How to Wash Dishes like an Israeli

As promised, here's my no-holds-or-pictures-barred view of how to wash dishes in a water shortage. Read at your own risk!

As Mark pointed out in response to my last post, the best way to save water while washing dishes is to own a dishwasher. However, I don't... as I'm reminded daily when I walk into the kitchen hoping the dishes will have magically washed themselves.

Back in the US, I'd wash dishes with a soapy sponge and a stream of hot water running constantly. To me now, that seems almost like, oh, barbecuing by feeding my grill a constant stream of dollar bills. Here in Israel, I've learned to wash dishes the the minimum of water running. There are some more complicated techniques than this: I've heard of people rotating three bins of water of various degrees of cleanliness, so that they first scrub in water that has been used twice, then rinse in water that has been used once, then rinse in water that was freshly poured that day. Then they throw out the dirtiest bin, shift the other two bins over, and start again the next day. However, this is what I've seen most Israelis do.


STEP 1: Fill a small bowl with warm, soapy water. Our water takes a while to turn warm (our water heater is on the roof), so instead I tend to use hot water from our electric tea kettle. The point of this water is simply to keep your sponge clean and soapy.

STEP 2: Use a sponge and this small amount of warm, sudsy water to soap up all the dishes. (Scrape off any remaining food before you do this step.) Set the soaped dishes on the counter while you're soaping the rest.

STEP 3: Rinse off all your dishes, turning off the stream of water while you put each dish on the drying rack. Bonus points if you can rinse several dishes at once. I usually manage to rinse big clumps of silverware at a time.

STEP 4: Clean off your counter. It gets very soapy.

That's it! Ha, I avoided the Step 2 picture of my dirty dishes. So this post ended up not so graphic after all. (My dirty dishes aren't unusually disgusting-- no mold, I promise-- but still, isn't it gross to see someone else's half-eaten chicken?)

This, btw, is my drying rack:

It slides down (making a sound like fingernails on a chalkboard) as it gets heavier with dishes, and it can be hidden from view behind cabinet doors over my sink. I'm not sure if this is a uniquely Israeli invention, but I know I never saw build-in racks like this in the US, and I've seen them in several apartments here.

Anyone have a different dishwashing technique to share?

Close the windows during a sandstorm

This is definitely one of those lessons I learned the hard way. Yesterday we had hot wind from the south. The temperature shot up into the high 20s, and wind woke us up in the morning as it slapped date palm branches against our bedroom window. I love having open windows and was excited for it to be a bit warmer (ask me in August how I feel about warm weather then), so I opened our blinds and windows throughout the apartment. We are lucky enough to have three "kivunei avir"-- directions of air-- which meant the wind travels right through our apartment in the glories of cross-ventilation.

What I didn't take into consideration was that yesterday wasn't just wind from the south-- it was a sandstorm (known when it travels this far and is this diluted as a "dust storm," or sharav in Hebrew). I guess I'd expected "sandstorm" to look more like something out of Lawrence of Arabia-- you know, men hunched forward on camels with turbans wrapped around their faces, disappearing into the orange haze. And I'm sure that is what a sandstorm would involve if I were much further south. Here on this side of the Carmel Mountain, we are mostly sheltered, but I should have seen the signs: the sky looked cloudy, yet the clouds were yellowish. Shadows were still sharp on the lawn, indicating (if I'd been paying attention) that the clouds weren't actually thick cumulo nimbus (or whatever) after all. And yes, it did take a certain amount of willpower to ignore the fact that my hair, face, and hands were all starting to feel just a bit dry and gritty.

At any rate, this morning I was sweeping my floor when I realized that I was gathering a deep pile of reddish-brown dust. Then I wiped off our dining room table and was shocked by how quickly my paper towel turned reddish-brown. Basically, thanks to my obession with open windows (as my husband sometimes calls it), now the entire southern half of our apartment is covered in a thin dusty film... or at least it was until I spent a few hours attacking the grime this morning.

Live and learn! And now I REALLY need a shower.
****

UPDATE: Muse posted beautiful descriptions and pictures of the dust storm here. Also, apparently this weather is really hazardous to those suffering from breathing conditions such as asthma, and ironically enough today is World Asthma Day.

Clean for Pesach

Basically every Israeli cleans before Passover, even the Israelis who plan to sneak to Druze villages to buy pitas the day after Seder. In this spirit, I've been moving furniture, vacuuming rugs, and cleaning blinds in preparation for Pesach. (I discovered about 50 Q-tips and rubber bands-- Pixel's two favorite toys-- under our sofa.) And it's not just me. The trash bin beneath our apartment (which gets emptied every day-- a nice difference from weekly trash pickup in the US!) overflows daily with my neighbors' dejunking: pet sofas, vases, appliances. Olehgirl notes the proliferation of discarded TVs right now, although I suspect this might have to do partly with the huge Israel-Greece World Cup qualifier game coming up on Wednesday night.

I really love Pesach cleaning, actually... it feels great to know that I am getting rid of all that dust and dirt that I normally don't touch. I love the idea of a fresh clean start in the spring-- the air now smells better inside AND outside!

I've made a list of everything I think I should clean, but I get the guilty feeling that I simply don't THINK to clean some things that other people probably scrub on a weekly basis. I didn't get that neat-freak gene. I also suffer an inferiority complex when I think about those people whose floors simply NEVER have a cat hair, foot print, or kitty litter pebble on them, let alone a sticky spot (now covered in cat hair) where they dripped coffee. I only discovered yesterday that rugs get much cleaner if I flip them over and vaccum the underside... and then vaccum the floor where all the dust came off my rug when it was flipped over. So help me-- what are you cleaning before Pesach? Are you a just-the-minimum (no kezayit of chametz) person or do you launch into crazy deep cleaning?

This is a Mop

After making aliyah, most of the life skills I'd acquired over 25 years of semi-competent existence were wiped out. I felt like a movie princess suddenly forced to live without her maids. How do I get an appointment with a doctor? Where do I go to rent a movie?? What should a lease look like? How do I pay taxes? Where do I write the return address on a letter?? What do people eat for dinner? And what should I wear if it's 20 degrees outside?!

So one thing I had to learn was how Israelis mop floors. I have yet to see a Swiffer or sponge mop here, and I only saw a traditional mop with spaghetti strands when a Brit provided one as a theatre prop. Instead, we have these metal poles that grip towels between their plastic teeth and wide base.

They are easy to use, really, except that getting the towel to stay on confused me at first. I attempted to wad both ends underneath the clamp in a ploy to approximate a Swiffer, but all four corners wouldn't fit. Then I think I let the towel drag behind the base of the mop, towel wistfully tickling the floor as I dragged the foam-metal base, squealing, along my poor tiles.



The secret to using these mops is that you put the base down ON the towel, as you see in the picture above, and push the towel around with the pressure from the handle. (My husband's aunt, the most meticulous housekeeper ever, just slings towels on the end of the thing without clamping. This, I believe, is an advanced skill.)

My next challenge-- getting the mop wet. I tried to dip the whole head in a bucket with the towel on, but it was too wide. I needed to take the towel off before wringing it off into the bucket. Then I tried to wash the dirty towels in my washing machine, but these are special cheap floor-washing towels (which you buy as a pack in the supermarket), so they ended up beading off into bits of lint. My husband claims the towels are supposed to be disposable. I still wash them, but now I mostly just rinse and hang.

The thing is that I now like this system better than a Swiffer or a sponge mop. The towel is nice and large, so it cleans my floors quickly. The towels last longer than those disposable Swiffer papers, and by reusing them, I save money.

A lot of people panic about all these changes when they make aliyah and try to bring everything with them from America. My advice would be to suck it up, and stalk an Israeli to see how she gets through her life. Yes, you'll feel like an idiot for a little while-- you'll have to ask a lot of questions about things your mother taught you to do when you were eleven years old. But it's worth it, because now I feel like an Israeli when I mop the floor, and I'm not begging Swiffer papers off of every visitor who comes to see me from America.

Now don't ask me about how to be TRULY Israeli and use a squeegee to clean the floor. That one still scares me. (I think it stands on a higher plane of Israeli-ness.)

If anyone reading this made aliyah, what life skills did you have to learn?