Straw Hat Day

One day I got on the bus, which seats 40, and there were 17 women wearing straw hats, in various styles and colors! They were all women over 40, which I suppose means that in another generation there will be no more straw hats.
Today there were only a few straw hats, so I busied myself with trying to imagine how the two women opposite me would look if they switched hats.

One of our teachers somehow finds time, when not grading hundreds of papers, to do some crafts. Today she had a sale and here is what I bought:

(This item is an absolute Must, to remember my teacher by.)

Somehow I have never thought of university professors as being the type that would do cute little crafts.

From A to U

In two classes, with a total of 46 different students, these countries are represented:

Argentina
Australia
Canada
Chile
Colombia
Costa Rica
Egypt
France
Germany
India
Israel
Italy
Jordan
Korea
Mexico
Netherlands
New Zealand
Russia
Spain
U.S.

Now if only someone from Zanzibar will join us, this post will have a proper title.

July 30

It was a little bit cooler today, which was a relief. Summertime is very slowly coming to an end. I will be sort of glad. Jerusalem is getting really dirty now. Trash is blowing around, and it's about time for some rain to settle the dust. I saw a street cleaner the other day, but it would take 20 street cleaners to make much of a difference. Occasionally I see men trimming back some of the overgrown vines, but I don't see much evidence of any real knowledge of gardening. They never cut anything back far enough to get fresh green growth, and they don't fertilize. They don't compost, either. What a pity. All those nice leaves going into the trash instead of back into the soil where they belong.

When I lived in Indiana I hated to see the summer end. Towards the end of July I deliberately shut out of my mind the knowledge of what the date was, and put all my attention into getting the most out of the last days of summer. Unfortunately, this also meant I often forgot my mother's birthday, which was August 4. I do remember one year, some time in the nineties, when we had nice weather clear through November.

I am always hearing people saying things like, "You simply must [do this, see that, go here, go there], it's simply fantastic!" But we don't have any opportunity to do all those things.

Several times in class the teacher has asked us what we do in our spare time. I never have any thing to say. I, uh, well, study Hebrew, write on my blog, and sometimes mess around on the internet. One guy just simply could not understand why I didn't have an MP3 player. Maybe after I finish level Gimmel I'll reward myself with an MP3 player. Or maybe not. He says they don't cost much at all. Well, plane fares do, and you can't have everything. And I do have a digital camera and a computer, which is pretty wow, really. And he was amazed when I told him I had never been to a movie. Why not? Well, they're not real. Learning to live real life is a full time job. There isn't time left over for living an unreal life, or watching an unreal person's unreal life. And there's the next life to think about, too. If you fill in all your free time with whatever is handy (books, music, food, work, study, internet, shopping, sleep, etc.), you'll never notice how empty you really are. When you get good and empty, that's when you realize that you'd better feed your starving soul. Better, of course, not to wait until you're starving. To be healthy you have to cultivate an appetite for healthy food. And you have to exercise. Prayer is pretty good exercise, wouldn't you say?

Unknown tree.

Jacaranda et al

Jacaranda was in bloom here in May. It originated in South America but has been planted in various warm places in the world.


Four o'clocks (p.m.). Actually they open about 6 p.m. here.
My mother once planted a package of four-o-clocks. They came in magenta, yellow and white. They came up all together in a clump and for a long time I thought it was one plant with three different colors of flowers.


Passion flower. Passion fruit juice is delicious. I tasted a delicious yogurt drink made with passion fruit and persimmon.


Caparis Spinosa
These bloom in the evening and night. Most of them have purple stamens. Some have white stamens. It is funny to see bees sitting on the ends of those long stamens.


I can't find the name of this.

Stress

How do you not stress out? There must be some method I have yet to discover. I sit in class and listen to the teacher talking a mile a minute and I feel the tension building up. I try to tell myself, "So what? Let her talk. It doesn't matter." If I could just convince myself not to care. Or space it out and think about something else. Maybe I'll just skip class. But I don't want to skip class. There's nothing else about my life that is as interesting, so if I don't go to class, I have no life.
One way to relieve stress is to sprawl out on a comfortable couch for a couple hours. But I have no comfortable couch. I have a short, hard couch. I have a comfortable bed, but a bed doesn't have the same effect.
Another way to relieve stress (or depression) is to write poetry. So I wrote a bi-lingual poem about the teacher that talks too fast. Maybe I'll get bold and hand it to her next time I see her.
But better yet, don't stress out to begin with. Ok, so, I don't care. I really don't care. It's just life. Here today and gone tomorrow. I'm too slow and that's my sorrow. She's too fast and can't slow down--whirling Hebrew words around. Round and round my head they spin--some go out and some go in. Some I understand so well; other words I just can't tell. Let them come, let them go. Some are strange, some I know. I don't care, it doesn't matter. I'll just eat choc'late and get fatter.
(Looking at Nutella jar--no, better get giant bar of dark chocolate. Pure, unadulterated dark chocolate. Eat it slowly with a few sips of coffee. Hey, I feel better already, and that was just an imaginary chocolate bar.)

Who needs translators, anyway?

Signs from around the world:

Airline ticket office, Copenhagen:
We take your bags and send them in all directions.

Hotel lobby, Bucharest:
The lift is being fixed for the next day. During that time we regret that you will be unbearable.

Doctor's office, Rome:
Specialist in women and other diseases.

In an Italian cemetery:
Persons are prohibited from picking flowers from any but their own graves.

Hotel brochure, Italy:
This hotel is renowned for its peace and solitude. In fact, crowds from all over the world flock here to enjoy its solitude.

Tourist agency, Czechoslovakia:
Take one of our horse-driven city tours. We guarantee no miscarriages.

From the "Soviet Weekly":
Here will be a Moscow exhibition of arts by 15,000 Soviet Republic painters and sculptors. These were executed over the past two years.

Supermarket, Hong Kong:
For you convenience, we recommend courteous, efficient self-service.

An advertisement by a Hong Kong dentist:
Teeth extracted by the latest methodists.

In an East African newspaper:
A new swimming pool is rapidly taking shape since the contractors have thrown in the bulk of their workers.

In a Nairobi restaurant:
Customers who find our waitresses rude ought to see the manager.

Torture/Fun

I didn't think it could get much worse. Today (Thursday) we had a horrible lesson with the best teacher possible but it was still horrible. It was horrible because there was a horrible amount of information we had to learn all at once, including a new pronoun, with all its endings; a new verb type, which I kept getting confused with others that I thought I had learned but apparently hadn't; and possessive endings, of which there are about 40. Of course everything follows a pattern, mostly patterns we have learned before, but it all flew over my head in one mass of mangled bird. After class I heard one guy say, "That was torture!" and I wholeheartedly agreed. During class one girl, who is really sharp, would occasionally groan or say "Oh no!" under her breath, but after class she said, "That was fun!" I won't call it fun unless I see a passing grade on the final exam. Maybe not then, either. If I get an 88 or better I will look back and say, "That was...not exactly fun, but hurray, it's over!" And I will imagine myself crossing the finish line and everybody will be cheering and maybe I'll even go out for ice-cream!
The fun part is getting out of the house and being in the real world with real people. Home gets really old after awhile. The things that make it enjoyable are odd things to enjoy. Like a certain man who comes home and yells in Russian. Russian is a beautiful language when spoken slowly, and a little strange when spoken very fast. Spoken loudly in anger it is rather funny. It is fun to see a Texas-sized cockroach. It is fun to hang out clothes and see a fat tortoise-shell cat blinking at me from down below. It is fun to get the dishes done in 10 minutes instead of half an hour. It will be fun to wash clothes for a while with one teaspoon of detergent for every load--there is so much soap build-up in the machine and in all our clothes. It is fun to put the green sheets on the bed because they're so much better quality than the blue ones. It is fun to look in the cupboards and see that most of our food is healthy food, as long as I pretend not to notice the Nutella.

Language Struggles

Vocabulary--no problem. Grammar--not terribly hard. Hearing--what's that you said? Hearing is definitely the hardest part. How many hundreds of words I've learned without hearing them used in a sentence, or at least not more than once! And you have to consider that when words are run together in a sentence they sound differently than they do separately. I don't think one of my teachers has a clue as to how hard this is. She speaks too fast, all the time. Or maybe she thinks that I have such a great social life that I can listen to Hebrew during all my waking hours. The stress that builds up in this class makes me want to quit, but staying home would be boring. On alternate days the other teacher teaches, and I can relax and actually learn something.
Speaking is also hard. I learn a verb in the infinitive, three tenses and three persons, singular and plural, and it makes sense when it's on a chart, but that means more than twenty different words for one verb, and I am supposed to instantaneously pull the right one out of the hat.
Reading is not much better, especially when I am in a noisy room. Remember there are no vowels, so there are umpteen ways to pronounce something unless you have every word perfectly memorized. Okay, so I know the root, I have the general idea of the meaning, and can guess the rest from context. This gives me a vague sense of knowing that I know something of what's going on, and a greater sense of near panic. I'm supposed to become a genius overnight. And then there's the knowledge that I am the oldest and slowest person in the class. Not the dumbest, but the slowest.
Young people, get busy and learn, while your brain waves are still at top speed. It won't last forever.