Exhaustion Sets In

Whew! Today... today was Monday. Which means it's Tuesday. Which means it's only three more days of school til the weekend. This whole starting-on-Sunday-thing is still throwing me off pretty badly.

I learned some stuff in Hebrew. I felt like and idiot. Made some strides. Figured some things out. Still feel utterly and completely lost.

Came home and had the most non-Kosher meal ever: Salami and cream cheese sandwich on fresh bread.

Oh, well, I should backtrack for a moment. I went to the grocery store and now I have a JAP story. JAPs abound in this program. I don't know why. Anyhoo, I went to the grocery store and ran into two girls from the program. Perfectly JAPy, even down to the New York accent. They had TONS of stuff, and only two hands to carry it all back. My having lived abroad has prepared me for daily grocery shopping, so I had very little and helped out. I should mention that the grocery store is maybe a seven minute walk from campus, if you hit the one red light possible. After expressing their surprise at my lack of overload of food, I mentioned that I was used to daily shopping and that they could actually get better and cheaper food from the shuk. Their response was along the lines of it being far enough already and it being a hassle to even go the five minutes.

I don't really get why people travel or move just to be exactly the same in a different place.  In Belgium, you go to the supermarket literally every day and eat at home, go to the bars around 8/9, and then catch the metro home by midnight. In Singapore, you don't really party out anywhere, eat every meal at a stand and pass time hanging out in malls. Here in Israel, you go to the beach, you hang out, you eat super late (dinner's at 9/10), you go to the shuk to get fresh food. In Clemson or Charleston, I go to the grocery store once a week, never walk anywhere and leave to go out at 11 or midnight. Why I would take that mentality anywhere else is beyond me. That's not learning anything about another culture, that's just changing the scenery.

Speaking of which, I got into an interesting conversation at the bookstore today. I'm one of the very few southern people on this trip (the other person being from Tennessee). I don't really have an accent, nor do I ascribe to some of the more common southern traditions. I was talking to a friend and mentioned that some of the people I went to school with in Clemson were essentially on par with the stars of Duck Dynasty.  Surprise! Israelis know what Duck Dynasty is! So I was talking to the clerk, and he was asking if people really spoke like that or acted like that or whatever. He seemed surprised when I said yes. He was even more astonished when I told him I knew people who had never been on planes, who had never traveled, and had no desire to ever leave their hometown, except for family and southern traditions like football and college. There were other people in the room that were following our conversation, and I was overwhelmed with the general response, and eagerness, of people to travel. I was speaking in English (since I'm not exactly capable of Hebrew yet), and at least six people joined in - all of them Israeli, all of them fluent in at least English, if not English and another language.

There are people here in the Ulpan program who are from Germany, Panama, Argentina, Norway, France, and other non-English speaking countries. They not only are learning Hebrew, they have to learn it from English, since that's the predominant language. So they're learning a third (or sometimes fourth, fifth or sixth) language in reference to their second language. It's mind boggling. I am so impressed and so jealous, and now have a reasonably substantial goal in life. Maybe not the eight languages of Marion and Inge, but a good, solid four or five would be nice. Of course, keeping them straight might be difficult, as I definitely answered all the Hebrew questions in Portuguese today... Answered them correctly, as in understood the Hebrew, but said all the answers (also correctly) in Portuguese. That was a fun moment.

So after all this, I finally got a blanket from the apartment, spent the afternoon hanging out with my roomies and doing homework. Now it's time for bed.

Lilah tov!