Chanaton, Winning, Thanksgiving, and Tzfat

Hello loved ones! In this blog I have a lot to say considering I've been a huge bum and not updated in quite some time. So, let's begin.

Last Shabbat (as in a week from yesterday) I went to a Shabbaton at Kibbutz Chanaton (yes I know that rhymes). The Shabbaton was organized in part by a girl on Nativ and there were HebrewU students, Yeshiva students, and Nativers there. I went with my friends Michelle and Misha. On the way up to the Kibbutz, we stopped for lunch in the Druze village. I'd been there once before on pilgrimage but it was really nice to see it again. We perused the shops and I bought some scarves. It was quite lovely.
Once on the Kibbutz, we had some of the usual Shabbaton activities - meals, icebreakers, and services. Kibbutz Chanaton is in the North, and it is really gorgeous up there. The Kibbutz itself is really small, with only about 6 families, as it is the only Masorti Conservative Kibbutz currently in Israel. Mostly the Kibbutz hosts visiting groups like ours, but in order to attract more families to the Kibbutz they are privitizing everything and abandoning the socialist way of life, as are many Kibbutzim in Israel today.
Michelle and Misha and I mostly kept to ourselves all weekend - we had a very relaxing time sleeping, reading, and talking. Sometimes it's nice to get away from base just to do nothing in a different setting. All in all it was a great weekend, exactly what I needed.

Sunday morning was a volunteer carnival for a local school that one of the Nativers had organized with a family friend of his who works for a non-profit here in Jerusalem. We spent the morning playing with kids in a neighborhood called Talpiyot, where many of the families are poor immigrants. It was really a lot of fun, and I've really missed being around kids so I had an especially good time.

Last week was also midterms (which is partly why I wasn't able to write here last week). Everyone was pretty frazzled running around trying to study for exams and keep up with all the regular school work - it was the first time I actually felt like I was in real college. I had my Church Midterm last Monday (which I got back already - my first college A!), and my paper for Holocaust class due Wednesday. This week continues Midterms, with my Mysticism paper due Wednesday and my Hebrew test in two parts on Tuesday and Wednesday. Hopefully all of those will go well.
So while I was home writing my Holocaust paper last Monday night, Nativ girls' football had their first win of the season! And in fact, since Nativ didn't win a single girls' football game last year, it was actually Nativ's first win ever, which was really exciting, and I'm very sorry I missed it - although glad I didn't have to worry about working on my paper late Tuesday night.
To celebrate the completion of half of my midterms, I of course played in beer pong on Wednesday night (after sushi Wednesday dinner - after my full day of school on Wednesday I really need my sushi). In ANOTHER spectacular underdog win, Kesha and I (Becky was home writing her Holocaust paper) WON OUR FIRST BEERPONG GAME. It was all glory and rainbows and sunshine, with everyone cheering for us and the commissioner of the league yelling 'those are my girls! those are my girls!,' while the boys we beat had to hang their heads in shame. Overall it was a spectacular win as we only had 3 cups left, and then I made one shot, and then Kesha made it in the same cup, which means that the boys had to drink all 3 cups (when both partners make it in the same cup it counts for three cups) and we won the game. No matter how great the feeling of winning was, the best part is still the fact that now my father, Mr. Fraternity Present Man, no longer has to hide inside the house in shame of his eldest child.

Thanksgiving on Thursday was a spectacular event. The entire dining room was decorated in orange with confetti on the tables (just like home) and drawings of turkeys on the walls. There were over 250 people there, as all the past Nativers who now live in Israel are invited to come for Thanksgiving dinner with their families - and many of them do. Before dinner we all gathered to watch the new Nativ promo video (which was amazing) and to hear the Nativ acapella group perform (which was even more amazing). When we walked into dinner, I got the biggest surprise of all. Nativ had e-mailed home and arranged that every single Nativer would get a packet of letters from home, and then when all the e-mails came back our staff sat there and individually copied and pasted each e-mail into a word document and then printed them all out and organized them for us. If there was any doubt in my mind that Nativ was the best Israel program out there, it totally disappeared after this. It was just so nice and so unexpected to have this connection to home on Thanksgiving, even if it did make me cry a little (okay, a lot). Thank you SO much to all of you who wrote to me - it made my Thanksgiving really really wonderful.
After dinner, all the Bogrei Nativers (that's what we call people who went on Nativ in past years - don't ask me why) left, and all the current Nativers gathered in the auditorium. There we watched a very funny video of all of us and life on Nativ that the Thanksgiving Committee put together. Then our staff listed all the reasons why they're thankful to be our staff, which was really really sweet. After all of this, there was a marathon of all the Thanksgiving Friends episodes; I couldn't have asked for better programming. All in all, although it was sad to not be home, it was a really great Thanksgiving.

This weekend I decided that I wanted to take advantage of being able to travel from Jerusalem up north before we go down south for second semester. One of my favorite places that we visited on pilgrimage was a town in the north called Tzfat, known for it's candle factory and as a center for Jewish mysticism. So I asked my friend David Bocarsly (who's always up for anything), and we formed a group to go to Tzfat. It ended up being me, David Bocarsly, David Beizer, and my friends Sara and Emily (not the same Emily I'm going away with over winter break).
I made the reservations for us at the youth hostel, so Friday morning we set off bright and early, leaving at 6 AM to catch a 7 AM bus. Only problem was, somehow I had gotten the wrong bus times (I swear the lady from the bus station that I called told me that there was a 7 AM bus to Tzfat), so the first bus wasn't until 9. After sleeping in the bus station like hobos for an hour and a half, we walked across the street to the bus stop and waited for our bus. And waited, and waited. When the bus finally rolled up at 9:30, we were about 10 minutes away from abandoning the trip all together.
We got on the crowded bus, and a mere three and a half hours later we arrived in Tzfat. Hurray! We checked into our youth hostel, which was pretty cute. It was dorm style rooms, so the guys and girls were split up, the guys having two other roommates and the three of us girls having one other roommate. Then we basically said goodbye to the guys for the weekend. They went out and toured around the city with someone from the youth hostel, while the three of us went snack shopping for the weekend and walked around, exploring the town for ourselves. It is a really cute and beautiful place, with gorgeous views of mountains and other scenery.
The hostel we stayed at is a Chabad (orthodox) run organization, and so they set us up for Friday night dinner and Saturday lunch. After Friday night services (in which the men and women were separated, so we didn't see the boys), we went to dinner (in which the girls and guys had been split up when assigned a host home). Dinner for the three girls on Friday night was interesting, to say the least. We were in an orthodox home where there were at least 13 people, all related, and it was very difficult to tell who was married to whom and who each child belonged to. It was about ten minutes after entering the home that we were even acknowledged (besides the young boy who pointed to the couch and commanded that we "sit down," which we obeyed), and then it was only by the women. The men (with the exception of the father, who explained this week's Torah portion to us in English before going back to speaking only Hebrew) didn't acknowledge us all night, except for the one man who snapped at Emily to get her attention and then pointed to the Coke, signaling that she should pass the bottle. Sara and I were both asked to button up our cardigans, although I can assure you my top was far less low-cut than usual. The mother was very nice to us, to be fair, but it was clear that in the hierarchy of the family her opinion towards us mattered very little. We soon decided it was best to just remain engaged in our own conversation and enjoy the food.
The next day we slept late (we really needed it after midterms week) and then got up, warily, to go to lunch. After about forty minutes of wandering around and asking several people for directions, we finally got to where we were supposed to be. This family was great - a mother and father and about seven or eight children, some of whom did not belong to the parents. The food and apartment were modest, but the children were sweet and adorable and the parents made us feel extremely welcome - the mother even sent us home with leftover desserts and walked us all the way back to our hostel, which was totally unnecessary.
We spent most of the rest of the afternoon resting and laying around, and then Saturday night after Shabbat we all made our way back to Jerusalem. Overall it was a really wonderful weekend and I'm so glad I took advantage of the opportunity to do some traveling.

Pictures of the carnival, Thanksgiving, and Tzfat can be found in my new google pictures album:
http://picasaweb.google.com/kaleibowitz/ThanksgivingAndTzfat02#

Hope you all had great holiday weekends, talk to you again soon!