April 19

There's been too much excitement since my last post. Since we've hit the 2 month mark of the program, people are starting to get even crazier, and there's been a lot of drama, and tensions between Ulpan-ists, but that's more on a personal level, and I won't write about that.

I don't know if you all remember me writing about Anton, the crazy Russian on our Ulpan, but to sum up the story I'm about to tell: he's now in a mental institution (excuse me if I'm not politically correct on that one). I can give some details, but out of respect for Anton, and the fact that this is a public blog, I won't go into the more personal details. A few weekends ago, it was a few peoples birthdays, so we celebrated by having a bonfire. Anton was there, drinking a bit, and looking sadder than usual. He came up to me at one point and said he wasn't feeling well. Afterwards, I heard him talking to his roommate and saying that no body likes him, and that he wasn't happy. People continued going to talk to him to try to calm him down, but he often get in states like that, but there was nothing we could do except talk him down. A little bit later, someone comes and tells us that he had run out in front of a moving car, and got hit. He survived that, so he broke through the fence of the fields, and ran away. He was gone from maybe 11/12-ish at night, until 3 the next afternoon. There were cops searching for him, and helicopters too. We were all very afraid that he was dead, but at the same time, afraid of what laid ahead of him if he wasn't dead. They luckily found him alive, and seemingly uninjured, drinking in a bar not so far away. The whole turn of events didn't come as a surprise to anyone, and looking back, there were signs that he would do something like this for a few days leading up to it. He had already threatened to run away, and hinted at hurting himself, and we did what we could. Someone had already talked to the Ulpan director to say he needed to get out of here because he was obviously extremely depressed. That's all I feel comfortable sharing with this story.

This was how my passover vacation basically started. After that weekend, I had 4 days of only work and no school. My boss, Mazel was acting very strange on those days. The first day I was told I finished too quickly and didn't do a good enough job, and that we didn't need to do any mopping. The next day I'm told I'm working too slowly, that I'm lazy, and that we do in fact need to mop. She drives me crazy because nothing is ever clean enough (because it is not possible for things to be spotless), and she's constantly flip-flopping in her mood.

Wednesday, April 8th, my vacation started. It begun by me waking up feeling sick once more. This time when I went to the doctor they told me I had strep throat, and I was finally given anti-biotics, so now I am finally healthy. Me being sick came at a bad time though, I was very close to not going to Jerusalem for Passover Seder. I did end up going though, to spend the Seder with some family. It was nice- good food, good company- but I was feeling down for a lot of the night because I was feeling sick, and it made me miss my own family. Luckily the next day, I stayed in Jerusalem, and was able to sleep a lot, to get my strength back.

Friday morning I went to meet up with my boyfriend David, and my two other Spanish speaking boys, Avraham, and Yaneev. I met them at a beach, on the Mediterranean Sea for a 3 day music festival called Bombamella- although I only came for the last 2 days. There was a soul reggae tent, techno, a tent that only played club music the whole time, and then tents where various Israeli artists were playing- there was blues, rock, and Israeli pop artists, I guess. There were a lot of people doing strange things for example there were people wearing white toga-like clothes, faces painted white, holding hands, walking along the festival not saying anything, picking up people on the way. They were holding signs that said something about peace, so I'm guessing they just wanted everyone to be peaceful and happy? There was also body painting, a pool of mud people were jumping into, lots of food, and market stores. One of the most interesting things we saw was the Hare Krishna tent, where they sang their Hare Krishna song for an hour at a time, a few times a day, and served people free food. The Hare Krishna song has 8 lines, each with 2 words, only 3 different words are in the song, and the tune barely changes. It was so different, and we were so curious to see if they'd do anything different (they didn't) that we ended up staying a while. We camped out on the beach in tents, along with probably thousands of tents. People didn't go to sleep until the sun went up, and all you could hear all night were drunk people singing passover songs. We met interesting people, got a lot of sun, and listened and danced to a lot of good music.
We came back from Bombamella in the evening, and took time to relax at the kibbutz. On Monday morning, the 13th, we all went to the Dead Sea. Getting there was exciting, since it was a Jewish holiday, and there were a lot of people travelling. I was appointed to wait in line to by our bus tickets to the Dead Sea, and I had to drop my Canadian politeness, and get to the front of the line the Israeli way. I had to yell at a few girls who were trying to go in front of me. I then had to tell off a man who came to the front of the line as I finally got to the front (after 15 minutes), saying he just had to ask a question. I told him we all have questions, we're all trying to get somewhere, and he has to wait his turn. Of course this was all in Hebrew. We got to the Dead Sea, and went floating. After 10 minutes of being out of the water, my skin started burning, and I got a bit of a rash, and I had to run away to shower. Unlike typical tourists however, we forgot to get mud to rub all over ourselves, we had made new friends, and got distracted. The friends we made were religious, but not in the black hat, and clothes kind of way. They weren't offended by me in my bathing suit, or people eating unkosher food, and we were able to have a respectful conversation where I found out a lot about their beliefs. At one point I over heard one of them saying that people who watch too much soccer lose their way, which made me laugh a bit, but I kept that to myself. That night we camped out right on the beach. We played our drums a bit, listened to music, played some cards, and sat waiting for our water to boil for maybe an hour. When we arrived home the next day, I had never been so exhausted in my life from all of the sun, and travelling. It had been about 40 degrees at the hot part of the day, and this is just spring. I will probably melt when summer actually comes.
The next day, I went with a couple friends to spend a bit of time on the beach in Tel Aviv. It seemed like a good idea, but when we got there, it wasn't warm enough to be in our shorts and tank tops, or swim, and when we lay down on our towels, the wind blew large amounts of sand in our eyes and mouths. Luckily we were able to get a ride back from a friend who was with family nearby, which made the little time spent there worth it.
Getting back to class and work just a few days ago from holiday was hard. Being on vacation, and getting a chance to explore was amazing, and relaxing, and an opportunity to get closer with everyone.