First Week of the Semester

It’s been a bit of a crazy week filled with decisions and indecisions.

So I came home from Prague on Tuesday at 7:15 AM and rolled right to my bed until 9. Then I had to get up to attend my first Hebrew class of the semester. Gasp. It’s time to take it seriously as it is for a letter grade. It was alright as it took me a little while to get back in the gear of being immersed in Hebrew language. One of my friends passed me a note complaining that he didn’t like the teacher. I gave him a look- don’t ruin my first class! Afterwards, I went to Eastern European Jewry history class since Wendy’s in it and I thought I’d check it out. The professor’s actually from Buffalo so we talked a little bit about it afterwards. I like what she’s going to present but somehow I didn’t really feel like taking a midterm and a final in addition to a short paper (yes, I call 6-8 page a short paper). Lastly, I went to a seminar called “American Jews and Israeli Jews: A Comparative Perspective.” It looked like a lot of fun filled with a variety of medium including film and memoirs, not just dry scholarly articles. I’m definitely staying in that class as it will help me with my senior thesis.

On Wednesday, I went to Hebrew again, and then sat in a 3 hour long environmental class that was called “Environmental and Natural Resources Policy in Israel and the Middle East.” I found Julianna and Nora in there. The class was in a computer lab- it was really weird. Then I realized that the professor would use power point and our computer monitors would have the power point presentation so we can see it better. There’s no Internet playing as the computers were locked and under the professor’s control. So much for surfing during class. It was interesting- it felt like watching that Al Gore movie again. I came out of it feeling unsure. The professor said that the grades would be 50-50: just a mid-term and a final. Hm.

Later, for dinner, I went to Laura’s birthday party at Melissa’s place. It was all Mexican food- I was very happy to see black beans and cheese quesadillas! Good company, good food as usual. They are just sweet girls.

I tried to check out the Purim party in the student village but it wasn’t anything that I expected- no one danced and the party had started at least forty-five minutes earlier. All it was just free beer, some music, and people talking. I went straight up to the room. No point and I needed to catch up on my Hebrew homework.

Thursday, I got to sleep in a little longer since Hebrew wouldn’t start until 12:15, instead of 10:15 in the past few days. Also, I decided not to take the class on women and the Middle East since I talked to Rachel and from what she said, it didn’t seem worth taking it in terms of the workload. In the afternoon, I had my AJ-IJ seminar, then the Holocaust seminar. The Holocaust seminar felt like a gigantic blank. There’s just me, Natalia, and some other girl. The professor didn’t give us a syllabus or anything. He’s just going to e-mail us our readings for the next class and we just write one paper that would be our grade for the class. He even asked us if we really wanted grades! He gave a lecture about the Nazi anti-Semitism and how the Holocaust changed the meaning of the word anti-semitism since the Nazis’ version was more of a racial focus than religious. We got into a little debate at the end about why the U.S. approved Israel’s charter for statehood- was it out of guilt or not? Anyway, I left feeling a bit disappointed. I really thought there’d be a lot more people since those kind of classes tend to draw waitlists in the States everywhere. Yoel also said that any class with less than 5 people would be cancelled. Therefore, I guess I will wait until Tuesday to find out the class’ status. Also, I officially signed up for the environmental and EE Jewry class. I will have to get everything straightened out on that day.

For dinner, Dena and some of her friends invited me and Jessica over since she was using all of the pots. I met a few more new people since there were some from the year-long program who had been away during ulpan.

Today, I went to the shuk to pick up some bread, cheese, and some produce. I meant to buy eggs since they sell tons of them there but apparently, I’m supposed to be the whole two dozen, not just a few. It was crazy as usual and for some reason, there were a lot of baklava being sold. I could not buy any hamanschtens since the merchants sold them in bulk. Since I arrived closer to the closing time, I got a lot of things at very cheap prices that I could not believe I paid more in the past few weeks for the same things! For example, I bought a bag of 6 pitas at Mister Zol’s for 6 sheklim whereas I bought 5 pitas for only 2 sheklim. I’m going to do my best to really learn how to shop well before my family comes so we get the best deals.

For Shabbat, I thought I’d be going to Zvi Feine’s house since he called last week inviting me over while I was in Prague. Apparently, the plan didn’t work out for them so we made another date, in two weeks. So instead, I stayed home. Oh well, sometimes it happens that I don’t get invited anywhere (okayyyy, I probably should’ve said yes to Kobe’s invitation anyway!).