Maybe Gd doesn't want me going to Tel Aviv
Hashem is the king, the world is his court, and sometimes I feel like I'm the jester.
Yesterday I decided to eschew the programmed yeshiva tiyul for an escape from J-lem tiyul to Tel Aviv. Jerusalem and I have always had a love/hate relationship... Jerusalem is a beautiful city but it's also a very intense city, every small daily struggle transformed into a life or death battle for supremacy. So every once in a while I like to travel to Tel Aviv and bask in the lazy calm of the most westernized city in Israel. But every time I go there I can't remember which bus takes me to the center of the city and end up taking a bus that drops passengers off in Jordan with a map and a compass. This time I tried to be smart about it; I went to the information booth, asked which bus went to the central bus station and bought the correct ticket...
Unfortunately my jester-like qualities revealed themselves, I dropped the ticket while walking to the bus stop and watched as the wind picked it up and forced me to chase the ticket for about 10 feet. I ran, stomped on the ticket and bent over to pick it up; but just as my hand closed on the piece of paper I felt an unfamiliar "airy" feeling in the seat of my pants and heard something tear... I jerked upright and twisted to see that my pants, an old pair of khakis that predate my adventure with yiddishkeit, had split from between my legs to mid-tuchus. I moved my man-bag to try and cover the hole and tried to think of a plan. Golf, the Israeli version of Banana Republic, was probably my best bet for new pants, but it was three floors below me... I waddled and tried to keep the hole in my pants as inconspicuous as possible, but by the time I was downstairs the hole had grown and I was frantically trying to find new pants before the ones I was wearing lost structural integrity. Luckily one of the sales people was uncharacteristically Israeli and actually helped me.
New fact:
In Israel often pants are made in only one length (33 in.) because the market is too small to support having multiple lengths. And since most Israelis are only a little taller than me I actually fit into most of the stuff here.
