Today I had an almost-rough day in the Ulpan.
I say almost rough because the Ulpan was fine; I enjoy learning Hebrew because it feels like I'm reminding myself of things I already sort of know- I've never learned grammar, but I obviously know how to conjugate verbs. Now I just know the name for what I'm doing, the steps of the process that happens automatically in my head. I'm also getting gently corrected by the grammar- sometimes I say things not entirely correctly, like "beitzah ayin" instead of "beitzat ayin."
So I'm thoroughly enjoying myself.
The problem is, today I found out that my Ulpan class is filled with irritating and poorly educated people. I'm talking about the kind of person who thinks they are so rich that they don't really need to know anything about anything. You encounter these people occasionally, but it's rare to be stuck in a room full of them. Well, I shouldn't say a whole room full. The people in the class fall into a few categories:
(1) People who think money > being a marginally intelligent human being
(2) People who are very insecure about their weight, talk about it all the time, but will get offended if you respond by suggesting they work out occasionally
(3) Very religious people who think (as previously mentioned) that I'm their best friend, and
(4) Me.
So today I overheard a couple of people in my class talking about how Anchorman (one of the dumbest movies ever made ever) "revolutionized the film industry." For half an hour.
And that's when I realized how much I appreciate my roommates and my other friends here, who aren't mind-numbingly dull. :)
Irritated with my class, and with the fact that I flew 5000 miles to sit in a room with unpleasant JAP's (yes, even the boys), I wandered into the library.
And there I did encounter a shelf, hidden away in a corner, out of sight of everyone and everything, containing all the books of Leon Uris, Phillip Roth, Naomi Regen, and more wonderful authors. The perfect bookshelf.
Half an hour curled up there reading Exodus cured my ill-will towards my classmates, and brought me back into my comfort zone :)
So enough complaining! The experiment is proving successful. My Hebrew is good enough to fool everybody now, not just taxi drivers! My aunt and uncle, my roommates, the "madricha" of the program (kind of like an R.A., except she doesn't live here), and my friend, Gadi, who very nearly had a heart attack when we talked on the phone and he heard me speaking in Hebrew for the first time in six years! There is a whole vocabulary that I don't have, about academics and politics and science and food, but I'm going after it with a vengeance.
Amusingly enough, my Hebrew classes are also teaching me a lot about how much of the English I know is wrong. I learned yesterday about "cloves" of garlic (which I think sounds silly!). It doesn't look like a clove. It looks like a tooth. Should be tooth of garlic, especially as it comes out of a head of garlic, but there you go.
Today, however, my silly class tried to claim that "milk teeth" isn't an expression in English. It is. I will swear on anything you care to present that it is- these people are just uneducated and have never heard it. Or read it. Or read anything.
Tomorrow I am going on a real adventure: to try to buy stamps to send letters to the US. As I have no idea where the post office is, how to ask for stamps, or how much the stamps should be, this will be fun. Matthew, I hope you appreciate this!
As for the other experiment- the living in Israel experiment- no news to report. I still feel like I'm on vacation, rather than really living here. But a very lovely vacation it is!
