akrish

As usual, I have been negligent of my blog for the past several months. As soon as the semester started I got really caught up in school work and completely forgot that I even owned a blog. While this has happened over and over again, this time was worse because my contract with my hosting company expired so akrish was completely taken down. Honestly, I didn’t even notice until my friend Gary sent me an email asking me about it (thanks Gary). Anyway, a couple of days ago I renewed my contract and so akrish is back up. Winter break is starting in a couple of weeks and I’ll probably write more then.

I’ve been getting into bouldering/climbing sort of as cross-training for ultimate. It’s also something my brother is excited about and he got me into it during Thanksgiving. Anyway, watch this video. It’s crazy.

I have a final in a couple of days, so until next time (which is hopefully not in four months…).

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.

It’s high time that I wrote something about Ultimate; I’ve been playing for this entire school year and I’d say I’ve become kind of obsessed. So obsessed, that I just spent the last minutes (between writing the previous sentence and this one) watching videos of ultimate on youtube. Ultimate has essentially replaced soccer for me. In high school, I was obsessed with soccer, I would watch games whenever they were on (and often record them), I would run and lift weights to improve my fitness for soccer, and of course I played competitively for a club team and for my high school. This year, I’ve been watching ultimate videos whenever I get free time, I train for ultimate and I played for Thugmo (our Men’s B team).

I have a decent amount to write about with regards to ultimate (of course keep in mind that I’ve been playing for less than a year) and I’m sure there will be many more posts to come about the sport. For this post, I wanted to write about throwing. During the year, I usually spent a couple of hours a week outside of practice just throwing a disc around with a couple of my teammates. I attribute a lot of my improvement over the past year to those sessions outside of practice, as I’ve noticed that my throws are significantly better than they were at the beginning of the year. My coach also repeatedly told us this: throwing is the best way for a new ultimate player to get better.

One thing that I really like about throwing sessions is that you get to goof around. At practices, I spend most of my time working on my real throws, the ones I’d use in games. When I go out and throw with my teammates, yeah we work on real throws, but we also work on stupid throws. Like today, we started out normally, throwing standard flicks and backhands, then started mixing things up with high release throws and upside down throws. Finally, we played a 4v4 scrimmage with only left handed throws. It was really fun, but I’d argue that the scrimmage wasn’t all that beneficial.

There is some benefit to the goofing around though. Some of those throws are really useful (especially hammers and high release backhands), but practice and tournaments aren’t the place to perfect them. That’s where throwing sessions come in. You get to work on the throws that you don’t have, and get them to the point where you feel comfortable throwing them in games. I’ve been working on my high release flick and my left-handed backhanded, both of which I feel can be useful short-distance throws, and I’m almost at the point that I’m willing to throw them in games. The same can be said with my hammer. Throwing sessions have really increased the types of throws that I am comfortable with.

From another perspective, as a overworked student, throwing is a great break. When I was a freshman we used to play soccer as a break, but for soccer you need at least 6 people. With ultimate, you can have a pretty good time with just one other person, and I can almost always find someone on my team who is willing to throw with me for an hour. It’s really easy to organize a throwing session, and I derive a lot of enjoyment from it.

I guess I’m just really excited to be playing a competitive sport again. After a couple of years without it, I realized how much I missed it. Last year, I tried filling the gap with running, but the lack of a close team didn’t cut it for me (although I do still enjoy running). It’s been really amazing to be back on a competitive team.

I’ll leave you with a video I watched while writing this. Enjoy.

If you didn’t see this last night, then you really missed out. Watch it right now, it is truly amazing. I think it’s one of the most incredible moments of the olympics so far.

After watching swimming events for the past couple of nights, I’ve developed a new fondness of swimming. I always knew that swimming was pretty insane and I even tried to get into it last summer, by swimming a couple of times a week on top of my running, but I’ve realized that I’m a pretty bad swimmer and should maybe just stick to running.

I’m really excited to watch more swimming, so it’s good that it’s been getting a lot of coverage, thanks to Michael Phelps. At the same time, I can’t wait for the track and field events to start up, because those athletes are also insane.

And so it begins; I think the most hyped olympics in awhile (at least in my short lifetime) starts today. Well technically it started earlier today. Since it’s almost 1am on Saturday in Beijing right now, I’m assuming that the opening ceremonies are over.

I’m really excited for the games because there hasn’t been much to watch on tv in the way of sports. This summer started of amazingly with the NBA Playoffs, the Euro Cup (probably the most excited soccer tournament I’ve ever seen), along with the French and Wimbledon Opens (also two of the more exciting tennis championships I’ve seen), and finally the Golf U.S. Open (which was absolutely amazing).

Usually I don’t watch sports that much, but this summer I’ve been watching more tv that usual, and have gotten sick of the same old garbage that’s ordinarily on. It also helps that I have people to watch sports with: Basketball with my housemates, soccer with people at work, and tennis with my dad.

So I always find the Olympics pretty exciting because it’s so competitive and it’s amazing to watch people who are that good at what they do (I guess you could say the same for anything though). But some of the events are more exciting than others. I’m looking forward to watching soccer, water polo, diving, some of the track and field events, and some of the gymnastics. I’m a big fan of watching the sports that don’t get much air time, so I also look forward to watching some of those as well.

In terms of nations that I’m cheering for, India seems to have a decent chance in both shooting and men’s doubles tennis, so it would be pretty cool if we could pull in a couple of medals. There’s also been some talk about China trying to oust the US as the “overall winner” of the games, so it’ll be pretty interesting to see how that plays out.

Rather than embed a video or something, there’s already a bunch of content on youtube and nbcolympics.com so just check those out instead.

I’ll be writing a bit about the olympics depending on how much I’m watching and wether I have other things to write about or not.