TAU comes to HebU

Recap of the Weekend:

Thursday--IT SNOWED AND HAILED IN JERUSALEM! We were hoping for a snow day but it didn't start till we got to Ulpan. Everyone in Jerusalem freaks out at the word snow--it was funny to see the reactions of all the Israelis and there were some kids in my Ulpan who had never seen snow!!

My friend Nikki came to visit! She is studying at Tel Aviv University for the spring semester. Her best guy friend at TAU is one of my friends cousins--small jewish world--so she came with him and another guy friend. We had a great weekend! Thursday afternoon we went to the Shuk and bought tomatoes, avocado, mushrooms, lettuce, candy, wine, desserts, fruit, fresh challah, pita, hummus, chicken, and more. I absolutely love the shuk. We are getting better each time and figuring out which vendors are the best and how to ask for things in hebrew to make sure we don't get ripped off. Thursday night we went out in downtown Jerusalem. Friday it was freezing cold and we had a lazy day of movies, catching up on the latest American TV shows (aka Grey's Anatomy,) and games (Sporcle.) Friday night we had an AMAZING Shabbat dinner. We used all of our wonderful Shuk purchases and made delicious chicken, potatoes, salad (full of veggies,) challah, wine, pita, hummus, and our madrich (Eli--madrich means guide/RA/counselor type) came over after dinner and brought dessert. He is really great and comes over for dinner and we all chat about Israel, school, pretty much just life in general. After dinner--which didn't occur till very late due to an underestimate of the time it takes to make mashed potatoes--we decided to stay in and hang out in the apartment because the weather was once again freezing. Today we woke up to a beautiful (but misleading) sky. It was pretty cold but we had to take advantage of the sun. We went on a walk to this amazing look-out-spot in near our campus and took some picutres. Then we went to our favorite falafel stand (the ONLY thing opened on Shabbat) and ate a lot of falafel.

My friend just left and now I am going to start my homework and prepare for week #3 of Ulpan. WE ARE HALFWAY DONE WAHOOOO! I have a test on Monday that we are trying to change to Tuesday so we can watch the Superbowl, its on at 1am here! We want to go to an American bar downtown and watch with a bunch of kids on my program..let's hope I can figure out how to beg/suck up to my teacher in Hebrew so we can postpone the test.

That's all for now...
love always

PS. I have officially been in Jerusalem for 3 weeks..so weird!