רק בישראל

A lot has happened since my last post. I finally recovered completely from the worst ear infection EVER. A warning: try never to get an ear infection as an adult. It sucks. Now, that I am better, we have been venturing out of the house to do a little more Tel Aviv exploring. This past weekend was the first weekend we have stayed in Tel Aviv, and we had a visitor! Yuval's first cousin Ian! Ian is here on the Schecter Neshama program, and he came to us for his first free weekend. Now, Ian got here last Thursday around 5pm, Yuval had class so I went to pick him up at the train station. I took the bus there--because that is how we get around and waited. Yuval had spoken to one of the counselors in Hebrew a few days earlier, and the main rule seemed to be "don't take him to crowded places." Now, we were unsure how to interpret this rule, especially regarding taking the bus. So, I went to pick Ian up unclear on how we would get home. I got there early and waited until he called, at first I was running around the parking lot trying to find where they were, and after 10 minutes of looking like a crazy American, I found him. He was with a group of Schecter kids, and a counselor who looked about my age. She looked at me and handed me a paper which was completely in hebrew and told me to give it to my parents! She then told me she had to watch us get into a cab and drive away, and that is what we did. I showed Ian around our neighborhood--we walked along the tayelet, and met Yuval for dinner, at a cafe around the corner from our apartment that has the best hamburgers ever.

The next day we took Ian to the shuk and the artists fair on Nachalat Binyamin, and I got a pair of earrings that I have been pining over for the last 3 weeks. March Madness began that night, so we spent the evening watching the basketball and having a n extremely mediocre shabbat dinner. We are going to have to practice a little more working with our little toaster/convection oven.

Saturday was a BEAUTIFUL day, so we went to the beach. We met up with two kids from Yuval's school, (ben from brandeis and david from canada), we had a really nice time. The beach was beautiful, the weather was beautiful, it was a great day.

Sunday morning, we got into a cab to take Ian back to his group, and me to Ulpan. This was the first Ulpan class that I was bored in. Sometimes in classes, activities work and sometimes they don't, this time the activities the teacher prepared just didn't work. As I continue with the ulpan there are things that are very frustrating. The first is that there are a number of people in the class who seem to not care at all. This is confusing to me, because they are all paying out of pocket for this class, and if they don't want to be there, then what are they doing?? The other issue is that there are numerous Russian women in the class, who have been in Israel for a number of years, and they also seem afraid to participate. Now, this wouldn't be a problem if most of the class didn't revolve around group work. But, it does. So, its frustrating when I do the work and then the people I am paired up with expect me to do their work also.

Yesterday was a very interesting day. We woke up and went out to buy tickets to the Israel-Greece Soccer game this weekend. Yuval is extremely excited about this...I'm sure it will be fun. We then had to go fix Yuval's phone. Now, Yuval thought he knew where it was. He didn't. We ended up walking 439457469843740 miles until finally finding it. I was cranky from that.

Anyway, this was much longer than I expected. We are very very very very excited to be coming home next week!!

Love,
Sarah

ps. I wanted to tell everyone how grateful I am to Yuval for cleaning the floors in our apartment for me whenever I ask.