It was all going so smoothly until now...

So, something I have yet to mention in the blog is that, as Tel Aviv is an always expanding city, they are always building and renovating apartment buildings. One of the apartment buildings that they are currently building is, unfortunately, right next door to us (literally) and every morning we are woken up at 6:45am when they start hammering outside of our window. So, we have started a daily tradition of moving from the bed to the couch around 6:45am, and then sleeping a few more hours on the couch. This is annoying, but not a big deal- especially when we actually have to start getting up for work in the morning anyway.

So, this morning, like every other morning, we are woken up at 6:45am, bring the pillows and blanket to the couch, and fall back asleep. As I am drifting in and out of slumber, I am hearing banging and sawing and thinking "wow, that is getting so loud.. it sounds like they are in our apartment..." and then would fall back asleep. After doing this a few times, I was woken up by a buzzing noise which meant someone was outside of the apartment. We both somewhat ignored it, because we didn't know of anyone who was coming over. A few minutes later, we had an actual knock on our door but by the time we got up and got to check who it was, there was no one there. As I turned around to walk past the kitchen and back to the couch, I looked through the kitchen into our back storage room, and I saw two men standing in there. Needless, to say, I freaked out and started yelling for Oren that there were two men in the storage room. Oren ran in and started asking them (in Hebrew) what they were doing, and we realized they did not speak Hebrew, rather, they spoke Arabic. Upon closer inspection, we realized that they were in our storage room for a good reason- they were removing the 3 feet of cement that had broken through the wall of our storage room and flooded it. Apparently, someone miscalculated something, and whatever was supposed to be in place to prevent the cement from breaking through the wall was not in place. So, as the two Arab men stood in 3 feet of cement and shoveled it into buckets, their supervisor who spoke Hebrew explained to a stunned Oren and me what had happened and told us that they would rebuild the way by Sunday and reimburse us for any property that was damaged (luckily we didn't have a ton of stuff in the room...) So, we spent the rest of the day sitting in the apartment to keep an eye on the "progress" they were making in removing the cement. Photographic proof of this memorable experience coming soon...

At a point later this evening, we finally left the apartment only to be faced with the incredibly sad reality that our bikes had been stolen overnight. Yes, both Oren's bike and the pretty green retro bike with a basket that I got yesterday. Stolen. Oren had been locking his bike up there for months now and never had any trouble... Ridiculous, right?

So, we have concluded that it is time to take matters into our own hands, and first thing tomorrow morning we are going out and purchasing an evil eye to ward off whatever yuckiness has fallen upon us and finally get the parchment for our Mezuzah (non-Jews inquire within and I will explain) and get it hung up ASAP. Call it superstitious or whatever you like, but we are willing to try it.

Alright, time for bed. Here's hoping that tomorrow goes more smoothly than today!