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):