Sof Shavua

The weekend is here at last. This is good because I have no talent for waking up at 6:45. The rest of the day is practically wasted, at least until I have a nap. Luckily classes end at one, so I get to have a nap EVERY DAY. I miss, I so desperately miss, the life of a student. Apart from all the studying, that is.

Speaking of studying, I'm becoming increasingly worried about this test. I took a practice test this week, and it was miserably awful and stupid and hard. The problem is that here, the teaching methods vary so greatly that it's hard for me to learn. For instance, I could study every word that I've ever been taught in class, but there's no real curriculum, see? so maybe the test will have what I've learned, and maybe it will have what the class down the hall learned. One key word that I don't know in a text, and I'm kind of ****ed. So it's the luck of the test, basically. Luck was ot with me this week, but maybe on the real test? The problem is there's no way to know for sure. So here's hoping.

But being in Jerusalem again makes it all worth it. I forgot how much I loved it here--have I mentioned that yet? I wake up happy, I go to school happy, I come home happy. Israelis are loud, aggressive, annoying, and I love them. One minute they'll be yelling at you, then the next they're inviting you for dinner. Even the rage is the intimate rage of families.

I've gotten accustomed once again to the idiosyncrasies of Israeli life: the straightforward nature of the people; the teenage soldiers with their machine guns sitting next to me on the bus; the handing over of my bag to be inspected before I go into the library, the supermarket, the mall; the stray cats that are everywhere in the city; the black hats and sidelocks walking along beside girls with miniskirts worn up to their necks.

I spent an hour on the bus yesterday when a large group of Hassidim blocked the street to protest the building of a train through their neigborhood. Then last night, I went to this live concert under the stars--free of course for students--and drank arak till I was dizzy, while during breaks they played HaTikvah, Israel's national anthem, to celebrate 40 years since the 1967 war that gave Israel back the Western Wall. It's just the beginning of the summer, and Jerusalem is gearing up for all the events that happen, one after the other, concerts and film festivals and parties, all of which are so different from New York events in that they're A) free, and B) crowded enough to be fun, but never to crowded to get in. How will I ever go back??