So here we are, almost exactly one week since I entered the very apartment in which I sit now.
I wish I could say that it was all better now and I’d completely settled in, but that would be pretty far from the truth. As a realist, I’ll be happy if I’ve just found some sort of routine after a month. Hopefully, after a month everything will have settled down a little bit and some sort of routine or at the very least some semblance of normality can be found. But then this is Israel, apparently it’s quite quiet here at the moment as there are peace talks on – though after 60 years of peace talks if they haven’t found it yet, I’m not sure if it wants to be found.
I really just want to move out of this place and move into a flat that I can call my own. Granted, I’ll still be lonely in the evenings but at least it’ll be of my own choosing, in my own space. I think one of my biggest problems is that because I know that I’m going to have to imminently move all of my stuff I’ve held back from buying a lot of things, things that I’d only have to move. What this has meant, is that in the evenings I’ve largely turned vegetarian – subsisting almost entirely upon very plain rice and pasta dishes, and that just isn’t something that you look forward to going home to.
Still, over the weekend, I filled in a questionnaire online from the housing office asking me about the state of my accommodation when I moved in. Obviously, I was not at this point going to lie about the shoddy conditions of this place (bare electrical sockets above immediately above my head in the bed!) 1) because what’s the point of lying on these things and 2) I aint going to be paying for damages I haven’t made. This morning I received an email from the housing office apologising for the state of affairs, stating that this apartment was due for renovation but hadn’t got there yet and that a cleaner would be arriving in 3 days. I haven’t replied as yet because I don’t know if it’s worth it. Apologising doesn’t stop the fact it was shoddy when I got here or that it was severely detrimental to my mental well-being when I got here, nor does it fix it. The cleaner also comes with conditions, namely no one can be in when they turn up and that he/she/they will only stick to communal areas, and anything personal in those communal areas needs to be removed.
Otherwise, I dont know what’s wrong with me at the moment. Thursday night (start of the weekend), I slept for 12 hours. Friday night, I slept for 12 hours. Last night, after going out to dinner with the boss and the Romanian collaborator I got a solid 9 hours (thanks to a sneaky clock change). Which was pretty shameful really as I was beginning to drift during dinner before 9 o’clock. An entire weekend of sleep, procrastination and thesis corrections. Considering the last few months with the rush to finish in the lab, write the the thesis, defend the thesis, get a visa, move to Israel I haven’t really been sleeping more than 5 or 6 hours a night, I dont know where it’s all coming from. Maybe this is me catching up on sleep debt. Maybe this is the crash I was predicting last week. All I know is that it is just gone half 8 and I’m starting to drift again.
Made better when I know that tomorrow is going to be mental. I need to get to the bank. Hopefully collect my bank cards and cheque book. Get my visa extended from an embassy issued “I suppose you can go” to an “Israel says you can stay for a bit”. Find the photographer for my staff photo. Present a paper at the group meeting. And then assuming I have the cheque book run across town, meet the new landlord and sign the contract on the new place – cos I have to hand over 12 pre-dated cheques with the rent for the year (as is the way here).
But going back to dinner for a moment. I learnt 2 things. Ask for your steak a lot more done than you expect. My safety choice of “medium” was seared on the outside and raw in the middle. Also ordering steaks in grams is inherently wrong. The second thing is that my contract is very much definitely a year, with a nonchalant we’ll think about it later, “if I’m happy, if he’s happy, if the project is working”.
So maybe my stay might be shorter than I was expecting when I was leaving Blighty. But right now, a year feels like a really long time. Especially when the flat contract is 12 months, the health insurance is 12 months, a blinking SIM card is a 12 month sign up, gym membership requires a 8-12 month sign up to take it to sensible money from over £50/month. It all feels like an awful lot of commitment to a place where most of the time I could quite happily walk away tomorrow without a second thought.
But then there are moments when it really strikes you. Walking in this morning I saw Israeli flags hanging from some lamp-posts and my first thought was “what kind of idiot would hang them?”. But of course, I am actually in Israel. And that’s strangely very easy to forget in a multi-national lab group. I was also in and out of a nano-science lecture series this afternoon – where the institute had just brought over the top 10 names in the field to evaluate the science on site and whilst they were here give a talk. Now nano-science isnt really my thing but the speaker list was just silly Stanford, Oxford, Harvard, MIT. You know it gets silly when a guy not 15 years older than me is introduced as Sir Professor… not to mention the guy had basically made a frictionless lubricant. His headline figure was that if you somehow put 40 tonnes on his outstretched hand with this stuff on it, you could move those 40 tonnes with less than 400 grams of effort – so less than a jam jar. Or rather throwing a jam jar at this 40 tonne weight would send it shooting off. Crazy!
It’s moments like that where you suddenly remember that you are actually surrounded by some of the best minds in the world.
Makes me wonder then, that I’m not enjoying it more. And of course, instantly brings me back to feeling like I’m one stupid question away from being exposed as a massive fraud.
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