Anchors away....

3 hours in Newark airport, 10.5 hours on a plane, 2 hours in customs/immigration, and 1 hour on a bus later, here I am in my brand spankin' new 8th floor apartment in the student village.

When we landed, it was raining like I've never seen it rain in Israel, which kind of glorious. The road to Jerusalem was lined with shockingly green fields, as opposed to the brown and grey I've been accustomed to. We dragged our suitcases around for a little while on arrival, trying to find the right building, and finally I waltzed into apartment 81, my home for at least the next four months.

I'm not 100% clear on my roommates' names, but here's what I've learned today:

Girl is an American graduate student who made aliyah last year.

Boy #1 is an Israeli with American parents doing a double degree in medicine and law (undergraduate, which apparently you can do here)

Boy #2 is an Arab Israeli from the North who doesn't speak English very well, but is also studying medicine and thinks brains are as cool as I do.

Boy #3 is an Israeli with British parents. Instead of introducing himself when he walked in and saw me in the kitchen, he said "I have a space heater. You should take it." It would seem that I look cold!

After/in between meeting all the roommates and unpacking in my **SINGLE** room, I took a nap underneath a couple of coats- as hobos do- because I didn't have any blankets yet. I later found out that most of the people I came here with did similarly odd things.

At 3PM we convened to walk to the University. We thought we were just going to see where the international school building was, and the cafeterias and such. What actually happened was, after a red eye flight, two hours of sleep, and having not eaten a proper meal since the night before, we were sent to a classroom and told to write an essay in Hebrew.

Now, I'm not upset because I have gotten my revenge already. They made me write the essay, but now they have to read my barely coherent, impossibly spelled, occasionally made-up words. Hah! Take that!

After that we went to a mall for people to get necessities (like, for instance, blankets). I met my uncle Zion there and he brought me lots of good things, including cake and two blankets! My Hebrew was stretched to its limits and beyond, but I'm very happy that I was able to have a perfectly legitimate conversation for over an hour with him. This whole becoming-fluent thing might work out after all.