I'm here and doing well.
At about 8 a.m. on Sunday, we drove off to the airport. We got through the line much earlier than necessary, so we just kind of... went back through security. We shared a dark chocolate Toblerone (not as good, don't try it) before I flew off.
The first flight was the same type of tiny plane that Lyera and I took on our way back. I was just going to Newark, which I had confused with New York. The relation between the two is still not clear to me but I don't care enough to look it up, so there.
I took the usual plane photos, of course. Nearby a toddler was crying because of the pain in her ears. It did hurt very badly, perhaps because the plane was so small. As her mother explained to her, "In a small plane, you feel every turn..."
Did you know the northern part of New York State is mostly forest and suburbs? My dad said they think of it as "the great north". This is probably the most urban part of it:
After stopping for a few hours in the large food court in Newark and getting fast food pasta (nothing feels weirder), it was off to Tel Aviv, the much longer flight. I had forgotten about security since I didn't face any in Toronto, and thought I was safe from all laundry detergent mishaps. Actually, I was, because I deliberately avoided taking it, but that's hardly the point. They had a miniature security depot set up around this one gate. Luckily, I got through without any hassles. Or unluckily since it made for no stories -- you never know. But among all the passengers to Israel I did decide that there exist a small number of people who really do personify the Hollywood/Seinfeld image of the stereotypical Brooklyn Jewish housewife. They have a particular way of talking to their children (e.g. "See the goyim?"). By contrast, the American woman merely interested in Israel tells her children that she is "an honorary Jew". What could this mean? Can anyone be one??
The flight was fairly uneventful and best recounted in poem format. I was reading David McFadden (whose book I got at a poetry prize reading) and what came out ended up sounding somewhat like him.
A patch of night
We flew into a patch of night like cloud,
a huge cloud over Europe,
lit by just two lights,
the ones on the tips of our wings.
I won a game of chess
against the airplane console,
but I lost at Reversi.
Battleship was a tie.
Nowhere do we look so bad
as in an airplane washroom.
The harsh light shrinks our pupils,
exposes every piece of stubble,
eliminates the shadows that define us.
In my dream a woman addresses the dead,
reaches out her hand, tousles their hair.
She makes the semblance of a life.
She is the globe, who waits for us.
We have it easy up here.
They show us a picture of the world
with the locations of day
and evening marked.
Frost forms on the outside of the glass
in the black night;
through it silver slivers fly.
The moon tails us, snaking along
through the rivers of Paris.
The screen says outside
it's minus some abysmal number.
Funny it should be so cold
when the country we're going to
is hot, hot, hot.
Guess above everything there's ice.
They call that land Ha-Aretz.
That can mean The Country or The World.
When we flew over Tel Aviv an excited couple of children who had been talking behind me for an hour ("I have a high sense of smell" -- "Yeah? Well I have a high sense of HUMOUR") began exclaiming about the extreme coolness of seeing Israel at last. "There's the coast of Israel; oh my God!" Five seconds later it turned into "...Is the middle of Israel, like, a big desert? Because that's what it's looking like..."
In honour of this rapid turnaround, here's a picture not of the coast of Israel but of one of the islands in the Mediterranean, sporting some terrain that looks like the more attractive parts of Israel.
Getting through Israel's customs was slightly harder than last time. I had to show my acceptance letter and defend my visit to a clerk without a high sense of humour ("Why did you want to study Hebrew in the first place?!"). Then I climbed on the sherut, which Lyera and I definitely should have taken last time because it was a breeze and it costs a company standard of 50 shekels rather than the taxi's 300. And the driver doesn't try to cheat you as much. It's just slower, because you go to five or six stops unloading one passenger at a time. At one such stop I was reminded of the shapeless, uninterested nature of Israeli public art.
Got there, checked in, yadda yadda yadda. I went up to my apartment and was in for a huge reality check. Now, language program students check in a few days before everyone else does. Whereas last year Simmon and I arrived during the last few days of the residency of a trio of dancers who kept the place clean and left us a wealth of materials, including food, towels, books, decorations, dishes, and a microwave, not to mention had an apartment whose main window faced south onto the Old City and the Dome of the Rock, this tenth-storey apartment had been totally cleared out except for a couple of pillows, smelled pretty bad, sported smudges and stains (including on my mattress... first priority: buy a sheet), and had a view of the brick wall of the next building.
Which reminds me, every modern building in Jerusalem has a lame stone facade of which I'm now pretty bored, and they're all the same colour: tan. Tan, tan, tan, as far as the eye can see.
Tired, depressed, and lonesome for home or at least my travel partners, I decided to make the best of it and buy as much as I could. There are a couple of shops near the campus. I bought hand towels, air fresheners, disposal dishes, and so on, over four or five trips. (On the last one I finally found a sheet bearing themes from some Cartoon Network show.)
Before unpacking anything, I had to go to a general orientation on campus. On the way I passed some familiar Jerusalem crows. I actually really like their colour, despite Seoren saying last year that they look dirty. Here's one at a location that readers of the blog should be able to recognize and name, for a prize of one (1) kitschy item from the Old City that I will bring back. I also intend to create a similar contest among my roommates, except the challenge is to take a picture of a squirrel in Israel. I'm pretty sure there are none, but that's the fun of it.
Also, this patch of long grass where we saw a starving puppy last year burnt to the ground somehow. I haven't ascertained the cause yet.
All proceeded normally at the orientation, although this time around I was able to hear just how much of their security advice is exaggerated to avoid liability, and was sadly aware of how many crucial things they didn't mention. I wish they'd follow Lyera's suggestion and give a couple of tips on haggling before people go out naively and overspend, or at least the maximum price one should pay for a taxi in Jerusalem. Or they could mention that the light rail is by far the easiest way to get to the Old City so people don't have to hear it by word of mouth. I did, however, learn that "you'll adapt right away, but when you call them, your parents will be the ones with culture shock". Okay.
I had lunch and stupidly missed the guy who was delivering my SIM card equipment, so that's the main thing I have to sort out right now. Sorry to anyone who's trying to call my number. My phone is currently an elaborate and weighty timepiece. (Another thing to sort out is who it is that for two days in a row has taken out the piano key before I can get to it. Blast!!)
INTERLUDE: Here's a sample of some classic trees of Israel.
The palm:
The scraggly pine:
The somewhat savannah-y deciduous:
The pitiful non-survivor:
The one whose bark peels off as a matter of course:
And here's a panorama from the roof of the Boyar Building, which is the central building of the international students. Hopefully you can right-click and download the high-quality version. Oh, and to build suspense, here are the five flights of stairs and the mildly frightening service ladder I had to climb to get there...
And then it was evening, so I went back to home sweet home after a couple more shopping runs, including one to buy pasta for supper. That reminds me, "home sweet home" actually means the same building I had last year. Kind of cool. Well, actually, I'm not sure if it's good or bad.
And my utilities table (not pretty):
The last thing I did that night was use some crappy made-in-China scotch tape to put up the dorm welcome sheet, and then I got sentimental and broke out my precious duct tape to put up my one decoration:
I read from Isaiah and slept well.
The next day (today) has been a lot better. Here's the view outside my window, which faces in a different direction from that of the main dorm window:
I had some cereal in 1% milk (which I mistakenly thought I would like) and read a bit of Leviticus. I noticed that in the long list of feasts and festivals, only Shabbat and Passover seem to be kept by Christians. I'm curious as to why that is. Also, if a person has any physical defects, they may not approach the altar or offer sacrifices (although they can eat them). Very sad. But it also adds a new dimension to the cultural view of the sick and to Jesus's healings.
Then it was time for my first Modern Hebrew class. I took an online placement test a few weeks ago, and probably because of my Biblical Hebrew, I didn't do too badly. They placed me in the first level, but it turns out the first level has about seven stages, and I was in the fifth. But in the first ten minutes something was off. The professor began speaking rapidly in Hebrew right from the get-go and I figured this was some kind of immersion with a steep curve. Then we were given exercises of which I couldn't understand a word, and a couple of us realized we were supposed to understand a lot more than we did (the exchange went like this: "Am I supposed to understand a lot more than I do?" -- "Pretty much"). I bid farewell to the professor and went to the office to get transferred to a lower level, and they stuck me in the first one. That works for me, because although the next couple of days will be boring as we relearn the alphabet, we've already encountered a couple dozen words I'd never come across in Biblical Hebrew. Quoth the department advisor: "You mean they don't have ice cream in the Bible?"
That reminds me. I asked the professor why "studentim" ("students") is stressed on the "ent" and not on the "im" like regular Hebrew plurals, and she explained that some borrowed words are assimilated better while others maintain a foreign sound. That's odd, I said, considering how common a word this one is in Hebrew. (As a tour guide said to me last year when I asked him is there not a Hebrew word it: "Probably, but nobody knows it.") The professor asked whether I thought the stress change was good or bad thing, and as a linguistics student I answered, "I don't know... It's neither good nor bad." She corrected me and explained that it was good because it maintains the distinction between Hebrew words and foreign words. Aha. But I guess Hebrew is one of the languages most entitled to a little purism, even at the university level.
After class I was feeling pretty good, so I wandered around campus and bought a cheese pastry, all in Hebrew (my few monosyllabic words raised no eyebrows!) and I found a nice spot to eat it. That brings us to what I hope can be a regular feature of the blog this time around: videos.
(Addendum to the video: See? How can anyone think these birds are not attractive??)
Since then I've pretty much been unwinding. I didn't go to the store at all today, which is very refreshing. I read a booklet of some potential student activities and briefly dropped in on a "social evening" that was happening in the courtyard, where I learned that even school field days have tour guides in Israel. "Most of the guides are old and boring or funny and clueless, and one of them is me."
In the cool of the evening my appetite returned, so I went to a nearby restaurant and had some chicken schnitzel. Easily the best food I've had in Israel so far. In Israel everyone from restaurants to convenience stores sells beer, so I decided to have a bottle of Tuborg instead of Coke for once. (Don't worry, it's not a habit. The beer, I mean. The pop sadly is.)
And so here I am. Tomorrow after class it's probably time I made a long-awaited return to the Old City. I leave you with a trademark Jerusalem Cat -- one of the healthier ones, I think.
P.S. Three notes on Hebrew computers:
French accents don't work.
Everything is reversed right to left, which very perplexingly includes the brower's back and forward buttons.
When I uploaded the video, YouTube offered to smooth out the shaking and I accepted (hence the odd smoothness). A pop-up appeared in Hebrew and the browser offered to translate it, which yielded, to the notice that I would be sent an email letting me know when the process was done, the amusing responses "Not interested" and "I realized".
At about 8 a.m. on Sunday, we drove off to the airport. We got through the line much earlier than necessary, so we just kind of... went back through security. We shared a dark chocolate Toblerone (not as good, don't try it) before I flew off.
The first flight was the same type of tiny plane that Lyera and I took on our way back. I was just going to Newark, which I had confused with New York. The relation between the two is still not clear to me but I don't care enough to look it up, so there.
 |
| This was cool in that the blades were invisible to the naked eye at this point. |
I took the usual plane photos, of course. Nearby a toddler was crying because of the pain in her ears. It did hurt very badly, perhaps because the plane was so small. As her mother explained to her, "In a small plane, you feel every turn..."
Did you know the northern part of New York State is mostly forest and suburbs? My dad said they think of it as "the great north". This is probably the most urban part of it:
After stopping for a few hours in the large food court in Newark and getting fast food pasta (nothing feels weirder), it was off to Tel Aviv, the much longer flight. I had forgotten about security since I didn't face any in Toronto, and thought I was safe from all laundry detergent mishaps. Actually, I was, because I deliberately avoided taking it, but that's hardly the point. They had a miniature security depot set up around this one gate. Luckily, I got through without any hassles. Or unluckily since it made for no stories -- you never know. But among all the passengers to Israel I did decide that there exist a small number of people who really do personify the Hollywood/Seinfeld image of the stereotypical Brooklyn Jewish housewife. They have a particular way of talking to their children (e.g. "See the goyim?"). By contrast, the American woman merely interested in Israel tells her children that she is "an honorary Jew". What could this mean? Can anyone be one??
The flight was fairly uneventful and best recounted in poem format. I was reading David McFadden (whose book I got at a poetry prize reading) and what came out ended up sounding somewhat like him.
A patch of night
We flew into a patch of night like cloud,
a huge cloud over Europe,
lit by just two lights,
the ones on the tips of our wings.
I won a game of chess
against the airplane console,
but I lost at Reversi.
Battleship was a tie.
Nowhere do we look so bad
as in an airplane washroom.
The harsh light shrinks our pupils,
exposes every piece of stubble,
eliminates the shadows that define us.
In my dream a woman addresses the dead,
reaches out her hand, tousles their hair.
She makes the semblance of a life.
She is the globe, who waits for us.
We have it easy up here.
They show us a picture of the world
with the locations of day
and evening marked.
Frost forms on the outside of the glass
in the black night;
through it silver slivers fly.
The moon tails us, snaking along
through the rivers of Paris.
The screen says outside
it's minus some abysmal number.
Funny it should be so cold
when the country we're going to
is hot, hot, hot.
Guess above everything there's ice.
They call that land Ha-Aretz.
That can mean The Country or The World.
When we flew over Tel Aviv an excited couple of children who had been talking behind me for an hour ("I have a high sense of smell" -- "Yeah? Well I have a high sense of HUMOUR") began exclaiming about the extreme coolness of seeing Israel at last. "There's the coast of Israel; oh my God!" Five seconds later it turned into "...Is the middle of Israel, like, a big desert? Because that's what it's looking like..."
In honour of this rapid turnaround, here's a picture not of the coast of Israel but of one of the islands in the Mediterranean, sporting some terrain that looks like the more attractive parts of Israel.
Getting through Israel's customs was slightly harder than last time. I had to show my acceptance letter and defend my visit to a clerk without a high sense of humour ("Why did you want to study Hebrew in the first place?!"). Then I climbed on the sherut, which Lyera and I definitely should have taken last time because it was a breeze and it costs a company standard of 50 shekels rather than the taxi's 300. And the driver doesn't try to cheat you as much. It's just slower, because you go to five or six stops unloading one passenger at a time. At one such stop I was reminded of the shapeless, uninterested nature of Israeli public art.
 |
| In their defence, it's no worse than Square One's. |
Got there, checked in, yadda yadda yadda. I went up to my apartment and was in for a huge reality check. Now, language program students check in a few days before everyone else does. Whereas last year Simmon and I arrived during the last few days of the residency of a trio of dancers who kept the place clean and left us a wealth of materials, including food, towels, books, decorations, dishes, and a microwave, not to mention had an apartment whose main window faced south onto the Old City and the Dome of the Rock, this tenth-storey apartment had been totally cleared out except for a couple of pillows, smelled pretty bad, sported smudges and stains (including on my mattress... first priority: buy a sheet), and had a view of the brick wall of the next building.
Which reminds me, every modern building in Jerusalem has a lame stone facade of which I'm now pretty bored, and they're all the same colour: tan. Tan, tan, tan, as far as the eye can see.
Tired, depressed, and lonesome for home or at least my travel partners, I decided to make the best of it and buy as much as I could. There are a couple of shops near the campus. I bought hand towels, air fresheners, disposal dishes, and so on, over four or five trips. (On the last one I finally found a sheet bearing themes from some Cartoon Network show.)
Before unpacking anything, I had to go to a general orientation on campus. On the way I passed some familiar Jerusalem crows. I actually really like their colour, despite Seoren saying last year that they look dirty. Here's one at a location that readers of the blog should be able to recognize and name, for a prize of one (1) kitschy item from the Old City that I will bring back. I also intend to create a similar contest among my roommates, except the challenge is to take a picture of a squirrel in Israel. I'm pretty sure there are none, but that's the fun of it.
Also, this patch of long grass where we saw a starving puppy last year burnt to the ground somehow. I haven't ascertained the cause yet.
All proceeded normally at the orientation, although this time around I was able to hear just how much of their security advice is exaggerated to avoid liability, and was sadly aware of how many crucial things they didn't mention. I wish they'd follow Lyera's suggestion and give a couple of tips on haggling before people go out naively and overspend, or at least the maximum price one should pay for a taxi in Jerusalem. Or they could mention that the light rail is by far the easiest way to get to the Old City so people don't have to hear it by word of mouth. I did, however, learn that "you'll adapt right away, but when you call them, your parents will be the ones with culture shock". Okay.
I had lunch and stupidly missed the guy who was delivering my SIM card equipment, so that's the main thing I have to sort out right now. Sorry to anyone who's trying to call my number. My phone is currently an elaborate and weighty timepiece. (Another thing to sort out is who it is that for two days in a row has taken out the piano key before I can get to it. Blast!!)
INTERLUDE: Here's a sample of some classic trees of Israel.
The palm:
The scraggly pine:
The somewhat savannah-y deciduous:
The pitiful non-survivor:
And here's a panorama from the roof of the Boyar Building, which is the central building of the international students. Hopefully you can right-click and download the high-quality version. Oh, and to build suspense, here are the five flights of stairs and the mildly frightening service ladder I had to climb to get there...
And then it was evening, so I went back to home sweet home after a couple more shopping runs, including one to buy pasta for supper. That reminds me, "home sweet home" actually means the same building I had last year. Kind of cool. Well, actually, I'm not sure if it's good or bad.
In the elevator I saw a sign telling students to bring their old stuff to an apartment on the ninth floor instead of throwing it out, so that it could be given to "student's club" and people in need. I decided to check it out and see if they had some pots and pans; I hadn't bought any since they were relatively expensive. When I got there I thought it was the wrong place. The door was wide open and there was just a middle-aged man sitting at the table. But I told him what I was there for, and he said the stuff was actually for refugees. Since they're in much more need than me, I started to turn away, but then he asked where I was from, and I said Canada, and then he offered me things from his two carboard boxes. Suddenly I felt a little guilty, so I just took an old pot and plate.
I unpacked my things and set up the apartment/ I'd put the air freshener out, and it worked so well that not only the did apartment smell a lot better, I also started sneezing and had to put it away. Soon I was merrily cleaning the countertop and washing the plate while the pasta water was boiling in the pot. There was a faint smell that I took to be excess natural gas from the stove. "It's a good thing I opened the windows," I thought to myself. "But how am I going to heat up the sauce?" You see, I had only one pot. "Oh, I know! I'll just pour it over the pasta after I drain it (holding it with hand towels, since I do not own oven mitts) and keep the burner on. The sauce should be wet enough to keep the noodles from burning." Then the smell became so strong that I realized it wasn't natural gas and turned around. The pot was now burning up something awful; the bottom was already burnt to a crisp. So I threw it out and decided to postpone the pasta, which was okay because I didn't have much of an appetite anyway.
Here's my kitchen:
And my utilities table (not pretty):
The last thing I did that night was use some crappy made-in-China scotch tape to put up the dorm welcome sheet, and then I got sentimental and broke out my precious duct tape to put up my one decoration:
 |
| Also from the poetry prize ceremony. |
I read from Isaiah and slept well.
The next day (today) has been a lot better. Here's the view outside my window, which faces in a different direction from that of the main dorm window:
I had some cereal in 1% milk (which I mistakenly thought I would like) and read a bit of Leviticus. I noticed that in the long list of feasts and festivals, only Shabbat and Passover seem to be kept by Christians. I'm curious as to why that is. Also, if a person has any physical defects, they may not approach the altar or offer sacrifices (although they can eat them). Very sad. But it also adds a new dimension to the cultural view of the sick and to Jesus's healings.
Then it was time for my first Modern Hebrew class. I took an online placement test a few weeks ago, and probably because of my Biblical Hebrew, I didn't do too badly. They placed me in the first level, but it turns out the first level has about seven stages, and I was in the fifth. But in the first ten minutes something was off. The professor began speaking rapidly in Hebrew right from the get-go and I figured this was some kind of immersion with a steep curve. Then we were given exercises of which I couldn't understand a word, and a couple of us realized we were supposed to understand a lot more than we did (the exchange went like this: "Am I supposed to understand a lot more than I do?" -- "Pretty much"). I bid farewell to the professor and went to the office to get transferred to a lower level, and they stuck me in the first one. That works for me, because although the next couple of days will be boring as we relearn the alphabet, we've already encountered a couple dozen words I'd never come across in Biblical Hebrew. Quoth the department advisor: "You mean they don't have ice cream in the Bible?"
That reminds me. I asked the professor why "studentim" ("students") is stressed on the "ent" and not on the "im" like regular Hebrew plurals, and she explained that some borrowed words are assimilated better while others maintain a foreign sound. That's odd, I said, considering how common a word this one is in Hebrew. (As a tour guide said to me last year when I asked him is there not a Hebrew word it: "Probably, but nobody knows it.") The professor asked whether I thought the stress change was good or bad thing, and as a linguistics student I answered, "I don't know... It's neither good nor bad." She corrected me and explained that it was good because it maintains the distinction between Hebrew words and foreign words. Aha. But I guess Hebrew is one of the languages most entitled to a little purism, even at the university level.
After class I was feeling pretty good, so I wandered around campus and bought a cheese pastry, all in Hebrew (my few monosyllabic words raised no eyebrows!) and I found a nice spot to eat it. That brings us to what I hope can be a regular feature of the blog this time around: videos.
(Addendum to the video: See? How can anyone think these birds are not attractive??)
 |
| It's a crow, for crying out loud! |
Since then I've pretty much been unwinding. I didn't go to the store at all today, which is very refreshing. I read a booklet of some potential student activities and briefly dropped in on a "social evening" that was happening in the courtyard, where I learned that even school field days have tour guides in Israel. "Most of the guides are old and boring or funny and clueless, and one of them is me."
In the cool of the evening my appetite returned, so I went to a nearby restaurant and had some chicken schnitzel. Easily the best food I've had in Israel so far. In Israel everyone from restaurants to convenience stores sells beer, so I decided to have a bottle of Tuborg instead of Coke for once. (Don't worry, it's not a habit. The beer, I mean. The pop sadly is.)
And so here I am. Tomorrow after class it's probably time I made a long-awaited return to the Old City. I leave you with a trademark Jerusalem Cat -- one of the healthier ones, I think.
P.S. Three notes on Hebrew computers:
French accents don't work.
Everything is reversed right to left, which very perplexingly includes the brower's back and forward buttons.
When I uploaded the video, YouTube offered to smooth out the shaking and I accepted (hence the odd smoothness). A pop-up appeared in Hebrew and the browser offered to translate it, which yielded, to the notice that I would be sent an email letting me know when the process was done, the amusing responses "Not interested" and "I realized".
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