Josh and Alexis: About

About Josh

Josh was born in Ithaca, New York, where he has spent the better part of his life except for not so brief forays off to strange corners of the world. He did his undergraduate work at Cornell University in Anthropology and Archaeology (with a year spent in Sydney, Australia, and excavation seasons spent on Easter Island and assorted parts of Virginia), and upon completion stayed to do a Masters in Archaeology at Cornell University. After graduating from Cornell yet again, he left for Israel - less than two weeks before Alexis would get to Cornell. He has spent the last two years studying at Yeshivat Hamivtar near Efrat, Israel.

About Alexis

Alexis was born in Columbus, Ohio and grew up nearby in Gahanna where she attended Gahanna Lincoln High School. She got her undergraduate degree in Jewish Studies and Asian Studies at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA and spent the Hurricane Katrina semester at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY - where she just missed meeting Josh. Alexis has spent the past year learning at the Nishmat seminary in Jerusalem and this fall she will be starting her first year at Suffolk Law School in Boston.

How we failed to meet

After Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, thus closing Tulane University for the semester, Alexis was persuaded by a couple friends to come to Cornell University instead. Unfortunately, as Alexis was making this decision, Josh was standing in JFK Airport watching the devastation on the television screens, having left Ithaca about a week before. On the first day of his studies in Israel, Alexis flew to Ithaca for the semester.

How we met

A year later, a mutual friend from Cornell, Ilan Cohen, was making Shabbat at his apartment for a small crowd of mostly Cornellians. Unfortunately, Alexis wasn't able to make it, due to a program her school had that Shabbat. Even so, she dropped by Friday afternoon to see everyone. Everyone cleverly (or accidentally) contrived to leave the two alone, and they had a chance to talk for the first time, but though there was interest, nothing came of it. A week later, Alexis met Rabbi Binyamin Gilbert, a good friend of Josh's, who upon next seeing Josh, told him "I just met someone who'd be perfect for you." One thing led to another and a few weeks later Josh finally managed to get Alexis' phone number and…

How it happened

It should have been simple, really. A nice walk, a park, and dinner afterwards. Unfortunately, Josh has a way of taking simple ideas and tweaking them until they get more and more complex. That Thursday evening, they met in the Old City and made their way to the Kotel (the Western Wall). Some fast thinking and excuses of photographs allowed Josh to get Alexis down to the Kotel first, a necessity in order to take the roses through the security checkpoint without the guards looking through the bag in front of Alexis. After the Kotel, the two made their way out of the Old City towards Yemin Moshe. Supposedly, they were meeting a friend before dinner. Outside the old city, Josh gave the decoy rose. Little did Josh know, but by failing to answer the phone when he'd been at the jeweler's that morning, he'd managed to make Alexis suspicious, thus losing any chance of surprise. In Yemin Moshe, they found one of the parks had a random minstrel sitting out of sight, playing a guitar (not at all abnormal for Jerusalem parks, although this one happened to be an old friend of Josh's), and sat for a time. Under a beautiful starry night, in front of a view of the old city of Jerusalem, with a musician playing lecha dodi in the background, Josh got down on one knee and took out the second, real rose, an amethyst and silver necklace wrapped around the flower, and asked Alexis to marry him. After an indeterminably long silence, he asked again, at which point she realized that answering might be a good thing.

Josh's Engagement Statistics:

Number of roses involved: 2
Number of florists visited looking for the right roses: 3
Number of mailing containers butchered: 1
Number of poster tubes purchased after butchering mailing containers: 1
Number of decoys involved in proposing: 5
Surprise achieved (Y/N)? No. Silly precognitive women.

Number of stores visited looking for amethyst necklace: 25+
Number of cups of coffee consumed in the 6 hours prior to getting engaged: 4
Number of proposal plans discarded: 2327, +/- 5
Number of times I had to change the time for the dinner reservation at Gabriel's: 2
Number of days I waited before telling her that the random minstrel we heard playing in the park behind us was actually a friend of mine who she'd met the day before we got engaged: 2.5
Number of phones stolen after having been locked in Gabriel's coatroom: 1 (hers)
Bottles of champagne consumed thursday and friday: Only 2...
Hearing her say that she wants to marry me and spend the rest of her life with me? Priceless.

Photos

(hover over thumbnails for medium size, click to enlarge)

October 16, 2007. Fourth Date (five days after first date). We both were still on break for the fall holidays, and were finding this strange phenomenon that a 6 hr date was far too short, so we decided to travel a little and we spent the day at the Ein Gedi nature reserve in the Negev Desert (South) hiking. It was beautiful.

Fourth Date. Those pocket tripods work wonders. In the foreground is Ein Gedi, with us perched on the rocks, in the midground is the Dead Sea, and Jordan can be seen faintly in the background.

October 26, 2007. MASA (a wonderful program from the Jewish Agency which gives significant scholarships to a wide variety of programs, including ours) had a rather odd idea to take 2000 odd students on a luxury train ride day trip to Akko (in the North, on the Mediterranean Sea) two weeks after we started dating. We may have been the only two who considered their money well spent on this trip.

The day after we got engaged. Ramot, Jerusalem. Photo Credit: Mary Jo Elman.

Shushan Purim. Obviously, Josh is a chassid on vacation (yes, that's his real hair) and Alexis is a fortune teller whose "third eye" painted on her forehead had worn off earlier in the day.

March 10, 2007. Engagement Party. After being bugged for over a month Alexis and Josh acquiesced to general demands and held an engagement party at Nishmat ( Alexis' school). This picture has Alexis and Josh surrounded by friends from Cornell.