As my days in Israel come near the end, so many fun things are still going on every single day.
If you don't read any of this, at least watch the video towards the end.
Wednesday night
My roommate, Hadassa's birthday was slowly approaching and since she always goes all out on everyone else's birthday, we decided to do as much as we could with as little money as possible for her birthday. At about 10:00 I walked into the kitchen where the preparations had already started happening. I got there just in time to save the cookies. We decided to make the cookies that they usually make on Tuesdays for Hadassa's birthday but nobody who was helping in the preparations really knew what they were doing so they kinda just made it up until I came along and showed them how to do it. They came out a little bit differently than usual, but they were still super yummy. We also made fruit salad, guacamole, cholent, and cheese cakes for birthday cakes. At one point Hadassa actually came into the kitchen and saw everything that was meant to be a surprise. We just told her that it was for something going on the next night. We cleaned up at around 1:00 and I finally dragged myself up to bed.
Thursday Night
The next day was fairly normal.
At night, after classes, we all went up to the roof of Sarah and Eve's apartment. We put out the fruit salad, the cholent, and guacamole and chips. At midnight, we all gathered around and we brought out cheesecake and balloons and sang happy. In honor of her own birthday, Hadassa prepared a really nice lesson for us about Megillat Ruth that we were about to read on the upcoming holiday Shavuot.
Friday
I woke up at around 8:00 as usual and did a few errands around the Rova that I needed to get done. At 11:00, I went to Sarah and Eve's apartment to pick up stuff for the picnic. We packed some blankets and a tablecloth and the rest of the food that we didn't eat from the night before. We went to Salati to get salads for lunch and then we went to Independence Park. We set everything up and then waited for Hadassa to get there. Reva took her to get a fish manicure where cleaner fish eat the dead skin off your feet leaving them nice and smooth, and then they walked over to the park. When she got to the park we all began singing Happy Birthday. Then we just sat out in the park eating and talking and having a good time. Eventually, we decided that it was time to go. When we got back to the dorms, I took a nap because of all the late nights that I've been having and the late night to come. I woke up a couple of hours later and by then, it was time to get ready for Shabbat.
Shabbat was just a normal in-shabbat with all of my Harova friends.
Saturday Night
The next part of the adventure started once Shabbat was over and the holiday of Shavuot started. Shavuot is the holiday of the receiving of the Torah.
After we prayed, we learned the laws about staying up all night which I was planning to do. It is customary to stay up all night learning on Shavuot because there is a story that tells us that we have to "fix" the fact that the Jews overslept on the day that they were supposed to receive the Torah which is why it's called "Tikun Leil Shavuot." For dinner, we had an amazing dairy meal with chocolate milk and pasta and an interesting new invention of tuna balls which dipped in cream cheese tasted very good. Then we went to the school building to learn all night which surprisingly wasn't that hard since we didn't finish dinner until about 11:00 at night.
Sunday
4:30 we went to the nearby Yeshivah where we heard Megillat Ruth. Afterwards was one of the longest prayers I've ever been to in Israel, almost as long as Rosh Hashana. It was about three hours or until 7:30 until we finished, and remember that we had all just stayed up all night. Right afterwards, I went to my room and I was in bed by 8:00. I slept until 1:00 in the afternoon when I woke up for lunch. It was a normal lunch but afterwards we started singing. One of the windows to our lunchroom was open and it was on the street level. People began looking in and they were listening to us singing and I think that we made some people really happy. I went back to sleep for another couple of hours and then the rest of the night we had some nice Harova activities.
Monday
This day was the second day of holiday for some, half a holiday for others, and for some people it wasn't a holiday at all. This happens because there is an argument about whether people living outside of Israel that are in Israel for the holiday, should they keep one or two days of the holiday? So it was really interesting to see different people relating to the day in different ways. For the entire morning we had seminars about going back home and going to college. In the afternoon, we had our Drama and Tanakh Presentations. For over half a year 7 of us have been working on monologues of characters in Tanakh. We first picked a character, then we did a ton of research. Next we had to start writing our monologues and once we were done with that, we then memorized and rehearsed them until they were amazing. We each had very different characters with very different styles. Tali was Chava, Abigail was Noach, Shana was Sarah, Kayla was Hagar, I was Dinah, Daniella was Delilah, and Leah was Devorah. Raquel video taped mine, but the beginning got cut off. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tHXDEzbh7A You have to watch this! If you have any questions, please let me know because it is a very heavy topic with lots of research put into it and there may be things that you didn't quite get. We were all amazing and I'm very proud of everyone in the class.
Tuesday Night
Sarah and Sara have a night in the Beis...
What a crazy amazing week! I'm exhausted! Don't forget to watch the video! Shalom V'lehitraot!
No comments:
Post a Comment