Food for my thoughts

A few days ago I received an email from a good friend who asked a very interesting question (thank you Debbie). She wanted to know what things about moving here were harder than I had imagined they would be and which things were easier. I think it’s a really interesting question and I’ll try to answer it. Hopefully I do a thorough job.

On the positive Side- Many things have been a lot easier or a lot more natural than I had anticipated. Take my relationship with David for example. Most of our relationship has been (very very unfortunately) long distance. I was really worried that when I got here and we would start to spend significant amounts of time together and really start to build a routine together that there might be problems. Maybe we wouldn’t fit together as well as we had though? Maybe we’d find each other just plain annoying? Questions like that plagued me for the weeks leading up to my aliyah. Thank G-d we have been very fortunate. Being so close to him has been even better than I could have possibly imagined. He gets a long great with my friends and I with his, we enjoy spending as much time together as possible (obviously or we would have broken up by now), and we are simply just very happy to be together. It makes me very happy that things are working out so well ☺

Another thing that is better than I could ever have imagined is my apartment situation. Rebecca and I get along so well that I am having withdrawals from her and we are only going to be apart for a total of 3 days. She went to Beer Sheva for Shabbat ☹. We do pretty much everything together. After I come home from ulpan we play before I start my homework. She has been on break between finishing her Sheirut Leumi (National Service in place of the army) and starting a job and school. We make dinner together every night and have even started making art projects to decorate our depressingly white walls. Unfortunately we hardly see our third roommate Shira because she works a night shift for an American company, but when she is around we all get along great. Physically the apartment is coming together really well. We hung up our first piece of homemade artwork and Rebecca’s geometric wall is AMAZING (see picture). My room is being painted next once I get over my laziness over clearing out most of my furniture… We have a cool chandelier thing, two couches, and we even have curtains that we have to figure out how to hang. Basically it’s so cool and really exciting to have a place of my own with people that I like and an eclectic fun decorating style.

Ulpan fits into both categories. It is a ton more fun than I could have ever ever guessed. My class is so diverse that it is always interesting to talk to my classmates. We also get along great and always have a good time with each other. Our teachers are also some of the best teachers I’ve ever had for anything. They really help promote a good classroom atmosphere and really bend over backward to make sure we are doing well. They make class so fun that sometimes we forget that we are really learning (until the test comes around obviously!) Hopefully I will leave the ulpan with some good new friends.

On the negative side ulpan is much harder for me than I had anticipated. My Hebrew is very good from the point of view that I can get along in life and converse about many topics fairly fluently, but from the proper speech and grammar point of view I am very weak. I am managing though. I had to give a presentation the other day which was pretty fun. I had to translate a song from English to Hebrew, present it to the class, and explain why I chose it all in Hebrew. The teacher commented that I am very comfortable in front of an audience (as if that should come as a shock to anyone) and that my speaking Hebrew is very good. YAY!

Social things are also a bit harder than I had hoped. I knew things wouldn’t be easy with the majority of my friends in the army. Unfortunately the problems go a bit deeper than that. I am at a point where about half of my friends live here on their own and the others still live with their parents. As much as I love all of them there is now a certain disconnect between those of us who are on our own and those who still live at home. It has nothing to do with how I feel about the others as people or how I see them as my friends, but there are just certain things that I am dealing with and going through that they cannot understand now matter how much they would like to. It is the kind of thing that you can’t really explain to someone who still lives at home. You have to truly be on your own and completely responsible for your self to know what its like. Forget things as simple as having to remember to wash your clothes and buy food and make food, but things like learning how to pay bills, opening bank accounts, buying internet and insurance are all things that weigh on my mind at all times that my other friends don’t ever have to think about. Hopefully some day relatively soon we can close the divide. But for now, while they are in the army, they should be home with their parents and have someone to wash their clothes and make them yummy food when they come home. On the plus side it has created quite a nice community and family feeling for those of us who are living here basically without family. I have cousins who I am very close to but they don’t live around the corner and aren’t popping in and out of my every day life. Those of us loners have really started to help take care of each other. It has made us really close and I don’t know what I would do without them. They are truly the best support system. Even David can’t understand some of the things I am going through so it’s nice to have friends who can. (this is my friend Yoni who moved here by himself a few months before me and is now in the army. I can't imagine how much harder life is for him than it is for me. Becca and I have kind of adopted him-- we do his laundry!! These are pictures from his first official army photoshoot)

I hope that helps answer the question. I am with David again for Shabbat ☺. We don’t have big plans, but I am hoping to get a lot of rest because I have an eye infection and it has unfortunately kept me up a few nights wanting to scratch my eyes out. I have seen a doctor and have medicine but it takes a while to really get rid of the infection. My medical experiences here so far are a whole separate topic, maybe for next time. I hope all is well with everyone. All my love. Shabbat Shalom.

Sorry I Dissapeared!!

Sorry for not writing in so long things have just been so crazy busy in my life that I really haven’t had the time to sit still for long enough to put everything I want to say down into words. So what have I been doing these past few weeks that has kept me so busy? I moved into my apartment and started ulpan. Moving in has been a much more stressful and time-consuming process than I had previously imagined. Pretty much every day I have had to go to some store or another to buy something, or spend hours trying to organize all of my stuff in a new and unfamiliar room. My roommate’s parents own the apartment and they were here for the first 10 days helping us get things purchased and organized. We didn’t have a fridge, oven, or washing machine until about a week after moving in. Our first grocery store run was a huge excitement! We actually had something to eat!!

At the same time I started ulpan. My first night in the apartment directly preceded my first day of class. I am in level 4 out of 6 and I love it. I was very overwhelmed at the beginning. There is a huge emphasis on Hebrew grammar, and as I have no real prior grammar training everything that is supposed to be “review” at my level is brand new material for me. They give us a ton of homework and because I’ve been so busy trying to get the rest of my life together I haven’t been able to focus on my work properly. Other than that I LOVE my class. My class is taught by 2 teachers who switch off at least once every day. One focuses on grammar and the other on vocab but they are pretty interchangeable. They are both super super nice. One of the teachers is really amazingly dynamic and we don’t sit in her class for more than 5 minutes without cracking up laughing. Yesterday we played a game to demonstrate a new rule she was teaching us and is was so much fun I almost forgot I was in school. Another really fun, amazing thing about my class is how incredible diverse we are and how well we all get along. My class consists of 3 Americans (including myself), 1 Brit, 1 Russian, 1 Columbian, 3 French, 3 Arabs, 3 Germans, 1 Swiss, and even 1 Japanese woman. It is so much fun to talk to them and listen to all of their stories. For example, one of the German students is 27 and doing post- Theological school studies in Israel. When he was 19 he decided to do National Service instead of serving in the German army. He knew he wanted to go out of Germany and I still don’t quite understand what made him pick Israel. Whatever it was, he caught the Israel bug. He went back to Germany to finish his studies and then decided to do some postmasters additional studies and couldn’t stay away from Israel. I am so fascinated that a non-Jew, especially a German, can feel similarly strong feelings of love for Israel that I do and can share the feeling of having to be here despite everything. There are a lot of recent immigrants in my class- it makes for a nice environment and a support system in addition to the friends I already have. I will post more anecdotes when I have more time.

Back to the apartment: Yesterday I built my first pieces of furniture all by myself! I now have a desk and a real chair at which to do my homework! I also bought a rug and now my room is finally starting to come together. I also bought paint to add some color to my room. Israeli apartments tend to be so absolutely white that it’s painful. Right now I am sitting in my roommate’s room while she and a friend are taping geometric shapes onto her wall. I can’t wait to start painting then in!

This Shabbat I am spending at home with my two roommates and we’re doing a roomie Shabbat. My third roommate Shira works the night shift at an American company so I hardly see her and we’d all really like to spend some time together.
That is about it for the major stuff for now. Other than that I’m still trying to have fun. I went to a concert last night with Becca at the Internal Arts and Crafts Fair in the middle of Jerusalem. It was really really really fun and it was amazing that we were sitting there in an archaeological park with the walls of the Old City on the right and our neighborhood behind. I love this city and I still can’t believe I am lucky enough to live here!