Alright, so let me begin this entry by apologizing to my family for not blogging in a while, but I really didn't have anything to write about. So that being said, here is an update on how things are here. My classes are going in interesting, if not especially challenging, directions. In Terrorism and Responses the teacher almost always has a handgun in his waistband while he is teaching, which I think is funny but which freaks out Baeli and Regine. It is looking like I am going to have to do an oral report on the Aryan Brotherhood, or the Aryan Nation or whatever they are called, for that class. This is lame because I had wanted to do a report on the Tamil Tigers, but someone else got there first. Oh well. Psychology has been intriguing not so much because of the subject matter but because of how the teacher and I interact. You see, his English is not that great and I have a habit of talking quickly, quietly, and with a decidedly unusual choice of words. This means that eventually I will ask him a question and he will not entirely understand me, but he does not want to admit that he doesn't know what I said, so he gives a vague and open ended answer which doesn't really answer my question but doesn't really not answer it either. I know he is doing this because I do the exact same thing every time he asks me a question. Regardless, I remain optimistic about the course as a whole. Speaking of optimism, my Honors Seminar is finally getting interesting. The teacher had to start from square one of International Relations Theory because he did not know how much we knew seeing as how we all come from different institutions. Fortunately we are finally getting to some stuff which, while I already know it, is still interesting nonetheless. Arabic is going well, we can now conjugate regular verbs for every person in the past tense (yay?). I really don't know if that means we are going at a good pace or not, but it is working for me so far. And finally, Rabbinic Lit is beginning to drive me crazy. We have spent 4 WHOLE classes just getting clear on when someone can say the Shema (the morning/evening prayer). That is an entire month on a few lines of text. I stand by my original statement that Rabbis are crazy, or at least that Talmudic Rabbis were crazy and this craziness has just lingered around for the last several hundred years.
Now for the one interesting thing that has happened so far since my last post, another trip to Tel Aviv. This trip was born partially out me being spontaneous and partially out of a conversation between myself and a guy named Alex Popper, who usually goes by his last name. He basically said that me and him and Baeli and Regine should go down to Tel Aviv some weekend and go to some clubs or something. Now it happens that Beali has a friend named Anat who is from Yemen and who lives in Tel Aviv and who Beali stays with when she goes down there. One fine Friday I decided that, since Beali was already down in Tel Aviv the rest of us should go and meet her. Anat also happens to have some sort of in with the people who are involved with the club scene in Tel Aviv so she always knows where the good places to go are and can get us in for cheaper than normal. So I called Regine, but she had homework, and then I called Popper and he said sure, but he had to wake up and pack and whatnot before he could go. Because it took him so long to do these things we ended up rushing down the mountain to make the last train, which we still managed to miss. The one funny anecdote from this part of the trip was from when we called the cab to take us to the train station. Popper called and asked in English for a cab and was told that it would cost 70 shekels. When we tried to haggle down the price the guy hung up on us. So we asked the guard lady to call another cab guy, which she did. When she spoke to him in Hebrew we got a cab for 45 shekels. The moral of the story is that one should always have someone who is from here call for services.
Anyway, we missed the train and had to settle on taking a bus down instead. On the bus I ended up sitting next to a woman who was from Tel Aviv but had spent the last several years in Virginia doing "Alternative Research." When asked what that entailed she listed two areas of study as examples: meditation and ape psychology. Needless to say I was very hard pressed not to laugh at her career choice. On the long, long walk from our stop to the beach we kept asking people for directions, even though it was a straight line from our starting position to the beach. I noticed that Israelis give directions in English the exact same way that they give directions in Hebrew, To clarify, when you ask where something is in Hebrew, the answer usually goes something like "yashar, yashar, yashar, smalah, yashar, jaminah, etc." This translates as straight, straight, straight, left, straight, right. When we asked for directions in English, the answer we got was "Straight straight straight, straight straight, straight straight straight, left." Each straight, in both languages, indicates about 5-15 minutes of walking, so as I said it was a very long walk.
Eventually we stopped for food at this Russian place. We had pickled herring and potatoes and mushrooms in piquant sauce as appetizers and chicken stir-fry for the main course. They also served some truly excellent freshly made lemonade. The appetizers were disturbingly tangy and the pickled herring could not be eaten on its own, you had to eat a potato chunk at the same time or else it just tasted too weird. Part-way through the meal a whole bunch of elderly Russian people from America who were on a tour of Israel (I don't know why) came in and Popper had a long conversation with a woman who also happened to be from Santa Monica, which is where he is from. After the meal we called Baeli to see what was going on and she said that she had to get ready so we waited for her by this fountain by the beach. After a while we got bored and started to make use of what I thought was playground equipment. It turned out to be exercise equipment, but it looked like it had been designed by Ronald McDonald. Regardless, it was very amusing and after Beali showed up we went back to Anat's apartment, changed and got ready to go out.
The girls, of course, took a lot longer to get ready, so Popper and I went out to some bars to pass the time. We ended up back at Joey's Bar (which is where I started my first night in Tel Aviv back at the end of the Ulpan). This time the place was a bit more populated than it was the first time I was there but not a lot more. This was due to the fact that the nightlife in Tel Aviv starts late and ends late, as I was to experience over the course of the evening. We were there at around 11pm, and things were just barely getting started. So we left pretty quickly after we arrived. The music was also rather intolerable. The only way I could describe it is that if you took a manic four year old with ADD, gave him an iPod, let him upload music that best fit his mood, and then set it to shuffle, that was the music in that place. Also the beers were really expensive.
After that it was off to the club. Anat recommended a place called the G-Spot, which I thought sounded like the name of a strip club but apparently it wasn't. It ended up being a very interesting night and I spent 5 hours at the club without even realizing it. I labeled this effect the "Techno Time-Warp," so called because a person's perception of time distorts greatly when exposed to excessive amounts of techno music. This is caused by the fact that all techno sounds the same, so while I thought I had only been there for a few songs, I had actually been there for four hours. Afterwords, my ears were ringing for about a day and a half, so if I end up going back I am definitely bringing ear plugs in order to avoid permanent hearing loss. I got out of the club at about 5:30am and we all went to breakfast at a place called Dixie's, where I had my first bacon and egg breakfast since coming here. Granted it was not bacon like I have back home, but it was close enough to keep me happy. Once breakfast was over with, Baeli and Anat went back to Anat's place to sleep and Popper and I were cast out into the streets of Tel Aviv. Fortunately the sun had come up while we were at breakfast, so we went down to the beach. They were setting up these lawn chair type things there, which cost money but are less expensive than a hostel, so we decided to just stay there. Popper ended up sleeping on a lawn chair for about 6 hours, while I read a book, then went for a walk (I didn't end up sleeping at all that night/day). Baeli rejoined us around the time that Popper woke up and we all lounged about on the beach until public services began again (this was all during Shabbat, remember) and then went back to Haifa. Overall, it was a very good trip and look forward to going there again.
On the topic of trips, Regine, Baeli, and I are trying to plan where we want to go during the rest of the semester. In addition to Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey, we are also thinking of going to Nazareth and possibly Hebron (because I want to see the Tomb of the Patriarchs) assuming things aren't too dangerous there.
Two final things. The first is that my refrigerator may very well be possessed. The damn thing, no matter what I set it to, will constantly freeze everything I put in there. I had a can of olives in brine which would periodically be frozen solid for not apparent reason. This would also happen to my mushrooms and my jelly to a limited extent. Last night, I discovered that my carrots had all been encased in a thick coating of frost and they are no where near any water at all. The second thing is that the best part of getting my own internet connection will be that I will no longer have to come up to this horrible lounge. Something about the lounge which I have somehow forgotten to mention, I think, is that it ALWAYS smell like cat poop. Always. This is because the cats use the planters, and occasionally the floor, as litter boxes. There was, at one point during the breaks, a 4 day period during which there was just a big ole lump of cat crap right in the middle of the lounge and no one would clean it up. I seriously cannot wait to have internet in my room.
More Later.
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