Holiday Weekend

          I’m never quite sure how to start these blogs. I sit here and stare at the screen, and try to think of something interesting to say that summarizes the week, that isn’t the same thing I said last week. But it’s not really working at the moment, so I’m just going to start talking, if that’s okay.

          Purim vacation was nice; a couple friends and I (yes, the same friends as always) went to Ramallah on Friday and visited. Because it was Friday, a lot of things were closed, but we walked about and looked at the architecture and a couple of churches, and had lunch. I ordered food I hadn’t had since my summer in Jordan; it brought back some pleasant memories.

          We had been warned that the checkpoint to get back into Israel from the West Bank was a pain. It didn’t turn out to be that bad; it just involved a long, slow line and the normal bag scans and metal detectors. Compared to most places, I suppose it was extensive, but compared to US airport security it was still a breeze.

          When we got back to campus, we went through another security checkpoint to get into our dorms. I’m always a little nervous about things going wrong until the trip is over, and all of us were a little anxious when the guard waved excitedly at us as we exited the building. As it turned out, though, they were handing out gift-boxes for Purim, which completely made up for the hassle of the other checkpoint.

          That was most of my Purim holiday. On Friday a few of us hung out, had dinner, and watched a movie, which was nice. The rest of my three-day weekend was spent watching movies and thinking about philosophy – specifically, Plato’s Republic. It’s a good thing I’d just read the Iliad, too, or quite a few allusions would have been lost on me.

          For the first few books of the Republic, I was very excited; Socrates/Plato apparently agrees with me on a bunch of things I thought of independently, which is nice. However, in book five we start talking about the “general inferiority of the female sex,” and it all just went downhill from there, although the end was quite interesting. In any case, though, it got me in a philosophical mood again, so I ended up doing quite a bit of writing.

          Now, though, it’s back to school, although we have another break for elections before too long, and then Passover at the end of this month. This in itself makes it hard to want to apply oneself to assignments, but now the weather has started feeling like it’s early summer in Texas, and so I feel like I should be out of classes.

          In any case, though, classes are still going fine. We had a fun time in colloquial Arabic earlier this week; we spent nearly the entire class coming up with skits using the vocab words, and since two of the words were ‘beat up’ and ‘kill’, the skits were fairly entertaining. I still haven’t started my formal Arabic class, but my Arabic adviser is just going to start instructing me in lieu of my normal teacher, who hasn't gotten approval yet.

          Because I have more free time, I also spend more time with the people in my classes. Because this is the Rothberg International School, there aren't many Israeli students in my classes, though they’re always around campus. However, I now know people from China, Turkey, Germany, Canada, Romania, Russia, and so on and so forth. It rather reminds me of Harvard.

          That’s about my news for this week, with one other addition – Harvard is paying for my summer study abroad in the UK! I’m definitely looking forward to that, too, but at the moment, I really need to focus on the Modern Middle East portion of my double major, for obvious reasons. I will talk to you all next week – thanks for reading!

PS - the building in the last few pictures is the tomb of Yasser Arafat. I believe there was also a museum, but we didn't find it; we just ducked in, took a few pictures, and headed back home.