Weddings!

If you're reading this, you probably already know that Michal and I were recently married. But because we held two ceremonies, one in Israel and one in California, very few people attended both events. So, as a prelude to a series of posts about our month-long honeymoon in Vietnam, I'm posting some photos from both weddings.

First, the Israeli wedding:

"The Big Reveal" - just before I saw Michal in her wedding dress for the first time.

I approved.

I mean, seriously, who wouldn't?

We did a pre-wedding photo shoot, of course.

Things got a little silly.

Or perhaps very silly.

 The weather turned threatening..

..so we relocated.

These photos were all taken in Sarona Market, where there was a terrorist attack only a few days ago.

The rain storm that had just passed and the setting sun made everything glow.

Our drivers insisted on appearing in a photo with us. It's so hard to find good help these days.

Tres chic.

Of course, we had to take a silly one.

Finally, we've gotten to the important part: pictures of baby Inbal (and Asher).

Here's Inbal again (and Maya).

Both families.

 Just the Americans (plus Michal).

Just the Israelis (plus me).

Michal's grandparents (Asher's parents) Nissan and Aliza.

Just the young, ahem, gentlemen. What did I say earlier about the help? Mhmm.

The young ladies were much more dignified.

 Walking up to the chuppah.

Michal doing the same.

Michal waiting for me..

..here I am.

Approaching the chuppah together.

There were quite a few people.

They were quite attentive.

All of us: bride and groom, parents of the couple, and the officiant (don't call him a rabbi) under the chuppah. Here, Michal is reading a few lines from our ketubah.

 Israeli marriage ceremonies end quite dramatically, with the breaking of a glass.

That look on my face is intense relief that I didn't screw up breaking the glass.

After that it was pretty much just drinking, eating and dancing. We have more than 500 pictures from this portion of the evening, but they're all pretty much the same. It was a good time, and if you weren't there, I wish you could have been.

Drinking.

Dancing.

It wouldn't be a Jewish wedding if the couple weren't hoisted up in chairs and nearly dropped! I automatically adopted a bullriding stance, but Michal was less thrilled.

Her dress was designed for this moment.

Even though it was a Wednesday night, we kept going for quite a while.

All in all, it was a pretty great wedding.

I didn't intend this to be such a long post, so I'll do the American wedding photos separately. Stay tuned!

הדירה החדשה של מיכל ובנג'מין

(Michal and Benjamin's New Apartment)

Michal and I recently moved from a very small ground level apartment in Nachla'ot (נחלאות) to a large, bright one bedroom in the city center.

It's only a 15 minute walk, according to Google.

First of all, the old place. It was about 250 square feet split between two rooms. Though it was small, it was in pretty good condition and we had it set up really well. It was just enough for Michal and I. Just. And we rather like each other.

 The front room. The front door is just out of frame to the left. The two windows on the far wall are on the same level as the alley outside.

The other side of the front room. Michal and her father, Asher, added the shelf on the right which held the microwave and toaster oven. Between them and the counter top gas range that's hidden behind the fridge, the kitchen worked surprisingly well.

 The bedroom. America is actually quite unusual to the extent that most bedrooms have built-in closets. We had that wardrobe pretty much completely filled.

Michal's desk and the bathroom, which made a telephone booth feel comparatively spacious.

And that's it! Quick tour, eh?

To be honest, though, the sheer size of the apartment wasn't why we moved. I may have grumbled when I first arrived, but as we grew accustomed to it, we stopped noticing its size. And it was certainly easy to keep clean. No, the problems were pretty much all outside the apartment itself, both literally and figuratively.

First and foremost, it wasn't much fun having our home on the same level as the alley outside. If we didn't keep the shutters low, all and sundry could look directly into our home. And even with the shutters lowered, we couldn't escape the sounds of our many neighbors. Nachla'ot is an old neighborhood that has only recently become popular again. It is very dense, with numerous small apartments built one atop another.

You can't help knowing what your neighbors are up to in a neighborhood like Nachla'ot. Photo source: flickr.

Also, a large percentage of the residents are still orthodox and Haredi Jewish families and/or what Israelis refer to as Mizrachi (מזרחי, literally "eastern," thus of Iranian, Iraqi, etc. descent). They are, quite frankly, outrageously loud. One woman in particular had Michal and I fantasizing about an epidemic of laryngitis. On a nearly daily basis, she would walk down the alley screaming at the top of her lungs for the most mundane reasons. "Yitzak! YI-I-I-T-ZAK!!" "What?!" "Give me a cigarette?" She and her brood were constantly arguing with each other and every night they'd search for their dog (whom they apparently never thought to keep inside), wandering through the alleys hollering "Snoopy! Come! Come, Snoopy!" I confess that at times I wished the dog would run away for good (or worse), just so I wouldn't  have to hear its name called every night.

So, yeah: it felt like all of Nachla'ot was traipsing through our living room shouting. And then there were the upstairs neighbors that dropped pool balls on the tile floor in the middle of the night and the landlord that wanted to raise the rent more than 25%. Clearly it was time to go.

What we found was a bit of a diamond in the rough. One might have also called it a dump. Though wonderfully located, well laid out and spacious, the former tenant didn't appear to have cleaned in, well.. ever. There were large and apparent water stains from a burst pipe several years before, numerous holes in the plaster and the floors featured such intractable stains that only bleach would (eventually) get them out.

But it had potential! So we signed a lease, bought some paint and asked Asher to loan us his tools.

A scaled floor plan of our new place. It's about 45m² or 480 sq. ft. Click to embiggen.

Here's what it looked like when we took over.

 There are several things that confuse me about the layout of the apartment. This entryway for instance: why is it so big?

Neighbors told us that a pipe burst several years ago. Clearly repairing the damage wasn't a priority for the former tenant.

Ugh. Plaster falling off the wall above the tub. Heavy rust stains in the tub itself. And the worst: instead of a nice, clean line of silicone between the tub and sink and the tile there were fat rubber gaskets epoxied in place. All along their edges were years and years worth of grime and mold.

Halfway through cleaning the tile above the tub. It was like this everywhere.

An example of the terrible rubber gaskets, these from the kitchen sink. Ewwww.

The bedroom. Its walls were heavily stained beneath where a desk had been and above the bed.

 The kitchen, including the entire extent of cabinetry. The former tenant

 Another view of the kitchen looking out toward the "utility balcony" (מרפסת שרות). This is another mystifying feature of the apartment. Why waste windows on a utility area? Isn't it better to use that space inside the apartment?

 The "utility balcony" connects the kitchen and the living room. It's about 40 inches wide.

The living room. You can only see a little of the water staining alongside the heat/cooling unit at the top of the photo.

Looking back toward the "utility balcony" from the living room. Note the water stains above the door. They extended along a broad swath of the ceiling as well.

After we got the keys, Asher and I spent a full weekend patching the walls, installing a florescent light in the kitchen and repairing all manner of miscellany. I spent the following week painting pretty much every flat surface in the apartment, including multiple coats on all of the water stains. The next weekend, Asher returned and we installed shelves and he, Michal and I moved all of our belongings from the old place to the new.

And so, without further ado, our new place.

Michal's desk fits pretty nicely in the strangely big entryway. It was Michal's idea to cover the bedroom door glass with the Mexican rug. Quite colorful, no?

Another view of the entryway. The front door is on the far right.

The bathroom will never be perfect, but considering our old bathroom wasn't much bigger than the tub, we're satisfied.

The bedroom. It's just big enough.

 We considered not having a closet in the bedroom to give us more room, but decided it would be too weird to have to walk to the living room to get your clothes.

This side of the kitchen isn't all that different except for the addition of the oven..

 ..but the opposite side is 100% better than it was.

And we're far from done in the kitchen: when Michal's sister and brother-in-law, Merav and Yaniv, move to their new home in February they'll give us another couple of shelves. One will go at counter height to complete an 'L' (or 'ר' depending upon your perspective), replacing the brown wooden desk seen above. The other two shelves will go above the built-in cabinets shown in the previous picture, also in an 'L' ('ר') configuration except at eye level.

A funny thing happened when I went looking online for "small kitchen ideas": nearly every kitchen I saw was larger than ours. Yet when I drew a floor plan for some of Michal's family and described our plans, their comment was "Wow, so you have a big kitchen. Nice." Go figure.

 The living room. We actually have someplace to sit. Hooray!

 The other side of the living room. Man, that rug makes the place look classy. Really ties the room together, ya know?

The water stains around the heat/cooling unit are almost completely covered by fresh paint.

And that's pretty much it. We have way too long of a list of projects we'd still like to do, but we're in and settled.