Funny Things

Ok, so, funny things aside for a second, last night was a pretty good night: Nathan and I sat on the beach and had some beers, then went back to Jake's apartment and hung out for a while before going to sleep.  It was pretty nice, and I also got to hang out more with many of the scouts--whom, frankly, I love.

Then today we got to wake up later than we initially thought, and then went to the Ulpan to find out our volunteering placements.  As it ends up, I am working with elementary school kids, mostly teaching them English (which is a good placement for me, since I speak Hebrew pretty well and will be able to explain things to them).  We found out the other day that Garin Tzedek (the group we were going to have volunteer with Darfurians, or, as Israelis say it, Darfuris) is going to work differently than what we'd planned: we're going to have options to volunteer with them occasionally, but they cannot be our main volunteering placement.  Which is kind of annoying, but I'm still glad to have any opportunity to work with them at all.  Hopefully sometime in the next couple of days I and some other people can figure out more things for the Garin to do.

We then signed up for Siyurim, which are basically trips that take us to see everything cool in Bat-Yam.  So much for exploration.  Still, Scott and I are looking forward to planning our own camping trips.

Now, on to funny things:

after Ulpan, I went to Simon's apartment for lunch, and they made me pay 5 shekels to eat there.  In their defense, I ate quite a bit.
afterwards, we slouched around for a while before going over to Emily's apartment to shave Simon's back hair, which looks like pubes.  This was quite funny, because Simon was freaking out the whole time.  Hopefully pictures of this will be up soon.  Before that, however, Simon was on the phone with IsraelPhones trying to get his phone fixed, but he was on hold for a long time.  Instead of waiting like a reasonable person, he yelled at the phone and then said that he was Scott, and that if someone didn't pick up in two minutes, he was going to blow up Israel.  It was fairly funny (and also an act of terrorism, so if the IDF reads this, I would understand if they have to kill him), and made me wonder about the fate of my own phone, as the 6 key has fallen off.  When I went to the cellcom stand in the mall to try to fix that, they basically just ignored me.  Awesome.  But, within a minute of Simon saying that, someone came on the phone and fixed everything.  Go figure.

the other night, Aaron almost got into a fight with some Arab people.  I wasn't there, but apparently they bet him 20 shekels that he couldn't hit over 700 on a punching bag machine near the beach.  Now, I saw Aaron hit 840 on the same game a few nights before this, and spend almost 50 shekels (because if you hit exactly 777, you get free vodka from the store it's outside of--although you'll probably end up spending more money than it would have cost to just buy some vodka, it's the principle of the thing, really).  Aaron was apparently so drunk, though, that he couldn't hit over 500, and freaked out about it.  I'm actually kind of glad I wasn't there.

This evening, the tsofim took us to a pool by the beach--it was ok.  I should go to bed now, though, because I start my volunteering placement for the first time tomorrow morning.

Take it easy, friends!