Alarms

We experienced our first alarm today while sitting in Ulpan. Spoiler Alert (so my mum doesn't have a heart attack) - It was a drill. We didn't know about it because the internet has been down.

Israel has an advance warning system for rocket fire - radar detects the missiles and a siren is activated automatically, giving you a between 30 seconds to a few minutes to get into the bomb shelter or secure room. We all have secure rooms in our dorms, and we know about about the sirens, so when it went off today, we were like "Huh, that's cool, there's the siren - for real!"

Then I looked up at the teacher's face. Her expression immediately went blank and she starts telling us "Go! Go!" It wasn't a mad scramble dash to the shelter, but this was not like the calm and orderly fire drills we had in grade school. This was more of a "Don't fuck around because impact will be about 30 seconds from now so get your ass up those stairs" kinda scene. Luckily, our instructor, Ruti, called her husband from the shelter and found out that there was, in fact, a drill today.

Quotes of the day, both courtesy of Ruti:

"Every summer, they say there will be war, but who wants to fight in this heat?!?!"

"Yeah, there was bombing in Haifa, couple of years ago, but it's not so bad at the Technion. All the bombs fall down in Bat Galim. It's safe up here." ...umm, you mean Bat Galim, the neighborhood where the medical school is located and where most of us are moving next month? Cool.

Here's a video, shot in Bat Galim in 2006.

Food for thought:

This year, the IDF the six ships of a "peace" flotilla with the stated purpose of breaking the Gaza security blocade. In 2009, 566 rockets were fired into Israel by Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihadists, the PFLP, and others. When you turned on the TV, which did you hear about?