To the South!

This title is really more for tomorrow. We're going on a 3-day free-for-all into southern Israel: the Negev desert. Thank god we have a car and a borrowed GPS system.

We paid another visit to Naomi's grandma today. It was an interesting experience for me because it pointed out how much better my hebrew has gotten without my knowledge since I got here. I was able to utter several useful comments during the conversation. This was the bigger score for me; I UNDERSTOOD the conversation. Awesome. Baby steps.

To underline my further strides in Hebrew we took a trip to a market on Carmel mountain. I was just as disappointed as all of you to find out this mountain, like all others, is just rock. :/ We went from shop to shop looking at odds and ends. This was an Arab market so it had slightly different stuff than an Jewish market - more antiques, scarves, and curved daggers. It's been really hard this trip to avoid buying a weapon. I also passed up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy a life-size brass tiger. You readers are hopefully beginning to get a picture of just how awesome the inside of the Whalen house would be if it were in Israel.

I bought Aladdin pants. They are aquamarine so they are actually a cross between Aladdin pants and scrub pants, which makes them more awesome. They are also a bit longer in the legs. These pants have a enormous waist which makes them great for feasting as well. Naomi wouldn't let me buy a velvet fez.

To ramble back to the point I was trying to make (before I wasted everyone's time by vividly painting a scene in everyone's imagination not unlike the master writers of old): I furthered my Hebrew education by haggling in the market. Thanks to my constant attempts to try to pay for things I am actually pretty good at counting in Hebrew. I used this new-found power along with thriftiness and tips given to me by my many Israeli friends:

1. Never act interested in what you are haggling about
2. Never mention the price they have listed
3. Always mention a price you saw somewhere else
4. Never ever speak English

A lot of this is surprisingly easy with the level of Hebrew I have. Since I don't understand half of what the shop owners are saying, it's very easy for me to act disinterested (like trying to get Freya to do anything). It's also easy to come up with the price I'm willing to pay for something because I have time to think of the number. Once haggling starts, I can't just shout out a new number because I don't remember how to say it so I have them right where I want them. Also, everyone here thinks I'm German until I say an English word which is a nice touch. Once I fully release my midwestern dialect, though, it's all over. In fact the crisp, rigid Iowa accent is so infectous our friend Elinor wrote us the other day saying she has been getting mistaken for a tourist. Hah.