Happy Tuesday!

Beautiful weather is still around, albeit windy, and classes are going well. Now the rundown.

Sunday was interesting. My first two classes went very well (as usual). We spent more time talking about pre-State of Israel movements and political developments in the area. Lots of promises to different people that completely contradict each other--hurray for the British. My music class covered the beginnings of Israeli rock and roll which was initially patterned after the Beatles. When they tried to come to Israel, the government wouldn't let them because they deemed their music to be "detrimental" to the sabra culture Israelis were focused on cultivating. funny, eh? My third class... well, it was dropped. I was officially the only person enrolled for a total of 5 minutes before they informed me that I would need to find a different course. Somewhere small children were crying for me.

I ended up sitting in the one class that I had no interest in ever taking--Political Communication. The guy rambled the entire class and I am still waiting for someone to return those 90 minutes of my life to me. Seriously, I want them back.

Monday I went back to the director and admitted that although I like to smile during our conversations, I was really really really annoyed that I was paying to take a class that I never wanted to be in. He was very understanding and helped me find another class... again. So I now have, hopefully, a concrete schedule for the rest of the month. Instead of Environmental Issues in Israel, Arcaeological history of Jerusalem, or Political Communication, I am now taking "Conflict Resolution: Palestinians and Israeli Dialogue". The catch is that it is only 2 days a week from 330 until 7pm. So, two days a week I start at 930 and end at 7pm. Sweet.

In other, more exciting, news. My friends Judah and Ilya stayed with me saturday night, sunday, monday, and tuesday. Judah left on monday morning but Ilya and I got to spend a lot of time together over the last couple nights. He is really going all-out during his time abroad, it's fun to hear about it. At Hebrew U our network of friends is growing which makes our evenings a more crowded, but also very fun. There are a couple guys from France who been hanging out with us... and proving that I really don't remember ANY French from my summer there in 2005. However, there is a girl from Spain in one of my classes who's made me feel very good about my Spanish, which I previously thought I had forgotten. I guess my head can only hold a certain number of languages at a time--hopefully I won't wake up tomorrow speaking french, spanish, and english while forgetting all my hebrew!

Monday morning Jody returned to Israel for a few hours. He spent the year here on Year-Course and has been travelling in Britain, Scotland, France, and probably other countries as well for the last month. It was great to talk and catch up before he needed to go back to the airport and catch his much-anticipated flight back to the USA. On the family note, Ariel has been getting interview after interview with people all around Israel for his PhD stuff. I still don't totally get it, but he's been very busy! Of course, it's hard to complain about seeing him ONLY every other day when we've been living so far apart for six years :-D

Today, my class took a trip to Har Herzl and the new Yad Vashem. It was very much an academic trip and so we didn't get to really wander much. However, I was able to go see Michael Levin--a friend of mine who was killed last summer in the Lebanon War. He had visited Camp Ramah the day before he returned to Israel and we had gotten to talk about what it was like making aliyah and serving in the army (among other things). That was almost exactly a year ago. Still very hard to believe.

Anyway, I'm ready to make dinner and need to go--there's always some adventure waiting in Israel! I hope you all are doing well.

Col tuv,

AVI