Voting

A week before elections, I finally figured out who to vote for. Thank you, israel.electioncompass.org. I thought I should vote for that party, but being able to compare parties' stances on the issues I care about (with sources given!) is very important to me.

Voting itself was a lot of fun. Election day is a national holiday, and there really is a tangible happy excitement in the air. This bubbliness is only helped along by the fact that the voting booths/ballot boxes themselves look like science fair projects that didn't get too much parental help.

Here's the voting booth, as photographed by friends of ours in Northern Israel.

And here's the selection of ballots, printed on normal paper, each about the size of a playing card. Notice that in this voting booth, the chart reminding you of which abbreviation is for which party has fallen down.

After standing in the privacy of the voting booth and carefully placing one and only one ballot in the very official envelope given to you by the voting attendents (the envelope actually is nice: dark blue, lined with black, with two actual signatures on the front to show it's 100% official), you seal your envelope and enjoy the immemsely emotionally satisfying experience of placing your envelope into the Government Suggestion Box. (I'm totally not being sarcastic, by the way. This simple form of physical voting is very emotionally satisfying, even though it totally feels like suggesting the local library get a few more copies of your favorite book. Still, I am left wondering why on earth this process is not electronic.)

Photo Credit: ynet's Herzel Yosef

And since today is a national holiday, we took the opportunity to go see Elmo at the Bloomfield Science Museum. The museum itself is a lot like The Franklin Institue, but forgive me for saying so, is even nicer. Not only are there more exhibits (and cheaper admission prices), there are step-stools everywhere. Naturally, this was all way above BSM's level, though he did enjoy grabbing a plastic ball from one of the exhibits and playing fetch with it.

However, we brought him to see the giant Elmo puppet, who only shows up on rare occasions. The giant Elmo turned out to be a person in a mascot costume (naturally), and BSM reacted as could have been expected: he didn't freak out, and he did seem to think it was cool, but rather intimidating. He loved the promotional sticker he got, though. He could hold it in his hand, and it had a tiny little pixely picture of Elmo hidden on it.

Really, taking him was a bit of a waste, but I would have felt bad if I knew Elmo was half an hour away from us, and we didn't take BSM to go see him. On a side note, the photo-op was in a little corner dressed up to look like Rechov Sumsum. It is soooo much prettier than Sesame Street. Just saying.