My best friend from school, Meg, came to visit me after her semester in London ended. We went to the beach, wandered around Jerusalem and Yafo, and she went to the Dead Sea and Masada. When she called and asked if she could come visit, Hilary and I had already booked our hotel and flight to Cairo, so Meg came with us. We left late Thursday night after checking out of the dorms and moving all of my stuff to my friends Jono and Jeremy's place in south Tel Aviv. They gave Meg a rough time in security (she looked pretty [View Full Entry]

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Israel's day of remembrance for fallen soldiers was last Wednesday, and I sang in service our program put on last Tuesday night. The next day, Hilary and I left early in the morning for Eilat. On Yom Hazikaron and Yom Hashoah, a siren goes off every year, and the whole country stops and stands for a minute and listens to it. On Yom Hashoah I was in class, a siren went off during our Yom Hazikaron service, and our bus to Eilat pulled over and we all stood up for the siren. Eilat is interesting. The city is really small, the [View Full Entry]

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I spent my Pesach break in London and Ireland. A bunch of my close friends are studying in London, so I stayed with them in their dorm near Kings Cross. They had been complaining about their dorm, because it's brand new but nothing quite works right, but it's like palace compared to my prison of a dorm room. It was really nice to see them again, but it was strange to be in London with them- I had planned on studying there for this semester up until late last summer. The day after I got there, their program took them to [View Full Entry]

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Last weekend, our program took us on a trip to the south. I love the Negev. I think the desert is absolutely breathtaking, and even after a weekend of the heat and mountains of sand and craters of sand, it was still amazing to look at by the end of the weekend. We left early Friday morning and drove down to the south, stopping for breakfast along the way. We got to our first hike, a national park that started in this valley that was created by erosion. The trail led us up a whole bunch of stairs and ladders and [View Full Entry]

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Classes started last week. I'm taking Hebrew plus four other classes: Israeli Drama, the History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, After Auschwitz: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Culture, and Jewish Education. The Israeli Drama class is really fun, I miss all the drama I used to do in high school. Last night we had to read a play and analyze one character in it, and then today in class we read parts of it, playing the character we had analyzed. It was really nice to read a play aloud again. The class about the Arab-Israeli conflict is good; it's very lecture-based [View Full Entry]

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Istanbul is absolutely gorgeous. The whole city is dotted with beautiful mosques and the whole city seems to pulse to the call to prayer five times a day. From the plane, the minarets spiral upwards, away from the city. The first full day we were there, Hilary, Jodi, Nataly, Emily, and I wandered a little bit with the help (kind of) of my new map before we finally asked directions to Sultanehmet Square. We somehow managed to take the tramvay to Sultanehmet and we walked to the Blue Mosque but got there just as they were closing to visitors for prayer. [View Full Entry]

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Not too much has been going on here. I've been walking to the beach and reading and studying there. It's really relaxing there- we found a restaurant on the beach that has couches that are long enough to lounge on, and we go there and get a drink and read and relax. Yesterday our program took us to Jerusalem for the day. It was about 15 degrees colder than it had been the day before and it rained on and off all day. We went to the Kotel and around the Western Wall where it meets the southern end and talked [View Full Entry]

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In typical Casey Farin fashion, whenever things seem like they should start getting better, they get worse first. And I usually just respond by laughing. Yesterday morning I woke up with my right eye crusted shut. Pinkeye. My suitemate Debbie woke up a little later and looked in the mirror at her eye all red and goopy and, flustered, says, "I have pinkeye!" So at least we both had it. We ended up going to a doctor who spoke very very minimal English and somehow conveyed to him that we had pinkeye, that our throats hurt, we were congested, and had [View Full Entry]

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The past few days have been really stormy- we've lost power for 2-3 hours a day for the past two days while it's been snowing in Jerusalem. Last night I studied for my Ulpan test by the light of my computer because the power was out and I didn't want to walk all the way to the 24-hour coffee shop/restaurant where I spend a lot of time. The thing is, Coffee to Go is really close to my dorm, it was just miserable out. My cell phone broke yesterday. I put my purse on a chair, my purse slid off the [View Full Entry]

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So I've been in Israel for only two weeks but it feels like a lot longer. Our flight took off on the 14th from JFK and we got here on the 15th. It was a group flight, so a lot of Americans from my program were on the flight, and I ended up sitting with two of them, Jodi and Mark. Being at the airport was like a mad dash to meet people as fast as possible, and we were already talking loudly amongst ourselves when someone from El Al came over and yelled at us to get on the plane [View Full Entry]

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