Five days with my room to myself...

So I get to be roommate-less for about five days, and at the moment I think that's pretty cool. There's nobody here being overly cheerful. I think I'm going to enjoy that.

Last Thursday, I left for Tel Aviv at 5:00 p.m. I spent the weekend at Janie and Moshe's house, and had a very nice time. When I got there Thursday evening, we spent almost two hours speaking only Hebrew. I kept a list with all of the new words I learned, because I would never have been able to remember them. After two hours, I started to get really tired. It's difficult to have to puzzle out ever sentence somebody says to you, and to figure out how to respond. So most of the rest of the weekend, we spoke a mixture of Hebrew and English.

Janie and I went to a music store on Friday morning, and went home with a pretty good haul. I got a crappy folding music stand, a book of Kreisler and Kreisler-arranged songs for violin, a piano book and a manuscript book. I also bought Suzuki Violin book one, as a present for a friend. He seems to be very happy with the gift.

After the music store, we decided to go swimming. The pool was in a beautiful facility in Tel Aviv, where they actually change the pool from indoors to outdoors for different seasons. Swimming was fun, as well as being good exercise. After that, and a bit of time in the hot tub, we ate salads upstairs from the pool.

Later, Janie and Moshe invited some friends and their little grandchildren over for dinner. I played with the kids, speaking a mixture of broken Hebrew and broken English. The little girl, about eight years old, seemed to understand me fairly well, but her four-year-old brother had a harder time figuring out English. The next morning, they came to the beach with us, and the little boy had a blast with Janie and Moshe's fluffy little animal (which seems not to be a member of the canine species). When it came time to go home, the little boy cried because he didn't want to leave the dog!

The bus ride home sucked, hands down. I almost ended up having to stand for two hours, from Tel Aviv to Be'er Sheva. Fortunately, somebody eventually gave me a seat (after fourty minutes). The ride from Be'er Sheva to Arad was much better. Apparently, most people don't want to go to Arad, and that's perfectly fine by me!

I had my first violin lesson on Sunday, which I think went fairly well. I've been invited to play with the conservatory's string orchestra, which meets on Friday afternoons. I'm definitely going to check it out this week. I hope it'll be fun.

Later that night, most of the group here went to a film festival in Be'er Sheva, at Ben Gurion University. Nobody will guess what the film was about. Need any hints? It was about Ben Gurion (the first prime minister, not the school). Actually, it was a fairly interesting movie, if a little overacted. It detailed the political and personal difficulties Ben Gurion experienced in the time leading up to his declaration of Israel's independence.

Yesterday, the only interesting thing that happened is that I went to the shook with a few of my friends. It's a pretty cool place--- you can get a lot of stuff very cheaply. Unfortunately, it's only open on Mondays. After that, we got hamburgers for dinner, which weren't half-bad. Of course, they weren't half-good either. At least they were more edible than the food we get at the mirkaz klitah for lunch!

That's it for now, everyone...stay tuned for more updates!