Shawarma and Souvenirs

            I am really sick of Hebrew at this particular moment in time, so I’m going to write this instead of the two-page essay I would be writing at this moment. Not that I particularly mind writing it in Hebrew, but we’ve beaten the topic to death, and I didn’t find it that interesting in the first place, and while it’s technically a real essay, structure-wise, it’s mostly proving that we understood the readings, which involves mainly summarization.

            This is the first week I’ve actually had a lot of work to do. It’s because of the break; all my professors are assigning loads of homework, in addition to all the midterms I have to study for. It’s not that bad, but most of it doesn’t require a whole lot of thought; my language classes are a lot of vocab memorization and verb conjugation, and after two months – well, it gets a little old. Ancient, really.

            Anyway, the weekend was interesting. On Friday a few of us headed over to Bethlehem to see the church of the nativity. When we got off of the bus, we immediately had to run the gauntlet of taxi drivers, but we knew where we were going, and it wasn’t far, so we just ignored them. We also invited an American couple we’d met on the bus to come along, and thereby earned the wrath of a couple of the more persistent taxi drivers, who accused us of blocking their business and hating Palestine. They eventually let us alone.

            Ironically enough, the American couple ended up taking a taxi anyway. On the other hand, we were followed by a couple of Brazilian students who were vacationing from their semester abroad in Budapest. We ended up going through the church with them and then finding a small shawarma shop to have lunch in – it was very good and very cheap. We then split up, and we did some souvenir shopping (and bread shopping – it was also very good and cheap.)

            The shop owners were very nice; usually the taxi drivers and tour guides have arrangements to take people only to certain, generally more expensive shops, for commissions, so if you come unattached to a tour, the prices lower significantly. They offered us tea, bargained with us, gave us free trinkets, and told us stories while we waited for change. We each ended up buying one or two souvenirs before heading back to Jerusalem.

            On Monday night we celebrated one of my friend’s birthdays with a dinner another friend cooked in her dorm. I don’t generally go to the trouble of cooking, so having cooked food was a treat, besides just being tasty on its own merits.

            Most of the rest of this week has been spent trying to get the bulk of my assignments done. During Passover break I’m going on a hiking trip, have the end of Holy Week to rest, and then have my parents visiting for a week (!), and if I don’t get my work done now, I won’t have any actual break time to recharge. So at the moment I’m working furiously.

            Not that I mind working furiously – the feeling of having figured something out, or accomplished something, or said something worthwhile, is one of the most amazing things I know. The human brain is one of the most astounding things on earth; it has nearly unlimited capacities for absorbing and organizing knowledge, capacities that most people never seem to get around to using. I love thinking; I love learning; they’re two of my favoring things.

            That said, I also tend to find a lot of assignments more like busywork than actual learning, and that makes them very hard to complete, like the essay I’m going to have to go back to after I upload this. In any case, though, it has to be done, so I’d better get around to doing it. The next time I post, I’ll have started vacation and finished a hiking trip. I hope everyone else has a good beginning to Holy Week.

Pictures: These first few are from the Church of the Nativity. And yes, those are fluorescent bulbs on the chandelier.

This is the square:

We believe this is an abbey - we're not entirely sure, but tourists could go in and walk around:

 The square again. All the shops you can see, and the ones beside them, are owned by the same Arab family (they have very deep roots here). We noticed this when one of the shopkeepers pointed it out:

Last but not least, birthday dinner (there were also assorted sweets, chocolate cake, and lots of tea):

Plato and Politics

                Coming from a university that gives an average of 8 days off per semester, I am thoroughly enjoying the plethora of holidays here. I had the day off yesterday – not for Saint Patrick’s Day, for elections. I’m not sure why all the foreign nationals were let out of school, but we were okay with it.

                I spent a good part of yesterday finishing Socrates’ Parmenides. The whole thing sounds much like this section:

                “the truest assertion of the being of being and of the not-being of not-being is when being partakes of the being of being, and not of the being of not- being--that is, the perfection of being; and when not-being does not partake of the not-being of not-being but of the being of not-being--that is the perfection of not-being.”*

                I know, right? I can figure out what they mean, but I’m convinced that they are purposely stating it in the most convoluted way possible.

                As for the rest of the week, I am pleased to say that I have finally started my formal Arabic independent study. I’ve never done an official independent study before, and I’m quite infatuated. My teacher is really sweet, and with just the two of us we can move faster, bring in random facts and connections between Hebrew and Arabic, and have a good time.

                I have no fewer than three language classes on Mondays, counting the independent study. In the morning I have three hours of Hebrew. This week we finished by talking about how to write an essay in Hebrew. I was surprised to find that one of the essays I had typed had appeared as the sample essay for this exercise (as a positive example, thankfully.)

                One of the fun things about language classes is that you get to go back and relearn everything you already know about writing from English. Things we went over included: acknowledging sources, paraphrasing, how to structure an argument, and last but not least, how to use paragraphs. I distinctly remember being told some of these things in third grade, but a reminder never hurt.

                We’re also currently expanding our legal vocabularies in Hebrew – I now know the word for ‘statute of limitations.’ The supreme usefulness of this word is demonstrated by the fact that some of the native English speakers in the class didn’t know its translation.

                However, that’s still better than my Monday colloquial Arabic class, where the punch line of a joke we were reading was the word ‘suppository’, which the majority of people in the class didn’t recognize in English. Even knowing the word didn’t help that much; looking at our faces after we watched the video, the professor abruptly announced a five-minute break – fifteen minutes before class ended. We were puzzled but didn’t complain.

                That’s about my selection of anecdotes for the week; things haven’t been overly exciting, but they haven’t been dull. In addition to what I’ve mentioned, I’ve gone grocery shopping, cleaned, done laundry, hung out with friends, done some creative writing, and the like. Mainly, I’ve enjoyed having a holiday in the middle of the week.

                Everyone in the States seems to be on Spring Break at the moment, but I don’t mind missing; I get a two-week break at the end of the month, besides which I’ve managed to miss the worst winter in Boston history. This has so far been a very pleasant semester; hopefully it will continue to be so. Until next time!

*Plato (2009-12-19). The Works of Plato (25+ works with an active table of contents) (Kindle Locations 19671-19675).  . Kindle Edition.

(when you copy and paste, it automatically gives you the citation. Isn’t that handy?!)

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.

Purim Ponderings

                When I started this blog, I had a hard time finding an appropriate background design. I wanted something academic-looking, but none of the templates exactly fit, so I ended up choosing the one I have now – a world map. But it’s certainly turned out to be apropos!

                One of the nicest things about studying in Israel is the Jewish holidays, and this week, it’s Purim. We don’t have classes tomorrow, and there are parties going on all over. Purim’s the celebration of the story of Esther; traditional elements of the celebration include wine, pastries, and costumes. On Tuesday there were already children wandering around dressed as various things. It’s kind of like Halloween, but without the pervading death motif.

                We talked about the origins of the tradition in Hebrew today. One of the reasons given for costumes was Esther’s concealment of her identity, and the fact that God is hidden in the story of Esther (He’s never explicitly mentioned). Also, the article explained, dressing up as someone else symbolized the many plot twists and fortune reversals in the story of Esther. (My face must have shown my skepticism at the second reason; the professor paused to say “yes, Lauren, I know it’s a stretch.”)

                Also in Hebrew this week, I gave a short presentation on a couple of campaign ads for the upcoming Israeli elections. No one else wanted to present the first week of class, so I ended up volunteering; it went well, and now I’m covered for the rest of the semester as far as that goes.

                I really like my class schedule here. It’s quite different from Harvard. Instead of starting 7 minutes late, classes usually end 15 minutes early (they’re scheduled for an hour and forty-five minutes). In addition, each normal class really is three hours a week; they don’t add in sections and labs and CA hours like Harvard does. Between this, having easier classes in general, and not having ROTC to get me up early or a cappella to keep me up late, I honestly feel like I’m on vacation.

                Being able to wake up at seven and not five means that I have a lot more time for sleep, but this unexpected plethora of free time is also very helpful for other things – learning German, for instance, or touring the country with friends. Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time reading the Great Books: I’ve finished the Iliad, Metamorphoses, several plays of Euripides, the Orestia, and more.

                I grew reading a lot of modern books that idealized ancient books – time after time I read about protagonists inspired by stories of grand heroes and epic quests, of daring charges and impossible victories, of dragons and knights and princesses and so on and so forth. But for all the classics I’ve read, I’ve yet to come across these stories.

                Of course, it’s entirely possible I haven’t gotten to them yet, and I’m sure they exist somewhere. But I can’t help but think that many of the people who moon about these stories have never actually read them. The Iliad is, for sure, an amazing poetic work. It’s the story of a great battle fought by demi-gods. It’s also the story of a bunch of trash-talking rich guys who decimate an entire city through pillaging, arson, rape, and infanticide because one man ran off with another man’s wife (this man, it should be noted, had several wives, not to mention concubines). Not what I consider the stuff of legends; surely there are better role models out there.

                Anyway, that’s my rant on the Iliad; apparently if you want inspiring legendarium, you have to go to Lord of the Rings. I could go into a long philosophical muse on the place of legend in pagan and Christian thought, and how that influences what I’m saying, but that’s not the point of this blog. In any case, I’m thoroughly enjoying my pseudo-vacation and looking forward to a long weekend. I hope everyone has a lovely Purim, and I’ll talk to you next week!