Random note

Just a random note about Hebrew University professor math Harry Furstenberg; he just won the prestigious Wolf Prize in Mathematics.

The reason I bring this up is because he is the upstairs neighbors of my grandparents!

quick update

Sorry for not writing in 2 weeks, here is the update of what happened. First, last week I was ill with a stomach virus. It was horrible... I ate nothing but bread and drank water for a week straight. It was horrible. On the other hand, while I was at home recuperating I watched Shahar Peer in the Australian Open. She is the Israeli player who made it to the quarter finals and lost in a very very tight game to Serena Williams, who is a scary looking woman.

Let me mention something about Israeli's in international sports: there are very very few of them, so when they do anything remotely exciting the entire country becomes engrossed. For example, when what's his name one the first ever Israeli Gold medal for wind surfing, he was treated like a hero when he came back. FOR WIND SURFING. So this Peer girl has taken over the Israeli news for a week straight, making it further than any Israel before in a major tennis match. They were even talking about her games in my Econ classes...

Then, last night, the kids from my Hebrew class went out to a bar to celebrate ending our class. The reason for the celebration is that many of the kids in my mandatory Hebrew class have been taking the classes for a year and half or more. I have to take this one final class, at the highest level, because I never did the Israeli version of the SAT, so I need to take the class and pass the final to get proficiency. On the other hand, some of the others in my class have started a the lowest of six levels and had Hebrew classes every single semester for the last 3 years!!!

2 weeks till my first final, wish me luck.

Random Day trip

So this past Friday my friend Katie called me up in the morning, actually while I was still in class, and said: I have a rental car from work till 2pm, lets go somewhere. After a brief consultation with ourselves, we decided that the only place that neither of us had ever explored which was close enough to return the car was the city of Ashdod, about 25 minutes south on the highway.
The city of Ashdod is interesting... It has the potential of being picturesque, with this gradually sloping hill that hits a great beachfront. Below is Katie on the walk through the city park toward the beach. The center of town is at the top of the hill. On the other hand, Ashdod is entirely an industrial city, where the whole infrastructure rests on the port, which is the main port of Israel (surpassing Haifa, which was the biggest port for years). The bizarre thing is, the port is right there on the beach (see photo below). Most of the huge industrial ports in the US and in Europe are located far from city centers, in industrial zones that can be seen from afar, but nobody goes to. (Think the port in Oakland, Long Beach, or Jersey, have you ever really gone there, rather than just looked at it from afar?) So in Ashdod it's a little bizarre that the beach just bumps into this massive port (the photo below is just the beginning of what was a massive structure, we drove past it on the way in)
The other bizarre thing about Ashdod is the actual residents. The city used to be Jewish European immigrants way back in the 50s and 60s, before the port. Katie started talking to this 85 year old man (in photo below), who actually survived the entire Holocaust, and only emigrated to Israel in 1949, after the state was created.
But the overwhelming bulk of the city residents today are immigrants. The children and grandchildren of the original Jewish residents have long ago moved, overwhelmingly to the Tel Aviv area. Now the city is Russian or Ethiopian immigrants, or illegal African or Thai immigrants, plus a small amount of new French and Argentinian immigrants. That Friday everybody was in the small city center sitting around the ratty little delis wasting time. The photo below is interesting because the deli workers were all Russians who spoke very little Hebrew, but the 4 people sitting in front were Ethiopian.
We spend about 4 hours there, and seriously did not hear A WORD of either English or Hebrew or Arabic. English I understand not hearing, I can go days without hearing it (depending on who calls me), but to be in Israel and not hear Hebrew or Arabic is actually a very surreal experience. It's basically like being in Los Angeles for 4 hours and not hearing either English or Spanish.

We had a great day nonetheless.

Oy

My final exams are coming up in a month exactly... I'm starting to stress.... and therefore I have started to study already. Not that the tests aren't doable, it's just that the amount of information is enormous.

More econ fun

With regards to the wage statistic, it is surprisingly equal, as noted in the low JB statistic, and primarily because the mean and the median are practically the same number. Taking the exponent of the values indicates that the average salary is about 19.60 Shekels an hour (in 1994 Shekels), and 47 of the 85 observations early within +/- 3 Shekels of that wage. This is a very different picture than what is going on today, 15 years after this survey was taken. Also, we can see from a simple scatter plot that the higher paying jobs are the more professional ones, corresponding to occupational codes 00 – 19. More importantly, I have been progressing with graduate internship applications. Here is the list of what has been officially applied to already:
NERA, LECG, Brattle Group, Frontier Economics, Greylock McKinnen, The Fed (Boston/NYC), JE Austin, UNECE, World Bank, IFC, CGD

Here is what still needs to be applied to:
European Investment Bank, Brookings Institute (something was wrong with their site, so I couldn't apply today), CEPR, IIE, SEC, OMB, CBO, CEA, BEA, Finca International, Navigant, CRAI, London Economics, and a number of smaller econ consulting boutiques.

I have till the end of the month, so plenty of time.

More photos from last week

More photos from the family and all the events of last week. My father, sister and I went to Yaffo, I believe it was on Tuesday, walked around the flea market. Below is a photo of my father and I looking at all the junk in one of the many many junk shops there. We had lunch that same day at Abu Hasan, which is arguably the best Humus place in Tel Aviv, definitely in the top 5 for sure. The thing with this place is that it is ALWAYS packed... They open around 10 and run out of Humus around 2pm. Also, to the point where you just sit down wherever, with strangers, in random corners, etc... Then you get amazing food and scarf it down. (Coco, we must go there together, you will love it). My father snapped the photo below of random strangers eating lunch together.
This is my sister and I outside of the place after we ate. Rumor has it that a lot of dignitaries like to go there, and you can usually see consulate cars pull up in the later hours. We were there by 11:30 already and we had to wait in line (you can see the perpetual line on the right of the photo).
Just two great photos from Yona's wedding last Thursday as well. She is yemenite, so her whole family was there, including the two grandmothers below. They had this singer who sang in Arabic to the whole group, which was fantastic.
And to top it all off, Yona about to break the glass.
Fun, but packed week.

New Years!

Happy New Years 2007! I started off my evening at Rafi's apartment in Yafo. I drove there with my friends Katie and Inbar. We ate food and drank a bit and watched some fireworks from his porch, which was a fun experience. From there we went with Inbar to a house party that one of her friends was throwing. First, for those who know me, I much prefer house parties to bar parties, and second, I prefer them even more when I'm crashing them, so crashing one in Israel is a special trat. Second, Inbar drives a white 1971 Beetle, and we all crammed in to her tiny car and had the music blasting as we drove through Tel Aviv. This is Katie sitting in the back seat with me.

This is Rafi sitting in the front seat of the bug. Inbar was not such a fan of us taking photos in her car, and refused to participate.
The house party was fun, we didn't know anybody there, but we tried to make new friends.

I left the party to meet Jesse (who is staying at my house through tomorrow) at this bar called Mike's Place. He used to work there, so he wanted to catch up with his old bar friends, even though Mike's place is a horrible bar. Seriously, I would not take anybody there, and if they still insisted on going I would not join them. The clientèle fall in to three categories: 1. 40-50 year old single sleezy expats. 2. Random Euro travelers (aint nothing more irritating than a drunk German singing out loud to Pink Floyd) or 3. Obnoxious Jappy Birthrighters. In any case, I still met Jesse there, and as you can see from the photo below, he was well inebriated by the time I got there.
All in all, it was an experience, and as always it's good to see friends. Happy New Years to everybody!