Day 219 (El Frido)

For one reason and another, I decided to run into Rami Levy (our grocery store) today. I've been to Rami Levy on an Erev Shabbos once before, but I figured maybe I was exaggerating how crazy it was. Maybe since I had just moved, I was more easily overwhelmed. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to just pick up the three things on my list. Tip: it is just as crazy as I remembered, but if you use shopping bags instead of a cart, it's more navigable. While at Rami Levy, I saw a woman. I knew I'd met her, and I knew I liked her, and she greeted me by name and asked how I was doing, but I still couldn't place her. Luckily, I didn't work up the guts to ask her to remind me what her name was, because as I wished her Shabbat Shalom and turned to leave, it clicked. It was Landlady! I like that my brain has her face filed under, "someone I really, really like" even if my brain can't bother to file her under the seemingly more useful "landlady."

Speaking of people I like, we finally had Shabbos guests from the Yishuv! I'll call them the Barzilai's. Mrs. Barzilai is the lady who saw me playing with BSM on the sidewalk one day and invited us to come to the park with them: they're that sort of people. We had a very nice time, them being very nice people, and all.

Having the Barzilai's over also solidified the feeling of having picked a good community for ourselves. We have a few unusual customs on Friday night: we smell hadassim, Husbinator makes a long kiddush, and we make hamotzi over twelve challahs. Generally, people ask what's up, and Husbinator tells them. This time, Rabbi Barzilai was all, "Hey, look, hadassim! Like the grandfather who met Rebbe Shimon bar Yochai!" and, "Ah! You take your time when you get to Hashem's name!" When he saw the oodles of little rolls coming out for hamotzi, Rabbi Barzilai just said, "Look at that! You keep all of the customs!" It's like... it's like... we're fitting in. Weird, no?

We did totally stump the Barzilai's at dessert though: they had never seen an apple pie. Is it a cake? Is it like a strudel? The only words the dictionary had for "pie" were "souflee" sort of words, so we agreed it was rather like a strudel. As Husbinator pointed out, if they can't identify an apple pie from eating one, then giving them the correct Hebrew word won't really help.