good bye Holy City, hello Modi'in
Looks like these bi-annual reports are becoming the norm. It still makes me sad that I don't have more time to write, but I guess with two kids under one and a half at home with me ALL THE TIME, I have a decent enough excuse.
So where to begin? Well shortly after Amalia was born in June, we started looking for a new place to live. My husband got a really good new job that based him out of Tel Aviv - and provided him (us!) with a company car - but the commuting was a killer and he was soon pulling 14-15 hour days, coming home absolutely wiped and hardly ever got to see the kids (he left before they were up and came home after they were in bed). Obviously, we hardly got to spend any decent time together either and so we knew that we really had to move.
It was not a hard decision because the fact is we loathed and detested our apartment and couldn't wait to leave. Jerusalem we loved, the apartment we hated. To add fuel to the fire, our landlord became the landlord from hell once we told him we wanted to leave and soon the situation there became untenable. I couldn't wait to find a new place so we could pack up and get the hell out of there.
Problem was - where to move to? We had a list of basic criteria: decent commuting distance for Doron, good public transportation for me (until we are in a better situation financially and can afford to buy a car), a reasonably sized English-speaking community would also be nice (yes I know I am supposed to be all acclimatised and native Israeli by now, but the fact is I will ALWAYS think/dream/swear and speak in my native tongue no matter how good my Hebrew gets (although truth be told since I have been at "at-home mum" it's deteriorated no end. Although I can sing loads of kids songs in Hebrew thanks to the children's cable channel on TV!)
In terms of the apartment itself, well the most important thing was that it had to be either on the ground floor or have an elevator. Being on the third floor without an elevator and two babies (and nappy bag, groceries etc etc was a KILLER!) Some outdoor space would be great too, having gone without even the tiniest balcony in our last apartment we realised how important it was for us to have some outdoor breathing space.
We looked at a few cities and although we did see some nice places (most out of our budget unfortunately) nothing felt absolutely right and we were determined not to cave in and take a place out of desperation, only to end up in another nightmare accommodation situation.
Then a friend suggested Modi'in.
Modi'in is a very new city - Israel's first truly planned city in fact - that grew out of the coastal plain roughly halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv some seventeen years ago. There was literally nothing here before 1993, bar a few rural communities. Now Modi'in is home to almost 80,000 people. That's some pretty crazy population growth!
I actually visited an Australian family who were living in Modi'in back in 2003 when I was first in Israel and studying in Arad. I was only meant to spend Friday afternoon with them, but missed the last bus before Shabbat and so I found myself stuck there for the whole weekend. I don't remember much about that weekend (except cursing the fact that I was stuck there all weekend without so much as a change of underwear) but I do clearly recall what a gorgeous house this family lived in. It was two storey, with a basement and a large garden. I'd never seen anything like it in Israel. It was so.... western! However, outside the house all I can remember were dusty unsealed roads and lots and lots of empty space. "Who in their right mind would want to live here?" I thought to myself at the time. "It's in the middle of fucking nowhere!"
Well seven years later I am living here! With my Israeli husband and my two Israeli-born children. Me and 80,000 other people. There's still a lot of unpaved dusty roads and tons of construction (the other side of our street for example!) but what a testament to this insane country I have called home for almost four years now. Take a bit of arid land, put some decent town planning to good use and voila! a city custom-built for families. Loads of greenery, parks and playgrounds practically at the end of every street, schools, shops, malls - you name it, it's all here.
When I was still living in Hong Kong, the last place my family lived was a place called Discovery Bay, located on Lantau Island (on the opposite side of the island to where the airport is now). Disco Bay or "DB" as it was more commonly referred to by locals, was also an anomaly in HK. People lived in HOUSES (WHAT??) or condos or spacious apartments with lovely views of either the mountains or the sea. It was very nice, but also a little creepy. It was all a little bit too... sanitised... too clean... too organised... too artificial. So not Hong Kong. Where's the dirt? The pollution, the crud, the stench?
And that's how I thought Modi'in would be. Kind of the Disco Bay of Israel. Maybe even a little "Stepford Wives-ish". And it's because of this, my pre-conceptions of a place I hadn't seen in seven years and had only spent 24 hours in anyway, that initially I didn't even want to check it out as a possibility.
Well, when we were running out of options and every day in our Jerusalem apartment was killing me that little bit more that we decided what the hell, what can it hurt to check out the place?
Well, damn lucky we did. We drove into the city on a Friday morning with half a dozen or so apartments to see and Doron and I just looked at each other as we drove around. "Yup" we said, "this is the place." We just need to find the right apartment.
That, we discovered, was easier said than done. Modi'in is overwhelmingly populated by owner-occupiers. I read somewhere that only about 17% of all property here is rented. So lots of gorgeous places and not a whole lot of them up for rent. We were also approaching the big holiday season in Israel (Jewish New Year, Yom Kippur, Sukkot) and NO ONE moves at this time. We were getting desperate. After months of searching for a place to live (practically every weekend was taken up with flat hunting - never fun, but totally not fun with little kids!) we were exhausted and more than a little bit despondent.
Then - finally - a new listing. It was advertised in the week between Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur. We called the owner and went to see it a couple of hours later. We came. We saw. We loved. We took it!
We really found a gem of an apartment. It might only be two bedroom, but while the children are so small, it's really not a big deal. It's full of sunshine during the day, and we have so much more living space, it's wonderful, such a luxury! And best of all, we have two HUGE terraces (combined probably the size of our old apartment!) that I can't wait to decorate with loads of plants, an outdoor table and chairs, the hammock we got from a friend for our wedding which is STILL in its wrapping paper and of course being the Aussie that I am - a BBQ!!
We moved three weeks ago and although we still have to put pictures up on the walls, it definitely feels like home - something our last place never felt like. We've got friendly neighbours, an amazing online community of residents who send helpful replies to my numerous questions and queries about life in Modi'in and tonight we discovered our local shul (synagogue). It's in the street behind ours, which is actually still being built. In fact, the only completed building is the synagogue. As we walked home with the kids in their Sherman tank (our affectionate name for our double stroller) we laughed as we realised that we were walking in the dark (no street lights here yet) down an unpaved street, my sandals filling with sand and building rubble. "This street is a building site and yet the one completed building is a synagogue". That really touched me. I hope it gives you a sense of our new home and the warm community we have found.
Here's a photo I took the other day of Liev and Amalia (Amalia had just rolled over onto her tummy for the first time and big brother Liev was pretty thrilled!) in our new home.
Shabbat Shalom from Modi'in!
So where to begin? Well shortly after Amalia was born in June, we started looking for a new place to live. My husband got a really good new job that based him out of Tel Aviv - and provided him (us!) with a company car - but the commuting was a killer and he was soon pulling 14-15 hour days, coming home absolutely wiped and hardly ever got to see the kids (he left before they were up and came home after they were in bed). Obviously, we hardly got to spend any decent time together either and so we knew that we really had to move.
It was not a hard decision because the fact is we loathed and detested our apartment and couldn't wait to leave. Jerusalem we loved, the apartment we hated. To add fuel to the fire, our landlord became the landlord from hell once we told him we wanted to leave and soon the situation there became untenable. I couldn't wait to find a new place so we could pack up and get the hell out of there.
Problem was - where to move to? We had a list of basic criteria: decent commuting distance for Doron, good public transportation for me (until we are in a better situation financially and can afford to buy a car), a reasonably sized English-speaking community would also be nice (yes I know I am supposed to be all acclimatised and native Israeli by now, but the fact is I will ALWAYS think/dream/swear and speak in my native tongue no matter how good my Hebrew gets (although truth be told since I have been at "at-home mum" it's deteriorated no end. Although I can sing loads of kids songs in Hebrew thanks to the children's cable channel on TV!)
In terms of the apartment itself, well the most important thing was that it had to be either on the ground floor or have an elevator. Being on the third floor without an elevator and two babies (and nappy bag, groceries etc etc was a KILLER!) Some outdoor space would be great too, having gone without even the tiniest balcony in our last apartment we realised how important it was for us to have some outdoor breathing space.
We looked at a few cities and although we did see some nice places (most out of our budget unfortunately) nothing felt absolutely right and we were determined not to cave in and take a place out of desperation, only to end up in another nightmare accommodation situation.
Then a friend suggested Modi'in.
Modi'in is a very new city - Israel's first truly planned city in fact - that grew out of the coastal plain roughly halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv some seventeen years ago. There was literally nothing here before 1993, bar a few rural communities. Now Modi'in is home to almost 80,000 people. That's some pretty crazy population growth!
I actually visited an Australian family who were living in Modi'in back in 2003 when I was first in Israel and studying in Arad. I was only meant to spend Friday afternoon with them, but missed the last bus before Shabbat and so I found myself stuck there for the whole weekend. I don't remember much about that weekend (except cursing the fact that I was stuck there all weekend without so much as a change of underwear) but I do clearly recall what a gorgeous house this family lived in. It was two storey, with a basement and a large garden. I'd never seen anything like it in Israel. It was so.... western! However, outside the house all I can remember were dusty unsealed roads and lots and lots of empty space. "Who in their right mind would want to live here?" I thought to myself at the time. "It's in the middle of fucking nowhere!"
Well seven years later I am living here! With my Israeli husband and my two Israeli-born children. Me and 80,000 other people. There's still a lot of unpaved dusty roads and tons of construction (the other side of our street for example!) but what a testament to this insane country I have called home for almost four years now. Take a bit of arid land, put some decent town planning to good use and voila! a city custom-built for families. Loads of greenery, parks and playgrounds practically at the end of every street, schools, shops, malls - you name it, it's all here.
When I was still living in Hong Kong, the last place my family lived was a place called Discovery Bay, located on Lantau Island (on the opposite side of the island to where the airport is now). Disco Bay or "DB" as it was more commonly referred to by locals, was also an anomaly in HK. People lived in HOUSES (WHAT??) or condos or spacious apartments with lovely views of either the mountains or the sea. It was very nice, but also a little creepy. It was all a little bit too... sanitised... too clean... too organised... too artificial. So not Hong Kong. Where's the dirt? The pollution, the crud, the stench?
And that's how I thought Modi'in would be. Kind of the Disco Bay of Israel. Maybe even a little "Stepford Wives-ish". And it's because of this, my pre-conceptions of a place I hadn't seen in seven years and had only spent 24 hours in anyway, that initially I didn't even want to check it out as a possibility.
Well, when we were running out of options and every day in our Jerusalem apartment was killing me that little bit more that we decided what the hell, what can it hurt to check out the place?
Well, damn lucky we did. We drove into the city on a Friday morning with half a dozen or so apartments to see and Doron and I just looked at each other as we drove around. "Yup" we said, "this is the place." We just need to find the right apartment.
That, we discovered, was easier said than done. Modi'in is overwhelmingly populated by owner-occupiers. I read somewhere that only about 17% of all property here is rented. So lots of gorgeous places and not a whole lot of them up for rent. We were also approaching the big holiday season in Israel (Jewish New Year, Yom Kippur, Sukkot) and NO ONE moves at this time. We were getting desperate. After months of searching for a place to live (practically every weekend was taken up with flat hunting - never fun, but totally not fun with little kids!) we were exhausted and more than a little bit despondent.
Then - finally - a new listing. It was advertised in the week between Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur. We called the owner and went to see it a couple of hours later. We came. We saw. We loved. We took it!
We really found a gem of an apartment. It might only be two bedroom, but while the children are so small, it's really not a big deal. It's full of sunshine during the day, and we have so much more living space, it's wonderful, such a luxury! And best of all, we have two HUGE terraces (combined probably the size of our old apartment!) that I can't wait to decorate with loads of plants, an outdoor table and chairs, the hammock we got from a friend for our wedding which is STILL in its wrapping paper and of course being the Aussie that I am - a BBQ!!
We moved three weeks ago and although we still have to put pictures up on the walls, it definitely feels like home - something our last place never felt like. We've got friendly neighbours, an amazing online community of residents who send helpful replies to my numerous questions and queries about life in Modi'in and tonight we discovered our local shul (synagogue). It's in the street behind ours, which is actually still being built. In fact, the only completed building is the synagogue. As we walked home with the kids in their Sherman tank (our affectionate name for our double stroller) we laughed as we realised that we were walking in the dark (no street lights here yet) down an unpaved street, my sandals filling with sand and building rubble. "This street is a building site and yet the one completed building is a synagogue". That really touched me. I hope it gives you a sense of our new home and the warm community we have found.
Here's a photo I took the other day of Liev and Amalia (Amalia had just rolled over onto her tummy for the first time and big brother Liev was pretty thrilled!) in our new home.
Shabbat Shalom from Modi'in!
11:40 pm
As always, enjoyed reading your blog. I'm really happy you guys love your new place. top
8:54 am
Wow! What a lovely blog - you really paint a lovely picture of your place there. Lovely to see the photos - thank you for sharing this Tania, really really lovely!
Lisa top
1:51 am
Your kids look gorgeous Tanya
Wonderful that you found a lovely new place to live in and have your family in which to build a nice jewish home.
Always enjoy reading your blogs
Robert (sydney) top