Things that are different, Part III

Going against all previous plans, I am not even close to fluent in Hebrew yet. Every once in a while I get a glimmer of the ultimate awesome, but most of the time I just back myself into corners that only English can rescue me from. I have been put in charge of several important interactions. I pay for things, order the check at restaurants, and other day to day things. I printed out a couple of Bauhaus architecture walking tours before we left and I have been in charge of saying the addresses as well as saying the date the building was built in Hebrew. I assure you all that a four digit rolls off my tongue about as quickly my dad recalls the name of one of my friends, so you know Naomi has some patience of steel. *sorry dad* We have also started a ritual game where, as we walk home for the evening, I tally the day's purchases, in Shekels (meaning we get into the hundreds pretty quickly), in Hebrew, out loud with no paper, to make sure we have not been over-spending. Luckily our walks are long.

The Ulpan has been pointing out several small differences in the way Hebrew is constructed compared to English. Since I'm a beginner and have NO grasp of complex sentence structure I basically speak like a caveman. This is enhanced by the fact that there are no Hebrew words for "is" and "are". An example:

ENGLISH: The tree is nice.

HEBREW: The tree nice.

I've come a long way and can now talk about my wants and needs with easy. "I want book." Hooray.

A couple of other oddities about the language: Hebrew reads from right to left, but numbers in a Hebrew sentence read left to right. Date ranges read right to left. So a sentence with a date range, for example the dates that Mark Twain was born on and died on, has you switching the direction you read multiple times. To the casual English reader it also looks like he was born in the future and lived his life backwards. My life, ? - 1980, makes it look like nobody knows when I was born but I will die in 1980. This fun syntax was only compounded by a typo in our book making it look like somebody was born in the year 9878.

Israeli currency is also flat-out cooler than ours. We all remember that, in essence, American currency is green. Sure, they've added a couple of drab pinks and blues in sort of a Pleasantville way, but it's still just green. Israeli money, by contrast, would be more expensive to counterfit than it would be to earn, what with today's printer ink costs. It folds like crap, though, so whatever shape your Shekels arrived into your hot little hand is the same shape they'll be in forever.

Naomi and I have been walking all over town and slowly working through the suggested cuisine in town. We decided to try to get to bed early on Monday night and unfortunately thought we could accomplish this by going to a movie. This works great unless you go to Harry Potter 6. Movies are just as expensive here only you pay in Shekels which makes it seem more expensive. You also have reserved seats in the theater, like going to a play. In a movie of waning popularity like HP 6 you end up with 15 people sitting awkwardly close together. It was fun for two minutes or so to try to learn Hebrew from the subtitles but I ended up just ignoring them. Sadly, my lazy-ass brain is starting to do this with all the Hebrew signs around town if I'm not paying close attention.

Overall, Naomi and I have been relaxing a bit this last couple of days. Both of us have been working hard at our respective vocations and we've been in town long enough that some of the newness has worn off. I'm covering three days with this blog for this reason and because tomorrow we are going on a 10 hour tour to Jerusalem, which I'm sure I will have plenty to write about.