Adventures At The Technion

Update at long last...

I am, to my great surprise, back in Haifa!

I've been taking pictures and collecting stories, but due to my lack of internet access since the beginning of my trip, I have been tragically unable to start blogging. However, no longer! Today begins the extremely interesting and fascinating saga of my time in Israel this  summer.

Or, more accurately, later today, since I begin my internship in an hour or so. !להיתראות

A funny thing happened on the way to Canada dorms.

So I was trying to take this picture:





... which came out rather well, actually, so anyway, I take it and start wandering down the stairs, awkwardly passing this guy who's CLEARLY thinking "hey, who are you and why are you taking pictures of the flowers? Hippie!" but what he actually SAYS is "Hey! You look really familiar! Are you from the States?"

Now, I don't get recognized because I'm from the States every day. (Getting laughed at for that, on the other hand, happens reasonably often.) So I'm all "Um? Yes? Maybe?" And he's like "I totally recognize you from the internet. Myspace? Some blog?" And I'm all "... really?" So, apparently this guy is at the American Technion medical school program, and he looked up people living at the Technion from the US or something, and my blog comes up. So there you have it. This blog is so famous that I get recognized on the STREET.

Also, this guy was named Matt, which is funny because I think officially everyone I know from Canada is named Matt. That's awesome.

Today was my last day at work, which was kind of tragic, especially since we had to spend the last hour or three running around and trying to get our payslips and trying to turn in our cards and trying to pull some documentation for our project together. We also had an impressively entertaining lunch with our boss (hi, Vova!) and he's totally going to come visit me at MIT, wherein I will feed him. Yes.

Hey look! It's our group from IBM! Vova is standing right behind Irene; Michal is in pink on the far right.



Yay, IBM. Some of the best things about IBM were the invariably delicious vegetarian options; the cheapness of the meals; and the way that you could just get on a bus after walking out the door, basically, and be at the beach in ten minutes. :) The other day at the beach, I learned that I'm really tall:




Also, that the beach is *amazingly* beautiful.






Tonight's my last night in Haifa. I'll probably post again - either right before I get to Boston or the day I get home, the 15th - with pictures of the Dead Sea/Masada and Tel Aviv - but man, I'm seriously going to miss Haifa.

:(

long entry with lots of pictures.

A few people have complained that it's somewhat hard to navigate because the blog is so freakin' long because of all the cat pictures. I mean, because of all the interesting photographic documentation of my journeys as Mish, International Woman Of Mystery [and Professional Gallivantress.] I suggest using the calendar there --> since there's no more than one entry on any one day, and that way you'll only see one entry at a time, and it'll be great.

Yes. Onto pictures! Featured in this entry: real live Israelis, Tel Aviv, Haifa, the Bahai Gardens, the beach, funny signs, the usual. Not necessarily in that order.


First, Haifa. Oh Haifa. <3333.








My main traveling around Haifa in the last bit has been with Israelis. On Tuesday, Peli and I pitched a tent and made tea on Mount Carmel, which was absolutely lovely. If also dark and full of hyenas. [That's what Peli said, and I'm a dumb tourist, so I believe the natives. Always.] But it involved pitching a tent and making tea, which made me feel a) way hardcore and b) British, which are things of which I'm in favor! No pictures, because um, it was nighttime. Yeah.

On Wednesday, Irene and I went from work to Merkaz Ziv [Ziv Center] and then on to Horev, where there's a mall as well as various pubs, cafes, etc. We wandered around and were thoroughly unimpressed by the mall, except by the incense store, where I bought some delicious Nag Champa that I am currently enjoying. We then attempted to go to the Barbarossa next door, where they asked me my age and I FORGOT, which probably wasn't a good move. They claimed it was 23+ and wouldn't let us in. [I later found out that this was true, but still. Bah.] At any rate, we then went somewhere much nicer - Frangelico, which is a "Bar Sushi Bar" according to its sign. Er, yeah. They made me tasty girly drinks and delicious cucumber rolls, and I tried absinthe [not the real thing - the real thing has copper in it, which a) causes the green color and b) makes you see the green faery. They don't sell this very often, because, you know, consuming copper is generally somewhat bad for you.] It was AWFUL. Man, my curiosity is totally sated on that point. Eugh.

Last night, we were sort of absurdly full of seeing people. It was kind of ridiculous.

First, our friend Aviv - the guy who I met at Fun Day while worrying about jellyfish - came by to say goodbye, as he's going to Germany and returning the night I go home via Herzliyya --> the Dead Sea --> Masada --> Tel Aviv --> Boston. (Which will take about five days. I'm excited.) Yay, Aviv.



We failed to get to Roee's for dinner on time, which probably doesn't surprise anyone who knows me. But then they still fed us lots of tasty vegetarian food that included MUSHROOMS. This is Roee and his friend Ido [which is also our new sort-of-boss's name] - see, we do have friends!



And then I failed to leave there on time and consequently failed to meet Shay, a friend from salsa, on time, which means we failed to actually go see the Simpsons movie. Aw. BUT we did wander around the top of the Bahai Gardens and stopped by a park, where he taught me some salsa, and got drinks at the beach. Yay, beach.



How can you not like Haifa? They have funny walk signs, and this big mountain, and absurdly good public transportation, and listed octane counts:



... and places where you can buy atmosphere...



... and beautiful flowers...



... and signs in three languages...



... and, of course, the beach.



Also, it has the Bahai Gardens, which were pretty amazing.

Finally - Tel Aviv! Yay, Tel Aviv. There will actually probably be better pictures of it later, because we went with Roni and her camera's way better than mine, but I've been too lazy to schlep up the mountain and the several hundred stairs en route and get her pictures, so err... yeah. Someday. Anyway, though, I discovered that Tel Aviv IS like NYC after all. Look! Central Park!



I threw a penny in a fountain. (And by penny I mean half-shekel.) It was apparently an incredibly documentable moment. I also may or may not be covered in chocolate from an ice cream thingy I was eating that abruptly decided to DISINTEGRATE. ...WHILE I WAS EATING IT. Oh Israel. I keep suggesting to Israelis that they put up a giant, Israel-sized air conditioner, but for some reason they never take me up on it.



There was another cool fountain, apparently designed by a famous artist whose name I don't know.



We walked over to the beach and saw someone learning to paraglide, I think, which was pretty neat. [Or parasail. The thing that they're doing here, whatever it is.]



On this wall outside an shuttered movie theater, there were ads in four languages on less than four square feet of wall. I like those kinds of places.



We wandered through a mall and I was, as usual, amused by signs:



From the beach, you can see Jaffa, which is like the old part of the city or something.



We then wandered over (well, by car, actually) and saw it properly:



Also in Tel Aviv: pretty mosques.



Finally... I found some graffiti that I could read!





Some more Hebrew words -
sheshbesh - backgammon. (I think.)
z'hiroht - watch out/caution. This means that I can read on signs that I'm supposed to be watching out for something, but have no idea what I'm supposed to be watching out FOR.
nargilah - hookah. Like falafel, hummus, and shwarma, nargilah is an Arabic thing that the Israelis like to take credit for. :D
mivta - accent. Mine is apparently "cute." Uh huh. I'd rather it be Israeli...


Anyway. Israeli is awesome. I'm coming home on August 15th. Sad!

It's okay, though. I'll be back.

You know, there are some things you really just don't appreciate till you have them in Israel.

Like falafel. I think the way that the redeye exactly matches my nails as I DEVOUR this amazingly delicious falafel-filled pita with hummus, salad, and tchina (mmmm) is worthy of blogging:



Also, popsicles on hot days in Haifa.



This particular popsicle was about the best thing ever - I specifically remember it, plus I have photographic evidence to back it up.



You also don't appreciate restaurant names properly. I mean, how can you argue with the creativeness behind this one?



Something else you might not appreciate properly: your GOOD HEALTH. Look what those IDF-trained kids from Hibur did to me in paintball:



NO REALLY, LOOK AT IT. Two shots in *exactly* the same place inside a minute. I may have cried, but to be fair it really, really hurt. It kind of hurts just thinking about it.




I was going to put up pictures of Haifa from above and the Baha'i gardens, but my aesthetic sensibilities are sort of overwhelmed by just sorting through the pictures, so that'll probably have to wait till tomorrow. I will share my general impression of Haifa from above the gardens, though (i.e. a really high point from which you can see just about everything) - it's kind of like the Omni Theater, in that you get the sense that you're really high up and it's really steep = if you tripped, you might just fall down the ENTIRE MOUNTAIN. However - just like the Omni Theater - this is actually somewhat unlikely to happen. :D (And not just because there's no actual mountain in the Omni Theater. It's a metaphor, okay? Or a simile if you want to get semantic about it...)

Finally, since I don't think that my roommate/coworker Irene - with whom I spend approximately ALL MY TIME - has made it onto my blog - here she is, along with Haifa:

ki at ha machar sheli, at kol ha olam sheli...

No pictures today. Tragic, I know.

I may have just scheduled my first-ever breakfast date. I'm pretty excited. It's with "Robbie", whose real name is actually Amittai - but he will always be Robbie in my heart. :D It's also obviously not a real date, but you know, it's food with a person. So, close enough. Next adventure: finding chocolate milk in the Israeli supermarket. Heh. I'm excited. (It was going to be dinner, but apparently he *doesn't eat dinner.* This is ridiculous. He must be converted. *plots*)

Not really sure why I waited this long, but: I finally found a free, decent-looking program to learn Hebrew. Yay. Now I can pretend that I know useful things!

....
... man, nothing really happens in my life, does it?

Fasted today for Tisha B'Av, which in addition to not eating/drinking for 24+ hours, involved not sitting on chairs, not greeting people, reading Lamentations, attending services, etc. (It was somewhat odd to sit on the floor during shul...) I broke fast with a lovely Orthodox family here at the Technion with whom I'd had Shabbat lunch last Saturday. They have a 3.5 month-old kid whom I'm absolutely crazy about. He totally fell asleep while I was holding him on Saturday. It was really cute. They also have two boys, ages 5 and 3.5 - the latter one hasn't has his hair cut yet, in the Yemenite tradition, and he has wicked feminine features, and basically looks altogether like an adorable *girl*, and they kept referring to the boys and I just got more and more confused. It was great. Anyway, their kids are adorable and they have tonnes of soy food products and they're generally pretty awesome.

Tomorrow is a barbecue with Hibur/the physics faculty here at the Technion. Thursday night I'm probably doing something fun - like maybe going to the beach - or I'm going to Tel Aviv. Alternatively I'll go there on Friday, since I'm catching this play there.

Have I mentioned recently how awesome salsa is? I feel that this should be frequently committed to the record.

Irene and I took a Russian tour of the Baha'i Gardens on Friday. They were pretty amazing - pictures to come at some point in, um, the future. Yeah. It turned out to be entirely worthwhile to take the Russian tour, since there was less than ten minutes of actually listening to the guide speak and lots of time walking around, looking at all the pretty.


Some more Hebrew vocab:
binyan - building. I mention this because it's really helpful when there are FIRE DRILLS and there's no actual ALARM and they just ANNOUNCE IT IN HEBREW over the intercom. You can tell, though, because they say "binyan" a lot. Not that this has ever happened at IBM. I'm just sayin'.
c'movahn - of course!
cakha - like this. (The 'kh' is guttural.) It seems so sensible to have a single word for this idea; English should really get on that.


I'm coming home three weeks from... today, I guess. That's ridiculous!
I'm going to miss being able to have Shabbat dinner with Orthodox families all the time. Apparently this is something I can theoretically look into in Boston. Well maybe I will.

I will also miss salsa. C'movahn!


Finally, there's a decently interesting article about Orthodox Jews and the Maimonides School (of Brookline, MA) in the top ten most-emailed articles of NYTimes.com: Orthodox Paradox.

you can check out anytime you like - but you can never leave

Poker night with Hibur last night! Yay!




It's pictures of PEOPLE on my blog. Real people. What is that? Gah! They're not cats or flowers or anything... I'm confused.




This is me with a friend, Peli, from salsa. Why do I consistently look like such a tool in pictures? Maybe I should just pretend it's a feature, not a bug. Sounds like a plan.




Eliran! Who just left today for Spain for a month-long internship there. (The Technion students, led by their possibly politically-motivated student gov't, staged a 1.5-month strike earlier this year - just about right after the ~2 weeks they get off for Passover - to protest tuition hikes. They failed. Those of us from MIT/Harvard/BU have got *no sympathy whatsoever* for them, because our tuition is like an order of magnitude higher. Heh. Sadly, though, it means they're down to like a month of summer vacation... which kind of sucks.) He was basically responsible for organizing everything relating to our trips - plane tickets, dorms, dishes, you name it. He's totally awesome. :)




You can tell there were some pretty 133+ poker players in the hizouse. (I mix slang like crazy! I love it.)




We *totally* have friends. :)


Irene and I went to visit Roni (who doesn't appear in any of the above photographs, except for her sandal in the last one... hehe) and watch 'Babel' tonight. It had Hebrew subtitles with English subtitles *under* them, which was fine for me because I'd already seen it and thus knew the story... but I think Irene was just perpetually confused. Not only could I understand the subtitles a reasonable amount of the time, though - I could also understand it when they said "yalla!" Which, since a lot of the movie takes place in Morocco, was reasonably often. Hah. I win.


Some more Hebrew! (I have a hard time believing anyone's actually reading/learning this, but I'll probably appreciate it later when I go back to the States & forget everything I know.)
etmol- yesterday.
ha-yom - today.
machar - tomorrow. (Has that guttural 'kh' sound in the middle.)
oolai - maybe.
machshev - computer. (Same thing with the 'kh' sound.) Learning this one helps me eavesdrop on Israelis a lot more at IBM :D


Tomorrow: Haifa Museum (?), tooling around downtown Haifa, Baha'i gardens, Shabbat services and dinner at a fellow IBMer's house. :D Good shabbes!

(PS: This post now has over 200 views. Why? I credit that amazing picture of my foot...)

about that time, eh, chaps?

righto!
So, since four of my posts have more than 100 views (and one of them has almost 200 - I'm confused, I have no idea who's reading this. Y'all should say hi and help deconfuse me...) which means it's maybe about time for me to post again!
I had this great conversation at lunch today. I believe it's necessary to repost in its entirety, with names removed to protect the innocent.

E: You know, Mish, there are lots of words that are in English from Hebrew! For instance... uh, meshugges!
Me: ... that's Yiddish, but okay. There aren't actually that many, though, even so.
E: Yes! That's why you have to build your sentences around them.
Me: Ah. Of course! Like "yesh l'cha chutzpah"? (You've got chutzpah.)
A: Ah, see there's only one problem with that sentence in Israel.
Me: ?
A: It's a tautology!


... Maybe you had to be there.
Anyway, Israel continues to be great. As does salsa (which you, dear reader, might have been able to guess that I'd say.) Tomorrow I get to go to the bank and figure out whether my money actually made it into my account, and then make some sort of vague attempt at orchestrating a wire transfer. I'm excited, and by that I mean I'm sort of terrified that all my money will just kind of up and disappear, without actually ending up in my real-life, non-Israeli account - which would be *quite* sad.

I pretty much managed to do nothing between Friday and Saturday except hang out at the beach a bit with Irene on Friday. I was meant to go to Chabad House but decided to be a miserable failure and get all nauseous as I was leaving instead. (It's this country that does it to me! Totally! That's right: it's Israel's fault. Nah, but I do get dehydrated here insanely easy... which is why I've started drinking 6-10 litres of water a day at work. Heh.) On Saturday, I couldn't really do anything I'd usually do to amuse myself - so I ended up reading in their respective entireties the copies of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times that I brought with me when I flew over a month and a half ago. Man, I am such a cool kid. (And speaking of respective entireties, sp, I learned about context-free grammar at dinner this evening, and determined that it was just a fancy way of saying that the English language should be more like HTML. Or shouldn't - I vaguely forget which. :D) I quite like my dinner crowd! They also serve delicious food. We've got a nice system going wherein one room (containing two Americans) cooks dinner for two nights in a row with each of the other rooms washing dishes on one of the nights. Complicated but handy, and also tasty. Plus we can pretend to have friends whom we invite to dinner! It's good. (If you're Israeli and reading this: you should come to dinner.)

My cellphone can apparently get both text messages and incoming calls! (Kim, this is the phone you gave me - I'm too lazy to buy a SIM card for it, as I just use Irene's instead, but I didn't realize it got incoming calls and texts. Good to know.) Uh, let me know if you want to... text or call me. Yeah. Something like that.

Two weekends ago, I went and stayed with the Orthodox family in Herzliyya that's had me a few times now, wherein I delightedly concluded that I have actually hit one of my Hebrew learning goals: picking up enough Hebrew to play memory with their 3- and 5-year-old sons. Not enough to *win*, mind you, but enough to say things like "Me now?" and "Put them in rows" (which seems to be a bit of an aesthetic issue for young kids. It makes Memory *really* hard to play... but I persevered!) and "very nice!" and other such inane remarks. Hurrah. I am triumphant.

Myyyyyy Winsor course is totally coming together. (Any moment now, I should decide what language to teach it in so I can learn that language between now and then. Yeah, that might be good.) People should sign up for it or I'll cry, and by "cry" I mean "have to find a real job that doesn't involve several of my favorite things - Winsor's tech department, programming, and teaching." Which might suck.

Hibur gave us a very nice reception with lots of Technion faculty the other night. It was pretty awesome. Delicious (dairy! rather than meat as lots of places and meals are here. the issue is that places that want to keep kosher generally don't want to have the extraneous sinks/dishes/etc required to be able to serve both milk and meat, I think, and apparently people want to eat meat. Faugh; what is that?) and entertaining. This professor sat at my table and regaled us with tales of Israeli PhD students' superiority compared to American PhD students... which was er, kind of awkward actually. It went on for a WHILE, and I wasn't quite sure how to respond. "Why yes - we are markedly inferior in most ways, due mostly to a lack of maturity and a dearth of basic math and science courses compared to Israelis! Pass the salt." Eh, such is life.

I have lots of pictures, but in retrospect they're mostly boring pictures of flora and fauna. (And by fauna, I mean cats.) Still: it's my blog, so I can post pictures if I want to... you'd post pictures too if Israel happened to youuuuuuu! (Lalala. I'm lame. I know. And speaking of a preponderance of lame American music interspersed with decent Israeli music, check out Gargalatz - Israeli soldier radio, I think.)

First of all: a CITROEN.



This is only going to be amusing to me and maybe - maybe! - my dad, but that's okay by me. The main point here is that I very specifically remember Tintin driving around in a Citroen, and it's wildly amusing for me to see them in real life. (Kind of a shame about Tintin, actually: I really remember reading this book and liking it, but now apparently it's racist and whatnot. Heh. I guess in retrospect, I kind of remember that. Meh.)


... hey look! Cats!























Hey look! Flowers! (Haifa is absolutely full of them. Most of the rotaries, it seems like, have these *beautiful* garden thingies on them, and there are all these flowering bushes, and it's all pretty beautiful actually.)

















I leave you with this really cool bug. I saw this bug and I says to myself - "Mish", I says - "you ought to take a picture of that bug for the general edification!"





Finally finally, some more of my incredibly extensive Hebrew vocab.
b'seder! - means, literally, 'In order.' Also, things like 'everything's fine', 'don't worry', 'it's all arranged', etc - as far as I can figure. It's useful, is the point.
shafan - rabbit. This is only relevant to people that eat a lot of rabbit feed - I mean, chopped cucumbers - like me. But now you know it too. Ha hah!
nachon - 'correct'. The 'ch' sound in the middle is the guttural one mostly associated with Hebrew as opposed to other languages. This mostly amuses me because it's basically used the same way that 'right' is in English, for obvious reasons - except that it was defined to me as 'correct', which means that I translate Hebrew as reasonably stilted - after all, everyone's going around saying 'correct' all the time!
smola / yameena. Left and right, respectively. Admittedly, this is mostly important for salsa. But it's also useful for, you know, giving cabdrivers directions, etc... insert other relevant real-life examples here.


Finally finally finally:
I don't think I'll ever be able to mentally separate the Eagles' "Hotel California" - which (despite Emma's best efforts, I'm sure) I hadn't heard before coming here - from the AMAZING bachata that they do here. Oh man. Also, I may have to take a video of the riverdance dance for real next time at salsa, because it's kind of awesome... Also also, I will *really* have to travel more. It's good times here.

And this is how you remind me of what I really am...

I'm getting pretty psyched up for this class I'll be teaching at Winsor in the fall. Hopefully it'll be an afterschool programming class for 5th and 6th graders. This would be awesome. If it comes together, it'll be in Python, Processing, or Logo - I haven't decided which (and I'm still taking votes on the issue, by the way.) What I will have to do, apparently, is call my former teachers by their first names... two years after graduating. I'm not sure I can handle that. Oh man.

Tonight there was a tango/samba/swing/salsa/cha-cha night at IBM, and it was AWESOME. Oh man. I love dancing. The amount of physical therapy that I've had to do for the last couple of weeks is kind of ridiculous, but it's totally worth it. Apparently I should really get back into tango at MIT - it's surprisingly entertaining. Even if it is the most chauvinistic dance ever.

In case you yourself are ever planning to go to Israel - or just want to learn some Hebrew[-ish] words, I now present ...


Mish's Imperative Hebrew Vocabulary Reference, part I.

slicha - excuse me/sorry. This is extremely useful because a lot of Israelis speak English, but they won't actually respond out of the blue to "excuse me" - which makes sense, because everyone else speaks in Hebrew. It also helps when, you know, you fall on people while getting off the bus, etc. (Not that I do this. I'm just assuming it does.)
(at medaberet [f])/(atah medaber [m]) anglit? - do you know English? This is crucial for obvious reasons. (Incidentally, the answer you want is ken - or maybe "yes". Either way works.)
Ani lo m'vina [f] / ani lo mayveen [m] - I don't understand. Also crucial.
Ayfo ha rekevet/otobus l'... - where is the train/bus to...? In a reasonable amount of train stations, there are very few signs in English. (Actually, I have a lot of disagreements with Israelis about this. Because if you're Israeli, of course, it looks like's EVERYTHING'S in English, considering how few Stupid Americans (tm) like me there are. They're all "Why are you learning Hebrew? Everything's in English!" and I'm all "not the signs in the train stations! not my payroll forms! not my bank documents!" and they're like "... oh... well, almost everything's in English." Which I suppose I have to concede. It is true that ALMOST everything has an English translation nearby and ALMOST everyone speaks English - but the train stations have not-enough English signs for me, and the bus drivers don't speak English reasonably often, both of which are slightly problematic...) Also, in order to get people's attention, you have to intrusively interrupt whatever they're doing. It's kind of disconcerting. Gah.
Yalla! - let's go! - Arabic, actually. (Hence, Hebrew-ish.) Not imperative so much as entertaining... but either way.

There you go! Now you're all ready to attempt to conduct conversation with passers-by in Israel, like I spend a lot of time doing. It's amazing how far those words will get you, considering.


I'd also like to share this image, as a cautionary reminder against poor donor fund direction, since presumably M. and Mme. Fried had the best of intentions...






Oh, and this is really cute as well: http://www.johnsadowski.com/big_spanish_castle.php


Please comment! I love hearing from y'all.

code monkey very simple man, big warm fuzzy secret heart...

Ooh! Actual words! (Please see below.)

I spent last weekend in Rehovot (as astute readers will probably have noted by now :P) with my family from Uruguay. Of the cousins in my generation, we're related because our grandmothers are cousins - not very close. But they're awesome! My cousin Eyvi studies computer science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem - which we spent a while discussing, mostly because my Spanish is a bit rusty, and by "a bit" i mean "a lot" - but it was cool, because I don't get enough opportunities to practice. My other cousin Noa would come over every so often and be like "you're STILL talking about school?" and we'd be like "yep!" and she'd sigh disgustedly. It was great. My ... great-aunt... or something - anyway, my grandmother's cousin, who only speaks Spanish and Yiddish, came over for dinner. We also had Noa's boyfriend, who mostly speaks English, Hebrew, and Russian, and then all of the other family members spoke Spanish, Hebrew, and English (plus some French, etc.) It was quite the meal, and I even knew what the conversation was about! It was great. And then we went out to a bar. (The first one we went to was 21+. I blame the US for this, although possibly it's a students-but-not-soldiers policy, since generally all the soldiers are under 21. That's okay. I still blame the US!)

I did spend a while discussing language barriers with my grandmother's cousin. I've decided it has a lot to do with not having any close friends or family who natively and primarily speak a non-English language, but like a lot of Americans, I think, I always subconsciously viewed not knowing English as a willpower issue. Because *clearly* if you wanted to learn English, you would, right? Hah. This is a totally fallacious idea. Case in point: Hebrew, which is really regular and entirely phonetic, is really hard to learn at a level where I can actually understand real Israelis, mostly because everybodyspeakssodarnfast. (I'm sure Americans do the same thing - I just don't notice it, because I usually speak faster!) At any rate, my grandmother's cousin will sometimes come to simchas (celebrations) and just mostly sit by herself, unable to talk to most of her family without their initiating it - except for my grandmother, who does speak Yiddish. I never really realized how incredibly lonely and sad this was until experiencing dozens of conversations that I just couldn't understand - by people who do  know the language I speak, and just choose not to speak it, to boot! Anyway. Kind of an intellectual shock.

And on a lighter note... salsa remains awesome! And I totally hung out with Nice Jewish Boys (tm) today. I even invited one of them for dinner tomorrow, except that there might not be dinner because there's ANOTHER salsa party tomorrow night (at Haifa University, literally right next to IBM) and then Thursday there's tango and Friday I'm leaving town for Shabbat. Man, my life is so tragically busy with dancing and Shabbat. I am v. v. upset. My salsa is also totally getting to the point where I don't feel completely awkward all the time. I feel completely awkward all the time doing a lot of things, so this is quite an accomplishment and I'm very proud of it. My life is also kind of busy with work, which is... kind of working. Our project is TOTALLY going to get done. Yep. Totally!

Let's see. I keep hearing anecdotes about Why Israelis Are So Israeli that I mean to remember, but I'm generally bad at it. So, I guess, here's some trivia: it seems like lots of Israelis have really big toaster ovens rather than real ovens, and this apparently has to do with the fact that big toaster ovens are generally portable (as opposed to real ovens.) This is kind of a major advantage in a country where you can't possibly move more than, say, ten hours driving away, so it makes a lot of sense to take your appliances with you when moving. On a different note, I've heard I have to visit Tel Aviv, but the reason most often given is that it's like New York, which isn't exactly incentive as I don't actually like New York very much. (Although they do sell AMAZING socks in Grand Central Station, which naturally endears it to me.) However, apparently they also have things like rooftop mattresses for $7/night, or something, which sounds pretty awesome. Two of our friends here with Hibur, Hilary and Yakir, decided to sleep out on the beach in Tel Aviv. This was apparently an abysmal idea: three separate groups of people were playing INCREDIBLY loud electronic music until 6 in the morning, so not so much with the sleeping. Blah. Sounds manky to me. Also, Israelis keep being shocked (well, students, anyway) when I tell them what MIT tuition is. They're like "*boggle* You mean in shekels, right?" (The current exchange rate is about 4 shekels <--> 1 dollar.) And I'm like "Nope. Sadly." And then they're like "... wow." And then I laugh at them for striking for a month to protest an ickle bitty tuition increase. It's good times.

So we're totally supposed to go play paintball on Friday with the Hibur kids. As far as I know, there are six Americans (4/6 female) and about 25 Israeli Hibur kids (almost all male.) We (the Americans) decided that it was possible that the idea was to play Americans vs. Israelis, and taking six wimpy Americans vs. 25 IDF-trained Israelis is probably the most dangerous idea ever. Although not for the Israelis. :) Apparently this is not actually the setup. Which is, uh, good. Definitely good.

Look! More Technion feral cats!





Also, I totally gave blood for the first time yesterday. It was really exciting. My iron levels were high enough and everything, and I think it was even the first time I was eligible (due to age, traveling to Mexico, and a sinus infection, in that order.) I felt kind of iffy and lightheaded for the rest of the day, but I was fine today and I'm really glad I did it. (I'm also really glad I've been hyperhydrated recently, because otherwise I suspect it would been a significantly mankier experience.)




Quote of the day:
Me: "Man, I wish my program would work!"
IBM coworker: "Yeah, that's how I mostly program: by wishing."

... so, possibly you had to be there. XD

looking out for the sunny days...

Hm. Where to start?
Life's pretty good. I LOVE SALSA. OH MAN. I need to work on finding places to dance in Boston that aren't the Havana Club ($12/night) because salsa twice a week here suits me amazingly well, and the only thing that could possibly make it better is getting to do some Argentine tango at IBM - but wait! That's totally happening! Oh man. IBM may just be my new favorite company ever. I'm such a dork. I love it.
More on salsa - I have discovered that if I look friendly and happy - rather than nervous and socially isolated - people actually ask me to dance. Amazing. My new favorite people are these two guys who come together every week. They're apparently Technion students, one of whom is in econ. Ah, Course XIV! <3333! I have named them Robbie and Nicky. These are not their real names. They don't know that they have new names. But that's totally what they look like! (On reflection, I did actually ask "Robbie" his name, and it's Ammitai. What a disappointment. ... sort of. Anyway, he's a really entertaining dancer - about my level, only much more natural and less stilted and whatnot.) I also may or may not have danced with a guy who was, like, sixty, but he taught me bachata so that's okay. I also totally danced with an Italian guy who was incredibly suave. He was all "I work with the United Nations Programme here" and I was like "uh huh" but then on my way out I saw a nice car with a license plate starting with "UNP." So I guess he does work there.
Visited Rehovot this weekend. Good times with the travel...you have to switch trains at Binyamina, and you have about three minutes to get off the train, sprint through the station, and get on the other train. Those of us who can't read the signs kind of struggle with this, since, you know, it's not at all clear which train to take. And then finally I did find a train that looked right, so I kept being like (in Hebrew) "Is this the train to RehoVOT?" and they'd be like "... ReKHOVot?" and I'd be like "yeah, yeah, that" and then they'd point at someone else and say something really, really fast in Hebrew, and so I'd run and talk to the other person while they were STILL yelling at me, and then we'd have the RehoVOT/ReKHOVot conversation again, and it was kind of exciting really... but I made it! So, yay.
I stayed with my family from Uruguay. They all speak Hebrew and Spanish, and most of them speak excellent English as well. (And they they all learn French or Arabic in high school. These people are ridiculous, and by that I mean amazing. Coming from the US to a country where *everyone* is at the very least bilingual - Hebrew/English or Hebrew/Russian most commonly, it sounds like - is kind of shocking. And somewhat appalling in retrospect.)
We drank delicious Uruguayan tea on the beach:





There was a jellyfish that washed up... and it was freakin' HUGE. Like, the size of a small child's head. b'emet (seriously.)



They also had a really cool porch with what my cousin Eyvi described as a jungle, which it basically was. I, of course, loved it.















Anyway! I thought I'd try to write about some of the odder things about Haifa and Israel in general, the sorts of things that I wouldn't have expected at all in the States.

Here are some pictures, for starters:


This is the dorm next to mine. I love this name. Because, dude: Baltimore San Francisco. Seriously.



... why.



There are stray cats everywhere at the Technion. I only saw one as I was walking home, ready to brandish my camera at the slightest provocation. However, *as I was leaving my dorm* for the shiur this evening - without my camera, naturally - I saw four on the stairs. It's a feline conspiracy!



The street signaling system is both smarter and dumber than the American version. On the one hand, all the stoplights go to red-and-yellow between red and green, which is kind of clever - gives you time to rev your engine, or something. On the other hand, the WALK sign doesn't have a blinky mode! It's kind of ridiculous. Apparently the idea is that you step into the street and you're meant to magically sense when it's about to change. Using your, you know, magic. There are also an absurd number of intersections where you can cross halfway - and then have to cool your heels on the intersection island-thing until the lights change so you can cross to the other side, for some reason.



Almost all the street signs here are in Hebrew, English, and Arabic, which is definitely handy.



Purple car! Rockin'!


I have decided that writing actual words is too much to tackle with the amount of mental energy that I have now - which is to say, none - so more on Israel, Rehovot, and Haifa, tomorrow. Layla tov (good night!)

I should be sleeping now, but eh.

My coworker and boss now read my blog, apparently. Hi, guys!

Oh man. Today was pretty much the best day ever. I luckily didn't wimp out of Fun Day despite my jellyfish sting, so I went on the bus and we went off to some tasty restaurant where they fed us tasty food. There was then an entertaining ride in the Company Car with boss (Vova) and coworker (Michal), followed by a Team-Building Exercise (everyone knows how big I am on team-building exercises, right? I totally don't have chronic pain in my ankle as a result of one. Nope.) that was actually kind of entertaining. Other than my inability to speak Hebrew, which, you know, everyone else was speaking. I did get really good at a couple of Hebrew words, since we were rowing down the Mighty Jordan River (tm) and my job was to cox. So I basically spent lots of time yelling smoll! (left), yameen! (right), and yasher kadima! (straight ahead!). I also got pretty good at meod mahair! (faster... well, approximately, anyway.)

This is me eating a date in front of the Mighty Jordan River (tm). As you can tell, I was somewhat skeptical of both river and date.




I also did this:













Yep. So then we went off in the IBM Company Car to the Sea of Galilee - a.k.a. the Kinneret - in the process driving in, or by, or something, the oldest kibbutz in the country. More on kibbutzim later when I have energy to tell actual stories that involve more than copying and pasting pictures.

The Kinneret was BEAUTIFUL. Oh man. Most amazing water ever. We also made a friend! He's a Technion student, also an IBM intern, and he'd actually never seen tourists before in Haifa. (A lot of the Technion kids are interns, apparently, because when you graduate from the three-year Technion program you're expected to have at least two years of software dev experience. So the two students who work in the office with Irene and I three days/week for a total of 20 hrs/week during term, which is kind of intense...)

Finally, we had dinner with the other Hibur kids on our floor, and then went out to this really great salsa thing that happens at the Technion on Sunday and Tuesday nights. There's basically an hour of rapid-fire Hebrew-language salsa lesson (good times!) followed by a salsa party-kind-of-thing that also involves non-salsa line dances which are REALLY fun. Um, so that was awesome. I'll have to take a video of the line dances, though; they're kind of crazy. The last one was Riverdancey. It was awesome. I looked like a complete fool doing it, but y'all know how much that bothers me. Lots, is the answer. Yep. :)

So, yeah. Yay here. Too bad I should really get up for work in five hours. But life is exciting! And someday there will even be letters/postcards for those you in the union of the set of people who requested and the set of to whom people I'd send them anyway. That's right. Good grammar and set theory in one sentence - what now? That's what happens when Winsor Women get transplanted to MIT... and this will make sense to almost none of you, except Melissa. So: this is a holla to Melissa. :D

l'hitraoht! (oh, and for anyone at random - pls poke xiao until he emails me, yeah?)

PS: You can comment if you want to be included in that set union and aren't sure you're already in it. So, yeah.

Anecdotes, pictures, and mechitzas - oh my!

Some things I've seen for the first time in the last two days:
- a jackal
- a lizard (well, I've seen lizards. But only once or twice in Florida, so this is probably a different species.)
- cockroaches (I know; I lead a charmed life.)
- 30 Brits in one not-very-big room
- The most overstimulating club ever (go here - pictures on right sidebar)
- a family with eight kids - and by 'seen' I mean 'had dinner with'
- a JELLYFISH STING on my FOOT. And now you can see it too -
 



Heh. Awesome.

Yeah, so Thursday: we went to work, then pretty right after, out to dinner in the German Colonies. (Colony?) On our way, we saw the Baha'i gardens. Apparently Haifa is the holiest city in the world for the Baha'i, and many of them come here for one (or maybe it's five) year(s) to work at some pint. (I've had a couple of friends at MIT & Winsor who were Baha'i. Pretty neat.)

Here's what the gardens look like from afar - you may recognize them:



Pretty *amazing*.
Here are me and my friends - I'm the one that looks like a total tool. :)



My roommate, Irene, isn't in this picture. The people who aren't me are Amir, Yakir, Hilary, and Ellie. They're pretty awesome. Amir and Yakir are both Israeli, but Amir grew up here whereas Yakir grew up in Maryland (and Kenya.) So, yeah. They're working on teaching me Hebrew, which Hilary and Ellie are also learning. 's fun. :)

After dinner Thursday, Ellie, Amir, Irene & I went out to a party with some British guys that Ellie had arbitrarily met at lunch. It turned out that there were about thirty or forty Brits in this AMAZING flat in Haifa, overlooking the Mediterranean. (Pretty well everything overlooks the Mediterranean, actually, but this had an amazingly cool view.) That was neat. There was a long discussion of the many ways that Americans are deficient linguistically: 'flat'/'apartment', 'lift'/'elevator', 'centre'/'center', 'trousers'/'pants', etc. etc. Those of you who know my recent dating history can guess which side I fall on. (Hint: Benedict Arnold.) It was on our way out that we saw the jackal. It was kind of cool, but a little creepy. It's one of those disconcerting things.

We then went to a club. At 2:30am. This was fine, since the club opened at midnight and closed at 6am. Heh. The bouncers wanted to kick me out - apparently I look young, or something - but Amir argued with them & they relented. Oh, the "flexibility" of Israelis. :)

On Friday, Irene and I went to the beach. It was mostly awesome, except for aforementioned malicious jellyfish attack:


Beach. Oh man. Such a nice beach. And I am totally not an ecstatic little kid.



I don't build sandcastles or anything.



... nope. Definitely not.


Right! So, jellyfish attacked... then I went out to shul, and then to dinner at the house of the family with the eight kids. They were awesome. They totally let me practice my Hebrew, and I definitely told some actual stories in Hebrew. (My grammar is egregiously poor, but we can ignore that, right?) They were ridiculously friendly - the Israelis in general are incredibly nice and accommodating. They're good peoples.

Er, that's actually pretty well it - went to shul again this morning - a different one, because all the cool kids go shul-hopping. Yep, that's it - and then for lunch with a friend, also an American, from IBM. Then I slept for five hours this afternoon. I love Shabbat. I'm actually shomer shabbes here so far - for those of you to whom that means anything - which is a very unusual experience for me. I have a few friends from MIT who keep Shabbat pretty closely there as well, but it's much easier when it's not term.


Finally, another amazing picture from my Jerusalem trip:

Sometimes my own incompetence shocks me.

Suffice it to say that you can now comment on the blog. So please do. That way I won't be all lonely and stuff.
cheers!

At the request of the lovely Preeya Fabulous,

I am, in fact, updating my blog with Actual Words. *gasp!*

I put off starting this for so long (2.5 weeks, pretty well) not because I didn't have any pictures and stories but because I didn't think that I'd be particularly good at telling them. Which I still don't think is the case. However, I realize that if I don't write about my Crazy Adventures (tm) anywhere, I'll be sad, so here's as good a place as any...


Initial impression of the Israelis: they're totally crazy. They speak this bizarre language* and can't queue up and have the weirdest cellphone rings. Revised impression of the Israelis: they're totally crazy, but I kind of see where they're coming from, and I definitely like them. We have an officemate at IBM named Udi, who's about my age,** and he helped explain why the conversation style of the Israelis is kind of like an INTERROGATION. Sample conversation:

Me: *sitting quietly by myself*
Israeli: *approaches for no obvious reason* HELLO. BOKER TOV. MAH NISHMA? *...Israeli talks excitedly in Hebrew*
Me: ... m'dabear Anglit?
Israeli: *gets even MORE excited* OH. HI. WELCOME TO ISRAEL. WHERE ARE YOU FROM? WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? WHERE ARE YOU LIVING? *talks excitedly - but still somewhat incomprehensibly! - in English*
Me: Uh - Boston! Working! Living at the Technion! Thanks! Gah!

So we mentioned this to Udi - particularly that the reasonably standard conversational idiom of, you know, learning each others' names doesn't seem to come up for a while in a conversation with an Israeli. It turns out that apparently in the Army, you call everyone 'Achi' (brother) - because you meet so many people it's basically impossible to keep track of them by name. I thought that was mildly entertaining. (It also kind of clarifies how everything seems like an interrogation. Although I guess he didn't say that explicitly. XD)


And on that note... I kind of thought politics would be this big thing when I got here. Actually, it probably is; I can't understand conversations between Israelis, so they're probably talking about politics all the time. (My "Culture Shock! Israel" book told me they would be. I guess I have to take its word for it.) The people I keep staying with and visiting are very nice, and they keep trying to get me to stay engaged with conversations that I can't understand more than the beginnings and ends of:

Israelis: *talk in Hebrew togther for... a long period of time*
Me: ...
Israeli: *turns to me and translates the last sentence said - which is generally along the lines of "We're talking about the finale of SuperNanny!" or "Her son gets love letters from all the girls in his class!" - then jumps back into the conversation.*
Me: Oh! Okay.  ...

So, anyway. I do feel kind of remote from the political stuff happening now - including the West Bank/Gaza strip schism - but I guess that's kind of my fault for not, you know, knowing the language that everybody speaks and writes in. That'll do it.


Um, other stuff... when Irene and I went to Jerusalem last week, we sat near about 30 large-gun-toting Israeli soldiers [mostly] in uniform. And, like, four other people. How often does that happen in Boston? Also, there is amazing public transportation here, so Irene and I take a bus to work every day. Said bus comes every ten minutes in the morning. There are about two busses in Boston that come every ten minutes. It makes me happy. At any rate, near the bus stop, there is a large sign in front of a house that says: "Dr. XYZ - DOCTOR OF VENEREAL DISEASES." Heh. Apparently they're not much for euphemisms here.


I can go to bars! This is somewhat less exciting and more expensive than I thought it would be. In theory, we can also go to the beach really easily, since we're near the top of the mountain and the beach is right at the bottom. In practice, we haven't gotten there yet; but since the jellyfish are apparently 1km away from the Haifa beaches, and once they get here they'll stay till August, we better get on that. Not that I don't, you know, love jellyfish. I just feel that jellyfish and I ought to have separate beach-going experiences.


Meh, given that it's 7:23AM here (I love the time difference, here, by the way - seven hours ahead. Makes it almost impossible to talk by phone to anyone in the Old Country) I judge this to be long and creative enough. Plus, I have to go to work. Mm, work.

The commenting thingy doesn't seem to actually work, but that's okay - you can email me! It'll be great! And if you send a request, I will send you a letter/postcard. ... at some stage, anyway. :) Email: mish [at] mit [dot] edu.




* I only think that Hebrew is a bizarre language, because in my aforementioned Culture Shock! Israel book, they go on for a while about how exciting it is that Foo taught his kids Hebrew in 19xx and it was the first time that anyone had learned Hebrew as a native language in a couple thousand years. And then I put the book down. I should really pick it back up again, because it puts me in a bizarre state of perpetual amazement that Everybody Knows Hebrew!! Wow!! ... well, yeah - they all learned it in school and from their parents, so I guess that WOULD make sense. See, kids? Books rot your brain! Ish.


** "about my age" - which is to say about 3-5 years old than I am - which is what "about my age" translates to given the IDF. Everyone who's ACTUALLY my age is in the Army. Slightly disconcerting, actually - in the US, everyone pretends that my being a year younger is some sort of bizarre phenomenon, but in Israel nobody cares - I'm going to be at least three years younger anyway. Plus, it's Israel! Relax!

Haifa + Visiting Jerusalem

Maybe I'll finally get my act together and start posting pictures and whatnot regularly. Hopefully, anyway...

In theory: this is my Israel blog! I arrived in Israel on the 3rd of June and will be here till 15th August. It's an amazingly beautiful country. I'm staying at a dorm at the Technion ["the MIT of Israel"] and working at the IBM Research Labs in Haifa on a project a lot like ReachOut. (I'm here under the auspices of Hibur, a program that organizes stuff like this - and leadership programs, and other sorts of collaborations between the Technion and MIT ["the Technion of the US"]. Yay, Hibur.) Anyway... I'll start with a couple pictures of Haifa, where I'm living:





















The rest of the pictures in this entry are from the trip I took to Jerusalem last Thursday with my roommate/coworker Irene to celebrate my 19th birthday. It was pretty amazing.



















































So, er, yeah. Hopefully tomorrow I'll put up some actual words. :) Oh, and I can't resist posting this: