ballooNIM

First things first: typing is very refreshing for me right now because, for the first time in my life, I've lost my voice. When I try to talk, the best that comes out is a kind of subdued murmur, and the worst is cracking and disappearance of air altogether. I'm not having difficulty breathing, just coughing a lot. I can't tell if this is a serious problem or not. It's also hard to say whether it's better or worse than last year's dropped-in-a-foreign-country affliction, namely a constant runny nose.

I last wrote on Tuesday. Wednesday was very similar to it. Early in the morning, I got up and went to class. Hold on, scratch that. I slept in and arrived late...

That class is very interestingly structured. There are many strategies of learning a second language, and this one differs widely from the Biblical Hebrew course I took last summer. The Biblical Hebrew class was highly explicit and direct: "This is the definite article. These are its various forms and the different circumstances under which it takes each one. These are the personal pronouns." It was an intellectual rather than an immersive approach, and I like that kind of thing.

This course, on the other hand, is entirely immersive. The teacher began with a vocabulary of about five words, and with the help of picture cards, expressive intonation, and pantomiming (Hebrew "pantomima"...), has expanded to using a few dozen to communicate with us. Everything is based on association: we know the contexts in which it's appropriate to use a word or phrase, but we don't know its literal translation. Asking for one is discouraged. Sometimes this can get to be a bit of a stretch. For example, she gave us the word "lechem", which means "bread". Again, because we learn all the words by their contexts, after pantomiming failed she said, "Sandwich, sandwich" with the kind of tone you might use in Taboo when you can't say the taboo word but must make your teammates think of it. Now, Hebrew has another word for "sandwich", and "lechem" can't mean "sandwich". So those of us who are used to taking everything as equivalent and not associated end up very confused. Had I not known the word from last year's course, I wouldn't have been confused, wouldn't have asked for clarification, and would n't have guessed that it meant "bread". Similarly, when talking about masculine and feminine, she doesn't use the Hebrew words for "masculine" and "feminine" but the ones for "man" and "woman"; I guess the intention is something like making us think on the spot in a social setting: "Ah yes -- I'm talking to a woman -- I need to use this word, not that one."

With my tiny bit of Hebrew I tackled another campus cafeteria and got some chicken schnitzel. I'm really taking a liking to the stuff.

(Not so much to the classic shapeless Israeli public art.)

Nobody guessed the location of the bird from the last post, perhaps because a cheap, kitschy item from the Old City is not much of a find. It was the British military cemetery I explored a few times last year.

Later that day I went out for a walk to the Shepherd's Field (not its actual name, just what I call it after meeting an Arab shepherd child with his flock there last year). I took this somewhat uncomfortable belt pouch for my water bottle...

Walking to the Shepherd's Field was nice. There were a few parties of children around. That area is one of the ones they tell us not to go to because it's sketchy, but honestly, after walking in it half a dozen times last year, I'm not concerned. I mean, look! They have kites that look like planes!

If I hadn't said they were kites, would you have thought they were planes?

And wonderful sunset vistas.

I took another video here, but sadly, you can't hear most of what I say due to the wind. (I think I talk about the olive tree Seoren and I saw, the fire that seemed to have taken place in the field, the fact that the concrete had been flowing and driven through before it hardened, the walls around the Arab settlements, and my return to the village. You can hear some of it around 2:45.)

Also, here's one of those prickly plants I've mentioned before -- the plants that exist for the sole purpose of prickling. They're 100% prickles!

Although, actually, I was enlightened this time by seeing the odd one with some actual greenery. So maybe they do have a function.

On Thursday I was reminded of the awesome haze-filtered sunrises in Israel. It's one of the few light events in the world that lend credence to the myth that the old "bloom" effect in video games is somehow realistic.

That morning a German named Joachim left the class. He found it too easy. He moved up to the class I had left previously. But then he had studied Hebrew before. Oh, wait... so had I...

Uh oh, I just heard Larissa cough...

Oh, that's right. Larissa's here now! So are Cas and Paul and a Surprise Mystery Person whose identity we didn't know but whose room was standing empty, waiting for its occupant. They left early Wednesday morning and arrived on (what was here) Thursday afternoon. They hadn't all taken the same flight, but their different flights happened to arrive at the airport at around the same time, so they shared a sherut back.

When I got back to the apartment (after scoring some kitchenware from the maintenance folk, who, it turns out, do have a stash of stuff previous students have left behind), they were there. The SMP turned out to be Ivony (ai-VONN-ee), another U of T student. All of them soon went off to an orientation I'd been to on Tuesday while I tried to set up our wi-fi and, for the first time, saw a helicopter land at the helipad near the student village. I also "spied" on them with some binoculars my family lent me, and felt very covert. It's easy to feel covert when you're spying on the army. I ducked down low in the window so I'd be hard to spot... it was an instinct.

Then I joined them for a shopping trip at Malcha Mall, which is Jerusalem's big indoor mall.

In this shot, Paul is behind me, snoring. A candid shot of him has been placed at his disposal.

They had a new variety of lump (i.e. a new colour pattern), which I dub the Chevalier Lump.

Malcha Mall is very strange... I'd say the majority of the storefront names are in English, not Hebrew. It feels, as Larissa said, very much like an Israeli Square One. We ate in the food court; the others had some lasagna and pasta and other starchy things in an amazing-looking but very thick creamy cheese sauce, and I decided to try out Israeli sushi. In ordering it I made a slip-up in my quest to order everything in Hebrew: I pointed to some noodles and said, "Sushi vzeh," which means "Sushi and this." His next question, first in Hebrew and then in English when he saw my confusion, reminded me that you can't just order "sushi". There are several kinds and numbers and whatnot... So that was a fail. Also, Paul noticed that the fish in it was cooked, because (I think) raw fish is not kosher. (But it's very hard to follow a thorough Jewish discussion of the question.)

Then we did a lot of grocery shopping and stocked up on everything, because it's hard to get groceries on Shabbat. We bought a pack of "classic tea" despite not knowing which tea is classic in Israel.

On the way back, a New Yorker named Tim told us about his adventures volunteering in Israel on a grant. Then, because we could, we bought some wine (the Hebrew rhymes: "yayin") at a convenience store, and had a small toast to celebrate the safe arrival.

Friday was the most fun and worthwhile day yet. First, here's a bit of something I'll be looking out for: odd packaging. This is a cereal box whose photoshopping is quite poor:

The front of it looks fine, but it exemplifies a common trend you find when you actually read the Hebrew on a package. The large letters are pronounced, from right to left, K - O (likely) - R - N - F - L - K - S. So yes, cornflakes. It makes you wonder who the target audience is. Is it Hebrew speakers who just find English words really cool even if the main name of the product is not comprehensible in their first language? Is it English speakers who, like me, have learned just enough Hebrew to read a transliteration of the English word...?

Also really cool was that after class, in which we had an assessment quiz (they really need to split this class up; some of us are finding it way too slow, while others are finding it way too fast), we went to what what was described to us as "singing Hebrew".

It was in the auditorium they have here on the first level, where I often played piano last year. It was quite dim in there, and people from multiple classes were gathering. I got there early, so after a very talented pianist played Mozart's Ronda Alla Turca by heart, I played a couple of my songs for the crowd, and quit while ahead. Someone from my class (incidentally, a Chinese woman who teaches Chinese in Uganda) came up to me and said, "Luke! You are a man of many talents. You leave your book at home because you know everything, you play piano --" To which I had to interrupt, "No, I left my book at home because I absentmindedly forgot it!" But anyway, it's nice to make a friend through a door like that.

Then the main event began. A portly Israeli man stepped onto the stage (still quite dim) and stood in front of the piano. We had been given some songbooks with Hebrew lyrics, the pronunciation of the Hebrew, and English translations. He explained partly in Hebrew and partly in English that these songs were traditional, but they also played a major role in the recent history of Israel's statehood. They had names like "Kol ha'olam kulo" ("The whole world is a bridge"), a beautiful song whose entire English translation ran "The whole world is a narrow bridge / and the most important thing is not to fear at all"; "Toda" ("Thank you"); and "Yerushalayim shel zahav" ("Jerusalem of Gold"). That last is featured at the end of non-Hebrew versions of Schinder's List -- not Hebrew versions, because apparently actual Jews think of it as a pop song and not the score for a dramatic liberation scene.

He led us through each song bit by bit, playing the piano parts and singing each section first to demonstrate, before calling us to join in. Even I sang in Hebrew, and I don't normally sing. This is when I first noticed my voice was going, when it was cutting out (so to speak) on some of the harder notes. But it was a lot of fun, and all the teachers sang these no doubt familiar songs in fluent and lovely Hebrew. Man, Jewish music is so cool -- the way they design chord progressions is so fundamentally different that you don't need any music theory to hear it. Every song is interesting because surprising. After we had practiced, we sang a few of the songs again in a setlist of his choosing. It was a really neat experience.

I also asked around for my old Biblical Hebrew professor, Dr. Barak Dan, and we talked for a while both in a class break and on the way out of the campus. I'm the only person from last year who returned. We talked about the differences between the courses and I mentioned the odd plural of "stuDENtim" to him. He said that some foreign words behave that way, not following the Hebrew stress, particularly if they don't sound Hebrew. "For example," he said, "I think 'balloon' would be 'ballooNIM', not 'balLOOnim'."

And on my return everyone had gone to the Old City except me and Larissa, who was napping. So it was off on our first real adventure in the city. But as it was a long day and it's now past 1 a.m., I think I'll give that its own post -- perhaps tomorrow.

In the meantime, enjoy a catableau.