I realized that though there are all kinds of people in the world and surely some of them are lesbians who follow the latest in fashion and wear high heels and shimmering make-up, I have never seen such a one, and even though in all probability she’d look like any other glamorous lady, I still wanted to. This was not a good idea. If any of you need a good query to find lesbian porn, this would be it.

Upon arrival home, I began googling again, first for “hula hooping tips”, then “hula hoop calories” and finally “are unweighted hula hoops useful”, because I have a new-to-me hoop and want to make sure it’s helping my cause, which is the same reason for which earlier I googled “exercise app capoeira” to see if there was any application that would calculate the benefits from my vigorous two-hour workouts if the workouts were not running or cycling (apparently not, what is this obsession with mile-based exercise?, but I discovered a 1989 video with conditioning exercises to improve capoeira technique, which may come in handy).

After clearing things up with the hoop and doing a 20-minute impression of a chicken with St. Vitus Dance, by the end of which I’d like to believe I finally learned to apply the tips yielded by all that research, I googled “שיר השירים” (Song of Songs) to find the Hebrew text for verse 1:17, because someone wants to tattoo these words on her body and doesn’t speak Hebrew, and you may think I know the Bible by heart but I don’t, and why would you assume such a thing? The answer, by the way, is: קרות בתינו ארזים רחיטנו ברותים.

Finally, I decided to write this post, and a flurry of queries ensued: “what I googled today” helped me find out that there is indeed no such application yet. ”game everyone switches places” meant I was looking for a metaphor for my icons shuffling and could vaguely remember there was a children’s game like that. Although the answer, “train wreck”, is technically suitable for the occasion, I decided to forgo the metaphor. “st. vitus dance” was to check that St. Vitus is indeed spelled this way. He is. And that’s a good note to end on.