Haifa on the Fourth Day

First of all, I'm so happy that my internet is back up. I've been waiting to blog since this morning.

A little bit of my day so far, all in approximate times:

5 AM: I fall asleep.

7:30 AM: Apparently there's a siren, but neither my roommate and I wake up. We find out about it only later on the news.

7:55 AM: The second siren of the day. Inch, the cat, wakes me up by walking on me. I am competely groggy. It takes me a while to figure out that the real sirens are on and that this is not a dream. My roommate isn't in the hallway, so I go to his room and try to wake him up. I'm so tired I collapse on the hallway. I don't hear any explosions, so it seems to be a false alarm. I go back to bed.

9:30 AM: I wake up. I look at the alarm clock but the display doesn't work. I plug into another outlet but it still doesn't work. I try to turn on my bedlamp. There's no electricity. In the stairway, there's no electricity either. I grab my keys and walk to the neighbouring building. They don't have electricity either. I call my friend who lives a few neighbourhoods over. Same thing.

9:45 AM: Our electricity starts working again. It turns out it was a nation-wide power failure, probably unrelated to the "security situation." I watch the news. It's funny, they're showing the Ayalon Highway by Tel Aviv. Traffic moving south, towards Tel Aviv, is completely jammed. Hardly any cars are northbound. The internet doesn't work and won't work until several hours later.

10:00 AM: I decide to go back to sleep. I wake up to loud explosions some minutes later and jump out of bed. I run into the hallway. There are no sirens but I heard about six missiles hit Haifa. It's back to the news. There are no reports about new missiles hitting Haifa. I call the emergency hotline to tell them that although there weren't any sirens, I heard a number of powerful explosions. She instructs me to call the police and the city operator and tell them the sirens aren't working here. The mystery is soon solved when TV news catch up. A building in Haifa had been hit a missile.

10:30 AM: I decide to go back sleep. I'm woken up some minutes later by the phone. It's my mother's cousin asking me if we're okay. She recommends that I evacuate Haifa. I'm awake now, so it's back to watching some news.

11:00 AM: I decide to go back to sleep. I'm woken up some minutes later by an incoming text message to my cell phone. My friend is worried about me. I'm up once again. I go to watch the news. Another friend calls. I didn't know she had left the city. She went back to her village in the Galil to be with her parents. She was too scared to stay.

12:30 PM: A third friend from Rehovot calls to ask how I'm doing. I decide to take a shower. On my way back to my bedroom, the siren literally catches me in my towel. I take the chance and ignore the siren, choosing to get dressed. But after I hear a boom close to me, I jump back out into the hallway in my towel. The sound turned out to be only my balcony door slamming shut. We wait out the sirens in the hallway.

13:00 PM: The dentist office calls. The appointment I had scheduled a few weeks ago because of a minor, ongoing toothache, has been cancelled. The clinics (health clinics included) are still closed, as they they have been since the shelling began in earnest on Sunday. We rescheduled for next week but I was warned it may be pushed back once again, depending on the situation.

13:28 PM: My boyfriend calls as I'm writing the blog. A missile has just landed close to where he works, in the Jezreel Valley, and in the next town over. He can see the smoke rising from his office window. It's back to watching news, once again.