muevate, and urban(ish) hikes

Hiking hiking hiking! And, being good girs and drinking Loooots of water! (it was HOT)




Happy 100 years tel aviv!!! Giant concert with everyone!!Graffitti. Love you mom.


Shaloooooooooooooom.

Its late, and im doing a quick little update on my life here, and what I've done the past week. Again. Aren't yall tired of me yet?? Like, really? Still reading?? sigh, ok fine. Here goes.

1: the move. Oh, the move. It was really hell. I mean, that ish SUCKED. But, we got through it (of course with nothing going the way we had planned and with lots of hurdles to jump over: welcome to israel) and now we are all very happy and settled. Honestly, its great being here becuase its newer, cleaner, closer to everyone and everything, and nice. The downsides are not living in our old neighborhood which was the bomb-dot-com (ohhh yes), having a MUCH smaller room (hello 2 ft of personal space), and living above a music college. Which likes to play rock music. Until 12:30 at night. hahah of course!!! No, but its really wonderful and open and i like the floorplan SO MUCH BETTER and IM GETTING AN OVEN OMFG!(*#@!YR%*!(@@. Yeah, a bit excited.

2: Work. Work is going pretty well: yesterday was a bit boring but I get to see really cool things like ICSI and IVF done all the time, and its just SO FREAKIN COOL TO SEE THAT, like really. And make babies. Ow owww, haha. And, we cant forget my bomb diggity scrubs vending machine, now can we???? SCRUBS OUT OF A VENDING MACHINE PEOPLE. WHY IS THIS NOT MANDATORY IN THE US!?!??! Lots of caps today--guess I'm excited. Work can get boring, and its SOo freaking early (I have to wake up at 6 am. you have no idea how much i must love seeing reproduction to drag myself out of bed at 6am. wtf.)

3: Last shabbat was our first shabbat in the apartment and was really nice. We had a wonderful roommate dinner all together and a nice little bubbly to celebrate our arrival/homewarming to our selves, and it was very nice. And my roommates made a trifle for dessert, which they were totally stoked about but I dont like pudding. I know, I'm the weird kid. After dinner we had a rooftop party on our sick rooftop and just hung out and played board/card games (come on people, we dont have tv. this is what happens. This and puzzles--ohhh puzzles). Does anyone remember playing Set, or has every played it? Its the best game ever, and me playing that as a 10 year old is probably what positioned me to my love for logic and figuring out answers and patterns. I havent played it in about 11 years, but I rocked at life. WOOOHOO MY BRAIN ISNT TOTALLY SHOT FROM UNDERGRAD WOOHOOO!! We also played shesh-besh, better known as backgammon in the states (still getting that one back) and I won BOTH games of RummiQ, thankyouverymuch (even though I had never played before). Woooooop.
The other funny story from that night is that Jacks and Becky, both my roommates, decided to invite their Israeli guy friends to join us on our roof. Ok, so this can get kind of confusing, but Yoni is Jacks' cousins' neighbor, in some random neighboring city, who she met (and got fake married to by a 10 year old, ahem) over the high holy days, and Amit was Becky's armed guard on her birthright trip, and they stayed in touch. So yoni walks in, says hi, sits down, and starts playing, and then Amit walks in a few minutes later. They look at each other, and Yoni says, "huh. That's my cousin."

.............UM, WHAT???!?!?!?

This revelation continued to shock us all night, although both boys seemed really unfazed by it. Apparently this happens all the time in Israel, but for the amount of random things to happen to bring those two together, it was just freaking us all out. And, totally hilarious to boot.

4: hike-a-thon. So, we were sick of lounging around on Shabbat doing nothing (OMG i know, me, right? who would have thought me=hate lounging), so we decided to plan a hike for Saturday afternoon! After Becky had talked to her cousin/uncle who knew some trails, we decided to hike along the Yarkon river north of tel aviv. We were under the impression that this hike was like a MAYBE 2 hr hike, back into tel aviv to the port: so we hop in a cab and go along. After about 3-ish minutes of talking, our taxi driver starts talking to us and somehow he starts telling us a joke about 3 junkies and a crocodile...hahaha. It was the best joke i've ever heard, but made so much better by the broken english drug-usage vocabulary ("so the first guy, the first was very much liking up. the cocaina, you know, the up!" us: "uppers?" him: yes yes, uppers!!") It was pretty much awesome. Anyway, we got a taxi to take us to like the mid-north of tel aviv and drop us off, and the plan was to hike back into tel aviv. Simple enough. However, as we started on the trail, and HIKED (and almost got run over by ATVs, which answered my question 'are there ATVs in Israel becuase this looks like an ATV trail') for about 3.5 hours (through orchards, along highways, on ATV trails, you know, the usual) I started being like uhhhh, hmm. We're hiking east. Im so glad i brought a flashlight. And, randomly, Becky's cousin came and found us on his mountain bike on the trail and led us to a garbage dump (um, hello Mt. Trashmore), and we hiked it at sundown to see a great view of all over. It was fabulous. And, then we figured out that we had hiked all the way to Hod Hasharon. Um, what???? That's two towns over. And i needed my flashlight. SHawang!!

After the hike, we bussed it back to tel aviv and made our way straight to the port (damn im a trooper) to do dinner and go to the concert/final celebration for the 100year anniversary of Tel Aviv. It turned into a mega-outside party concert-water-show and was awesome. We met up with some other program people there and had a real blast--the concert turned into an impromptu israeli parkinglot rave to random israeli techno and was just so much fun--i havent danced like that probably ever and it was just silly and ridiculous and wonderful. AND, i had real soft serve ice cream for the first time (they only have like frozen YOGURT here, or ice cream. blech.) which made my night complete. We were bushed, so we headed home and cinderella'd it.

Today, we had our siyur "field trip" and visited a kibbutz on the green line that has lived in coexistence with a palestinian village for many years. It became quite famous in 2000 when it fought for the rights and land of the Palestinian people, and unfortunately this made them the target of a terrorist attack. A gunman came into their kibbutz and picked a random house and shot a mother and her two young kids. Really horrible stuff, even more so followed by the message "there are no good jews or bad jews, only jews that have stolen our land." It was a 'message' to the cooperating parties, which is just awful. They have a hard time putting what happened alongside their ideology of equality, and it was hard to hear him talk about that. We also talked with an Arab Moslim Palestinian Israeli, who shared his side of the story and it was really really interesting to hear a perspective from the other side, even if it is hard to hear someone say to your face 'you shouldnt be here and israel shouldnt have been created'. It was also REALLY good for me to figure out all these buzzwords that everyone keeps throwing out here, mainly the identification as Arab-Moslim-Palestinian Israeli. We figured it out like this: it breaks down to race-religion-regional identification-country. Its the equivalent of a Filipino-Christian-Virginian-American. Whoof, much better. Here its just that religion and racial breakdown mean so much more, so people identify themselves as that, and also since everyone asks. The kibbutz is also on the green line, so it was interesting to see how the war has directly affected them (they talked a lot about how the social sense of Israel has really been put on hold for like the last 40 years, and all of the social developments like equality and figuring their own internal problems out have been put on hold---really interesting stuff). It was also really interesting to learn about the word Palestinian, and what it means, and how it was used (ask me if you really want to know) before 1948 vs after. We also went to the refugee camp for jewish immigrants to the British Mandate Palestine after WWII who tried to enter the area illegally--woah, never knew about that before, and its really scary to see how much like a concentration camp it looked. And to imagine the Holocaust survivors being sent there after living through Auschwitz or somewhere comprable. Wow, really eye-opening to see that in Eretz Yisrael. Learned a lot today, and definently mulling over a lot. I like our field trips.

In other news, ulpan is going really well. I finally dont feel totally lost in class, and though I still have problems forming sentences, I feel much more confident, so YAY!!! Also, shout out to the Russell-Zobels for my birthday card--it got here in record time and made me smile!! Especially the testosterone nation part--thanks for the well wishes!!! Miss you!!

Finally, I would like to tell you all: I got my first joke on a t-shirt today. In hebrew. I know, you should be SO PROUD. The t-shirt was a big duck and a little bear, with a voice bubble from the little bear saying "Ken. Ata Meumetz." Which means "yes, you are adopted". SO FUNNY AND I GOT IT!!!! hahahhaha

Love yall!!!


HWOTD: meumetz. obviously. it means adopted. Like my mom (snicker).