You Have Been Weighed on the Scales and Have Been Found Wanting.

The first time I came to Israel was in February 1974. I came for my cousins wedding. I do not remember a lot about the trip other than my mother pointing out the orange trees and me wondering why she was pointing out orange trees as they could not have been anything else.

Since 1982, I have been coming here at least once a year. We moved here 3.5 years ago. For the most part, I really like it .

What I don't like is the metric system.

I remember when I was a kid that we were told the USA was moving to the metric system. I just looked it up and a law was passed in 1974 ( coincidence???). I remember we started to learn it in school but then it just sort of faded away.

I was happy with that as I was having trouble with the conversions. This is strange because I am good at arithmetic and usually can calculate things pretty fast. ( I said arithmetic and not math. or maths as they say in England {which should be another post} because I tuned out in high school and never really caught on to the whole algebra, trig thing.

45 years later and I am still not good with it.

I really don't get it. The metric system is all based on the number 10 as opposed to our wacky system ( again from England). It should be easier.

I am not having a problem knowing how many centimetres in a meter (100, even the name gives it away) or grams in a Kilo ( 1,000) and so on.

However, since I was raised with feet, pounds etc. I need to convert in my head and instead of just remembering that 30 Celsius is 86 in Fahrenheit , I end up either estimating or figuring it out ( c x 1.8 + 32) in my head.

I would like to be able to see the number and know exactly what it means.

It probably doesn't help that in my car, I set up for miles and Fahrenheit but otherwise I would't know how fast I was going or how far away I am from the exit ( my Waze is also set up for miles).

Did you know that 120 kilometres an hour is really 75 mph??

I didn't.

Officer I am sorry I thought 120 KPH was only 65 MPH. Don't think that will fly.

My scale is on pounds. That is just dumb because I would weigh about half as much in Kilo's

Cooking is another problem. I have been doing the Corona cooking thing, and all my recipes are in ounces and  Fahrenheit. The oven is in Celsius, and the measurement of food , all in grams.

What a pain.

I once needed to put something up at 180 Fahrenheit. I asked my wife to put it up at 180.

She did.

At 180 Celsius.

Luckily we like crispy food.

But the absolute worst is the 24 hour clock.

I can not tell you how many times, even recently, I have set up conference calls with New York or Los Angeles and called an hour early or an hour late.

Think about it. This one makes the most sense and should be the easiest. It is also the most useful.

Let's say you want to meet someone at 5. They don't know what that means. Do you wake up early? I don't know.

Say 'lets meet at 1700' no confusion. You can sleep late.

I am not really sure how to deal with this. I think the only way is to memorize charts. ugh

Let's talk about currency.

I can honestly say that I have no idea what anything costs here.

When you grow up in the USA you don't think about currency at all. Everyone wants dollars.

They still do.

The exchange rate has been between 3.8 - 3.4 Shekels to the dollar. If it stayed the same it would be easy.

I just use 3.5. Since I don't know what anything costs, it doesn't make much of a difference but I would like to know.

What I do know is everything is expensive.

Most of the taxes here are higher. Good thing is I don't pay tax on money I earn outside of Israel for the first 10 years after I make aliyah

6.5 to go

I can do a whole post on taxes but will save that for another time.

Rule of thumb, you pay where it is more.

I should have some more important stuff in my next post ( isn't there a coalition crises and a possibility of war with Hamas??) but this is what has been on my mind lately.