Snowmaggedon, or the week that Ukrainian snow disrupted everybody's life in every way

Here's a little bit of lately from Jerusalem.

1. Snowmaggedon

If you don't live in Israel, sometime in December you may have caught a brief news article in a national paper on the massive snow-storm that blew in from the Ukraine and covered Jerusalem in snow; you may have seen some charming photos of the Old City blanketed in snow or watched footage on the news of Israelis struggling to drive their cars on snowy roads and running around in clothing that is patently unsuitable for snowy weather.  The impact on your life will have been minimal. 

Doesn't it look beautiful and tranquil?  You have NO IDEA.

However, if you live in this country, 'Snowmaggedon' probably hit you in every way possible - physically, emotionally, spiritually, electronically.  The snow began falling on a Thursday morning and continued, pretty steadily, until Sunday morning; in the garden at school it was well up to people's knees so I'd judge that several feet of snow settled.  This was the biggest snowfall in a lifetime - the last time they saw snow like this was in the 1960s.  And for a nation that is so well-prepared when it comes to dealing with emergencies (like bombs or rockets or wars), Israel turned out to be spectacularly unprepared for this one.  Fair enough, you might say - why prepare for snow when it's so rare?  You've got a point but whilst you enjoy your moment on the moral high ground let me outline for you some of the effects of the snow-fall for those fortunate enough (?) to have experienced it:

• there was no public transport within Jerusalem or even out of Jerusalem for several days.  They actually sealed off the city - the main highway to Tel Aviv is essentially one huge hill and even the Israeli authorities were sensible enough to realise that letting people drive up or down it in this weather was a recipe for disaster.  Back in town, buses didn't run.  The trams didn't run.  There were no cars on the road.  Just walking anywhere was a slog because the roads were not cleared and neither were the pavements.
• when they did finally start clearing the roads - not, I hasten to add, with snow ploughs but with (I think) diggers - all they did was push as much snow out of the way as possible and dump it onto the pavement.  This then made walking anywhere pretty perilous and lasted for another week before things finally started melting.  Just getting out of my house was an adventure - the snow was about two foot deep in our little alley, which gets no sun in the winter, so it packed down hard then froze over.  It's a miracle I didn't fall over, especially given my track record in that area.
• nothing was open - no restaurants, no bars, no shops. Any shop that was open sold out of essentials like bread and milk in seconds. On the Friday morning, Snow-Day+2 we could call it, the shuk, which normally on a Friday is a sweaty heaving mass of people, was largely silent. Of course everything was then shut on Saturday for Shabbat, but even by Sunday evening most shops had empty shelves that couldn't be refilled and it was starting to resemble Soviet-era Russia with the lines at bakeries and the scramble for milk when things were finally delivered.  In a rare moment of prescience I realised what the snow would do to my regular weekend diet of eggs/milk/bread and bought what I could on Thursday before the shut-down commenced.  I felt pretty smug about that.
• thousands of homes were without electricity for days. The Israeli news seemed to have a permanent loop of stories outlining how miserable this was for those affected and how useless the electricity companies were at dealing with it. In my neighbourhood a lot of houses lost power and a lot of the power cables that already hang worringly low actually trailed along the ground in various pools of water. I'm astonished no one was seriously electrocuted.
• the covered part of the shuk was totally wrecked because, it turns out, no one had anticipated several feet of snow falling and the plastic roofing that does such a good job of keeping out the rain was totally unable to support the weight of the snow and collapsed onto many different stalls. I walked through the shuk on Snow-Day+3 and it was like a scene from The Day After Tomorrow when all the shops have been abandoned, there's rubbish everywhere and there are rabid wolves stalking humans through the alleys. Sadly there were no wolves but there were many, many cats hanging around.

Where's Dennis Quaid when you need him?

• following the example of the plastic roofing, trees all over Jerusalem gave up the ghost and collapsed under the snow.  This for me is actually one of the saddest parts of the whole event - Jerusalem is, on the whole (at least in the western part of the city) quite green and leafy, but the snowstorm damaged a significant number of trees.  In our back yard there's a pomegranate tree planted 80 years ago that is now hunched over like an old man going to the post office.  In the garden at school we've had to cut down two enormous trees that actually died - isn't it sad that trees can die? - and had become dangerous.  Along the wall of the Old City that runs down to Jaffa Gate two huge, ancient trees fell down.  Naturally I tripped trying to get past one of them in the snow and would have fallen if I hadn't grabbed onto a friend who stopped me from going arse-over-tit - not the first time he would have to do that over the course of the next few days.  Anyway, Jerusalem is now a less leafy city and despite all the people who keep droning on about 'nature's cycle' I, for one, am sad about that.

When I flew home before Christmas, a week after the snow started falling, they were still clearing snow from the streets and it was still an ice-rink of death in my little Nachlaot alleyway.  At least four people actually died as a direct resut of the snow.  They will be talking about this for years and I'm secretly rather glad I got to live through it.

2. Ulpan - the next level

I have now graduated from my third set of Hebrew lessons (ב) to my fourth (ב+), which I'm pretty pleased about though, worryingly, my marks for passing the end-of-class reading/writing exam seem to be following a downward trend - from 92% to 89% and, most recently, 81%.  This bothers me, mostly because it takes me back to my attempts to learn piano as a teenager, when I passed my Grade 1 with flying colours, my Grade 2 less so, my Grade 3 barely and failed Grade 4, which depending on your perspective is either due to the new teacher who scared the living daylights out of me or my total inability to play the notes with my right hand and my left hand at the same time.  I don't want to bottom out of the fourth round of Hebrew lessons, not least because this time round I've got the teacher from my first class, Dana, who is a) briliant and b) lovely.  However I am struggling to juggle twice-weekly classes with my increased workload (of which more later) - we've had four lessons so far and I've missed two of them for work-related events.  I've been pretty pants at doing my homework as well, which means that I'm not revising my verbs and grammar structure but I am losing my reputation as a keener.  Every cloud...

3. My increased work load

Some time in November the Board at AISJ saw fit, in their wisdom, to offer me the job of Head of the Secondary School which I rather rashly accepted.  This was supposed to start in July this year but again, in their wisdom, the decision was taken to move me up to Head of Secondary sooner so that my boss could be moved up to his new position as Director of the whole school.  This was about five weeks ago and officialy began three weeks ago, so for the past three weeks I've felt somewhat like a rabbit in the headlights. 



This is a very exciting thing but also a very terrifying thing; I've wanted to be a headteacher of a school since I started teaching, so this is a pretty significant event for me and it took a lot of prayer and wisdom from friends/family before even applying for it in the first place.  It is also a huge step up and a huge responsibility.  I've already screwed up several times (of course) and I am already working considerably longer hours than I used to.  I now have business cards, a large office, millions of meetings and a mountain of filing that would frighten Sisyphus.  Hopefully it won't take too long for the frighteningly steep learning curve to even out.  I'm sure you'll hear more about it on this blog though I'm also now aware that I can't be quite the blabber-mouth that I have been previously now that I'm (as my boss tells me) 'the public face' of the school.  One of the parents (Italian dad, of course) did tell me that I look much prettier behind my desk than my boss did when he sat there, so that made me feel pretty good for at least five minutes before the next round of meetings started.

So, that's the latest from Jerusalem that my befuddled mind can put together.  Next time: an update on my ongoing investigation into what it actually means to be Israeli, and why the guy at the bread stall in the shuk can't seem to take no for an answer.