Living like a king

When I got back to base on Tuesday, the week was nearly half over. Instead of joining the rest of my pluga I joined in the middle of a week of ulpan (hebrew lessons). It was good to get a bunch of formal classes of hebrew as opposed to trying to learn it on the fly. The best part of the ulpan was that I lived like a king, and by king I mean jobnik. A jobnik as it sounds is someone in the army wthat has what can be compared to as a normal 9-5 job - only about 10% of the army is combat soldiers. Jobniks don't go through the same intensive training, they tend to sleep moer and even get to go home mostly every weekend if not every day. We were treated like real human beings. The people in charge of us were not commanders, so we could talk to them like normal people becuase there is no distance between them and us like there is with our commanders. They gave us a reasonable amount of time to do things - for example 20 minutest o do everything as opposed to breaking it down to (3.5 minutes to run and brush our teeth, then 4 minutes to run and shine our shoes, 4 minutes to shave, and 5 minutes to make our beds). They took away our guns because we don't need them when we sit in the classroom, so we didn't have to do guard duty and got to sleep 8 consecutive hours, whcih is practically an eternity. It's ironic that I got a better night sleep during the 2 days of ulpan than I did staying in a hotel with my parents for a week! My only responsibilities were to be in the classroom on time after the breaks and to stay awake all day , so it was kind of like a vacation. And the best part was that we were allowed to do as we pleased on our breaks including using our phones! So what was the downside to the ulpan? I missed out on the FUN stuff (yes I did say fun - read on). So I missed 3 hours of krav maga and getting gassed. What is getting gassed you ask? you stand in a tent with your gas mask on, they release the gas and you remove your mask. (Yes I did say fun stuff if it wasn't clear before). From what I heard it was obviousy horrible in the moment but awesome after it was all said and done.