Ciao, tutti! Hope that everyone is well and staying warm despite the wintry weather. Tel Aviv winter is mild so far, but today we are being treated to a rainy day. I am celebrating the blustery weather by doing laundry at the lovely Dizi - a cafe that just happens to have washers and dryers in addition to tasty food and drinks.
Last week, I finally returned to teaching and it was good to see the kids again (we had a hiatus during the Hamas-induced chaos). It's interesting teaching the "Google generation": the students don't really know how to research or formulate original thoughts and simply rely on Wikipedia and Google Translate to do their assignments. We have been helping them with Power Point presentations on the environment, which proves to be both challenging and amusing. First, I had one group talking about water pollution and they had the following sentence on their Power Point: "Water pollution is when the concentration of contaminants rises above the concentration of natural substances in the water." They barely understand what "pollution" means, let alone "concentration" and "contaminants." I was trying to get them to explain what pollution was in their own words and they came up with "the water is dirty."
I also had a group try to tell me that compost is made of organic materials like fruit, vegetables, egg shells, hair, and blood. I think they must have just looked up what "organic materials" meant without understanding what compost is. It took a lot to convince them that we really don't use hair and blood in compost. Then the last group's presentation about recycling plastic featured 4 slides, one of which had about 7 sentences about the recycling process and another was a link to a 5-minute Youtube video. I finally convinced them that their presentation would be better if they had more slides with pictures and explanations instead of just showing the video. I've found myself using phrases that I never thought would pass through my lips like "Are you ready to listen?" and "Is this Youtube video/One Direction/Justin Bieber part of your presentation?" Oy. There is never a dull moment with Israeli kids.
Outside of teaching, things are going well. My Ulpan has finally progressed past learning the Alef Bet and now we can say complex sentences like "I am sitting on a chair next to the window." On Sunday, we had a special Chanukah lesson to learn about the history of Chanukah and then we had a singer come teach us about 9 holiday songs. The French people in my class seemed to know all of the songs; the only ones I'd ever heard were "Hine Ma Tov" and "Hava Nagilah." But I gave it my best shot. Now the songs take turns getting stuck in my head because I don't know all of the words. My voice lessons are progressing well, as are my Alexander lessons. In my last Alexander lesson, we made an interesting discovery: what I perceive as jaw tension is not actually my jaw moving forward when I sing, but rather, my entire head! My teacher took a video of me singing up a few scales and then I suddenly understood why my lower back tends to lock up when I'm singing.
Last weekend we had another "Dialogues Seminar" in Ein Gedi with most of the people who live in my building as well as other people from the program who live in Jerusalem. Of course, there were also Israelis on the trip. The topic of discussion was everyone's favorite: Jewish Identity and the social problems facing Israel. Actually, I liked the Beit She'an seminar better, partly because of my facilitator and partly because my group this time had about 30 people, which was simply too many to be able to have proper discussions or to get to know people. However, I got to swim in the Dead Sea again and it was less hazy than when I was there a few weeks ago, so you could really see the Jordanian mountains on the other side. The beach had giant rocks and cobbles leading up to the shore and some of them were rather painful to walk on because they were encrusted in salt. But once I got off of the rocks, the water was quite nice and fairly warm. Some people even dug up mud to put on themselves to have a real Dead Sea experience. We also had a "hike" (really, a nature walk) in the Ein Gedi nature preserve, which was really beautiful.
So, life continues as normal in Israel. There are still mixed sentiments about the ceasefire, but personally, I am happy not to jump at every siren or car alarm that I hear. And I am looking forward to this weekend because I have an excuse to make latkes and applesauce :)
Raindrops and kruidnoten,
Daniella
