akrish

I wanted to write about israel about once a week, but this past weekend was really busy (read on for why) so I didn’t get around to it. Plus my weeks have been pretty uneventful (until now…) so there wasn’t much to write about.

So last week (week 2 of work) was, as mentioned, pretty uneventful. I’ve gotten used to going to work in the morning, spending most of my day there, coming home and working, watching tv, or otherwise passing time at night. In my previous post, I commented that the dormitory isn’t a very social place and that definitely still holds. In fact, now that I’ve stopped trying to be social, it’s become even more so. Thus, I typically come home, make some dinner, and head to the lounge where I do work, watch tv (online), or otherwise waste time on my computer. So usually life is just that.

Last Tuesday, I went to play ultimate with the Holy Landers, one of the few teams in Israel. We “practiced” in a town called Rishon, a bit South of Tel Aviv, so I got a ride from one of the players. Practice was really fun, it was good to get back into playing again. I also met a bunch of people from the states, who have been playing ultimate for years and are quite good.

I’ll get back to what I did on Friday, but on Saturday I participated in a Hat Tournament at the nearby Hayarkon Park. The tournament was very different from the tournaments I’d been to, in that teams were created on the spot (I guess that’s how hat tournaments work) and the games were very relaxed. There were two “divisions,” a youth division and an everyone else division. I was amazed that the youth division had like 25 people and the adult division had around 50. People came from all over Israel, but I definitely did not expect to see such a good turnout. There were 5 teams in my division and consequently I got to play 4 games.

Apart from the ultimate, which was pretty awesome, the tournament was a great chance for me to meet a lot of different people here. I met some of the kids, some other natives, and a lot of people who are originally from the states or other english speaking places like Canada and New Zealand. Since the tournament, I’ve been hanging out with many of these people, and I think they will be my core group of friends during my stay.

Even at school, ultimate was my way to meet people and branch out from my existing group and I felt that this year was a lot more interesting because of ultimate. Now in Israel, ultimate is again a really great social tool. Since I’m not really in a happening place, and since my living environment isn’t that social, I’m relying on ultimate to kick-start my social life and so far it’s working. How ironic is it that I just met someone from the states in my dorm, and he seems pretty cool.

So this week, I was supposed to play ultimate yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and practices got cancelled so I went to throw with a couple of the people that live “close” to me. And it’s definitely good to get out of the dorm and to go around town and stuff. Tomorrow, hopefully I’m going to go into Tel Aviv to hang out with someone else from ultimate. So life is good this week. I’m actually pretty busy and unable to deal with the minor crisis of choosing what I want to study in grad school.

In other news, on Friday I went to Haifa to see the Baha’i Garden. The gardens were amazing and Haifa seems like a really cool town. I only wish I could have spent more time there, but it was Friday, and everything stops/closes early to prepare for Shabbat, including the trains. I took a bunch of pictures but I don’t have any more space in my Flickr account until August. As soon as I get space, I’ll upload them.

Work is also going pretty well. I’m still working on the same project, but basically we are happy with how fast things are running and are now looking at improving “correctness” of the results. By correctness I really mean, massaging our algorithms to spit out solutions that are biologically significant. We are also trying to make the algorithms find similar quality solutions. So this week I’m mostly generating a bunch of statistics and analyzing them so we can figure out how to move forward.

I mentioned this mid-life crisis I’m having and it’s pretty serious. I plan to apply for graduate schools in the fall, but I don’t really know what area I want to focus in. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and researching about it and I think it merits its own post (I’ve noticed myself saying this a lot recently…).

Finally, some food related things: croissants here are really good, I’ve been eating a lot of them. I also went to a really good hummus place with some ultimate players after the hat tournament. It was a small place, near the harbor, and unfortunately I don’t remember the name, but their hummus was excellent. In haifa, I ate at a really good cafe near the entrance to the Baha’i Garden, where I got a mozzarella, pesto sandwich and a salad. The sandwich was one of the better ones of that kind that I’ve had.

In summary, things have really picked up here. I’m really glad that I play ultimate, and that it’s a pretty big thing here too.