Had first class today. It was almost all in Hebrew. I understood it pretty well. We went over all the binyanim (conjugations for different types of verbs) and how to conjugate them, and practiced some speaking. It was mostly review for me. I had completely forgotten how to conjugate the future tense (the Bible only has past and present, so I'm out of practice with future), but it came back with the review. It's going to be pretty intense, but then that's what I expected.
Toward the end of the class, the teacher asked for two volunteers to go out in the hall for a while, so I volunteered. After the two of us were out there for a while, I was called back in while the other student stayed in the hall. Then the class told me a story, which I in turn had to tell to the other student volunteer. It was good practice for speaking, so that was good. Wasn't easy, but I do think I'm going to start improving rapidly.
I have a bunch of homework and I may go into Haifa again to look for a fan, and maybe stay for dinner somewhere in Haifa. Pretty uneventful rest of day planned.
[Later the same day]
This evening was my first Haifa adventure. There's really nowhere on campus to get dinner, and the cooking facilities in the suite are meager, at best. I convinced my suitemate (and rabbinical school classmate) Joan to take the bus down into Haifa with me (the university is on top of Mount Carmel, and everything else in Haifa is down the hill—it's kind of reminiscent of San Francisco or parts of Pittsburgh—windy roads with lots of steep hills).
We didn't have a restaurant in mind, but I thought I could get us to where I went on the Haifa tour the other day. I thought I knew the bus number and would recognize where we got off before. Well, not so much. We ended up going much further down the hill, getting off in a neighborhood where everything was closing for the evening and the only food we could find anyway was a McDonald's. You know I didn't come to Israel to go to McDonald's. We came across a grocery store (by now it was getting dark, around 8 pm, and I was pretty hungry) and got a few things to eat back on campus, having given up on finding a restaurant.
Then we had to find a bus to take us back. We wandered around for a while, got directions, followed them poorly (or maybe they were poor directions, or maybe there was a language barrier problem), wandered some more. We considered trying to find a taxi (that's always my fallback in my mind—if I really get lost, I'll just get in a taxi). Then we saw a sherut (a van that you share with other people; they follow bus routes and cost a little less than the bus. They have signs in the window saying what bus route they're following) with the bus number we needed! We followed it up the hill and finally found a bus stop where the right bus would come. And it did.
On the ride back up to the university, we went through an area with a gazillion nice-looking restaurants. I also saw the place where I'd intended for us to go in the first place. I think we either took the wrong bus down, or I just missed the place where we should have disembarked. We went back to our dorm, and I had tuna fish mixed with hummus, crackers, cucumber slices, and watermelon for dinner. Not what I'd had in mind.
At least we know where we want to go now, and we're going to try again one evening soon. (OK, it wasn't that much of an adventure, and it's frankly a little embarrassing, but I wouldn't want it much more exciting anyway.)
[this is good] You know you're a student when you get lost on the bus.
Posted by: mikerose | 08/05/2009 at 12:20 PM