this past week

This past week I have been spending a lot of time with my two long lost friends, Yossi and Elan. Elan I have known literally since age zero, and is currently living in Toronto. He is in town for a week visiting. Yossi is another friend of ours from NYC who recently moved back to Tel Aviv. So the three of us have been catching up and going out a lot.

Also, this past week I had a bizarre sort of Bay Area reunion. I went out with my friend Osi, who invited her friend Roni (Schertzer), who invited her friend Asaf (Resnik) who invited his friend Doron (Klein). Turns out that all of our parents know each other from the Bay Area (I added last names for my mother, so she knows who I'm talking about)

Lastly, for all the ladies reading this. I was walking around with friends yesterday and noticed a store that was selling 7 jeans. I mention this because my time at the GAP has given me some knowledge into the world of retail, and 7 jeans are apparently the favorite for females (note to Jacob and Jeff, they are not good on men, save your money). I also mention this because I don't recognize any of the jeans in this country, all these crazy brands like TNT, Replay, Lee Cooper, and tons of other brands I have never heard of, so seeing something I recognized (besides the obvious Levis) was funny. In any case, they cost 1000 shekels in this country, or roughly 230 bucks! That's crazy! I understand maybe 130 for a good pair of jeans, but 230??? that's insane.

Happy 10 year reunion

Tonight is my ten year reunion from Palo Alto high school. Sadly I will not be able to attend, which is a shame, I really wanted to see people.

So happy ten-year to any Paly 96 alums reading this, and I expect to hear stories/gossip and get photos from all of you.

Also, as a side note, I had another "only in Israel" moment on campus. On the right hand side of the entrance to campus there were these 2 ultra orthodox jews who were enticing students to join them in a quick ad-hoc prayer session. The, on the left side, were the Jews for Jesus people!!! I was in shock! I thought I could get away from those Jews for Jesus people but they have even gotten here, handing out the same lime green pamphlets they hand out in the states... ugh

Internationals

There is a Japanese girl in my Hebrew class named Keiko. She invited me to her house on Saturday night for a "Japanese party" where she fed us all this japanese food. She hand-made sushi for us, and nodles, and all sorts of other Japanese things (granted you really can't get good Unagi in this country). There were about 20 people there, probably 6 Israelis, 3 brazilians, 4 germans, one swiss, one pole, two americans and two koreans. I got to talking to the koreans, who were by far the most interesting people of the group. One has been in Israel for 12 years, studying semitic languages, the other is a diamond buyer at the Israeli Diamond exchange.
The diamond buyer, Tony as he calls himself, just got to Israel 5 months ago and signed a 10 year contract. He doesn't speak Hebrew at all, except "How Much" (kama?). He speaks minimal English, and was telling me how it was really interesting being in Israel, but also very hard (even though he spend 3 months of the year back in Seoul). He told me that there are only 200 koreans in the entire country!! That's it! He said about 50 of them live/work/study in Tel Aviv and the other 150 are mostly women who are married to Israeli businessmen who do business in Korea, met somebody there, and brought them back to the Holy Land.

Imagine being one of only 50 in an entire city. That's like when Jacob, Ben, and I were 3 of the only 50 Jews in Maastricht when we studied in the Netherlands together, or like Joanna in Forever 21.

Old friends

Today I had lunch with my old friend Adi, who I haven't seen in literally 8 years. She and I went to high school together and then she moved back to Israel about 6 years ago. We met for coffee this morning to catch up and gossip about all the people from high school that we are not in touch with anymore (my ten year reunion is in 2 weeks).

(note: Insert Katie in this photo)

Pot Smuggling Camels

My friend Tomer told me this story today that I want to share with you.
Apparently one of the ways to smuggle pot and hash into Israel is over the large border with Egypt, except they do it with Camels. They train these camels to come home on their own, and send them in to Sinai. In Sinai they put bags of hash on the camels (probably from Beduins) and send the camels home. These camels travel for a week or so over the desert (cause they don't really need water) until they reach their home base in the Negev desert in Israel (also Beduins).

How crazy is that?

Econometrics

I just finished up my first of many major Econometrics project, where we were supposed to analyze returns to scale for the electricity industry, looking at the cost of output as compared to the amount of production in billions of killowatts per hour. Above you can see the scatter plot of the residuals of the regression as compared to the natural log of output of killowatts, where the x-axis increases with the size of the firm. Clearly you can see the U shape, which indicates that there is something wrong.

First, we would expect ln(kwh) to be linear representing a steady state of returns to scale regardless of the size of the company. Second, the residual values are clearly correlated to the size of the firm. On the left side, with smaller firms, we have large residuals, indicating that for smaller firms our initial model is probably not a good fit. On the right side of the graph, with the larger firms, we see small residuals, but they are clearly starting to slope upward. Finally, we can look at the correlation between the lnkwh and the residuals, which is practically zero. This makes sense because the positive residuals are counterbalanced by the negative residuals. If there is no correlation between output and the residuals of the regression, yet we see in the graphs that something is wrong, we probably have different returns to scale depending on the size of the company and the amount of output. Even though the industry as a whole has a fairly predictable rate of positive returns to scale individual firms within the industry have different returns to scale depending on the size.
Obviously.

Weekend update

Oh what a long weekend... Lets begin with Thursday night, when my friend Boaz had his birthday party at this bar called Helena, which has a definite New York lounge vibe to it, where people actually dress up a bit (which is rare for Israel, especially with the men). Needless to say we were out late, then the following morning I went to go pick up a foam pad for my bed. My bed is great, but the mattress is a little stiff, so I hooked up a foam pad from Diada. Diada is the Children's Center of Tel Aviv (more like a mother/baby place) that has a cafe, book store, maternity clothes shop, activities, blah blah blah. Their branch is right near my apartment, and conveniently, my cousin's wife runs the place, so she hooked me up with the guy who makes the foam pads that line the bottom of cribs, it's fantastic.
Then, I went to the airport to pick up my father, and we went up to jerusalem to see the family and have dinner, which was great. Today I left Jerusalem with Jon to go to Tel Aviv together. Jon and I, along with his friend Jess, were invited to Rafi's apartment in Yafo for a little gathering. We actually walked all the way down to his house. Here is Jon and I on the beach heading south, it took us a while, but the weather was fantastic. We got to Rafi's house right as the sun was beginning to die down. As I said before, he lives in the area of Yafo that is starting to get gentrified, and there are some amazing apartments that have been refurbished. The city itself is mostly Christian Arabs and Muslims, but there are increasingly more Israelis who are deciding to move there.

Rafi's apartment is stunning, seriously amazing, with this huge porch and a great breeze. This is the view from his porch, it was a little cloudy, but you can see the potential for seeing sunset every single day over the Mediterannean. You can also see in this photo how there are certain buildings that have been refurbished, and others that are still in ratty shape. Also the spire to the right with the green lights is one of the local small Mosques (the spire is called a Minaret). I took this photo right as the call to prayer was sounding. From Rafi's house we went to Rabin square next to my apartment because today was the memorial for Rabin's death, eleven years ago.
This is a realy bad photo of it, and I will try to get a better photo from one of the news sources tomorrow, but the event was very touching, ableit very somber. Rabin was assassinated at a peace rally 11 years ago today, and the mood was very somber and depressing. There were an estimated 100K people in and around the square, with songs, speakers, music, etc... The best speaker, by far, was the israeli author David Grossman (who I guarantee will win the Nobel for litterature within the next twenty years. PS, I'm very happy Pamuk won this year, after all the crap he gets from the Turkish government). His speach was fantastic, and he speaks wonderfully well, but the speach was not very optimistic, but then, the mood in Israel in general is not very optimistic right now.