First week of Ulpan

On Sunday the ulpan officially began and it was the start of 5 months of Hebrew classes 5 days a week 5 hours a day starting at 830AM.  The only good thing about that is that my classroom happens to be exactly 37 steps away from my room.  We had a bunch of introductory exercises to meet other people in the ulpan.  They broke us into groups based on our native languages and we did some icebreaking games in order to learn people`s names and meet a lot of people.  They said that there are about 150 people in this program, and we represent 25 different countries from around the world.  The first thing we did was write a Hebrew test so that they can place us in an appropriate class.  I was placed in the highest class level and we have a class of 9 people.  This class consists of 2 people from the US, 2 from Australia, and then one person from Canada (me), Mexico, Uruguay, Latvia and Sweden.

Its going to take a while to get used to sitting in a classroom everyday learning for 5 hours a day.  On top of that its going to be very difficult to get used to doing homework. These things I haven't done since university (and how much learning and homework I did then is still up for debate).  In class we are working on listening to the news on the radio and reading from the newspapers.  These are the two things that give me problems with the language and I would like to better understand whats going on in the news, so it looks like the Hebrew classes will be quite good for me and that I will learn a lot from them.  We also work on all aspects of learning the language from reading, writing, speaking, grammar, etc.

After the class day ends at 1245PM, we have the rest of the day off.  We get lunch and dinner everyday.  For those who know me or have read this blog extensively you might have noticed a frequently occurring theme of "food" that I talked a lot about in the blog.  Note that the word food is in quotations because a lot of the time that I was in the army the things they fed us were often difficult to classify as real food.  At the ulpan, the food is what I expected.  The food is similar to what one might find on a kibbutz. The best part of it is convenience, and not necessarily the taste.  I'm on the first floor so I only have to walk down one flight of stairs to get to the lunch room.  All in all, the food is descent and I will be able to live with it for the next five months.  You also don't have to worry, there is plenty of food to satisfy my appetite - I won't starve to death here.

The rest of the afternoons have been doing important things like opening a bank account, picking up my ID card, getting health insurance, and other important things that involve waiting in long lines.  I happened to show up at the post office at the wrong day of the month. After waiting an hour and having dozed off for about half an hour in the chair, I started talking to the guy sitting next to me who was 50 numbers ahead of me in the line.  I was asking if it was always this long of a lineup and he said nope, just today because of taxes.  I said, of course this would happen to me.  I thanked him for the tip and said that I was a oleh chadash (new immigrant) from Canada. At this point (after 5 minutes of conversing with him in perfect Hebrew) he starts talking to me in English!  His English was horrible and he was struggling to form the first sentence, to which I said to him in Hebrew that he can talk to me in Hebrew, like we have been doing for the past 5 minutes! This is the best example I can provide of how too many people here insist on talking to me in English because I am a foreigner even though I can converse perfectly in Hebrew. The man was really nice and he told me to come up to the window with him so I could do what I needed to do and get out quickly, as I would have been waiting another hour to do something that took me literally 45 seconds to do. 


At the bank, there was one specific teller that was supposed to be very nice and was helping all the people from the ulpan to set up their accounts.  When I sat down and started to talk to her in Hebrew she said "wait, your at the ulpan? What are you doing there?  Your Hebrew is perfect".  Many other people I have spoken to have been surprised to find out that I am here doing an ulpan.  They think that my Hebrew is great.  This woman was really nice.  For signing up for an account we got a backpack, and a dictionary as gifts, and when she realized that it is almost my birthday she went and got me another gift and wished me a happy birthday!  After I told her that my Hebrew is so good because I was in the army, she said that maybe I still have money from the army waiting for me.  After getting released from the army soldiers receive a grant that can be used for several things.  I was unsure if I was entitled to it because I was volunteering, but long story short she found me almost $4000 that I didn't know that I was entitled to!  All in all, my banking experience was very successful unlike every other banking experience I have had in Israel.


Thursday evening a group of us went out partying in Tel Aviv.  At the first club I randomly bumped into a friend of mine from the US that was with me in the army who was shocked to see me because he had no idea that I had made aliyah!  Two of my commanders from the army joined met up with us for our long interesting night of partying.  After the night of partying we ended up at the beach at around 430 and waited until 8AM when we were finally able to go get our bags that we had stored with someone else.  During that time, we were watching a search boat and helicopter search for someone who had just drowned.  Once we got our things we changed into beachwear and played some frisbee, went in the water and hung out by the beach and caught some sun.  By 1030AM it was starting to get really hot and I headed back to Jerusalem for Shabbat.  We had spent the perfect amount of time having fun on the beach, and it was a lot more fun because the temperature was bearable in the early morning.  The beach was practically empty, so we had plenty of room to ourselves to throw around the frisbee.  


Once back at the ulpan, Shabbat was pretty relaxing as I had to catch up on the sleep that I didn`t have on Thursday night in Tel Aviv, finished my homework for Sunday and played some frisbee and went for a run.  We even have a test this week on the stuff we learned during the first week.  ugh - I really am back at school.