head, and Yippee decided to address him by the moniker “Buggy.”
Only Yippee could get away with something like that, but Kip liked it
and the name stuck.
CHAPTER 5
The kibbutz we were finally assigned to was situated about twenty
miles outside of Tel-Aviv and was called Ramat Mechasel, which
meant roughly “Hill of the Annihilators.” The name had me worried
that this was going to be a tough kibbutz, but I knew I could always
leave if I didn’t like it.
“Time for a little manual labor,” I said to Yippee.
“I knew a guy named Mañuel LaBorra once,” he said. “Didn’t
like him much either.”
Yippee had heard that hitchhiking was easy to do in Israel, so we
decided to save a few bucks and try to bum a ride off the street. We
stood with our thumbs in the air and held a placard with the name of
the kibbutz on it, but no one stopped. All of a sudden it occurred to
me that in Israel the hand signal for hitchhiking was different from
ours. When I was on the bus from Haifa, I had noticed some of the
gorgeous army girls on the side of the highway with their index
fingers pointed at the road. Then I remembered something slightly
disturbing: in some countries the thumbs-up hitchhiking sign
actually meant “up your ass.” It was no wonder we weren’t getting
rides. We decided to change our plan of attack and use the correct
symbol, and within another ten minutes, we were on our way to
Ramat Mechasel. Once we were in the car, I asked the young couple
in the front seat if the thumbs-up symbol was rude in Israel. The
couple smiled at each other, and the woman turned around from her
position in the passenger seat. Looking at me straight in my eyes, she
said calmly, “Nothingis rude in Israel.” To be honest, I had noticed
that the Israelis were a little brusque, but I figured that was only
normal for people who lived in such a hotbed of conflict.
My first impression of the kibbutz was that it looked like a
suburb of Los Angeles. There were quaint little houses with small
lawns, and paved streets in front of them. Japanese model cars and
mopeds scuttled around the area. The weather was the same as L.A.
I felt right at home. Yippee and I trudged into the administration
building, threw down our heavy backpacks and announced our
BIG AMERICAN BREAKFAST
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