Friday January 29th--Shabbat

Last night (Thursday nights) dinner was amazing!! We cooked pasta and sautéed vegetables, peppers, onions, eggplant (yuck), mushrooms (yuck) together with sauce and put it on top of pasta--- it was delicious! It was me, the twins, Rosie, Sam, Lauren, and our friend Danielle (who is in aephi at uconn). We had sooo much funn- we got alcohol and made mixed drinks, took pictures and got dressed together to go out.

Funny story: Our apartment had about 2 or 3 pots, like pasta pots, so we figured we would be totally fine to make dinner. However, when it came time to making dinner we couldn’t find ANY of them! And our Israeli roomie was no where to be found to find them. We saw 1 in the refrigerator filled with meat soup because she makes meat soup at weird hours of the night, but could not find any of the others! Sooo we had to make friends with our weirdo Israeli neighbors to borrow a pot to make pasta in. So Rosie and I knocked on the door across the hall and these Israeli guys answered- we became friends blahh blahh. So all of a sudden we’re talking to them and one of them goes “are you guys in your apartment by any chance disabled”? and we looked at eachother and we’re like no? and hes like “ohhh last semester they put all the disabled girls in your apartment- one was albino, one was exceptionally tall, and one was a midget and somehow they all ended up living together” so we’re like ohhhhh okkkkk good to know. I have a very strong feeling the albino girl lived in my room.

After we got dressed we decided to all pre game here. So we’re getting dressed, playing music, taking pictures, being loud and all of a sudden our Israeli roommate, Karen, comes in with her weirdo braces wearing boyfriend and shes carrying ALL the pots filled with weird smelly food. She cooks very strange things, especially at weird hours of the night. So her and her boyfriend were eating this weird smelly food and we were trying to pre game and have fun- but the weird looks from them made us feel awkward so we moved the pregame to our friend ethans apartment in a different building. We went there- the apartment was filled with people we didn’t know so we met a lot of people, took lots of pictures, then everyone ran into cabs to go out. Since our group is like 8 of us we had to split up in cabs and me and my apartment went into one with Ethan. Ethan is really sweet- he worked at ramah nyack with like everyone I know so we have tons of friends in common! He’s been to Israel a million times and both of his brothers studied here a few years ago so he really knows his way around so we basically followed him the whole night but it was really frustrating. Theres just so many of us and Thursday nights in Jerusalem are PACKED because its right before Shabbat when nothing is open, so every place you go to is jammed packed and there is lines lines lines! So first we went to Zollies, which is my favorite place, but there were only small tables outside and it was FREEZING so we tried that for a few minutes but it was too cold! Then Ethan found a giant table inside that we grabbed and everyone came and met up with us. We had fun there, ordered beer and hookah and took lots of pictures. It was really fun but just soooo crowded so people were sorta in a bad mood. It was such a long week at Ulpan that everyone was sooo crainky and tired, the littlest things got people mad! By accident the hookah cord wrapped around one of the beer glasses and knocked over on one of the twins, she was not happy! So after we stayed there for a little while, we moved on. There was just so many of us so we kept getting split up and not knowing where to go! We stopped at another bar, Kings, to pee and we started to dance but then they chased us around telling us we had to buy a drink but we didn’t want, so we left. Then we tried to go to this dance club, Constantine, but it was too crowded and they weren’t letting anyone in. Then I somehow ended up at a falfel stand with ethan and Sam. Then we tried to go back to the dance club we were at last Saturday night, Fusion, but it was too crowded so we stood in the street and waited for more people to come—then decided to leave. It was one of those nights where it was way TOOO crowded for a big amount of people to go anywhere + everyone was just really tired and crainky so it was a wipe out. It was good to go out, but not such a great night, dinner was better.

This morning I woke up to yet another breakfast party held by our lovely Israeli roomie, Karen. Its always with her boyfriend, who wears braces, and his friend who is really tall and looks like a Picasso paining so we call him Picasso. They make sooo much noise and we just don’t understand it! They cook strange things and it smells! They woke us all up and as we were getting dressed we heard an influx of people and little children come in. Karen decided to have her whole family come at the crack of dawn. I was the brave one to go inspect the situation first while we were all hiding in the bathroom. Her mom must have been complaining that the apartment was dirty or something because she literally cleaned EVERYTHING—like she actually came over to clean. When I tried to clean a dish in front of her, she grabbed it from me and cleaned it herself. She took out the garbage, mopped, you name it. The 4 of us happen to be very neat but Karen not so much. Her and her boyfriend cook strange foods and don’t really clean it up that well. Karens idea of wrapping up leftover food consists of just putting the whole entire giant pot in the refrigerator and leaving it there for extensive periods of time. Her meat soup that she made 5 days ago is in a giant put in the refrigerator. We have tons of Tupperware but Karen doesn’t know what that is. We tried to explain it to her today but I think she thought we were like being mean or something. These pots take up the entire refrigerator and there’s 5 of us so there’s not much room to begin with and when we want to cook something with the pot, we can’t because its filled with meat soup in the refrigerator. So we kindly explained and demonstrated to her how to use tuperware. We came back this afternoon and her and her boyfriend were sitting at the kitchen table with like 4 pots and tons of Tupperware unloading the food it was really funny.

After our encounter this morning with Karen, we went to the shuk for the Shabbat chaos that you just cant miss in Jerusalem. Its my favorite part of the week because you really see Jerusalem come alive. The Shuk is PACKED with people left and writing trying to find the best prices for fruits, vegetables, spices, meats, fish, etc… You have people screaming at eachother, stand owners screaming its great. They don’t really wear gloves in Israeli so everyone literally touches EVERYTHING with their hands, it takes a lot of getting used to. Strawberries are like loosely sold in crates so people grab them with their hands, pita isn’t bagged or anything. So the 4 of us (my apartment) went and got tons of stuff for our apartment. We bought peppers, tomatoes, strawberries, grapes, cucumbers, mushrooms, eggplant, fresh steaming hot pita, Marzepan, Challah, hummus, wine-- everything you name it. This is the time to do your food shopping because everything is SOOO fresh and sooo cheap. I bought 2 peppers for 3 shekels which is about 75 cents. I bought 8 pieces of steaming hot pita for 10 shekles which is like $2.50. We bought 4 bottles of wine for 100 sheckles, $25. It’s the best!

After the Shuk we came back and had a good lunch of everything we just bought- pita, hummus, tomatoes, cucumber, grapes, strawberries, marzipan YUMMMMM!! Then I took a nice long nap. The twins and Rosie went to this conservative temple in the area with Danielle and her boyfriend, Oddie. I was going to go but I lost my voice a few days ago and have been feeling SOOO tired, that I just stayed back and slept. Then I got dressed, and we went to the Regency hotel, again like last week, for a Shabbat dinner with the program. The program gives you 9 activity points. Activity points can be used for group weekend trips, day trips, Shabbat dinners, and various activities run by the madrichem for the Study abroad program. So for 1 point tonight was a Shabbat dinner at a nearby hotel which we also did last week. So me and my group of friends decided to go tonight. It was really fun- such a good meal. There’s a buffet with all these Israeli salads, and tons and tons of dishes!

After dinner we walked back with our madrichem Eli and Inna ad they decided to come hang out with us in Lauren, Danielle, and Hannahs apartment so a bunch of us congregated there. As we were walking there, this strange rabbi figure man stopped us and started talking to us and he followed us into their apartment, sat down with us, and drank with us. It was so strange, no one knew who he was. Hes one of the school rabbis that happened to be walking where we were and he was talking to Oddie on the walk so he just invited himself inside and hung out with us for a while—we all kept whispering to each other like whooo are youuu!!! This school is filled with these rabbi type figures that just wander and do weird things. Anyway, The floor that Hannah, Danielle, and Lauren live on is the Shomer shabbos floor, filled with 4 apartments of girls from the trip who are shomer shabbos- so there are tons of people in that hallway that kept coming in and out. We grabbed our wine and pretty much sat there all night talking and laughing and playing games. It was really fun.

I learned a lot of interesting things from hanging out with the Madrichem. We got to ask them a lot of questions about the school and why things are the way they are here. They told us that where we are living now, The Student Village, is not owned by the school which is why its such a far walk. This is technically an apartment complex built by an apartment company. The company made a deal with the school that they get all the money for the first 25 years, then the school gets all the money after that. Which means that the apartment complex gets all our money to live here right now and the school gets nothing, after 25 years the school will get it all. So basically the school is making nothing off this right now. The dorms that are run and owned by the school, which are very close to campus, are 82% Arab so Israeli students tend to not live there, AKA why we don’t live there. Also, I asked about all the weird things in the apartment—the button for the water heater, the fact that all the hallways and stairwells and elevators in the buildings are PITCH black all day long unless you turn the light on (which only stays on for 5 seconds). They basically put it that in America the streets are made of gold so we do whatever we want and waiste whatever we want. But in Israel that is not the Mentality and they tend to ration pretty much everything—water, electricity. So why have the water heater running all day if you don’t use it? Why have the hallway lights on all day when you don’t need it? It was very interesting to me how different we view some of these things in America. I have to do a semester long project when I return for my global studies minor, so basically we have to observe weird things we see and turn it into a project, that may be something I look into.

Funny Karen Story: So her English isn’t that great, we I didn’t think it was this bad. When we were eating dinner last night she came in and I said to her “do you want to sit down and eat with us” and all of a sudden she goes “0 5 2 6 1 8”--- she starts giving me her phone number. Everyone was DIEING, I tried so hard not to embarrass her but I couldn’t help but laugh. So I tried to keep it together and I ran and got my phone and pretended to put the number in because I didn’t want to embarrass her. We like haven’t stopped laughing about that now!