summer missing...

My friend that told me that whenever she gets homesick, and sees a SuperPharm Pharmacy in Israel, she goes in, just to feel like she’s home. Superpharm is the Israeli brand of the Canadian Shoppers Drug Mart.

I am also starting to feel a little homesick this year as the summer kicks into full swing.
It’s that time of year again, when everyone you know starts to talk about their elaborate summer plans. Most of the international students (and by that I mean the English speaking ones that are my friends), at the university fly home after exams for weeks, even months.

This is the first summer ever, well, probably since those diapered pre-nursery days that I actually have no summer plans whatsoever.

I work full time now. My life doesn’t come with built-in vacations anymore.

When you work, you can’t just leave your current vocation and live a quarter of the year in a different country. I’m not flying back to my hometown Toronto this summer. I am convincing myself that I am perfectly happy, as a citizen and resident of Israel, to stay put and enjoy the summer locally.

This would be a great plan, if it were not for the following two points:

One is that Tel Aviv is so unbelievably hot. You feel as if you are constantly sleep-walking in a human size oven that has been pre-heated. You find yourself planning your walking paths to the grocery store around the corner according to most shade available en route. You become so drenched in sweat, only minutes after leaving the house, that you wonder whether your deodorant is really perfumed water in a can. From May till November you won’t see a cloud in this Mediterranean sky. I’ve talked to Israelis about the weather here, comparing it to Toronto. We’ve discussed the classic summer weather cycle in Toronto. The buildup of humidity, more clouds, unbearable humidity, and then after waiting for days, the heat breaks, and it rains such a lovely calming summer rain. They look at me bewildered. “Rain in the summer?!? How can it rain in the summer? What do you wear, long or short sleeves?” They don’t seem to understand the concept of precipitation when the barometer reads over 20 degrees.

The second reason why my plan is doomed to fail is because, when July and August roll around, you suddenly find that the rest of the country flies out in a mass exodus. The streets are bare, and the banks are open only one hour a day instead of the normal two. Everyone in the office discusses their summer plans, and stares at me in disbelief when I tell them that I’m not going anywhere this year.

To top it all off, I heard today that even the dead sea scrolls took a 6 month vacation to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

I think that maybe I’ll just take a little trip to the pharmacy to get a whiff of what being back in Canada would smell like…