In this self-recorded story we hear from Nathan Burgess retelling of a road trip with his uncle through Israel’s south…and a bit on how funny language can be.
Auto-generated transcript:
[00:00:00] This is the story of when I was touring part of the south of Israel with my uncle who has unfortunately passed since. A little bit on him. He was professional army all of his life. Great guy, absolutely wonderful, wonderful person. Grew up in his parents had moved from Germany, so he spoke German, English, and Hebrew all more or less fluently.
[00:00:19] And if you’ve never talked to somebody who’s actually had to work professionally in another language and you do happen to speak another language, like casually give it a try. It’s not, it’s not easy. You’ll see why I’m mentioning this, you know, later on. So any day, anyway, we had started off our day in Be’er Sheva, where they lived at the time.
[00:00:35] It was like six o’clock in the morning. It was stupid early for, for being on vacation in the summer. And our first stop was the local market. And I don’t mean, I don’t mean a store, I mean a place where, you know, a guy kind of thing. And we stopped for a second. I’m still exhausted in the car.
[00:00:50] He runs out, comes back a few minutes later and he’s got a stack of like warm, freshly made, like 20 minutes earlier, pitas still warm in a, in a, in a nylon bag. And if you’ve never had a. pita that was just made in the last hour. Just like that is your whole breakfast.
[00:01:05] You are definitely missing out. Anyway, so we go on this tour, we go to the Macht Hashim. We go, we see all kinds of sites. After he had retired from the army, he was a tour guide, loved history, loved maps, had a briefcase full of maps to tell you about any part of Israel’s or world history. And we’re driving along and we pass a spot and he goes, there’s a kibbutz over there.
[00:01:27] And. They, you know, are, are really well known for their oysters. Now he spoke to me in English and I spoke to him usually back in Hebrew or, or we’d switch back and forth. Because for him it was practice. And I’m driving along thinking, my uncle’s a really smart guy. If he says there’s oysters there, then for some reason there’s oysters.
[00:01:48] Skipping the part where there’s not a lot of water in Israel, but I don’t know enough about oysters. Maybe they found a way to make it work. Also not kosher. So kind of a limited market. So I asked, I followed that line. I’m like, why do they grow oysters? And he goes, yeah, it’s, it’s for their feathers. I’m like, Oh my God, I really don’t know anything about oysters because I had no idea oysters had feathers.
[00:02:14] I’m thinking no, they really don’t. I’ve seen, I’ve seen oysters on like National Geographic and menus and whatever. And so, okay. I look at him and I go, I don’t think oysters have feathers. He goes, Yeah, totally. Like oysters. What, what do you think an oyster is? He goes, The really tall bird. I said, Ostrich!
[00:02:39] He goes, yes, ostrich.
[00:02:40] They raise ostriches there for the feathers. And, of course, the eggs for the kibbutz for the kitchen and all of that. And and we kept on driving along, obviously. But it was it was a really nice day, of course, with my uncle. But that, that stands out as a, as a great, um, memory just one on one with him.