Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Midterms and Thanksgiving!

The past couple of weeks have been very hectic for me, so I've been neglecting my blog, but here's a quick post to let ya'll know what I have been up to.

First, I have been swamped with midterms. For my Jewish Settlement in the Land of Israel class I had to write a 10 page paper on a topic of my choice. I decided to write about UN Resolution 181 which passed 11/29/1947 (Israelis call the day ט בנובמברכ(. My essay focused on why countries voted in favor of the partition plan. I had a variety of case studies—Sweden, Finland, the Soviet Union, and the United States—as well as more general observations. All of the research took up a lot of time.

On top of writing a 10 page paper, I got sick for a few days. I had a low grade fever and felt absolutely miserable, especially since I had a Hebrew midterm that week as well. I got better in time to take my midterm, but I made some pretty stupid mistakes on the test.

I've also had midterms in my two other classes as well. For my Palestinian History class we had our test in class—thirty multiple choice questions. It was fairly simple and I did well. For my Greco Roman history class my midterm was a take home exam with three three-page essays. It's due today and I just recently finished going over all my essays for the last time. I wrote about the problem with studying Second Temple Judaism, the uses of Hellenism by the Hasmonean Dynasty and Herod, and lastly, I compared to scholarly articles. Sounds boring right? Well it was rather tedious and I am happy to be done.

Unfortunately, I have another 10 page paper to do for my internship for UCLA this week and then I'm free (mostly) until finals. So what else I have been up?

Well, I went to Sanda's last weekend for Thanksgiving and all of us girls (Sanda, Stefanie, and I) had a spa day on Friday. We went to an amazing place near Safed and all got massages. It was my first time and I absolutely loved it. (I will post pictures sometime soon). On Thursday, I had a vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner, complete with tofurky and pumpkin cheesecake. Friday I had a more traditional Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and stuffing, etc.

Then, a few days ago, Rothberg in their infinite wisdom decided that Rachel and I needed more roommates and three new people moved in. They are all Israeli, two boys and one girl. So far they all seem to be pretty nice, but I haven't had much time to talk to them yet. We all seem to have different schedules, so I've only talked to Anat, the girl, who is also majoring in history. I helped her a little bit with one of her assignments, though she had to translate everything I said into Hebrew. Eventually, I might ask them to help me with some of my Hebrew homework, though I usually do okay. At least they brought a lot of kitchen supplies. We now have a microwave, toaster oven, cappuccino machine, and coffeemaker. We also have new rugs, tablecloths, and bathmats. They brought some pictures as well but so far they haven't hung anything up but I'm hoping they do so our apartment won't be quite so barren.
Anyway, that's been my last few weeks in a nutshell. This Friday I'm heading to Tel Aviv to check out Nachalat Binyamin (נחלת בנימין) an artists' market. I went once before and had a great time. I'm hoping that they have more stuff because it's Chanukah. (Here's the website: http://www.nachalatbinyamin.com/en-Default.aspx) Then, I am taking the train up to visit Sanda. And that's it. I will try and post more pictures soon!    

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