Schooled!

I've been here a week; it's high time I receive an education. Cock-eyed and optimistic, full of wonder and joy at the lovely summer morning I wandered off to school. Well, first I walked Naomi to the passport office and then went to school. Mile total: ~5 miles. THEN I got coffee with a successful all-Hebrew transaction. Today was great. Now on to school!

I don't know Hebrew from a hole in the ground and I'm in a class of linguists of the highest degree. After sitting in class for five minutes I realized I was in over my head. I was essentially in a class of native Israelis. I looked down, and, sure enough, I was completely naked! Wake up wake up wake up from nightmare school day! I borrowed a textbook - which we are on page 400 of - and tried to keep up. The teacher uses the time-honored tradition of calling on you at random so you're always terrified she'll pick you. I realized that not knowing my name didnt' save me, either. She was asking people what they during their weekend. I think she was asking this in Chinese. The students answered in German/Spanish/Russian/Ewok. I planned a beautiful response approximately like this: "Oh, we had a lovely weekend lazily driving up and down the resplendant coastline of Israel, who's chief imports, in case you didn't know, are..." and so on. Then she got to me and changed the question up just for me. Crap! She asked me something in Afrikans. I stammered out an answer: " I student two heads...no...two years. from america." Crystal clear. The class continued in this vane. By the end, she told me I'd be fine. Apparently she speaks English - where the hell was that when I needed it?!

I went to a cafe post-fantastic class and studied. I managed to rush through the first 90 pages of the book so that I can hopefully catch up. They started from scratch (so they say), so I can in theory work a mere 40x faster than them and be comfortable. Naomi came and found me after a full morning of passport hell. She can't leave Israel without it. You'd think all the traipsing she'd done into and out of the country she'd done prior to this would have raised similar alarms, but these are strange times.

A week of walking in sandals has left my silky-smooth feet a wreck of hideous weeping sores, so we collected band-aids. We got lost and then found our way. Distance total today: ~6. We caught some dinner, along with a drink called limonana, which god himself handed down to the Israelis and said: "drink! with this fantastic beverage you will live forever in eternal bliss." God, too, doesn't capitalize. It's lemonade and mint, and it's glorious. We then proceeded to walk to the big mall. Distance total: ~8 miles. Then left and got lost. Total: ~10 miles. Then walked to the beach: ~12 miles. We caught a drink and headed home: ~15 miles. My bandaids fell off after the beach so I left a blood trail all the way back home. We are keeping the blood-thirsty cats at bay using this laptop as a wedge in the door. They are coming---