A Day in the Life

Life in Jerusalem is really routine. I wake up, go to work, come back, eat dinner, hang out a little, go to sleep. The working world is boring. A lot of people are actually having a few issues with this. After such a year of adventure, this is what everyone has to look forward to (at least if they can find work). Most of us love what we're doing, but it's just so mundane.


To give ourselves a little break, we've all been traveling more on weekends. We're starting to realize how few we have left.One of my first weekends, I went to Tel Aviv to visit the other half of OTZMA. Nothing makes you appreciate Tel Aviv more than living in Jerusalem. I had never felt the young, relaxed vibe of Tel Aviv until this trip. The first night there was an outdoor concert for Tel Aviv's 100 Years celebration. Everyone there was in their twenties and having a great time. It was amazing to see how much the people in the Tel Aviv group changed in the 2 weeks since I had last seen them. They all looked so tan, fresh and relaxed; all of which are words that would definitely not have been used to describe us in Track 2 when we were all living in grubby little towns. (Actually many people felt really overwhelmed when we first moved into our big cities because there's just so many more people than we had become accustommed to.) Everyone in Jerusalem is still looks pretty haggard, stressed and pale-at least relatively, we do live in Israel afterall. It's amazing what that Mediterranean can do to help a person relax.

Last weekend, I went all the way north to Acco. A friend and I left Jerusalem at 6 AM and after 4 hours of travel, reached the city. Acco's actually a really cool city. The old city has ruins from Roman times. The old Roman fortress has been renovated a few times and was used as a prison up until around the mid-1980's. It's supposed to be one of the most in-penetrable prisons in the world, but there was a famous escape Israeli resistance fighters during the British rule in Israel. There's also an underground tunnel used by the Templar nights and an old Turkish bathhouse- although going to a Turkish bathhouse just wasn't the same without the full experience.

At around 4 we finished seeing all the sites and spent the next hour wandering through the city tryying to find our hostel. When we got there, we asked how much it would be and the man told us 250 shekels ($60 about). We told him that 2 days before when we called, they said it would be 40 shekels ($10). He told us yes, but that was for the dormitory room which was under construction- they had decided to tear down the room within the 2 days between our call and our arrival. He told us however, that the workmen leave at 7 and he could move the beds back in for us then.

All this time, my friend had been talking to the man in Hebrew and I was sure I didn't understand what they were saying. It turns out, I did understand, it was just so ridiculous that I assumed I must have misunderstood. I'm finding that the majority of the times I don't understand what is being said to me, I actually do understand, I just assume I misunderstood because what is being said is just too preposterous.

We went to look at the room and saw it was covered in sawdust with workbenches everywhere- they were actually in the process of tearing down the room to rebuild a nicer room. The door and the windows to the room were missing and all the old metal bedframes were standing outside. Both of us have learned to be flexible this year but even OTZMA hadn't prepared us enough for this. By this point, it wasn't long until transportation stopped for Shabbat which wasn't nearly enough time to get back to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Luckily, one girl on OTZMA is living in the hospital in Nahariyya to work with psychiatric patients. It took us an hour to make the 10-minute trip to Nahariyya (because nothing goes right for OTZMAnikim) and slept on her floor for the night. Of course we didn't have time to buy enough food before Shabbat so we had a very hungry Saturday.

Right now for ENP I'm doing a lot of funding research. I just finished researching and starting to reach out to grant foundations. I'm now working on looking up companies that are based in the cities we operate. In Israel, it's still a fairly new idea to have companies support the communities they operate in, so the next step is to reach out to them and convince them it's a good idea. The work isn't all that interesting but I like researching and a major part of what I do is organizing the information into excel spreadsheets, and you all know how much I love to organize so it's great for me. ( Note that I said organize, not clean- some things never change).