akrish

It’s been awhile since I wrote about Israel and what I’m up to so here goes…

If you read my last post about Israel, you’d know that I played in an ultimate tournament, met a bunch of people through ultimate and have been having a generally good time. So that was two weeks ago (the week of June 14-18th) and yeah that week was pretty awesome. I hung out a lot with people I had met through ultimate and had a lot of stuff to do.

That wednesday, I hung out with my friend Steve, and in part of our hanging out we went to a Falafel stand in town. Now this is ordinarily uneventful news, except on Thursday night, I went to play ultimate with a local team and got dropped off pretty close to my house, but I was so weak that I could barely make it up to my room. Fortunately, the next day was Friday (the weekend), so I spent that day pretty much sleeping. I think I slept like 18+ hours on Friday alone.

Turns out I got food poisoning. I’m pretty sure it was from the falafel, because that was the only out-of-the-ordinary thing I had eaten that whole week. So Friday I was really miserable but managed to sleep a lot and I felt quite a bit better by the next day. On Saturday, a family that I know here offered to pick me up and let me get better at their house. They called a doctor who, although he barely spoke english, managed to diagnose me and prescribed me some antibiotics. I spent the day and night at my friends’ house and they really took good care of me.

I took Sunday off, but I was feeling much better and moved back to my room. I decided to go to work on Monday. From then on the week was fairly uneventful, work had its share of ups and downs; there were times when I didn’t really have anything to do, and there were times when there was tons of interesting work to do. This coming week, Igor (the grad student who I am working with) and Professor Shamir will be away at a conference, so they gave me a bunch of stuff to do that should keep me busy.

Other than that, during the week, I really didn’t do much. I was still a bit shaken up from being sick and didn’t want to push myself and get worse. I pretty much hung out in my dormitory and kept myself busy.

Yesterday though, I went into town with Jake, my neighbor who is pretty much doing the same thing as I am in Israel. We wandered around for awhile and found a place to eat when my friend Jesse (from ultimate) called and said he was having a barbeque and invited us to stop by. It turned out the place we were eating was directly under his apartment so we ate and headed up to his place. The barbeque was awesome, I met a bunch of naturally english speaking med students, ate some really good food, and had a great time hanging out on Jesse’s roof.

And today, I went into Jaffo with two of my friends, went to an amazing hummus place, wandered around the flea market and then went to the beach. The beach was relaxing and I’m disappointed that I haven’t been spending more time there. I guess it wouldn’t be as much fun if you go by yourself, but now that I have friends to hang out with, I think I will be taking advantage of the beach that’s 10 minutes away!

So the last couple of days have been pretty jam-packed and fun, but the week preceding was horrible. And of course things are exaggerated because I was sick, but I think I’m going to have my ups and downs here. There’ll be times when I have a bunch of stuff to do and will barely realize I’m away from home, and there’ll be times when I’m just dying to fly back to the states. There seems to be an inverse correlation between how social I am and how much I want to go home. When I was sick and couldn’t hang out with people, I really just wanted summer to end and to go home. But these past couple of days, I’ve been kind of sad that I only have a couple of weeks left here.

And that’s the last couple of weeks. Up next, I’m working tomorrow so that I can take Wednesday off and go travel to the the Sea of Galilee. And I’m also planning a trip to Petra in Jordan, which is supposed to be amazing. Stay tuned!