have a very murray christmas

Sunday (12/25)

merry xmas! but more importantly, happy hannananukah! i sure wish i could watch the hebrew hammer right now, even though hanukkah actually starts tonight.

in honor of the holiday, i will say a few words that my friend keith once told me:
"you suck, hananuka sucks, shove a menorah up your ass."

so, instead of waking up early to go to class with limor, i slept in (big surprise) until 11am. i would have slept later, but loud telephone conversations in the living room woke me up.

about half an hour after i got up, i thought i heard limor get home, so i jumped back into bed from where i was working on the computer so limor could wake me up, but after five minutes nobody came in, so i assumed it must have been another roommate coming back. little did i know that about twenty minutes later limor would come in with breakfast on a tray! ahhh...so thoughtful she is. breakfast was damn good too - she basically took everything sandwichable from the fridge and put it between two pieces of bread. just how i like it. i felt bad that she didn't get a chance to wake me up though. maybe tomorrow (ha, at 4pm).

because limi planned on skipping her second class (or third, she "saved up" so she could skip a bunch while i'm here) we had until about 5:30pm to work. limor had some papers and things to catch up on, and i had the last several days to record, so we had plenty to do. i did take a cereal break at one point about an hour before we left.

then we went to class (which was the last one of the day, that she skipped the previous week), and i spent the hour and a half online, switching between typing up my travels and chatting with people on IM. i'm really glad i got to catch several of my friends from home, so i filled up a good hour or so with conversation. i tried to wish everybody a happy holiday that i could find, but i guess some people were already home and didn't have their computers on.

after class, limor had to drop off some papers, and then we rushed back across campus to her cousin zohar's apartment. we just barely made it out the gate before they locked it for the night - which is stupid, because they have one of those rotating gates that only lets people out, so i don't understand why they have to lock it. "no you can't leave the school you're trapped here forever mwahahahaha!" if we hadn't gotten out, we would have needed to circumnavigate the entire school just to get back to the other side.

so, zohar met us outside, which was very nice of her because it was drizzling and she stepped in a puddle to do so. there limor and i watched a little bit tv (on the one channel her set received) and chatted with zohar's nice russian friend. then we all headed over to celebrate the first night of hannukah with limor's friend amit. zohar tried to show us a shortcut, but she kinda got lost in the backway twistings and turnings, and we finally gave up due to treacherous mud puddles and walked down the street. it seemed like way we finally went was shorter and easier than the "shortcut" we had been trying before, but oh well. when in rome.

at amit's apartment he was just finishing up cooking up a ton of latkes [potato pancakes / hashbrowns], and i could see trays of souvganiot [filled doughnuts, like krispy kreme] sitting on the table. he had a bunch of other friends there as well, including one guy who actually used to live in cary (apparently limor and i had met him at a red hot chili pepper's concert several years ago). so i enjoyed some extremely tasty and oily foods - i ate about six latkes and 1 1/2 souvganiot, which at the time i thought was a good idea but later came to regret. it was nice hearing more hanukah songs than christmas songs. and those latkes were so good!

i also decided i had to have a dreidel, because i realized that the ones in israel have the letter "pay" instead of "shin". this is because the four letters around the dreidel stand for "nes gadol hayah po" [a great miracle happened *here*] instead of "sham" [there]. in fact, as long as i'm spouting hebrew, i'm also halfway to "leshana haba b'yerushalayim" [next year in jerusalem].

after our nice meal, limor and i parted ways with zohar and her friend, and we walked the twenty minutes back to her apartment through a light rain. fortunately i remembered to bring a rain jacket, which worked wonderfully, and i almost didn't even mind it when limor continuously poked me in the head with her umbrella.

we got back, dried off, turned on the radiator, and went to sleep. i woke up a couple hours later with a terrible stomach ache from all that oil. ugh...it lasted all night, but i don't feel too bad this morning (12/26) as i sit and type all this up.

speaking of which - i'm finally caught up to today! nice!