Adventures in Peru

Hello Everybody,

Here the first problem rised...

There is a travel agency in town which mostly work with Israelis (Andean Kingdom agency). They also heard about the Israeli Rosh Hashana and decided to organize a party with free drinks... with an entrance fee of 25 soles (about 7 US dollars). Oh, we said to ourselves ... how can we compete with a party with free drinks... We were talking with many Israelis and got the impression that most of them are interested in the party of the Andean Kingdom, and there were others who planned to go to Lima and celebrate there with the Habad people...

We were really sorry that it may happen that again we won't have a chance to celebrate Rosh Hashana properly, but still we didn't give up. We made a lot of publication to OUR Rosh Hashana meal. Every Israeli that we met, we told him about OUR party.

Then came Thursday evening - a day before Rosh Hashana. As you must remember, we asked all the people who wish to join OUR Rosh Hashana meal to gather on Thursday evening around 7:00 PM... and guess what happened... 7:00 PM arrived... and almost nobody came... I was sorry but still hoped that people were maybe late and they would come soon... and ... I was right... after some time more than thirty people arrived... Woooow...

We were the "chairmen of the meeting". Everybody expressed his ideas about the proper way to organize that meal. There were so many different opinions and ideas and it was very difficult for us, who managed that meeting, to come to a decision which will be accepted by everybody, but eventually we succeeded.

We collected 15 soles from each person (4 US dollars), and we divided the people into five working groups:
Group 1 - was responsible for the salads and soup.
Group 2 - was responsible for side dishes.
Group 3 - was responsible for drinks, apples with honey and pomegranates (רימונים). Since we couldn't find pomegranates, we used passion-fruits (פסיפלורה) instead. The passion-fruits have a lot of seeds, so it's actually the same idea as pomegranates...
Group 4 - was responsible for entertainment, decoration, fruit salads and buying disposable dishes (כלים חד פעמיים).
Group 5 - was responsible for the chickens, cakes, candles, fish head, white bread (חלות) and tables arrangement.
On the day of Rosh Hashana we put a sign with all the groups leaders names, groups members and the budget that every group is expected to use... I was the money collector ( גזברית) and divided the money between the groups...

We divided the people into five working groups.

Here comes our next problem...

There was not enough place in our hostel for so many people. The room in where we planned to gather was quite small... In addition to that, there were not enough tables and chairs. Oh, what can we do?? We don't want to prevent people from joining us due to a lack of space...

Here one girl came with a brilliant idea – We used BEDS with several mattresses on top as tables... so the problem of the lack of tables was solved. About chairs - we asked people from other hostels to bring chairs... and we used Nir skills in optimization in order to squeeze all these furniture into the small cozy room...

Everything was almost prepared. We got the Kiddush text by fax from my brother.

You probably ask yourself what happened with the Andean kingdom party. Well, almost nobody went there, and we had some people coming to see our meal, who deeply regretted that they were subscribed to the party in the Andean kingdom and not to ours...

In addition to the food, we had a very interesting quiz about Rosh-Hashana, which one of the girls managed to find after a lot of efforts in the Internet.

Rosh Hashana evening was JUST GREAT. Everything went so well. All the people were having so much fun, and didn't stop expressing their deep enjoyment.

It was definitely the best Rosh Hashana evening that Nir and I have ever had.

Shana Tova,

Tali and Nir