I slept better last night but still woke up a number of times, including one time when I got up for a couple of hours because I couldn't sleep. David was a little weak, so I had told him NOT to go further than the bathroom when he got up. He remembered my instructions, but he still fell one time when he was getting up from the toilet. I had to leave him there on the floor for a while (it was NOT cold, and I put a blanket over him anyway) until he got a little more strength. Then I managed to get him to use the bathtub edge to get up, and we got him back to bed. Luckily, he didn't seem to be at all injured from the fall.
I had already told Berlitz yesterday that I would be taking another sick day today, and now I have already told them I'll take yet another one tomorrow. I actually am definitely feeling noticeably better today than I did yesterday, but I'm still getting some hot and cold spells (maybe a very low fever?) and am having trouble with a deep cough, the kind that makes your abdominal muscles sore. David is still feeling quite a bit worse than I am today.
Despite our colds, we still managed to get out to vote today around the middle of the day. We walked over to the school (one short block away) where our polling station is, but I had to walk back up and get the car to bring David back home.
As we entered the school, there was a woman who looked at our voter cards and told us which way to go. The voters are spread out through numerous rooms since they only let one voter at a time in each of them. I told her that David was blind and asked if I could help him. Yes, replied that I absolutely could. When we entered the room, I again told them about David, and there was again no problem. One man (who was wearing a kippah, so we can assume he was religious) asked me what I was to David (a common question), and I gave my regular reply: אני בן זוגו ani ben zugo (literally, "I am the son of his couple" but perhaps better translated "I am his significant other"). Every single time that I have said this anywhere here in Israel, it has always been immediately accepted without even a TRACE of prejudice!
For those of you who may not be familiar with the voting system here in Israel, here's how it works. Rather than voting for individual candidates, we vote for a party. Then, each party that gets at least 2% of the votes get allocated seats in the 120-member Knesset proportional to the number of votes they got. Each party has an ordered list of its candidates, so that if they get n seats, the first n candidates on their list enter the Knesset. Never in the history of the country has any one party gotten a majority, so one party, usually the one with the largest number of seats, is invited to try to form a coalition of parties that WILL include at least 61 seats. In this particular election, EVERYONE agrees than Binyamin Netanyahu, the current prime minister, will get the most votes and thus will be forming the coalition. The big question, then, is which parties will be in it. We won't know until several weeks of wheeling and dealing have taken place.
As for the actual voting, it's very simple. When the election board folks have checked your ID (yes, you MUST have your national ID card to vote!) and located you on the list, they hand you an empty envelope. You proceed to the voting booth, out of sight from them, of course. In the booth are shallow bins, each one with pieces of paper for one of the parties. All of the parties have one-, two-, or three-letter symbols that represent them, but their party name and the name of the leader are also printed (all of this in Hebrew, of course!). You select the one you want to vote for, put the piece of paper in your envelope, seal it, and bring it out and drop it into the ballot box right in front of the election panel. And that's it!
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