Adjusting

No, not to that. That is a dream/potential nightmare that I will not be discussing tonight.

To this silly country, inconveniences and all.

To start with the positives: I love my apartment.
I love riding the train every day.
I have fabulous, incredible colleagues.
I now have a seder invite, or at least the promise of one pending a phone call to the rabbi tomorrow.
The biggest downside is that my work here is really, really hard and it takes a ton of concentration. Add to that the pressure of 'making the most of my time' and it can be a bit stressful.

But then again there are the little puzzles here. They are extremely paranoid of American credit cards. My credit card is not accepted at any supermarket I have found, nor the train station. This means I have to carry rather a substantial amount of cash with me. But there are tricks: the train station at the airport is the one and only place in the country that takes credit cards. So I went there last week to buy 2 weeks worth of tickets.

I just put my laundry in. It should be washed (not dried) in 2 hours and 10 minutes. It is a small load.

And tonight I made a total fool of myself in the supermarket. If you had asked me in the abstract, I could have explained the whole 'buying produce' system. You pick your produce, take it to the scale, try to find the name of the fruit/vegetable you have in your hand on the scale (not in English obviously), then you weigh your selection and it prints out a nice little price tag. I know this. I've done it before.

[Although one entertaining and embarrassing thing about me is that I have a substantial problem linking the names of vegetables to the physical item. This has resulted in many embarrassing phone calls to my mother in Fairway asking her "If I were looking for an eggplant, what would it look like?" And yes, I love to cook and I cook a lot. People who eat at my apartment never believe this problem is real. It is.]

But tonight I was so distracted by trying to plan the very healthiest meals possible pre-pesach as per the unmentionable secret in my life (obsess much?) that I completely forgot to print a single label. Which means that when I got to the front of the very long post-shabbos, pre-Saturday night binge drinking supermarket line, people were pissed. And no, the cashier did not take someone else instead of me. She called the manager to haul all my produce back to the produce section, very slowly and cautiously weigh it (while I survive death glowers from all of the young couples behind me in line buying beer) and bring it back to the register. Oops.

Speaking of shabbos, I went to synagogue and it was lovely. Although people here are generally pretty unfriendly, they were definitely having an 'on' day. And I was of course invited to lunch. And accepted, without even considering that I was about to spend 3 hours in your average observant household, and that means oodles of children. They were cute and well-behaved and generally left to entertain themselves (as will happen when you have 4 in 6 years and are a wee bit tired, I see nothing wrong with it). But it was SCARY. Am I ready for all of that? Forever? No more shabbos naps for the next 15 years? Total chaos? Oops, not thinking about any of that until the 11th.

I just got off the phone with my mother. She asked four times if anything was new and if I was feeling ok. I feel bad. I know she wants to ask, but she understands why she can't (she is after all a professional counselor). I would love to tell her what's going on, but she's not exactly stellar at keeping secrets. And there is no reason to tell her when I truly have no idea what is going on.

Since this blog is mainly to help me deal with these issues and to remember the process, I'm going to post one little thing related to that. Simply: everything was perfect today. It was a beautiful, sunny (but cold and windy) shabbos. I went to an orthodox synagogue and nobody asked any leading questions to attempt to exclude me/us. I'm in Europe. I was not stressed about work. I'm getting married in 8 weeks to the most incredible man. The wedding planning is done. I had a very slight soreness in my belly which kept me from worrying too much that this was all over (and I wore white underwear as an extra check. I might as well throw away the dark underwear now, I'm not going to wear them for the next many weeks). I want to remember this in case this particular little dream ends. It will be worth what it takes to get back to here.