Yam Le Yam

            Well, I’ve completed a hiking trip, and I have the scrapes, scratches, soreness, stiffness, sunburn, and slight sprain to prove it. It’s my left ankle this time; the good news is that my right ankle seems to be completely healed and trustworthy after last summer. This sprain isn’t nearly as bad; it hardly counts as a sprain. I hiked on it for two days without significant discomfort or discoloration, so that’s always a good sign, although I’ll have to cut down on my running for a few days.

            Anyway, enough about injuries. Last week I finished my last few classes before break. Everyone was pretty restless, as usually happens before break, and the affect was compounded by the fact that the regular university and the grad schools had last week off, so about a third of the students were gone from some of my classes.

            Early Sunday morning we headed up to the Galilee for some hiking. The Middle East, while it’s very arid, is not all desert; we spent our time hiking through verdant landscapes and wading through streams. We started hiking at the Mediterranean and then made our way over to the Sea of Galilee. The hike is called Yam Le Yam (Sea to Sea).

            We cheated, though; we spent our two nights in the north in the nicest hostels anyone had ever seen – we were convinced that they mistakenly inserted the ‘s’ and they were actually hotels. Not having gotten much sleep for a couple of days before, I slept very well, and the food was also great. However, it was still quite tiring to hike for several hours a day.

            There were about thirty students, along with our certified hiking guides, our student guides from the university, and our medics/security people. We hiked mostly as a large group. Sometimes the trail was quiet, and sometimes it was full of people. Everyone is off school, so there were lots of children’s groups running around. We also passed plenty of families and groups of soldiers.

            It takes a while to get used to people walking around with assault rifles, but on the other hand, it makes one feel more secure, and it’s good to know that all the Israeli leaders in your group are army veterans and know how to deal with situations that come up. Fortunately, nothing did come up except for quite a few sprained ankles, and we had a very enjoyable trip.

            The second night of the trip, we built a bonfire, sang, and introduced the concept of s’mores to most of the non-Americans. I don’t understand how America has exported so many other cultural concepts and not the infinitely more useful idea of s’mores, but we’re doing our best. And yesterday morning I woke up early and watched the sunrise over the Sea of Galilee.

             Most of my roommates are gone for the break – it’s a great chance to travel if you’re not too religious – so the apartment is fairly quiet. I spent most of today catching up on sleep and resting in general, writing some philosophy I thought of while wandering through the mountains.

            Well, I’ve been on a trip, but it wasn’t a particularly exciting trip; it was mainly a wander through the mountains. I philosophized some; discussed the meaning of life, and various other topics, with friends; and regained some energy and perspective now that I’m about halfway through my stay. There’s not much more to write, but I do have plenty of pictures, and I’m sure I’ll have more news after Easter and Passover. Happy Holidays to everyone!

Pictures: This is a picture of the sunrise; there are more later.

These are from our first day of hiking.

 This was the culmination of our first day of hiking:

 and our hostel for the night:

 Second day (this used to be a wine press)

 This is said to be Elijah's chair; as the guide said, "we're not discussing if that's true; that's not the point."

 I was very excited about taking pictures of the sunrise, as you can see (this is less than half of them.)

 Third day of hiking (I was about picture-d out)

By the way, I keep forgetting to mention - credit for all pictures of me for this semester go to my lovely friends. Thank you to all of you (and to everyone who read this far down!)

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.