Orientation Week

This past week was orientation week with the rest of my program and the other international MA students studying at Tel Aviv University this year. On Monday was the introduction to our program. There are about 17 students in my program, and I love them all so much already. We've already become a really tight-knit group, it's great. I know that I'm making friends that will last for a really long time! :) Anyways, on Monday the archaeology faculty and the Israeli archaeology graduate students welcomed us to the program with snacks and champagne. It was pretty exciting to meet some of the professors who I'm going to get the opportunity to learn from, since I read a lot of their work in undergrad in various classes and for some papers, and I'm really looking  forward to learning from them!

On Tuesday was a full day of lectures with the other international MA students. That morning we had a lecture about the city of Tel Aviv, which took the entire morning and then several lectures on things such as our health insurance through the university and academic writing. It was a really long day. That evening was a party at a bar down by the beach that TAU threw for the international students. One of my friends Lianne has been living near Tel Aviv for a while, so we headed down a few hours early to see the port and markets. She usually drives there apparently, but since we were walking it was a bit of a different route, and we almost wandered onto a military base on accident, oops. Of course when we explained what we were doing, "port" as in a water port is the same word as airport in Hebrew, so the guard was really confused about what we were trying to do. We never really did make it to see the port yet, because then we had to leave for our party, but hopefully our next attempt will be more successful.

On Wednesday, we had our Hebrew placement test first in the morning, and then our archaeology group toured and learned about the archaeology wing of TAU. The resources here are pretty impressive. There's an archaeology library, a pottery restoration room, mineralogy lab, photography lab, a room for sketching artifacts, and of course several exhibits about the digs associated with TAU. On Wednesday night, they had a party for our program at another bar in downtown Tel Aviv.

This morning, we had a tour by one of the PhD archaeology students of Tel Aviv, which was really neat. Since he's lived here so long, he was able to point out some good sites that wouldn't have been included in a regular tour such as where the best falafel is and the cheapest place to go for a beer in the city. During this tour, I actually took a few pictures of Tel Aviv. I've been so bad at taking pictures of the city to show you all, because I've got it into my head that I live here now and don't want to look like a total tourist. Anyway, it was neat to walk all around the city, because while I've done a lot of exploring since I've been here, it was great to have someone who actually knows Tel Aviv to show us around. Israelis are so much friendlier than Americans.

The White House of Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion:

The sea:

Looking south toward Jaffa:

I think this is like the first city hall building, but I can't remember for sure:

I'm also kind of good at taking the bus now. Well not really good, but I am not completely inept like I was earlier in the week. I consider this quite an accomplishment since I've taken the bus like 5 times total even in America. My Hebrew is also getting a bit better I think, and Lianne has taught us some new useful phrases as well. Tomorrow I have to go to the market in the morning before everything closes for the start of shabbat to grocery shop since the contents of our fridge right now consists pretty much hummus and olives. I also need to read for my classes which start on Sunday. It's difficult to get back into the academic mindset of being a student once again. I also got my Israeli phone, and it reminds me of the cell phones from perhaps the early 2000s. Like there's not a keyboard, and it has T9. I can now text in both English and Hebrew, which is sababa.

In other news, tomorrow I'm going with my friend Rachel to shabbat dinner at her cousin's! Super excited! I've never been (obviously because I'm not Jewish), but I'm really looking forward to seeing how the day is observed.

Also if anyone wants to skype soon, I'm pretty much always on gchat or facebook while I'm at my computer these days, so we definitely should! It's been great to talk to my mom over skype and to my best friends from homelike  Breanna and Sonia the past few days! :) Until next time, shalom and lilah tov!

The First Few Days

I decided to divide my first blog post into two, since the stuff in this post is really completely different from the previous.

The first few days in Israel have been great. My flat mates are all really nice, and it’s great to make new friends with similar academic interests as my own and also to reconnect with old friends from Megiddo again. We’ve hung at the beach a lot so far, since orientation and classes haven’t begun yet.

On Friday we went to the grocery store to buy groceries and a broom and some other necessities, and we have decided to never do our grocery shopping on Friday afternoons again. Friday is the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath, which means that everything closes start starting at about 3pm on Friday afternoons and doesn’t reopen again until about 8pm on Saturday, after Shabbat has ended. It was extremely busy and crowded and made all the more difficult since none of us really know any modern Hebrew yet, and my biblical Hebrew background is not at all useful in trying to say phrases such as, “Where are the trash bags?” We also took a while to try and convert the Israeli shekel to figure out what it would be in the American dollar, and the conversion rate right now is about 3.6, which is kind of a convoluted multiple to try to figure out in your head. Also we had difficulty reading the labels on things. Grocery shopping is so much more interesting when you’re not really sure what you’re purchasing.

Today we went to the beach since much of the city was shut down for Shabbat and ended up being asked to be extras in a movie they were filming. I really have no idea what the movie is about, but it’s apparently called Snails in the Rain. It’s probably going to be all in Hebrew, and I can’t find anything about it via a quick google search, but if you happen to ever see it, look for me in the background during a fight scene on the beach. I’ll be the one in a bikini perched precariously on a rock in the water.

That’s pretty much all that’s been going on so far.  Tomorrow we get our student IDs, and on Monday we start orientation, which will be a relief. I’m looking forward to getting some structure back in my life and also start to do academic thinking again, since my brain has pretty much turned to mush from watching television for the past few weeks before I left for Israel.  I’m also quite curious to see how the educational system works in Israel, since the States seems to primarily use a Socratic method in education. Specifically regarding my education in archaeology, it will be interesting to see the roles that the schools of biblical minimalism and maximalism play in our instruction, since these can be quite controversial.

My sleep schedule is still messed up.  Like we stay up until 3am and don’t wake up again until 11am.  I heard that for every time zone you pass over, that’s how many days you need to get over your jet lag, so hopefully in the next few days I can sleep regularly again. Also I miss my like 6 pillows from home and my dog.

The Journey There

So this is my first blog post. I hope to be pretty good about updating my blog in the future to keep all my friends and family updated on my life in the Middle East and also to share aspects of Israeli culture with you all. Hopefully this blog post works because the page is in Hebrew, and I’m not really sure what I’m doing.

Anyway. The journey to Israel was not too eventful. I flew from Grand Rapids to Chicago to Warsaw to Tel Aviv, so it was a pretty long journey. I wasn’t nervous at all to move over here, but I was extremely nervous about packing my life up in just two 50-lb bags. But I invested in some space bags, where all the air is vacuumed out and managed to pack sheets, a blanket, and also a pillow along with a bunch of clothes and shoes. Kind of amazing. Also, weighing my bags at the airport, and one of them was 50.0 lbs, and the other was 50.5 lbs. Such a relief. However, after I finished congratulating myself and my mom on our excellent packing skills, when I went to check in for my flight out of ORD, the airline lady informed me that LOT Poland only allows one piece of checked luggage, and then I had to pay $78 for my second bag. After the whole extra piece of luggage debacle and the fact that my flight out of Grand Rapids was delayed 45 minutes and that I had to get an international boarding pass to leave the States and ORD is like the biggest most confusing airport ever and the terminal shuttles were being slow, I made it to my gate exactly 4 minutes before boarding time. In Chicago, I was meeting up with another girl from my program Alysha.

The flight to Warsaw was long and uncomfortable since my seat was in the very back row and people kept bumping into me on their way to the bathroom and there was no tv. We had a nearly 9-hour layover in Warsaw, so we bought a bus ticket at the airport and got off at a random stop in the city to explore a bit and managed to find Old Town Poland, which was really interesting. You can read about it a little bit here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Old_Town

One thing that I wish I would have done before exploring Poland was to learn a few helpful phrases in Polish so that I could communicate with the locals a little and ask for directions and that sort of thing. Also I’ve found that most people are more than willing to share their culture with a foreigner who shows a genuine interest in their background, and to me, being at least able to ask if someone speaks English in their own tongue is a common courtesy that should be extended when traveling in foreign countries. Since we were mostly interested in wandering around and taking pictures and being a tourist, we totally got lost in the city for an hour or two but eventually found a stop for a bus that would take us back to the airport.

From Warsaw I flew to TLV, and this flight was also delayed. I finally made it to Israel at about 3am local time. I actually had no troubles at all getting into the country surprisingly and wasn’t even frisked once this time, which was a bit surprising to me considering all the trouble I had last year. We waited in the airport until about 7:30am because we couldn’t move in until 8am. While we were waiting we met a really nice Mexican man who was a pastor and didn’t speak any English, so we communicated through google translate on our computers for a little while. Also, the wheels on both of my pieces of luggage are broken. Pretty sure I’m never flying LOT Poland again…