The Apartments Smells a Lot like Fish...

...and I'm not entirely sure why.

Wednesday evening, after tossing frisbee for a while I attempted to go to a salsa club.  We went to a place called "The Yellow Submarine" only to find out that it was not there, and, after several phone calls, discovered that it was actually quite far away--so we decided to try for it another time.

Thursday morning was considerably more interesting than Wednesday.  Justus had me draft an e-mail for him a couple of times, organize his many post-it note business cards, and start doing some research about different Israel journals and talking points for a lecture.  He also asked me about youtube and myspace, which kind of made me chuckle.  I had to leave before lunch though because my first ulpan class started a bit earlier than it usually will.

Ulpan was good; it's great to have a bigger class again now that all the marva kids are with us.  A couple of people have also moved up to my level, which is cool.  We didn't do too much the first day, but we did read a story by Etgar Karet (a very eclectic Israeli author) about a kid's piggy bank and then write our own endings to it, which was fun.  To give you an idea of what kind of author he is, the story was about a kid who wants his parents to buy him a doll, but his dad demands that he save up money for it so instead buys him a piggy bank.  Every morning, they force the kid to drink chocolate milk (which doesn't really seem like a punishment to me) and give him a shekel each time he does to put in the piggy bank.  When the kid finally has enough money, the dad comes up to his room with a hammer intending to break the pig open, but the kid's grown attached to it and doesn't want to break it, so he tells his dad that he wants to put one more shekel in the next day before they break it.  In the real ending to the story, he hides the pig, but in my ending, the kid pukes chocolate milk up on his father before they run up to his room as the father (now obsessed with the doll the child wanted earlier on in the story) violently swings at the pig, misses, and accidentally kills the kid.  When we were talking about the story afterwards, I insisted that the father was an "arse," an Israeli guido of sorts, and the teacher was just like "You made him that way!"  It should be a good class.

After that, I took a nap before going to Creative Non-Fiction writing, which was much better the second time around because we got many more chances to write.  When class ended, I hung around campus for a little bit before returning home.

Thursday night we went to Ben Yehuda street to check out this bar Carlos told us about.  It was nice but fairly empty, and had a couple good deals.  We hung out on Ben Yehuda for a while after that before we returned home.

On Friday, I woke up and went with Andrew, Scott, Nathan, and Simon to the mall for lunch.  We happened to see Emma there, and then Andrew and I saw her again shortly after that at the grocery store.  She looked at the two of us standing in front of the alcohol aisle and simply said "I hope you're not bringing that back to the apartment."  We reassured her that we of course were not, and then, a couple minutes later, I called her and asked if she could clarify what the Year Course policy was on alcohol in the apartments.  We're not supposed to have it in the apartment, it's pretty much the most well-known rule, so that's why this is funny (or obnoxious).

Upon arriving home, Scott and I took a bus to meet Jake and David Gans at Ben Yehuda street so we could walk to Gan Soccer, a giant park next to the Knesset (Israel's parliamentary building).  We met up there with 12 or so random Israelis who play ultimate frisbee every Friday.  They ended up being pretty decent, and we played for almost three hours.  The entire experience was excellent, not only because we had a really good game going, but also because I got to meet some Israelis my age and talk to them for a while afterwards.  Hopefully this'll become a weekly thing for us, as it was quite awesome.

We walked back home from there (buses had stopped running for Shabbat by the time we were done), and I went to Shabbat dinner at Jackie's apartment to celebrate Hannah's visiting/Simon's birthday.  All of Derech Hebron then relaxed on our porch for a while before we went to Ben Yehuda street.  We spent some time there at a nice bar called Zolli's before going to a dance bar called Herzl's before returning home.  All in all, it was a good night.

I woke up much later than I wanted to today, but then again, it is a Saturday.  I think I'm going to head over to campus in a bit and see what everyone else is up to.  I hope you're having an excellent Shabbat and a great weekend!