Adventures in Israel

sunrise

2006-01-22T07:40:00.000-08:00

From Masada to New York to Salt Lake, I've followed a steady string of sunrises halfway across the world. Sitting here at my computer, in our frigid Salt Lake City sunroom, I find myself backtracking the miles from B to A, retracing my steps to the top of Masada.

Hiking through the dark, my chest tight and pounding, I remember explaining esoteric English vocabulary to Bar, our Israeli madricha. We stumbled over dry creekbeds and pressed our knees down against the stone steps, our eyes occasionally spinning up and back to look at the stars, speckled and brilliant against the navy blue sky. I lagged behind as we neared the top, my head aching and my sweat turning cold on my back. And then Elliot, who I still didn't even really know, was there standing next to me, with a quiet word of encoruagement and the soft presence of someone who didn't mind waiting up. We reached the top together, and I collapsed on a rock to gaze out at the distant Trans-Jordan mountains, glowing faintly with the coming dawn.

I watched the moutains glow brighter and brighter, butter yellows and blue-pinks oozing up towards the fading stars. We crowded around the cobbled defenses, elbows rested on the stone walls that held in our ancestors as we locked our eyes to the peaks across the valley. I can still see the sun as it appeared, suddenly, as if by magic, in the crux of two dark peaks. A distorted orange orb peeking up and out, its attention focused not on us, but on warm blue sky stretching endlessly above it.

Weeks later, I spent a restless night in a navy blue upholstered airplane seat, my nose runny and my eyes crusted open. Every now and then I would glance out the window, focusing vaguely on the black behind the oval where I could find no landmarks. Twelve hours passed on that plane; leaning up against Nathan as he drifted through medicated sleep, glancing back at him enviously through restless eyes as I woke, again and again, to the tone of the fasten seat belt sign. We landed at JFK at dawn. Walking down the glassy terminal towards passport control, clutching our bags to our chests and talking feverishly, I began to realize that soon, we would all be gone. Outside the window, through dark grey clouds on a backdrop of white-blue, the sun rose vaguely over the airport. The dull thunk of stamps on passports yanked us to the baggage claim, and within an hour, I found myself alone, dozing restlessly in another blue chair and waiting for the sun to set on my next airplane.

And then this morning. I didn't take Tylenol PM last night, and so at 5:00 I found myself alive and restless, twitching like a bellydancer below my heavy down comforter. I spent a few moments thinking about my muscles, a few moments thinking about the weather, a few moments thinking about hot black tea with sugar. I listened to three songs on my iPod (Pretty Things - Rufus Wainwright, Fair - Remy Zero, Against all Odds - The Postal Service), read two chapters in a book my father gave me months ago, and then put on my glasses. I watched the dark branches outside my windows grow backlit with the dawn, watched the sky morph from black to blue in the quietest way possible. The clouds, strung out at high altitude, stayed grey with the morning. I took a deep breath and stepped out of bed, treading down my house's carefully carpeted stairs to a glass of tea and the computer screen.

My cold fingers, clacking at the keyboard, can only reminisce for the Middle East.

cottonmouth

2006-01-12T22:56:00.000-08:00

listen to: regrets, by ben folds five.

Last night I was awake until 2:30am, just because I felt listless and had work to do and kept stalling for hang out time with everyone. This morning, when my cell phone alarm went off at 8? I let it go through three full ring cycles before I realized omigawd it's MY alarm that's going off, not Rachel's or Laura's or Sam's, and then I turned it off and lay there in bed for way way too long. By the time I actually made it to the hadar ochel, it was ten minutes to closing and the angry cafeteria ladies barked at us in Hebrew. I ate shitty off-brand frosted flakes with 3% milk, because for some reason they drink 3% here, not 2%. And instead of skim being skim, it's 0%! Madness.

Then I went back to the dorm to grab my English stuff (everyone in my room: still asleep) and now I'm here, in the comp lab, stalling. Today and yesterday have been finals for our sequentials: yesterday was Biology, today is Physics. For English I had to write an essay on a poem by Margaret Atwood, and now I have these hideous CHARTS about Joyce's Dubliners, and...ugh. Charts. The best part is that this is only the beginning-- this afternoon I compose the study plan of all study plans re: final exam in the core curriculum. All of Jewish History from biblical times to the present. In four hours of testing.

Niice. Mom says it's good practice for college but mostly I don't listen to her. Becuase...well, because she's my mom. No offense, Mom.

Wow. Good journal entry, Dory! Mostly I just felt obligated to put some kind of buffer between my awkward poetry and the future tense. I'll be concrete/coherent soon, I swear. After Shabbos? It's on.

xoxo

poetic interlude

2006-01-12T12:04:00.000-08:00

a week from today
i will be panicking as i try to track down lost shoes and socks and pack 900 shekels worth of gifts and traded t-shirts into my bags,
a week from today i'll be choking back the bittersweet foreign words that mean i'm finally, oh god, i'm finally going home.
a week from today i won't be sleeping, not at all; i'll be on the bus to the airport and we'll just sit there in the intl terminal, trying so hard to make so much of the last few hours before we're sealed in and sleep through and pop out
in nyc.
and then everyone will disappear through the cracks in the short-rubbed sanitary grey-blue carpet and i will fly home alone,
knuckles white on the blue pleather armrests and eyes locked on the clouded white mountains that i know will tell me i'm home.

tiyul: galile #2

2006-01-10T09:22:00.000-08:00

Today's tiyul brought us from home to home across Israel's Galile region-- first, a family of four living in a Bedouin-style tent to be closer to the land. Next, our guide's mother, one of the chalutzot, or pioneers, who came to Israel in the forties. Later that afternoon, we visited an Arab village; all 33 of us huddled into a stranger's basement sitting room, drinking small styrofoam cups of hot tea and listening to Aubrey's summarized translations of the man in the kafiya who explained to us the challenges an educated Arab faced in today's Israel. Discrimination in jobs, land rights, representation in the government-- the list was brief, but hit all the points that we take for granted as citizens of any country. Strange and somewhat depressing to see such a thoughtful, intelligent man inform us that our Promised Land and his Holy Land was also a land where he couldn't get a decent paying job.

In between housecalls, we returned to the misty hillsides of Zefat to visit the Artist's Quarter in the rain. Everyone says that Zefat is beautiful in the summer, that it's really too bad we couldn't see it in the sunshine, but I like it better the way I've come to know it. There's something about the place, with its crooked, Harry Potter-esque alleyways and lampposts, the music playing in small stone courtyards, the lovely overlooks of the mountains below-- I think if the mist lifted, it wouldn't be nearly as romantic, nearly as magical. Me and Jacqui looked through the shops, I couldn't find a keychain tacky enough for my liking, and we purchased hot chocolate and ice cream, respectively.

Dinner tonight was in the restaurant of a Yemenite Jew whose name I can't remember. I have no idea what any of the food was called but it was all delicious and I ate so much that, to be perfectly honest, I spent the entire 2.5 hour bus ride home wanting to vomit on myself. For those of you readers back home-- brace yourselves for the new Dory. She has gained the Freshman 15 a year early and she will kill a man for a choclate covered Oreo. Except that she doesn't have to, because her roommate Sam buys them on a regular basis and pretty soon she'll have a heart attack and drop dead.

True story.

Nothing else to report for tonight. Go Home Day is drawing ever nearer (10 days technically, but I'll round down to nine). I'm not really sure how I feel about it-- I miss everyone, to be sure, but saying goodbye to my friends here is defenitely going to smart.

Expect lots more entries before I leave! It's not over till...till it's over. Actually, more like until finals are over.

You get it.

xoxo

the negev

2006-01-09T12:23:00.000-08:00

So today I went here. Israel's Negev Desert-- over 50% of the country's land with less that 10% of it's population. All my friends pressed their foreheads to the windows with bleary eyes and said,
"It's so strange, it's so beautiful; only in Israel."
But looking out at those wicked badlands, rough bushes and sharp stones, I couldn't help but feel like I was home. The Negev was nothing new to me; as Uri stood in front of the group talking about the solitude the desert could offer, the clarity of mind it could give, I found myself thinking
I know. I live here.
Because I do, I really do live here. Scrambling up the backbone of a mock crater, squinting down at the dull earth bulging up around me, I understand more than ever that I am, first and foremost, a Citizen of the Desert. No matter where I go, the intensity and the emptiness of desert will always make my freedom.

"the holocaust martyrs' and heroes' remembrance authority"

2006-01-04T17:00:00.000-08:00

The last three days have left me completely exhausted. Every morning, I wake up the same way I always do-- reluctantly hauling from my bed, brushing my teeth, eating crappy food, and fumbling to class or the bus --and stare down eight to ten hours of Holocaust Studies.

On Monday it was endless classtime; reading excerpts from Nazi documents and partisan correspondence, writing down facts and figures and bulleted lists of political thought and motivations. All morning in class, lunch, afternoon with a Holocaust survivor, class, dinner, class, sleep. There was no time to think about what was coming into my head, no time to consider the gravity of the subject-- I was too busy taking notes.

The next day was our Resistance Tiyul. Wandering vaguely through the Carmel Mountains and looking out past a ruined crusader castle to the Mediterrenean sea, I kept myself awake with a steady stream of chewing gum, chocolate gelt, and whiny conversations with my friends. After the hike, we went to the Ghetto Fighter's Museum, one hour away. I gazed blankly into the pixelated photos of partisan soilders, smiling grimly out at me from their dull foamboard.

And then today. Yad Vashem. It's so hard to write about these things coherently; please forgive me.

In one of the rooms is a narrow display shaped like a strip of film negatives. Each panel shows a different image. In one, men running from trucks to a forest clearing, S.S. officers urging them on. In the next, the men pick up shovels; in the next, they begin to dig trenches while the soilders look on. Gold and grey captions run below the images: "The Jews were made to believe they were simply performing forced labor" one said.

Among the panels is a photograph taken right on the edge of one of the trenches, looking down at the men and boys working below. In the center of the image is a young man, with rumpled dark hair casting a shadow over his eyes. His head is turned, his brow furrowed; he stares out of the frame at something we will never be able to see. He looks preoccupied, concerned. Behind him, two older men work, their backs turned to the camera. The young man wears a numbered canvas jumpsuit, one size too large and bunched up around the waist. And his hands: still wrapped around the handle of his shovel, reaching down to take another load of earth from what, in moments, will be his grave.

In the next panel, the Einsatzgruppen-- the death squad --line up the men along the trenches, one man every twelve meters, backs turned on their murderers. Five gunmen point their weapons at each man, and the officers, thumbs between their buttons, look on. In the final photograph, they fire. The photo blurs as the bodies fall.

This display is the only thing in the museum which made me cry.

after 1.5 hours listening to an auschwitz survivor...

2006-01-02T15:38:00.000-08:00

"Surviving a camp like Auschwitz is not just a miracle, it is a string of miracles. To survive, you needed a few miracles per day."

"Many of us who did not think we had a chance went to the wire. That is what we called it, going to the wire. It was electrocuted barbed wire, 40,000 volts. They would say, we don't have a chance, why should we suffer? One day more, one day more. So they went to the wire."

"Before Auschwitz I was a young kid, in Auschwitz I became an old man. I learned everything about life there. It is the university you can imagine-- if you can survive it."

"I go back to Auschwitz usually two times a year, I make pilgrimage...why do I go back? To pay my respects to the memory of those who did not come back. The second reason is...that I can tell my taxi to meet at the front gate at say, 3:00, and it will wait for me. I can go in and out. I can leave Auschwitz as a free person every day."

the beginning

2006-01-02T12:14:00.000-08:00

Today marks the beginning of HSI-learns-Holocaust week, and also the beginning of a series of actual, assigned journal entries.

We'll see if I'm capable of maintaining any kind of quality in my writing. To repeat one of my new favorite words: assigned pieces? Fabricated.

Evian-Les-Bains, home of the famous bottled water, was also home to a conference which could have saved half a million human lives. There, in 1938, world leaders from 32 "Countries of Asylum" met to discuss potential solutions to the growing problem facing German and Austrian Jews-- the problem of pogroms, the problem of random arrests, of public humiliation, of hangings and corruption and the hatred of Jews.

They met, they talked, they played golf and had spa days and rode horses through the lovely mountain scenery. Not so far away in Germany, countless Jews were looking down the barrel of a fate that no one deserves. And these bureaucrats spent ten minutes each saying,

O, O God, it's so sad, so terrible, those poor innocent men and women and children. Those poor innocent Jews, we pity them so immensely, we care so much.
But I'm afraid that laws are laws and the people are the people and
no.
No, we won't be helping.
We can only pray that someone else will.

And again and again throughout history, people express their sympathy and look away and move on. The conference at Evian was just another moment that people chose to wait, another moment when politics left us with a dream-- a dream of life --deffered.

Making a difference is not something that can be postponed. We have to make a difference now, or we'll all really be screwed; you can't postpone the issue because in the case of the men and women at Evian it was as good as murder. And if all they wanted was to point at that weekend in France and say, look, we tried; say that so they could sleep at night, then fine. They got what they wanted. They didn't take issue with the extermination of innocents.

But someone has to. Someone has to take responsibility for the things and the people that the fools of this world shatter like clay vessels. Someone has to care for the broken, someone has to stick the earthen sherds back into one another like a jigsaw until our water glasses can be the mirrors for the voices we can only just hear, like the dull roar of ocean in a seashell.

Someone has to fix it,
someone has to listen.

If we don't, who will?

so this is the new year

2006-01-01T05:46:00.000-08:00

Today's song of choice: The New Year, Death Cab for Cutie. Obvious, but so appropriate.

The group spent the weekend chilling with a bunch of kibbutznikim about an hour from Hod. They were all kids about our age who had kind of deferred their army service to spend the year taking classes in Judaism and Zionism and get to know the country more-- not unlike what us HSI chillins' are doing. We spent the night on their little campusy area, talking to them and just hanging out. The idea was more fun than the reality; I had trouble forcing myself to really talk to people because I was so unintrigued by the awkwardness. I made a few friends, though, and had some bonding time with some of our group who I haven't hung out with so much. So a weekend well spent, I guess.

We had dinner at our teachers' houses last night, which turned out to be a lot of fun. We got to meet Aubrey's family and look through his photo albums and eat the AMAZING sufganiyot (fried dough with powdered sugar) that his wife made. We played a couple games of Chinese Whispers (that's what Aubrey calls it, for the rest of the world it's Telephone) and failed at one of those counting/clapping things, and then the bus took us back to Hod. An excellent bus ride, as a total side note: Brooke & I rocked out to Dashboard, and then Jack & I rocked out to Taking Back Sunday, and then I tripped over Ali's feet like nine times and Elliott made the smelliest fart in the world and Laura and Aimee made epic raps.

And then it was 10:30pm and omigawd it was almost New Years! Legs were shaved, asses were packed into denim miniskirts, glorious hiphop playlists were made. And then, once everyone (us and some kids from Akiba) were downstairs? NOTHING HAPPENED. Me, Sarah, Fallon, Jacqui, Brooke, and Ali tried so hard to make a party. We danced, we sang along, we drank Pepsi MAX and made Jack skip all the songs that sucked. Nothing.

As we counted down, I felt even less than I usually do on New Year's. The superficiality of it, how fabricated the time shift seems, left me smiling vaguely as the couples necked and one of my dancing buddies kissed me on the cheek. Three minutes later, Ben (the Akiba madrich and the older brother of one of the boys in our group, Sam) sent his kids home. In the immortal words of my father, and now Ben:

"New Year's ends at midnight. I want you home by 12:10."

After all the Akiba kids were gone and we were left to mill aimlessly around the moadon, Jack put on The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony and those of us still awake formed a circle in the middle of the room, swaying with our arms draped over each other's shoulders. Sandwiched between Bar and Nathan, I looked around the circle at all of my friends (and family, really) and felt myself cheer up a little bit. Each person took turns stating their hopes for the new year-- I hope we all do well on our SATs, I hope we all get into the colleges we want, and I'm so so glad to be celebrating New Year's with all of you who I've come to love so much.

We cracked jokes, we improvised a sacreligious rap, and I was happy about it. At 3:30am, I crawled into bed, Death Cab for Cutie slipping from my earphones to my subconcious as I drifted off to sleep.

This morning I woke up with a hacking cough, a splitting headache, and fever-sore muscles that refused to lift me out of bed. Yoni told me to go see the nurse, but I fell asleep by accident and didn't wake up until 1 in the afternoon when Rachel woke me up to ask if I wanted anything to eat. After being chastized for missing class, I showered instead of attending my first sequential, bought an iced coffee, and stumbled my way over to English. And now I'm here, in the comp lab, waiting for 4:40 and coughing mucus into a pile of Kleenex.

I go home in 19 days. I'm not going to miss Israel, I'm not going to miss classes, I'm not going to miss Mosenson Youth Village. But I am going to miss my friends. My God, am I going to miss my friends.

Happy New Year. I wish you all the very best.
xoxo

FUN FACTS

2005-12-27T01:54:00.000-08:00

1. In Israel, every little restaurant and cafe and crap stand sells this stuff called iced coffee. But it's not like American iced coffee with coffee and ice, it's like a delicious milky sweet coffee SLURPEE and you can buy a medium for 10 shekel at Ofer's on campus and they're SO expensive but SO good. SO. GOOD.
2. You know how there are two day weekends? Like, with Saturday and Sunday? I don't. Because in Israel, SUNDAY IS A WORK DAY. So there is one day and one night of true, honest-to-God weekend, but even with that Sunday is Shabbos so everything is closed until sundown. Moral of the story? Madness.
3. Yesterday while eating lunch in the Hadar Ochel, we looked up and the ceiling tile above us was all wobbly, and Leeron was like, "I think it's dripping..." and then it FELL on the TABLE, right on Brooke's tray. And there were chunks of ceiling everywhere and I laughed so hard I almost peed my pants.
4. I just got iced coffee all over the front of my shirt and I'm too lazy to change it, so now I'll smell like rancid milk ALL DAY.
5. Tonight is our super-duper exciting "Hanukah Halluh" party with the Akiba kids. Akiba is made up of 45 students from the same American high school who are doing the Alexander Muss program at the same time we are, just separately. We don't really know what a "Hanukah Halluh" entails-- although I suspect that by "halluh" they meant holla, as in holla back or "Hollaback Girl", if you will --but on the dorky little flyers they handed us it said to dress in your best 60's get up and that there would be free food. I'm down.
6. I spend most of Physics every day attempting to explain to my teacher exactly how I expect him to teach me. When I'm not teaching him how to teach, he's doing labs for me and getting distracted by Orli, who has an inborn gift for sidetracking teachers.
7. I'M going to go take a nap!
8. And then I'm gonna pick out my favorite 60's ensemble and get my groove on, Hanukah Halluh-style.

Happy Hannukah and Merry Christmas to all! Much love.
xoxo

laundry day!

2005-12-22T04:47:00.000-08:00

I'm not really in the mood to write much more, but I feel obligated to offer some kind of paltry update. Below is an excerpt from an email I just sent-- it is what it is what it is. Real updates soon, I promise. (Including a TRUE LIFE, IN-DEPTH, SUPER DETAILED REVIEW OF MY DAY from sunrise to post-sunset. Get pumped up.

"i come home in a month! how crazy is that? i'm having trouble grasping the reality of the time frame: on the one hand, a month is almost nothing and i'll be home tomorrow. on the other hand...well, every day here feels like a forever. so much HAPPENS, you know? i think it's the close quarters-- 35 of us breathing the same air, doing the same homework, eating the same food, using the same toilets --inevitably things happen quickly. it's this total retardation of the way relationships develop, everything gets sped up and suddenly there are people you want to puke on and people you want to sleep with and it all happened so FAST. and the kids here are from all over; i'm so excited about these friends i'm going to have all over the u.s. i've started constructing these elaborate fantasies about my year off: driving and busing and flying from city to city and state to state, sleeping on floors and finally meeting the friends and boyfriends and girlfriends that these amazing people keep telling me about.

long beach, seattle, colombus, greenwich, miami, chicago...and then salt lake city. everyone thinks it's hysterical that i'm from utah, and then they ask me really stupid questions about mormons, and then they find out that i have mormon friends, and then they flip shit all over themselves. a part of me is really irritated by it, but i think it's probably a good thing that they're actually hearing from a real person that mormons are not crazy. it's so funny, though, so hypocritical-- that jews, of all people, would jump to these rediculous conclusions about people of another religion."

Today's recommended listening is anything by Josh Rouse, and today's recommended eating is mellawach pizza from the little restaurant next to my dorm. Today's recommended things-to-send-to-Dory-in-the-mail is LETTERS! Or instant food, cash, and hoodies. Or letters. Send me an email (indieosyncrasy at hotmail dot com) and I'll hook you up with my mailing address! For reals, yo.

Peace.
xoxo

flash to black

2005-12-17T22:07:00.000-08:00

So I'd like to begin this post by informing you all of my current soundtrack. It will mean absolutely nothing to about 99% of you-- in fact, I can think of one, maybe two people who will read this and know who I'm talking about. But that's not the point. The point is Will Sartain. The point is In The Dark.

I'm glad I've gotten that out there.

Another dreamy 24 hours halfway across the world. Time passes so strangely here; I can't get over it. In a way it reminds me of AMIGOS, this perversion of moments that leaves me in some places forever and in other not at all. I open my eyes, and I'm blinded by a rush of hot desert sand, and my hips are flexed out so my legs can wrap around the saddle that is wrapped around my camel which is plodding methodically along the train; I blink and then I'm in the moadon, pupils dialted to American movies projected on the wall with my back propped against Danny and the couch; I close my eyes and take a gasping breath and it's morning.

Again and again, all of these tiny fleeting images that blind me and then fade-- no, flash --to black. Lack of sleep has left me with dry eyes for weeks; no number of steamy showers or eyedrops or brief fits of crying can rehydrate my vision. But I don't mind, I don't mind, I wouldn't have it any other way. Becayse every moment gives me something else to think about.

Maybe I am not a Zionist. Maybe I am not a very good Jew, maybe I do not believe in Eretz Yisrael the way I am meant to. But I am thinking about what it means to be the person I am not, and I am slowly constructing opinions of my own, slowly developing an understanding of this strange place that is supposed to be my homeland. Slowly, I am learning what it means to function within the Old City walls. Slowly, I am coming to grasp the complexities that run the bloodstream of this ancient country.

sunrise on masada

2005-12-15T00:43:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, at 3:30 AM, I woke up with my thirty-five new best friends and hiked to the top of Masada in the dark. The air was cool and the snake path was full of steps designed for giants, and halfway up I got that feeling in the back of my throat that makes me think of rowing crew, nearly done with a 2k sprint and wanting so so badly to throw up.

It was drama. We watched the sunrise over the Jordanian mountains and I took hazy pictures of the sky. My notes from that morning go like this: coherent printing, slowly deteriorating into cursive, then illegible cursive, then scribbly black lines, and then a really big bloody spot of black ink where I fell asleep. I woke up when Bar started handing out snacks. Exxxxcellent.

Lots of interesting discussion while we were at Masada about what we would have done had we been in the position of the people stranded there. There was a group of about a thousand people who fled from Jerusalem in the face of the Romans and took refuge on top of Masada. They lived normal lives up there for three years, under seige by the Romans but still essentially secure-- even though they were really stranded, and it was only a matter of time before things got ugly. The Romans finally decided to construct a huge ramp to roll all their weaponry up, so that they could really attack. The people living in Masada could have done something-- they had archers, and hot oil, and catapults that they could have fought off the people constructing the ramp with --but the builders were all Hebrew slaves, their own people taken captive by the Romans. So the Jews on Masada did nothing. When it was totally clear that the Romans would breach their defenses, the people decided to kill themselves to preserve their dignity and prevent the Romans from claiming Masada as a victory. So they did-- when the Romans reached the top, they found the entire population, men, women, and children, dead in their homes.

While sitting in a circle at the bottom of Masada's Southern Cistern, we talked a lot about whether or not we would have done the same thing in that situation, whether or not it was even really justifiable. It's a really hard question, and...well, I don't know. I can't really decide how I feel about it. I'll get back to you.

After we climbed back down from Masada, I spent ten shekel on a frigging Prigat (delicious grapefruit drink but totally not worth the equivalent of $2.50) and then bought some exciting giftage at the Ahava store. Oh! And we made friends with our guard. His name is Ron and he wears and headband and he carries his gun everrrrrywhere, which is actually a law or something but I think it's hysterical. One of our other guards would cuddle up with her gun and spoon with it on the bus. Tee hee.

I've got more fun stories to tell, because that afternoon we went to the Dead Sea, too (it BURNS!) but I've got to go take a crack at my English homework. I'll try and post the rest later.

I hope all is well back home, and that none of you are too angry at me for not corresponding. I'm mailing international postal service mensajes today! A.K.A some of you will have letters soon. Be excited!
Much love,
xoxoxoxo

quick antecdote time!

2005-12-11T05:36:00.000-08:00

This past weekend was our first free weekend off campus, and, as you may or may not know, I spent it visiting family friends of -my- friend Jack. I have not the faintest idea what their last name was, but the parents were Edi and Mordecai, and their daughter (my age) was called Cegal. So so much fun! They live in Raanana, which is about fifteen minutes from Hod Hasharon, and have a completely schitzophrenic dog named Sofi. I won't go into detail, because...well, because I am lazy. But I'll share a real quick anecdote with all a y'all before I troop back to the dorm to do English homework.

So on Friday night, after attending a late Thanksgiving dinner with a total random assortment of people who had made aliyah over the years, me, Jack, Cegal, and Cegal's friend Raanan went on a bowling adventure. Cegal speaks pretty much perfect english, because her mom is actually American, but Raanan's English was a little on the rudimentary side. (It was just another time when I wanted so so badly to be able to speak Hebrew, and couldn't. I hate not being able to tell what's going on, let alone communicate.) But annnyways, we were heading out to the mall in Hertzaliya, and Raanan was driving.

Wow.

For those of you who have never witnessed Israeli drivers before, I want you to imagine a stereotypical Boston (or New York) driver. Now make them angrier, give them tiny, fast cars, and design a road system composed entirely of roundabouts. Welcome to Israel.

Nor can you forget the mandatory sound systems, which are pretty much always pumping intense disco beats (availible on the radio at all hours of the day). Raanan liked techno, but he was also all about the Kelly Clarkson. So there we were, me and Jack in the backseat, 1am with Raanan blasting down the street, singing along to Kelly Clarkson in screetchy falsetto, and cutting off at least five people in a period of a few minutes. Oh, and signaling? Not something that happens here. You want to be in the other lane, you get in the other lane. Everyone else gets to deal with it.

But all of us lived to tell the tale, so I'm feeling okay about it. The weekend really was tons of fun, though, and Cegal promised to come visit our campus later on. Yay having Israeli friends! But now HSI has taken away one of our free weekends, so unless I miss our camel-Bedouin-tent-camping adventure, that's only one more homestay the whole time we're here. I can't really decide what to do; on the one hand, it is unlikely that I will ever again have an opportunity to spend the night in a Bedouin tent; on the other hand, I may never be back in Israel, and the first homestay was SO MUCH FUN. You guys have any opinions? You should comment if you do.

To everyone I haven't emailed/responded to recently, I am so so sorry and I swear I'll do it soon! I would say I'm too busy, but that's a little bit of a lie. There's just...a lot going on, that's all. But I will get in touch with you soon, I swear!

Oh, and if you want my mailing address-- email me! And you should send me yours as well; there are loads of people who I want to send letters to whose addresses I just don't know.

Much love to all! Hope everything is wonderful in your respective hometowns, more fun stories later!
xoxox

aw shoot

2005-12-09T00:52:00.000-08:00

Hey all!
I can only write a little bit today, it's Friday and I have to go pack for a free weekend. I'll be spending it in a town not far from here with my pal Jack; we'll see how it goes. Should be interesting, at least. And I am SO SO excited to have food that is NOT from the dining hall. Guhh...yesterday all I ate was pita, hummus, and cookies. It was all white and brown. Guhh...

ON Tuesday we left for our first overnight tiyul to Jerusalem. We spent the morning hiking at Mount Gilboa, but hiking is maybe not the best verb. Because it was all downhill. More like walking, or, occasionally, falling. Or ankle turning. I actually am totally in love, because they never ever make us walk UP the mountains, only down them. I hate up. I love down.

But anyways, the mountain was tons of fun. It reminded me of the forests in the northwest, all mossy and full of trees. But what do I know about trees. Then that ended, and we went to

Aw man. Our rooms are getting clean checked for cleaness and I need to be in the dorm right right now.
xoxox! More post-Shabbos.

fun old cosas!

2005-12-05T00:23:00.000-08:00

So here I am in the computer lab, on break from core curriculum in the morning. I've spent the past few hours studying Torah with my pal Jacqie, and then there was some discussion about historical value, bias, accuracy, etc-- for all of my TOK homies back in Salt Lake, this was totally old news and I OWNED it. If you had been there you would have laughed.

"It's a religious text, automatically carries a propagandistic bias, blah blah blah, cross-referencing for historical value, blah blah."

Awesome.

Yesterday we went to Tel Gezer, and it was completely, %100 amazing. It's an archeological dig about 45 minutes from Hod Ha'Sharon, and the areas exposed are from around 1750 BCE. The Canaanites were amazing-- they found this hilltop right at the beginning of Israel's foothills, and it's totally secured. It looks out along the costal strip (which is totally flat) to the Mediterranean, and then it's backed by more hills and the beginning of the mountains. Back in the day it was totally fortified; stone walls with cyclopean masonry as much as ten feet thick, and then those were reinforced with earth. To get water, they dug out a tunnel at least fifteen feet in diameter that went through the bedrock to an underground aquifer-- we even got to climb down it!

Amazing stuff, really. Just looking around almost all of us found pottery sherds from 3,000 years ago.

Break is almost over, so I'm off to study Biology for a few minutes and then it's back to class. Me, Fallon, Leeron, Jacqie, and Sasha are presenting a skit on Deborah's life as a judge. It's kind of terrible. But but...we were busy last night. With, you know. Homework. And stuff.

More later!
xoxox

baaack!

2005-12-03T11:37:00.000-08:00

(Sorry for the pause, all. The computer lab closes for Shabbos, so I couldn't post again until now.)

So back on the airplane. There was a big group of Hassids and a few rabbis sitting on the plane with us, at at least three times throughout the trip they stood up to pray. Towards morning, one of them came around to all of the boys on our trip.

"Are you a Jew?" He would ask. And when the boy said yes, without another word, he would wrap tefilin for him. It was bizarre and I think on some level a little offenseive; who's to say that every single one of the boys even WANTED that? It was our first ultra-Israeli cultural experience, though, and definetly an interesting one.

I read 'Damascus Gate' on the plane-- Dad, you were right, it's awesome. Haven't had a chance to read since then, but if I ever have free time ever ever again I most definetly will pick it up.

We arrived in Israel at 5:50 in the evening, totally jetlagged and even more confused. At that point I was mostly hanging out with a girl named Dena, who is quite religious and from Cincinnati. She's a total sweetheart, though, and speaks some Hebrew, so it was nice to have her around as the 35 of us navigated through the airport. At this point I was also hanging out with a sort of strange kid named Jared (can't remember where he's from, but he has a super awkward habit of breaking out in song whenever you say something that reminds him of a showtune. He has a lovely voice, though, so it's cool.) I had also spent a little time with this guy named Jack, who I thiiink is from...okay I have no idea where Jack is from. But he's super rad and an excellent guitar player, and I get to go home-staying with him next weekend! Yay.

But back to my narrative. Because you know I am allll about the narrative.

We arrived at campus in the dark, had a veggies, hummus, potato-cheesy-bread things, super vile kind of pizza, and chunky noodles--also vile. This food definetly foreshadowed the horribleness of things to come. The food here? Sucks. But anyways, first night, food, got our smashing Israel cell phones, met our Madrichim (essentially out counselors) and checked out the dorm. Our Madrichim are tons of fun-- Bar and Yoni. Yoni's originally from New York and is totally excellent, he talks about "people who have a true look in their eyes" all the time and has dreadlocks to the MAXX. Bar is super sweet, and lives on a kibbutz in the north. Her english is a little sketchy, so she almost never talks to the group, but she works really hard, is really funny, and is generally fun to be around. I <3 Madrichim!

Our dorms really aren't as nice as they should be considering how effing MUCH the program costs. We're in Friedman, which is one of the older dorms. It's got two floors, really terrible bathrooms (with flooding showers!), and a minor cockroach problem. I share room #13, right next to the stairwell and the bathroom on the second floor, with Laura, Rachel, and (dun dun DUNN) Samantha. I love Rachel and Laura, but Samantha and I, well, we don't get along so well. I spent the entire night chilling with Ali, Dena, Sam, and Jared, and trying DESPERATELY to avoid her. Good times!

I'm going to have to go for now, there are kids from the other American group on campus who need computers; they just got back from a week-long tiyul. More updates later! I miss and love every one of you.
xoxoxox

lech lecha

2005-12-02T03:06:00.000-08:00

ISRAEL.
I am so. Totally. In Israel.
I'll start from the beginning.

On Tuesday morning I boarded a 10:00 flight to New York JFK. I spent the next four or so hours chatting blandly with the girls of the BYU basketball team (who had me almost surrounded) and a group of LDS missionaries on their way to Poland or Russia or...or someplace.

I met up with the other AMHSI kids in New York, and it was really, really awkward. And quite frankly not fun at all. Oh, and Mom? You know how you thought I had way too much stuff? Comparatively, I am a hobo. I brought one big big duffel, my messenger bag, and a backpack. There was one girl with a matching 5-piece floral luggage set, and another with at least three duffel bags the size of my entire body. So let's hear one for packing comparatively light! But yeah, so I talked to some of the kids as we worked our way through El Al check-in and security, which was bizarre and incredibly thorough. The woman I talked to asked me to write my name in hebrew, and then grilled me about what Reconstructionism is, and then told me to have a nice flight. Yahoo!

At midnight we boarded the plane to Tel Aviv-Yafo. It was a gigantic plane--three seats on one side, an aisle, five more seats, and aisle, and then three seats again. Business class was on the second floor. Yes. The second floor. It was a goddamned DOUBLE DECKER PLANE. My friend Jack tried to sneak up to scope it out, but I guess the hoodie and the ratty jeans gave him away because the flight attendants made him sit back down.

(Okay, I've got to go to an all-dorm meeting. I'll continue this later today, I promise! Emails and letters soon, as well.)

xoxoxo

so so so close

2005-11-22T15:24:00.000-08:00

T minus one week and a few hours!
Also, T minus a serious crapload of work to do.
Yeah. About that...

first entry time! excellent.

2005-11-10T22:53:00.000-08:00

Hey all!
I'm just making a quick post here to test things out and see how it looks with the layout.
For those of you who already have the URL of this thing, I'll start updating for real probably around the 25th or so, maybe later. Feel free to check back then to read something of real substance!

In the meantime, I'm doing all kinds of freak outs about getting my work done before I leave. This weekend is college application time, hurrah! They're all due on the 15th, which is Tuesday-- and then I get to switch my attentions to my IB Theory of Knowledge presentation and my extended essay.
Should be awesome.

As always, if you want to get in touch with me, send me an email! The address is in my profile.
xoxo