meetings and meetings

Monday (12/26)

like every other day, i could have gotten up early with limor, but i chose to sleep in. this time, i only stayed under for an extra hour. i got up, ate breakfast, read some book (i need to pace myself better, i'm already two-hundred pages in), and finally got caught up with my journal / blog / whatever. i also managed to upload all the pictures i've taken so far - unfortunately i'm not as attentive as i used to be, so there are gaps here and there.

i did take a break to make myself a sandwich - again, using everything in the fridge. mmmm mmm...so tasty. i was cold today, so in addition to getting fully dressed, i wore an el al airline blanket wrapped around my waist like a kilt, and i wore my fleece airline blanket wrapped around my head and tucked into my jacket like a scarve. my feet were cold too, so i wore limor's pink slippers. all together i probably looked like a little old lady - which is what limor's roommate saw when she walked by the kitchen while i was making my sandwich.

eventually, limor came back from fieldwork, and we watched some of the neighborhood kids playing around on the first-story roof of some abandoned buildings behind her apartment. even though it was freezing cold, the little kids (who probably ranged in age from four to ten) were skipping barefoot through puddles on the roof. limor surmised they could be bedhouin children, and so were used to being outside. i wondered how they were going to accomplish the feat when their mother (or some random woman) called for them to get down. i was soon to see, however, for the clever children had brought their own ladder, and had pulled it up to the roof with them.

having had our entertainment for the afternoon, it was time to eat. limor felt like soup, and so soup it was - tomato with rice. i skinned the tomato (which i didn't realize was possible), which limor combined with tomato paste, hotdogs, rice, spices, oil and water. i added some creamy "white cheese" and extra za'atar to round it out. oh, so satisfying.

next we went to bgu (ben gurion university) around 7pm so limor could attend her biweekly perach business meeting, where all the participants/recipients in the work-study program could get together to discuss their progress or whatever. i brought my computer, and so didn't really pay attention. however, i did notice in the very beginning of class another quirk of israeli society. there weren't enough chairs to go around, so latecomers had to bring in extras. instead of taking them into the room and finding a place to sit, or asking people to slide over, they just put their chairs in the gap right in front of the door. then, when the next people came in, they did the same thing. i would think rational people would try get out of the way, but nobody made a move, and people just kept piling up in the doorway like a circus. this probably would have continued if i hadn't nudged the person next to me and suggested they tell everybody down the line to move over. it was very strange that i was the only person to consider this obvious solution.

anyway, so after the business meeting concluded, limor and i met hadas and adi outside of school, and hadas drove us a little outside of be'ersheva to a town called omer, where we searched for one of their friends from school. we found her house (well, her parents house), and like all israeli houses i've visited it was very nicely decorated. i like the layout of the house as well - it was basically a large ring with an outdoor atrium of sorts in the center with multiple accesses from all around the house.

we sat around with maybe twenty people and chatted, and ate various foods (i stayed away from the souvganiot), and waited for the pizza to arrive. unfortunately, most israelis seem to like the green olives better than the black, but i didn't mind too much. we sang the blessings over the candles, and hung out some more. the girl's very affectionate (and large) dog jumped on me several times, and i continued to be the center of attention for a while when lots of people came over to speak to me in english.