Don’t be an Israeli when the weather says snow!

Before you start reading you need to ask yourself a few questions. Can you handle humour? Can you handle sarcasm? Can you handle critique? Can you handle some finger-pointing? If you answered YES on all these questions – keep reading. If NO on any, just close this window and go on with your life.

First of all this is out of context – you already have summer in Israel by Nordic standards. But it took me a lot of effort to make this useless post with uploading videos, cropping images and come up with a catchy end… So please enjoy.

About every year or so some parts of Israel get’s like 2 cm of snow – Jerusalem, The Galilee and the Golan Heights usually. When the snow falls upon the holy land a shimmer of glory, mindfulness and quietness suddenly appears. Everything is tranquilo. For about five minutes.

After these five minutes have passed, and everyone has taken their pictures of this weird nature phenomena – it all turns into complete balagan. Cars with worn-out summer tires gets stuck, accidents, people slipping, snow-ball fights, people praying in the street, shops close and schools are shutting down. Public transport ceases to exist and the government sets up a joint emergency center with the Palestinians in order to combat these 2 centimeters of snow.

And about every year or so when this happens I laugh. Some might say I should cry but I laugh. The balagan is insane – I get picture-spammed on my Whatsapp from relatives and friends, the news-flash-thingie goes bananas on my phone and it feels like the really shitty movie ‘2012’. The world is going under. Or at least Israel is going under. I read headlines of “Major snowfall sets country on halt” or “Flooding on Ayalon highway sets traffic to a halt” just to take a few examples.

Now I deeply understand what geography and climate is. If it would’ve been let’s say 40 degrees celsius in any Nordic country they would probably perish into history.

But I don’t care, because I’m making fun of Israelis combating snow now. And I’m one of them who happens to live in a remote place far north, where the snow-depth is counted in meters instead of centimeters. So I started with a snow-shovel. And I managed for a number of years. It looks like this;

I swear to god (who by the way doesn’t exist) that this snow shovel is the best workout you can have. And in the same time breaking your back. So I recommend to all of you, buy one shovel. It costs like 20 shekels and you can use it to shovel anything – it fills many purposes. If you can’t find these shovels send me an e-mail and I’ll bring it on my flight the next time I visit home.

After a couple of years shoveling tons of snow, I realized I could shovel as much snow as I wanted and it would never end. Especially when it looks like this for about 7 months/year;

Ha! You think, it will never start. It’s too cold. And I agree – it is too cold. I don’t want to live in a cold country. I’m not a winter person. I almost hate winter. I love the sun, the beach, the humidity and the joy of getting your ass burnt when sitting down in your sun-soaked drivers seat. So – will it start?

Yupp, that’s my tank starting up.

But hey, before you go on snow-clearing adventures there is a couple of things you need. One Canada Goose winter survival jacket, Winter survival pants, One cat, A pair of insulated snow-boots and a bad-ass American T-shirt made in Vietnam.

You can add gloves, but as I’ll explain later you won’t need them. And you definetely don’t need anything on your head like a cap, hat or viking horn-helmet. The survival jacket takes care of that so you look like this before heading out, sababa?

And yes, it’s real fur. Fake fur or substitutes will NOT be enough where I live. Even though some people try. And yes it’s sad for the animals and cruel and I’m an evil person. But what can I do? This is life.

Now when you’ve come this far, your’e almost set to start shoveling away your 2 centimeters (or 2 meters) of snow. You just need to buy a Husqvarna 3700 snow removal machine, which literally throws snow 30 meters away on your neighbors lawn instead. Isn’t it great? Furthermore this wonder-machine, cuts branches and turns cement into powder. It’s that powerful. So you can use it for almost anything – snowclearing, destroying stuff (which is really fun if it’s your own stuff) or just show off in front of your neighbours that your ego has grown by about 200%. Mind you we live in the 21st century, so the ego grows – not body parts.

Well, the time has come. Moses has divided the water. Muhammed has risen on his horse. Jesus has resurrected. It’s time to start up the ego-booster-200%-machine-of-doom.

You see, super-easy – right? So now you don’t need your 20 shekel shovel anymore, you need a 10.000 shekel ego-booster-200%-machine-of-doom. So let’s see how it works and how you can use it in Jerusalems old city which has a lot of space, no tourists whatsoever and endless of land where you can throw the snow upon.

And as in all great cooking shows, it looks super-easy and it’s all done within five minutes. The same five minutes it takes for any Israeli to SnapChat 2 centimeters of snow before making a balagan out of everything and setting up emergency crisis centres.

And finally, just to weigh things up… This is the true life I really enjoy below.

I wish every day could be this beach day in Tel Aviv.