If anything derails my best attempts at regular blogging, it’s time on the road. Away from home, my life is usually too chaotic to regularly fit a significant stretch of daily drafting time – an unfortunate necessity for a writer as painfully slow as I. Then, even once I return, the work piled up in my absence still keeps me away from the keyboard.

Which, in short, is an oblique apology for the late lack of content. But if I don’t want this already desiccating site to shrivel up and die completely, blogging-while-traveling is a skill I’d best pick up, fast. I head out of town, yet again, to Sweden and Denmark this Friday evening, then return to New York just long enough to unpack and repack for the Toronto Film Festival, which will take me away from home until mid-September.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m thrilled to head out into the world. As Seneca observed several millennia back, “travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” It’s just that, these days, I never seem to have quite enough time to fully consider one completed adventure before being flung into the next. Perhaps, then, it’s William Hazlitt’s more recent (just centuries old) quote that’s more apropos: “I should like to spend the whole of my in life traveling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home.”

“Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.”
-Leonardo Da Vinci

Off to the airport to escape for the weekend. Assuming I can find internet access, blogging to continue apace.

The north of Israel is a land of cellphones. For towns that still lack plumbing in large percentages of the houses, routing phone lines is a definite second (or twenty-second) priority. Which is all to say that getting online isn’t particularly easy – it usually depends on the good graces of shop and restaurant owners willing to unplug their credit card terminals for me to log on. That makes checking email tough, and blogging nearly impossible. So, my apologies for the recent lack of posts.

That said, here a few more random thoughts that have bouncing around in my head during the spare moments in our long, long, long shooting days:

ï You know you’ve been gone for too long when you have to look up your own office telephone number.

ï “When the country falls into chaos, patriotism is born.” – Tao Te Ching

ï The Arab citizens of the Galilee maintain the gift culture of their forefathers – compliment someone’s shirt, and he’ll literally offer it to you off their back. The region’s Jews, similarly, being largely of recent Eastern European extraction, come from a world where a four course meal is happily presented to guests as a light afternoon snack. Let the two cultures cross-pollinate long enough, as they have here, and any time you walk within 100 feet of someone’s home, they’ll empty their refrigerator onto their porch-front table, refusing to let you go until you’ve eaten with them, until you’ve drank several cups of the strongest coffee in the entire world.

ï About that coffee: As Chris, the film’s director, this morning pointed out, when we arrived nearly a month ago, it seemed undrinkably strong, like condensed espresso mixed with day old coffee grinds. Now, it seems just about right. Combine that with the Coke ubiquitously served with meals, and I’ve somehow gone from an essentially caffeine-free diet to more or less mainlining the stuff. On days off, when we aren’t plied with cup after cup of coffee as we move from house to house, I find myself in serious withdrawal: migraine, light shakes. Returning to my New York caffeine-free life is going to be a bitch.

ï Shortly before I left for this trip, I managed to break my camera’s main lens. And, as I didn’t really have time to get it fixed in the whirlwind of frenzied pre-trip preparations, I convinced myself that I didn’t really need to bring it along, that I’d be fine simply grabbing occasional snapshots with my pocket digital. It has since occurred to me that I made the completely wrong choice. Still, I’m looking forward to the remaining handful of shorter trips to Sakhnin, as I suspect there’s a great and imminently publishable photo-essay to be found here.

ï Karmiel, the slightly larger Jewish city next to Sakhnin where we’re staying, is a great reminder of how little I get for the money in New York. Here, one of the players on the team has a huge three-bedroom house with mountain views from his backyard that he rents for about $500 a month. Dinner for four – with drinks and dessert – runs $50.

ï That said, Karmiel’s – and Sakhnin’s – cultural life leaves a bit to be desired. Outside of the soccer team, it seems to be mainly limited to watching goats. When our trip ends in a week, I’ll be more than ready to head back home.

In the hotel room where I’m spending the night, I can pick up someone’s wi-fi signal from the neighboring apartment; two weeks of dial-up was a great reminder that the internet really only changes your life when it’s always on, and moving at high speeds. No wonder AOL and Prodigy sucked.

That said, a few things I’ve noticed here in the past few days:
– Coca Cola is vastly better in glass bottles than in plastic ones.
– Israeli toilets have two levers, the smaller of which uses the lesser volume of water needed to clear out a ‘number 1.’ Growing up in similarly drought-ridden California, where the water-saving alternative was simply not flushing (as we learned in summer camp, “if it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down), the Israeli approach seems a bit more appealing.
– While nearly ever restaurant takes credit cards, you can’t tip by card – you have to do so with cash. Presumably that’s to save waiters from paying taxes. If so, I’d happily boost up my tip by Israeli income tax’s 17%, because when most of the meals you’re paying for involve a whole documentary crew of people, having enough cash on hand to tip is a real pain in the ass.
– Also, it seems sushi bars have yet to catch on in Israel. Having recently eaten at one of the few in Tel Aviv, I’m pretty clear on why.

Listening to conversations over the past few days, I’ve found my long-forgotten (and, even at its peak, already remedial) Hebrew to be holding up much better than expected. I understand about every second or third word, which is usually enough for me to at least get the vague gist of the conversation.

Where that falters, though, is on humor – apparently, understanding jokes requires far better comprehension than I possess. And, while shooting interviews, that’s a problem – when someone’s best material falls flat, they’ll often try to explain it (or, at least, disclaimer it as an intended joke), interrupting the flow of the conversation.

So, to avoid that awkward situation, I’ve taken unconsciously to mirroring the expressions of the Israelis around me. When they look sympathetic or impressed, I catch myself doing the same. When they burst out laughing, I can’t help but do so to; at very least, I smile and shake my head knowingly.

Yet, while I usually feel like I’m doing a surprisingly good job of following along, in the middle of each faux guffaw, I can’t help but think to myself: actually, I have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on.

[Thanks to our wonderful Israeli line producer, Nir Weiss, I’m back online. As much as my shoot schedule permits, I’ll be posting here near-daily, and on Cyan’s site two or three times a week. To all those who emailed in the interim since my last post with their advice: yes, I promise I’ll try really hard not to get blown up.]

“Nes gadol haya sham.”

I recited those Hebrew words while growing up, year after year, prompted each hanukkah by the first letters – ‘nun’, ‘gimmel’, ‘hey’ and ‘shin’ – that in turn adorn the four sides of the dreidels my family would pull out of a box in our garage. Nes gadol haya sham – a great miracle happened there.

In short, that’s what hanukkah – like most other Jewish holidays – is about; memorializing a great miracle that kept the Jewish people alive, century in and century out, despite the best efforts of countless civilizations. Still, in the case of hanukkah, which celebrates the successful revolt of the Maccabees, the miracle we celebrate isn’t the suprising, David-and-Goliath-esque military victory, but rather a much smaller one.

When the Maccabee rebels returned to their Great Temple after tossing the greeks, they found the place ransacked, the Neir Tamid – the Eternal Light – extinguished, with barely enough oil left in the one unbroken flask to last a few hours. Yet, through the eight days it took them to pick and press olives, to replenish their oil supply, the single flask burned on.
From that, then, Hanukkah – eight days, a festival of lights. Yet, in the bigger picture of their against-the-odds win, that little miracle seems, well, not all that miraculous. But, perhaps, that’s the entire point – a miracle of any size is a miracle none the less.

While growing up, I remember each year being told that, In Israel, dreidels differ slightly – the letter ‘pey’ replaces ‘shin’, the stood-for word ‘po’ replaces ‘sham’. Nes gadol haya po – a great miracle happened here. In this very place.

I thought of that today as I drove back from Ben Gurion Airport towards Tel Aviv. I had just sent out Chris, our director, and the Israeli crew that will be following him, off to Newcastle, to shoot Sakhnin’s UEFA game later this week. As we had been running behind on our way to the airport – we wanted to get there in time to film the team’s bus pulling up – I had given in to the urgings of my car-ull of Israelis, and driven straight through, despite the nearly-empty state of my car’s gas tank.

The fuel light had come on well before we arrived at the airport, and, on my way back, the needle was dipping further and further below the empty line. I drove along the highway to Tel Aviv, looking desperately ahead for signs of roadside gas stations on the horizon. But, not only were there not any gas stations, there weren’t even any exits – aside from junctions for equally large highways shooting off towards the desert on either side – for tens of miles.

By the time I pulled off the highway onto the first exit I could find, the car was already beginning to slow slightly – my top speed had dropped to maybe sixty kilomters per hour. And, as I drove, increasingly slowly, down block after block of the small road I had exited onto, the odds of finding a gas station seemed increasingly slim. The small commercial strip gave way to sparse apartment complexes, and handfuls of industrial buildings.

Still, knowing I certainly didn’t have enough fuel to return to highway speed, I kept pushing forward. I was doing thirty kilometers an hour at best, but the car kept going, one painful mile at a time. Finally, some ten minutes after I had turned onto the road, I caught sight of a gas station far up on the left. Ever slower, I rolled forward, my eye on the glowing sign ahead.

By the time I pulled in, the engine was knocking, and I was barely doing five kilometers an hour. But I managed to roll the car up alongside the pump. As I stepped out of the car, breathing in the beautiful smell of petrol, I thought about those Israeli dreidels. Nes gadol haya po. A great miracle happened here. Apparently they still do.

A few weeks back, I wrote that I was thinking about taking a month and moving somewhere other than New York, for no real reason other than that I could. And while I threw out a number of possibilities – New Orleans, Vancouver, Rome – a small Arab town in the far north of Israel wasn’t really on the list.

None the less, it appears that’s what’s on the slate – on rather short notice, I’ll be headed off to Sakhnin, a small village deep in the heart of the Galilee, for about a month.

I wasn’t, at first, thrilled about that, but the more I’ve marinated in the fact of the trip, the more excited I’ve become. Sure, given the choice, I’d have had a bit more time to prep, to temporarily close out the loose ends of my New York life. But, in the end, there’s very little I won’t be able to push forward by email and phone.

So, consider this official notice. By the end of the week, this blog will switch from a collection of the misadventures of a young New Yorker, to a collection of the misadventures of a young New Yorker who just happens to be living in Middle-of-Nowhere, Israel. If only just for a month.

Assuming I can get all the internet access stuff worked out, blogging should continue (relatively) uninterrupted. Though, as early disclaimer, I should point out that drastic change of scene doesn’t always help ongoing programming; just think of Saved by the Bell: The College Years.

Despite my earlier belief that I’d be back in New York for a (reasonably) extended stretch, it appears I’m bound back for Israel (and possibly England) by the middle of next week.

And despite, by now, having become used to travel, to juggling jobs and films and responsibilities, I increasingly feel as though I’m falling slightly further behind with each step. Friends and colleagues have started telling me I look stressed out, tired, and generally on the verge of cracking.

So, at this point, my choices seem to be:

A. Slog through, ever harder, in the hopes of making it to a quieter stretch.
B. Give up completely and retire to a forsaken upland hermitage.
C. Invent a machine to periodically freeze time so I can take advantage of the pauses and catch back up.

Clearly, option C is where I’ll be focusing my energy.