You Know You're in a Different World When...

I've posted short lists of "ways to know you're in a different country" periodically on Facebook, but realized there are some friends and family who won't be seeing them unless I put them here as well. So here are my first 16 observations...

• A lunch conversation about the pros and cons of Tel Aviv has two disparate views, but the reason is not that one speaker is a 'city person' and the other isn't, but rather that one is speaking from a Palestinian understanding and the other from an Israeli.
• The tour of the campus includes where to go if you hear a bomb siren (and the difference between a bomb siren and a siren that announces Sabbath).
• Dinner conversation about where I should give birth includes the point that having a birthplace of Bethlehem (in the West Bank) will give my child a chance to be allowed in to many more Middle Eastern countries in their lifetime than they would with a birthplace of Jerusalem.
• You can't flush the toilet paper
• You're the only patient at the hospital NOT wearing a hijab.
• On the way to town, you can't communicate with the bus driver who only speaks Hebrew, and on the way back, you can't understand the driver who only speaks Arabic.
• Dinner discussion is about the varied concepts of land ownership around the world, and in particular, includes the heartbreaking question of whether or not the Israeli army has razed a nearby Bedouin village they've been threatening for months.
• Your washing machine is in the bathroom and is so small that doing one load only half-fills the drying rack we use on our back patio.
• You hear a call to prayer every few hours. 
• You get to eat dates, fresh guavas & persimmons at lunch, and pomegranates hang in your backyard.
• The price for a smallish pack of diapers is listed as 25-75 (NIS).
• The whole country shuts down for a holiday you've never even noticed before.
• Toilet paper doesn't come on a roll, but instead comes out sheet by sheet (like kleenex) from a dispenser on the wall. 
• What sounds like fireworks on a Friday night *might* be just that, but also might be tear gas getting lobbed into the Palestinian refugee camp inside Bethlehem. 
• Your babies' birthweights all have to be converted into grams when your medical history is taken.
• Heavily armed Israeli soldiers enter your bus on the way home, to check the i.d. of every passenger on board. 

  

  Our small capacity washing machine, squeezed into the bathroom.