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Shavuot, the most recent Jewish holiday is known, among others, as the Festival of Reaping; the time in which the first crops were traditionally brought up to the Temple in Jerusalem. I won't get into the technicalities of it, since I have little knowledge and possibly even less interest in the subject, but you can read more about it here. I spent Shavuot (this past Wednesday) up north on my uncle's kibbutz. The kibbutzim are very well known for having pretty elaborate Shavuot festivities, so after a dairy-filled meal, my cousins and I, along with assorted offspring, went to see the ceremony in the afternoon.
I hadn't been to one of these things since... well, since I stopped living in a farming community when I was 13. Looking at it today, I can say that the target audience for these types of ceremonies is aged between 2 and 10. Since my cousins all have little kids these days, we had quite the crew in attendance.
The setup for the ceremony was as follows: At the edge of a large, plowed field, were "bleachers" constructed of huge bales of hay. In front of them was a flat area, probably about 20 meters wide, for people to sit on the ground or on blankets. This area was roped off at the front. Beyond the rope were 20 more flat meters, and past them was a "stage" - a large tractor wagon decorated with bales of hay and flowers. The MCs stood on the stage and narrated the ceremony.
Quite naturally, parents with very small children sat up front on the patch, behind the rope, so that their kids could have a good view, and also so that they could participate in the part of the ceremony in which the children bring their own "crop baskets" to "Jerusalem" (i.e. the stage).
I sat along with my cousins and their kids (aged 6 months to 4 years) right up front, by the rope.
The reason for all of this setup has to do with what ensued; the "artistic" component of the ceremony. Which was MORTIFYING.
The artistic portion of the ceremony was an illustration of the workings of the kibbutz orchard, which is apparently one of the more profitable crops for the kibbutz. The "show' consisted of a guy up on stage describing the various stages of growing and then reaping oranges, accompanied by a "comical" demonstration of the process, which is as follows:
1. Planting small orange trees - two boys came right up to the rope with a branch of an orange tree, dug up a small hole in the ground and "planted" the tree.
2. Watering - a boy came over with a watering can, pouring some water around the "roots".
3. Fertilizing - a tractor drove up, carrying a "tanker" (imagine the big gasoline tankers you see on big trucks on the highway, smaller in scale), and "fertilized" the plant by spraying it with water from the tank. As an attempt at humour, the spraying wasn't reserved to the plant alone, but rather to the entire front row of the audience (the one with all the little kids, I'll remind). At this point I turned to my cousin's husband and asked: "Do you suppose someone went in there and scrubbed out all the fertilizer remnants before they sprayed us just now?" to which he replied with a grunt, while holding his 6-month-old son: "I doubt it."
4. Spraying with pesticides - lather, rinse, repeat of stage 3, but this time with a different looking machine. It didn't have a tanker, but it still sprayed the audience and again, I very much doubt anyone cleaned the pesticide remnants before taking it on "the show".
5. Shake the fruit from the tree - a big machine with a clamp apparently drives up to the tree, shaking the fruit to the ground (or containers, I suppose). To illustrate how well the machine works, they had the driver drive up to one of the young boys participating in the show (a teenager, I think), and pretend to shake the piss out of him while he pretended to hold his penis in a pissing stance. After that hilarious bit, the clamp pulled the plant out of the ground and drove off, concluding this lovely display.
No, I did not make ANY part of this up. I still have to pinch myself to convince myself that it actually happened.
What mortified me in that HORRIFIC display was that (a) Welcome to 2007, a time when almost everyone in the world is concerned with the environment and the damage humans inflict upon it. Do you really think it's NECESSARY to share with the world that stage about the pesticides, and moreover, do it so gleefully? I mean, yes, I hate bugs and all, but no, I probably WON'T ever purchase your produce again, and I'm strongly debating whether to ever purchase non-organic produce, while I'm at it; and (b) HELLO? WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU SPRAYING BABIES WITH FERTILIZER AND PESTICIDES, YOU IMBECILS?
I left that thing angry. Angry at the idiots who allowed that display; angry at myself for years of not really caring about the crap I put into my mouth and all the damage it does to the planet long before then; angry at this country, where the concept of organics is about as foreign as the concept of peace.
It's unfortunate though, that while fruits and vegetables are an essential part of any healthy diet, the only kind I can put in my mouth are covered with the crap with which those idiots were only so happy to spray me. It's a catch-22, really. I'm truly trying to be a lot more conscientious about the environement and about my own eating habits, but the only way to "improve" them is to take in the unhealthy bi-products of the crappy process within which my food is cultivated. Being vehicularly-challenged, I don't even have the option of trying to find organically-grown produce (which is rather reminiscent of the whole recycling issue I talked about a few days ago).
I'd love to start my own little garden of home-grown, organic produce, but I haven't got anywhere to do it yet. Honestly - what's a greening-minded girl to do, living under such conditions? Here's an intersting story about someone who found a way to live a relatively organic life, and who also initiated a rather large-scale composting and organic lifestyle within his community. I've been to his moshav, visiting a friend who owns organic lime and avocado orchards. I applaud him for recognizing that he was part of the large mechanism that contributed to damaging the environment and upon that realization, taking the steps necessary to try to turn the scales. I hope that the small steps I'm taking will lead to the same direction.
There are big, big changes afoot for rappyamhappy in the next few months. I'll get into them at a later date, but these changes have caused me to examine a number of things a little more carefully.
The first thing I've become ultra-aware of is the environment and my contribution towards its demise. Having moved to Toronto right around the time that the city and its suburbs began recycling on a mass scale, I essentially grew up with recycling as a default. If I couldn't find a recycling bin in which to toss my can of Coke, I'd be wracked with guilt with the thought of tossing it in the garbage. Not only does almost everything get recycled in Toronto today, they even have compost collection! My parents started composting years before the city caught on to the need, so I was aware of the process, but I applaud the GTA for implementing it en masse. Today my parents toss out about a grocery bag's worth of garbage every week, recycling and composting everything else.
As I write this, I'm listening to the sounds of the garbage truck driving by on my suburban Tel Aviv street. Garbage is collected here three times a week (it's collected daily in Tel Aviv itself; in Toronto, by way of comparison, garbage is collected ONCE A WEEK), with each truck operated by three people, plus one person whose job it is to go into the yards of individual apartment buildings to take the garbage bins out to the street. On a personal, resigned level, I'm blase about the whole process now, because I know I can't expect any better, but on a conceptual level, it infuriates me.
I can't find the article to confirm this, but a while back I read an article in Haaretz newspaper, quoting some sort of recycling figure that literally made me snort (recycling figures from the Ministry of the Environment can be found here). Mostly because it was in the low double-digits, a ridiculously inflated figure. The reason for this is that the Israeli government thinks that its citizen are complete and utter morons. This is unsurprising, given the people who "run" this country, but I digress.
The only mass scale recycling that goes on in this country is of plastic bottles. There are big "cages" (the Ministry of the Environment likes to call them "receptacles", but everyone here refers to them as cages) spread on various street corners throughout the country, into which you can toss your plastic bottles for recycling (more details regarding these cages can be found here). The closest cage to my house is about half a kilometer away, meaning that in order for me to recycle I have to hoard my bottles somewhere in my tiny apartment until I can find time to go to the cage. Then I have to walk around with bags precariously filled with bottles. Once I toss the bottles into the cages, which must be done one-by-one, through small round holes in the cage, I'm left with a selection of plastic bags in hand. Since I normally go to the recycling cage when I'm on my way somewhere, I have nowhere to put the empty bags except the garbage. Because why should the cages include a solution for recycling the plastic bags, really?
All of this, by the way, is applicable only to larger plastic bottles. Let's examine the process for smaller (under 1l) bottles. In 2001, Israel implemented the Deposit Law on Beverage Containers. Essentially, prices for all small bottles were raised by 25 agorot (1 NIS = 100 agorot, approximately 6 US cents), considered a "deposit". Upon consuming the contents, the bottles could (conceptually) be returned for a 25 agorot refund.
At the time that the law was implemented, the only place you could go to claim your refund was the grocery store. Sounds easy, right? So in theory, I could buy a bottle of iced tea, drink it while I was shopping, and then hand it over to the cashier and ask for my refund. In theory. In practice, the grocery stores would only accept bottles in multiples of 10 in order to issue a refund (and in most cases, not even a refund - store credit, forcing me to continue to shop there). So after finishing my bottle of iced tea, I would have to find somewhere to store it, take it home and start a collection to reach 10 bottles. And so I did, happily collecting bottles willy-nilly in anticipation of my refund. I'd toss the bottle of iced tea in there, followed by an Eden water bottle, a Neviot water bottle, and assorted other bottles. Once I'd reach the longed for quantity, I would happily make my way to my local grocery store (hereinafter: HELL), approach the head cashier with my loot, and politely ask for my 5 NIS. (Because for a whole 5 NIS, it's really worth getting out of the house, you see).
The cashier would take one look at my bag of goods and respond with an emphatic "No". "Why not?" I would ask. "They all have to be the same kind of bottle," she would respond. HUH? So in order for me to get my money back, I'd have to buy 10 bottles of Eden, 10 bottles of Neviot, 10 bottles of iced tea? Is that how this is supposed to work, I'm supposed to over-consume in order to meet your strict standards? Suffice it to say, at this point I started tossing my smaller bottles into the cages with my larger bottles, when I managed to get to the cages, that is. More often than not, I'm embarrassed to say, I just tossed the bottles in the garbage, because recycling became SUCH A HASSLE.
That was one way of handling this ridiculous process. Another was the enterprising concept of opening "recycling storefronts". Some of Israel's leading crime enterprising families opened up "recycling centres", in which they would take any bottles you wanted to give, without the aforesaid sorting hassles. The only catch was that they'd only pay you 20 agorot per bottle. A miniscule loss for the citizen, a massive gain for the criminals environmentally conscientious owners. Did I happen to mention that two of Israel's leading enterprising families have turned this venture into their main area of contention?
In light of all of the above, the Israeli clown posse government, decided to extend the deposit law to all bottles, bowing down to pressure from the ultra-orthodox community, which is characterized by massive consumption of family-sized bottled beverages and a very low levels of employment motivation income.
I'm particularly amused by this quote:
"Since the law was put into effect it has raised ire within the ultra-Orthodox community because it did not include 1.5 liter containers. Leaders in the ultra-Orthodox community have argued that the law excludes customers from large families, who typically buy the larger, family-size bottles, and therefore cannot receive the 25 agorot refund."
Um, hello? THEY WILL RAISE THE PRICE BY THE AMOUNT OF THE "REFUND", YOU MORONS!"
All of the above goes to show why recycling is bound to never succeed in this country. (Let us not even go into recycling such things as glass, aluminum or paper.) Instead of making recycling easy and convenient, it is layered with hardships and stupidity. I don't need to be "paid" to recycle and I don't think the vast majority of Israelis are looking to make a killing (if you'll pardon the pun) on returning plastic bottles. What we need is to have recycling bins right next to our garbage bins, and trucks that are equipped to collect both simultaneously; or alternatively, give up one day of garbage collection in favour of recycling collection.
I mean, really, it's not like Israeli authorities need to INVENT recycling practices. All they need to do is copy the processes that have been successfully implemented and refined over the past twenty years in the majority of the developed world.
All of this is to say that in light of the non-existent recycling facilities, I've been really careful with what I actually consume. With the reduce/reuse/recycle mantra in mind, and knowing that the latter is largely unavailable, I've been trying to focus on reducing and reusing. In general, I'm trying to buy less, of everything, and I'm trying to reuse what I have. Plastic bottles at home get refilled with tap water or with home-made ice tea. Plastic bags are taken when I go for groceries or produce, in order to avoid bringing in more plastic into my house (I laud the city of San Francisco for recently banning the use of plastic shopping bags). Being friendly to the environment is not only about the health of the planet, it's also about personal health, a topic I'll expand on at a later date.
This evening there was a fire throwing event at the southern end of the Tel Aviv boardwalk, right by the dolphinarium. I'm glad I brought my tripod along, because some of the shots turned out awesome.
Walking around Munich yesterday, I became strangely obsessed with lines.
Saturday, May 5, 2007 was 24 hours of flickr day. I spent the day travelling in Switzerland, as evidenced below...
Now that I've discovered the nifty gallery tool from flickr, I'm taking the opportunity to post a few more pictures of Knut!
I've always been fairly oblivious to grafitti. I mean, I acknowledge its existence, but never gave it any thought. That changed when I saw a stunning grafitti wall in Soller, Palma de Mallorca. I've posted pictures here before but am too lazy to link to them. At any rate, I snapped a few more pics in Berlin over the weekend and have created a set in flickr and am testing out a flickr tool called pictobrowser to display the pictures.
I saw Knut! in the Berlin zoo yesterday. Yes, he IS that cute, and no, I don't know if the experience was worth it. Entrance to the zoo costs 11€. Knut! is on display between 11-12 and 14-15 each day. We got there for the last ten minutes of the first showing and it was NUTS. I literally could not get a decent glimpse for more than two seconds at a time, as there were HORDES of people there.
To the Berlin zoo's credit, they set up two viewing circles, one for children on the inside, and one for adults on the outside, so at least the kids get to see the bear. Once the viewing ended we walked around the zoo for another two hours, thinking we'd get to Knut(!)'s enclosure at 13:40 for a good spot. Well. They actually close off the area right up until the showing, and there was a lineup of several hundred people in front of us, so we made the sane choice to leave and go for Indian food.
It's kind of amazing that Knut! has become such a huge sensation. It's not like no polar bear has ever been born in a zoo. I think the Berlin zoo realized what a marketing draw it would make, because dude, baby polar bear=THE CUTE, and cashed in. I suppose it's a better way to get funding than begging the government for money, so good for them, but the media circus around the whole thing is a bit much.
At any rate, these are the few good shots we got (thank you, Sigma 28-300mm lens!). Can you stand the cute?
