monthly post...

Well, it seems like I only get around to posting on this about once a month, so here's the catch up. School has continued, and I have continued to bear it. With only 2 weeks to go until the end of the semester, I am praying that I will make it without completely combusting. Oddly, as a coping mechanism I have developed the habit of making extremely long term plans- in this case trying to plan out what I will do this summer (where I could live, how I could make money, how I could avoid losing all the language ability that I have worked hard to develop...). This has the strange effect of leaving me with feelings of productivity and at the same time removes any feelings of guilt over my laziness with regard to writing the papers I need to. For some odd reason, the school system here works weird so that they expect people to work on papers for the month in between semesters, making them all due on the day the next semester starts. These two facts (laziness and weird school program) couples with the fact that the library and the IT department at Hebrew U don't like me (in the form of not letting me sign in and use the electronic journal resources) means that I probably will have to set aside some of the time that I am in Utah researching in the HBLL. What a vacation...Thanks HebU!

Otherwise, things are on the up and up. I keep making new friends and having funny experiences. Being here for the war was especially interesting. But I'm going to need to put a post up about that all alone. One of the funnier experiences was wandering around the market and being asked by a random religious Jew if I was Jewish because he said (in Hebrew) "you have a Jewish face." I told him no, but had a good laugh about it, plus a little more of a chuckle at the funny look on his face as he realized that he had just had this conversation with me (a Gentile/Goy) in Hebrew. I wish I could have gotten a picture of his face.

What I do have is a picture of a tile map on a wall at a municipality building here in Jerusalem which is a representation of an 18th Century German religious map of the world- shows how they conceived of the world with Jerusalem at the center.