Lila Lavan

It's late morning, but I'm free because I finished my job a while ago. It's not so bad, I guess. I wake up tired and annoyed that I have to clean, and the job is kind of exhausting and so hot (after a little while there is usually sweat streaming down my face), but by now it only takes us a little more than two hours to finish everything, and I have the rest of the day off. Sarah from Australia, the girl I work with, is really sweet. And sometimes mopping the floor can even be rhythmic and relaxing.

So this past Thursday, instead of going to the pub on the kibbutz as usual, a bunch of us took a sherut (big cab) into Haifa for this street party they had there. This big street was closed off to cars, and all the bars and pubs had tables and were serving people in the streets. There was music playing and huge sweaty suffocating crowds. Lazar and I broke away from the rest of our ulpan group to find my friend Kara Block from Vassar. She's doing research at the University of Haifa this summer. It was nice to see her and (try to) talk to her a little bit over the ridiculous noise and throngs of people. After a while she went home and Lazar and I met up with our friends Lucy and Michelle from the ulpan, sat at a restaurant for a while, decided we'd had enough, and grabbed a cab back.

On Friday, I travelled with my ulpan friends Michelle, Anita, and Chen to the Kineret, the Sea of Galilee. Chen's cousins took us, and together we were a group of over ten people. It's very interesting there...we got there around six and set up the tents and grill and started bbq-ing. All around us, every five or ten feet were tents, grills, mattresses, boomboxes, nargilas (hookahs), backgammon sets. It was so crowded and loud! The water was nice, kind of warm, not salty, no jellyfish (meduzot). The jellyfish in the oceans are supposed to be vicious, so it's a big plus that the Kineret doesn't have any. We saw the sun set over the mountains on the other side of the Kineret, and we swam and ate and floated well into the night. It's so hot there that it's really comfortable in the water even at midnight, and there are people who are awake and swimming and haning out all night long. The next day was SO HOT. I heard it was 45 degrees celsius, but regardless, it was probably the worst heat I've ever been in all my life. I slathered sunscreen all over myself a few times, but I still got a decent burn. Around 2 we decided we absolutely couldn't stand the heat anymore, and we packed up and left. Before that, I alternated between thinking I was going to die or pass out from the heat, and falling asleep on a big blue mattress in the water.

In other news: I have a root canal scheduled for half an hour from now.