Settling into the med

Here in the mediterranean things work differently. 1230 means 1245. Cell phone use is tollerated everywhere (classrooms, in the middle of conversations). Lunch lasts 2 hours. The lager is 4 %. Schedules exits, but are flexible.

Television is particularly interesting: Israeli politcs talk shows are a jumble of arguments (which I cant understand). There is no moderator and the panel members interrupt eachother every few seconds. He with the loudest voice and most ferocious tone wins the debate. The stations I get on my little cable box are a mix of turkish soaps, egyptian game shows and expat channels. ESPN shows rodeo. Eurosport airs drag racing. The premiership is viewed as the ultimate in football: English commentators can be heard in the background, behind the russian ones (why dont they just mute the english?) while subtitles in Hebrew line the screen.

Despite being here for all of 4 days, my boss has already enlisted my support in drafting a grant proposal. Although this appears to be a minor task, I'm sure it will actually be quite tough seening as I have no experience in the subject. I still have not aquired a bonafide email address, but that may equally be due to my nostalgia rather than IT incompetance. Although perhaps it is also a reminder that here things work slower. What amazes me is the resourcefullness of the israelis. They have turned a barren wasteland into a fruitful country with little help from the outside world. Since it is harder to obtain high performance computing here, they manage by writing smart algorithms to solve the problems they are interested in. Whereas my lakadasical coding style was acceptable when I had 512 processors to use, here I must be much more efficient. This in itself will be a challenge.