End of Summer Session II

Summer session two was the first half of level Gimel. Gimel is the third letter in the Hebrew alphabet. Gimel is kind of like the hump level of Modern Hebrew. After completing Gimel you can sign up for classes in the main university that are taught in Hebrew. The level is very challenging with lots of homework. Many nights I would be so tired I would have to go to bed and get up early the next morning in order to finish my homework. I have the next week off then I continue with the second half of Gimel in September.

Over the next week or so I hope to be able to post about some of my adventures from this past month that I was too busy to post about. This morning I went to the store and got a copy of the Jerusalem Post. This newspaper is in English you can check out its website here. This would be a good time to mention that in Israel since the weekend is Friday and Saturday; getting the Friday paper is the equivalent to the Sunday paper back in the states. There is no Saturday paper that I'm aware of because the stores are all closed on Saturday. I'm looking forward to have time this coming week to read for fun.

Hebrew University has had mandatory vacation from August 16th-29th. They had this last year but I don't think I ever posted about it. What this means is during the vacation only Rothberg International School was holding classes. So going through security in the morning they look at your ID more carefully to see the international logo. There was no reason for students not part of the International school to be on campus during this time.

When they say vacation they really mean it. This is just through to entrance from the pedestrian gate. The lights are off in the forum (student center). Normally this cafe is busy in the morning. Sometimes they have the radio on playing some music. You have the sound of the coffee machines. The smell of fresh pastries to tempt you on your way to class. When you're used to all that activity the silence is very strange. This picture is a little brighter because of the light from the skylights. Even though the skylights look more like alien spaceships coming in for a landing in this picture. The black machine to the right of the picture is a cigarette vending machine. I haven't see one of those since I was little. A lot of people smoke here. They don't have any anti-smoking campaigns or surgeon general type warnings.

This is a little further into the forum. There is another closed cafe ahead. To the right there is a staircase leading down to the second level. The lights were not on down there either. However there were workers down there. The sounds of drills and hammers and voices shouting floated up from the dark stairwell.

You might remember this area from a previous post. This is where they were knocking down the wall last summer. Some of these vending machines talk to you when you make your selection and put in your money. It can be rather frightening to have a vending machine speaking Hebrew to you if your not expecting it. Notice the machine in front of the plant. Mentos are popular over here. I've never noticed a mentos machine like this at home but then I don't really like Mentos so I might not have seen them. I had to lighten this in photoshop so you could see the vending machines.

This is the main hub of the forum. There is another cafe to my right. Normally this area would be filled with people. Not as many during to summer as the main semester but still there would be people. I did not alter this photo so the lighting is a little strange.

This picture I'm standing in the same place as the picture above I just turned a little to the left. It really is creepy being in a place normally filled with people that is so empty. I felt like I was in a low budget horror film and someone was going to jump out at me.










Questions from previous posts:
Uncle Joe- Tel aviv sprouted from Jaffa. Two Jewish neighborhoods were started in 1887 and 1891. Tel Aviv was the third in the area, 1909. Tel Aviv was named after the city in Theodore Herzl's book Altneuland (old-new-land). Tel is a word describing something very old and Aviv is the word for Spring (new life).

The Dead Sea scrolls and the Aleppo codex are housed in the same building. The building was designed after the shape of the top of the jars the Dead sea scrolls were found in. That's why the building has such an odd shape.

May Flowers Part III

I had my oral exam for modern Hebrew this morning. We had to write a dialogue with a partner, memorize it and then preform it for the teacher. The second part of the exam was individual. We had to choose one text in the book and be able to summarize it and answer questions about it. I was very nervous but I think I did okay.

Since I haven't been doing anything exciting lately I have more flower pictures for you. I really can't get over how beautiful the campus looks with all the flowers.

I was playing with the close up mode on my camera for this one. I this flower has the same yellow color I like from the previous flower post.














All the flowers featured in the post line one of the ways that I leave campus. So I get to walk down flower row almost everyday. These flowers come in several different colors.

Here we have the same flowers as above only in purple. I think they look better in purple. I was lucky when taking these pictures there didn't seem to be any bugs flying around. Right now the bugs are everywhere. I guess that last year arriving in the middle of June I missed the bug season. Right now there are lots of gnats and mosquito type bugs flying around. The mosquitoes are the worst if they bite you it swells up and itches like crazy worse than in the states. It's a good thing I brought Benadryl with me.









For those of you that were interested in the post on the Western Wall tunnels I found this article on Yahoo this morning talking about the tunnels. The picture that is in the middle of the article is the claustrophobic tunnel I mentioned in my post on the Western Wall tunnels tour post.



From the last post:
Uncle Joe- You are right it is called Turkish salad. I had been calling it Turkey Salad as a joke and I guess when I was writing the post I just typed the wrong word. I had never heard of lip dubbing before I don't think I will be attending the event anyway. They do sing Hava Nagila here in Israel. I think it might have been one of the songs they taught us last summer but I don't remember.

N.T.- How busy the garden is at any given time is rather hit or miss. The weather has been nicer lately so there have been more people in the garden.  The garden is undergoing some renovations of its pathways and stone staircases so some days its too loud to sit in the garden.

There are several nice smelling flowers here. I love the plant I called lavender in my post titled So it's Spring Now. The bell shaped flowers above also have a nice scent. My favorite smelling flower was blooming back towards the middle of March and the start of April. They were little yellow flowers on a bush that was on the way to school. I never did get a picture of that one though. The national flower of Israel can be seen here.

The tower in the background of the desert garden picture is the Hebrew University tower. I'm not sure what is in the tower. It's one of the landmarks that you can use to oreint yourself when your down in the valley as it can be seen easily. It has also featured in a few other posts of mine I think I've mentioned it to help show where I am in relation to campus. I think it was in the post titled Misadventures in Israel when I was walking to the post office. I think the tower also appears in my post titled Geography of Jerusalem.

The corn chip Doritos in the last post do not taste any different that the ones in the states. However the other flavors of Doritos do taste a little different here they have more oil on them and sometimes you taste the oil more than the flavoring.

Getting to the Root of it all

I've had the idea for this post for a while now I just haven't had the time or there were posts that needed to be written first. I guess this post will be a continuation of a mini language series since yesterday's post was about Akkadian today we have Hebrew. This post will focus on mainly Modern Hebrew.

Modern Hebrew is a fairly new language you can read a little about its history here. It's hard for me to believe I've been studying Hebrew for almost a year now. One of the things I like about Hebrew is the root system. Each word in modern Hebrew has a three letter root. There are of course some exceptions to this rule but most words have a three letter root. Each root has a meaning so if you see a word you don't know you can guess the meaning if you know what the root means.

For these examples  remember that Hebrew is read from right to left. I know that one word is out of place but you can see where it goes in the table. I can't figure out where I made a mistake in my html code for the table.

                                                ספור

book	ספר
story	סיפור
writer
to tell a story	לספר
library	ספרייה

The idea of roots having meanings also continues into Hebrew names. Lucky for you my name is Hebrew in origin. Anna written in Hebrew as      אנה   In modern Hebrew this root has several meanings to lament or mourn, to cause to happen, or to meet. If you look in baby name books they will tell you the name means gracious or merciful.

I really like the root system because it does help you figure out the meanings of new words. Of course the other side is there are many roots in Hebrew and its hard to remember them all.

Just finished my midterm exam

So I kind of disappeared for a while. The modern Hebrew class is very intensive, 25 hours of class in a week. It's 5 hours of class each day then around 1-3 hours of homework. But just doing the homework isn't enough to pass the class you have to study for several hours beyond the homework if you want to be able to actually speak the language. Learning a new language after the age of 10 is supposed to be harder. Almost everyday after class I have a huge headache. I think it's because my brain is trying to categorize the new words I learn each day. My throat is also sore because Hebrew has some guttural sounds that we don't have in English. So after class I have a snack take a short break and read a little in an English book then start homework. I do almost the same things everyday it seems. So that means I don't have anything too interesting to post lately. This is going to be more about everyday things.


School is quite stressful right now so you have to find humor somewhere in the day. I get a kick out of the misspellings on the packages in the store. In the school store they sell ralling stamps (rolling stamps) for kids. When we first got here Claire bought a pillow that said it was hiege quality. So anytime we see something misspelled we just say its another hiege quality product made in Israel.









I made spaghetti I think this was last week. I've made it before but this time was the first time I used gluten free pasta and I didn't fix the recipe correctly for that. The sauce is olive oil, green peppers and garlic. I didn't think about the fact that this pasta wouldn't absorb the oil like normal pasta so it turned out a little too oily. I think I should mention we do have flatware other than the maroon ones in the pictures. I just noticed that the food looks better in the pictures on the maroon flatware.








Claire made pasta and meatballs. The meatballs were made with the help of a packet of spices. The instructions on how to make them were of course in Hebrew but there are pictures as well. Claire was cooking while I was doing my homework and I asked how she knew what to do. She said she was following the pictures. Since she is in the Hebrew level above me she knew what half the words in the directions were. Just for fun she started reading off the directions and came across the word for egg which we know. This surprised her and she exclaimed "There's an egg in this?" We had a good laugh about that one. So cooking using just the pictures is not a good idea.



Claire and I made chicken in a bag! I still don't understand how the bag doesn't melt in the oven. It actually came out pretty good and it was nice to have meat. The oven belongs to our Israeli roommate.










As I mentioned in my last post there are a lot of cats living in the student village. Below our balcony there is a garden that the cats like to hang out in. These two kittens were napping under the tree while there mother was off somewhere else. They have another sibling but that kitten was under one of the bushes.










I've named a few of the cats if they are distinctive enough that I can't think of a name quickly. This is Smokey Jones. He likes to pick on the kittens I think because he doesn't have any family in the student village but he keeps trying to join other families and getting chased off.









Claire named this one Angler after the Angler fish because of the white tip of his tail.














These are the twins we've been watching them grow up since we got here in June. I love watching the kittens play fight in the garden. We aren't allowed to keep pets in the student village so a lot of students adopt one or more of the cats. Its fun to watch people feeding the cats some people sneak over like they don't want anyone to see them feeding the cats. The garden always has several paper plates of food and bowls of milk and water.




Ever since I got here in June the weather has been the same everyday. Sunny and hot once or twice it was cloudy but other than that its been the same. So imagine my surprise when two mornings this week we woke up to fog on the Mount Scopus. The fog didn't last for long but I have the picture here to prove it!









Back in the botanical garden Claire pointed this tree out to me. The branches are covered with these sharp thorns they are really strong you can't break them easily. The trunk also has spikes on it. The leaves are strangely small looking.









Here is what the entire tree looks like. I have no idea what kind of tree this is.


















The tree across the path looks similar but its covered with blossoms so I'm not sure if they are the same tree or not. Does anyone know what kind of tree this is?










If anyone is interested my roommate Claire also keeps a blog. You can follow her blog to get a different view on life here. Since we live together and are both in the Bible and the Ancient Near East degree plan we tend to do things together so you might end up reading about the same things just different perspectives. Her blog can be found here: http://claireregan.blogspot.com/

Questions from the last post:
Uncle Joe- I live on the third floor of my building the picture of the dove was taken from my bedroom window. I had English breakfast tea with the eggs and chocolate rolls. I think I had coke zero with the chicken, high class yes?

Nikki-Yes we had enough room in the freezer for the chickens.