Is great, in general.  It's a Golani base, so it's a totally different vibe from being at a non-combat base.  Also, the tanks that I see are actually in fine working order now (other than the stuff I'm supposed to fix).  I'll be at this base till December or so, and then I'm all done.  I'll post pics as soon as I feel comfortable enough at this base to show up with a camera. I'm home every day, but still have to get up at 5am every morning to go to my base...so it's not all a party while I'm at home. More to come!

With my course, at least.  Sunday I have to report to a new base and see what they wanna do with me.  But before that, more pictures!
 

So when I get to the base the morning of the "graduation ceremony," I find this guy from my course passed out in the corner of the classroom...bootless.  Turns out he was pounding beer and vodka at the BBQ that the course had the previous night in Tel Aviv that I skipped in favor of going home to sleep.  After drinking enough alcohol to kill a small horse (he's russian, if you were wondering), he tried to wander home, but was too drunk to have any idea how to get there.  He somehow stumbled onto a train that was heading north (soldiers get free use of trains and buses) and got off the train in Haifa.  Turns out that, in his drunken stupor, he decided it was a wise idea to remove his boots and socks while he was on the train and had long since forgotten this decision by the time he disembarked.  He ended up sleeping (barefoot) at one of the train stations in Haifa.  When he was woken up in the morning at 4:30am by the first train, he decided to wander back to the base and crash in our classroom.  He was a little hungover, as you can imagine.  He borrowed some boots for the ceremony.
 

This was taken a little before the ceremony.  Israelis love to smoke.  I'm sure they also are leading the world in terms of complete disregard for the rules govern where you can and cannot smoke.  The guy in this picture was smoking too, but his "smoking hand" is just out of view (and tons more people in that warehouse were smoking, too).  The sign in the background says "no smoking" in hebrew.
 

So when I got to the mess hall after my ceremony it was filled to the brim with israeli soldiers in american uniforms!  wtf?!?  Turns out that there is a new officers course that started the "preparation" part of their course (which basically just means "lots of running") at my base and they have to wear these uniforms as their work uniforms.  The course is mostly girls, but the uniforms are way too big for them, so they end up looking like DMX's back-up dancers or something.
 

There is actually a law in the army that boys and girls have to stay 40 centimeters apart at all times.  This is a picture of my sergeant showing one of my commanders who is in charge.  I mean, he already outranks her, but you gotta keep 'em in line.  One of the benefits of being in the commanders' office was seeing scenes like this (although sometimes with the roles reversed) unfold on a regular basis.  About "the 40 cm rule," it's worth mentioning that they sell condomns in the army-run stores at every base.  That rule (like many rules in the army) is more about "castach" than it is about directing the behavior of soldiers ("castach" is a hebrew abbreviation that means "covering your ass").
 

This is a picture of the commander of my course (Captain Tal Shamir, if you're curious) and myself.  He was awesome and made me laugh pretty much every time I talked to him.  I enjoyed watching people ask him stupid questions...suffice to say, he wasn't havin' any of that.  It was also fun hearing everyone do their version of an imitation of Tal.
 

I'm sure you all prefer my posts with train pics, so here you go.  These trains are the really new/nice trains.  It was empty when I got on (hence I was able to wander around and snap this pic), but promptly turned into "standing room only" when we pasted through Tel Aviv.
 
I think I'll be able to come home about every day from my new base, so I should be posting a lot more often starting next week (unless things or just really boring or I am really lazy).

I will get assigned to a new base. I don't know where it will be yet, but I'm hoping I'll be close to home and able to sleep in my own bed every night. Either way, this is the last week at my current base before I get to go out into the army with my newfound tank-fixing skills and make a difference. I'll post some more pics in the middle of the week, if they let me come home. If not, it won't be till thursday.

So I'm gonna exposit a bit so that this short (and still boring) story makes some sense. Ok, so the base I am currently in is really one "big base" with a whole bunch of "smaller bases" in it. The military police have a large base there, so does the medical corps., and, obviously, my base is there as well(ordnance corps). This means that once you enter the first "main gate" that gets you into the "big base," you then have to go through another "main gate" to enter the specific "smaller base" you want to go to. This also means another around of showing your military ID and establishing that you are in fact supposed to be there. My smaller base is big in two ways: it contains about 5,000 soldiers at any given time AND it if physically quite large because it deals with tanks, tractors, and artillery. Because of its size, it is divided into two parts: one contains all the offices, barracks (no more tents!), mess hall's, et cetera; and the other contains the actual stuff that the base deals with (and all the garages that contain them). Going between them is like going from one base to another base (each with a main gate that has soldiers guarding it).

Anyhow, the phone I use to talk to my girlfriend each night is where all the garages are, so I have to walk back to my barracks each night when i finish talking to her. There is one gate that is near the phone (that I always use), and one gate that is on the other side of this base. The other night I finished talking to her and found...

a locked gate! This pic was actually taken a couple nights later but the first time it was locked, that chain was double wrapped. Anyhow, I was bummed cause I didn't wanna have to walk all the way to the other gate.

But just when I had resigned myself to my fate I noticed...

A hole of freedom! This is the hole that the cats use to move freely, and now I made use of it, too. I was still wearing my yucky work uniform that I wear when I'm working on the tanks, so I wasn't too worried about getting it dirty. The benefits of being thin have never been so apparent to me.

Anyhow, a couple nights passed with the gate being open and guarded as usual, but on the third night it was locked again! But! Someone had obviously thought about thin people like me who just want a quicker way to get back to their part of the base:

Hooray! Enough room to get through the gate without having to crawl around on the ground!


I took this pic at the train station. This women is wearing these shoes that israeli women that are originally from russia LOVE. They are mad for them. If you are ever in israel and think a woman might be russian: look at her shoes. If you see these, you have your answer. Honestly, I don't like them at all. Too weird, too pointy, too much like what I imagine genie's would wear. Anyhow, this chick never knew I took her pic.


Taking a pic of that woman's shoes without her knowledge inspired me to pass the 10 more minutes I had to wait by taking pics of everyone around me without them knowing it. Anyhow, everything was going great until these girls totally busted me. They were super cool, but the gig was up and they were on to me. I had so much fun doing that, though, that I'll prolly keep doing that when I need to pass the time.

I hope this post isn't really as boring as it seems to me. I mean, three of the pictures are of a fence at night. Oh well. There's always next time. Enjoy!

...cause I have a few pics of it.


So I walk past this stuff about 30 times a day. Ok, I'm exaggerating, but it's safe to say that I see it a lot. The pic of me with the D9 was taken in the garage on the left, but the tractor in this pic is not the same tractor from the other pic. Anyhow, everything in the picture is really big. This picture does very little to convey that.


This is a garage from the main "road" of the my section of the base. The APC's that I am learning all about are in the distance on the left. Everything in this section of my base is just huge garages with tons of tanks and tractors in them. There's no forgettin you're in the army here!


So when we were learning about all the parts of the engine, they would have us go into the garage and take apart whatever it was we learned about so we could play with it and see how everything works. Obviously, they didn't want us ruining healthy APC's, so they have a bunch of old engines that just sit on blocks to be played with by idiots like me. The section of the cooling system that contains the thermostat is laying on the top left section of the engine (and I think I'm actually the one who took it off and never bothered putting it back on 2 weeks ago...and I'm being totally serious). Anyhow, I know way more about this engine than I ever dreamed I would know about any engine.


This is my sergeant. He saw me with the camera and quickly knew that he had to represent for the APC, yo. He has an acronym for "armored personnel carrier" written on his hand in hebrew. He gets mad props for this pic.


I seem to always post at least one pic from a train, so here you go. This was the train today (a tuesday) as I came home. Nice and empty. These are the "old style" of trains in israel. They are actually still really nice, just older than all the others. I love trains in israel (when I have a place to sit, that is).

I'll give a bigger update of what is actually going on with me when I get home for the weekend. I have to wake up tomorrow and head right back to my base though, so no time to get too deep right now.

I finished the part of my course that qualifies me to work on the engines of the armored personnel carriers. It only took 4 weeks. The next two weeks will be all about the electrical system. As JAP-y as I can be, I'm totally shocked by my automotive knowledge right now. You should be, too.

So I had to go back to my base Wednesday morning, but I got to the train station about 20 minutes early and decided to go across the street to the beach!


This is a wednesday morning at about 9:00am. The only other people there were quite old. The school kids are already out for the summer, but they're not about to wake up that early. This is for sure one of the benefits of living in Haifa (read: on the coast) Anyhow, this is the view looking north...


...and here is the view looking south. I love the beach here. At this point was was asking myself if I really had to go to my train in 15 min.


In the summer, they have concerts at this stage (there are actually tons of places that they have concerts "on the beach" in Israel). I saw the Israeli version of the Spice Girls (Hamsa) here last summer and had a blast.


Here is a good view of how much room there is for the people. It's really fun to see concerts here. People usually dance in that open area in front of the stage (where the truck is parked). They've also had dj's come in and just spin from the stage. Also lots of fun.


So this is what the train looks like on a non-sunday morning. Tons of room to sit. One nice thing about being a soldier is not having to get out your ticket when that ticket-checker-guy comes around because all soldiers use public transportation for free.

This is also where things get a little interesting. So I'll exposit a bit here so we'll all be on the same page. The day before, I dropped my beret somewhere at the train station near my base. The beret is a part of the Israeli Army uniform, so you can get a ticket/fine if someone from the military police catches you without it, and I was kinda worried about this on the way back to my base. It didn't take long for things to come to a head, because as soon as I sat in this space on the train I looked over and noticed that I had sat down next to a girl from the military police! I started to panic a little at this point, but didn't want to get up and move because it might get her attention. I stayed in my seat wondering what to do, so...


I decided to be sneaky and take her picture! That will show the military police! Right under your noses! She was listening to a bunch of songs I like on her .mp3 player and not really paying any attention to me, so...


I decided to get more daring! Truth be told, she was a pretty cute police girl...but bad lighting, horrible sunglasses selection, and harsh angles were working against her. Shame.


This pic was taken at the Central Tel Aviv train station. It was funny as hell to watch this hapless guy keep trying to explain the train they needed to take to these girls (who just weren't havin' any of it). The guy kept pointing to way too many places on the schedule while the girls stared blankly and remained unconvinced. It was much funnier than this picture can possibly convey.


Ok, so somewhere in Tel Aviv, these two girls got on the train with some parents. They had so much style/spunk/sass/whatever, that I just had to go over and take their picture. I thought it would be an example of how much cooler Israeli 13 year-olds are than their American counterparts, but it turn out that the girl on the right is actually from Miami. You can't see their whole outfits from this pic, but it's pretty safe to say that they have cooler clothes than you (and the aisle was like their catwalk when they boarded!). Anyhow, I got all of their names, but totally forgot (but I gave them the address of this blog, so they can clear that up if they like).

At this point things get interesting again (ergo, more exposition). So I go to the office of the train station where I dropped my beret and asked if anyone found one yesterday. They guy said no, but he had one from the air force that someone found two weeks ago and hasn't been claimed, so I could just take that one. I also discovered one of the many tricks soldiers can use in Israel to get things free: go to a bus station or train station and tell them you lost your beret! Score! Anyhow, I decided that an air force beret was better than no beret at all, but I'm not in the air force and don't have the uniform to match the beret (and it's really obvious), so I'm still all too aware of the fact that I'm still at risk from the military police when...


I run into another 3 guys from the military police at my bus stop! Crap! Then I notice that one of the three is also not wearing a beret with his uniform, so I get up the courage to sneak a picture of them! Right after this, a soldier came to the bus stop with army pants, but a civilian t-shirt. They were having none of that, so they promptly wrote her a ticket...


This is for all the people that wanted a pic of me in my uniform. I figured that I'd give the people who aren't all that interested in that something to look at as well. This is the Israeli-modified/Caterpillar-built D9 tractor. The american army actually buys the armor kit that the israeli army makes for this tractor now. Needless-to-say, it is not easily stopped.


This is what all the trains look like thursday evening as all the tired soldiers are going back home. The girl closest to the camera (who is a sergeant, if you're wondering) took the headrest off of her seat and used it as a pillow while the girl on the other side (also a sergeant) is crashed out across two seats. The flash from the camera didn't even phase them. Soon after this, I fell asleep as well and only woke up just before my stop when someone bumped me by accident.


This girl was so funny that I had to take a picture of her, too. I doubt she is more than 14, but nobody can say she hasn't fully developed her "look." It was funny to watch her talking to people on her (not one, not two, but) three cellphones. The first person I ever see with three cellphones is a 14 year-old israeli girl...typical.

Anyhow, then I got home and wrote this post. You don't need a pic of that. Enjoy!