Pics:




Random doggie opener!


The weather, the day I got my haircut. The clouds were so gorgeous and... expansive, abnormally, I had to take a pic. This is a view from my town from across the road from it; I marked the size of a house in red.


This is what the same field looks like often in the morning in winter. Being able to see the fog settled low on the field before it dissipates is the only good thing about being woken up to drive my sister to the bus station at 6AM. (Photo taken from sister's phone.)


Home


The Night of the Haircut, I drove someone to Tel Aviv at 4AM. It started raining, then hailing, and I went on this strange rain/light photo spree.






Traffic light


As you can see via pretty HUD, my speed was 0 km/h.


And, uh, slightly faster this time. I've gotten into the unfortunate habit of taking photos while driving. Don't try this at home, kids >_<. The road back from Tel Aviv.

Random road shots:


"Falafel on the road"




What the road home looks like in the daylight. ALL THE TRAFFIC LIGHTS LOOK THE SAME, it's not very interesting.


Creepy lady at ADP reunion, lol. She was not really creepy, she was very pleasant, but somehow she came out looking not unlike a witch.
I actually took photos here just so I remember to talk about it. So, a week ago I went to the reunion with the Israelis and Palestinians I was in the US with this summer. It was good and strange and all the same feelings of guiltguiltguilt came back up when it turned out that for many of them, it was the second time in their life in Jerusalem, and they only had one-day permits until 10PM, which meant that they got to spend a few hours in the city in the morning and... that's about it.

Like staying in touch with them after the US, and like being with them in the US, really, seeing them was a little awkward. It's so hard to communicate with the language barrier, it makes everything stilted and official and shallow, and I remember it was like that in the US too. It took time to warm up enough to have actual long, deep conversations, as much as is possible, and you can't really spring back into that in a 2-hour reunion with donors and officials walking around, so what's left is smalltalk, which was a little disappointing.

At the same time, it felt good to see them, and it felt like they were happy to see us too. Well, me anyway, and I'm the only one I care about. Greeting them was a little awkward -- handshake? hug? kiss? what should I do what's appropriate, and in the end they all initiated a handshake + three air kisses combo, which felt weird but hey, whatever. (There was also awkwardness for me, at least, when my prof arrived and there was a round of hugs and kisses with him too -- Israeli, so half-hug plus two cheek-kisses -- and it was super weird for me, mostly because I haven't even handed my final paper in yet and meep weirdness.)

The movie-presentation thing I'd edited was a success, so that was nice; everyone laughed out loud a lot and people asked for copies later. The US ambassador (left in the pic) gave a motivational speech thing, as did all the profs, and all in all the "official" conversation was a little tedious but most of all, meeting the people was nice.

After it was over, a few of the Israelis (I really don't think I've been as close to any group of uni students as these people, which is so great -- it keeps being fun seeing them again, even the annoying ones, we know each other's quirks and annoyances and I feel comfortable with them) went for dinner in Abu Ghosh, but I could not join because I was meeting... minglingcrab! THAT'S RIGHT, BITCHES. My first new year's resolution for 2011 completed, and it was AWESOMECUPCAKES is what it was. I kind of want to thank Adam Lambert for getting me to meet so many awesome people :-)




Taken on Friday morning, on my way back from brunch with the seminar Israelis and the Oberlin profs who are visiting here, taken with my new iPod camera so y'all can see how short my hair is :D it is down to my shoulders and that is all!


The same afternoon, same iPod, baby sis eats the most perfect apple I have ever seen in my life. look at that.


So for me and baby sis's birthdays, my mom made food from a literature-inspired cookbook, where every dish is something described in a book. It was both amazingly awesome and delicious :D We were 9 people, Just us and my aunt's family and my grandmother, so it was small and comfortable and the food was so good:


This was just a decoration my sister put on the plates when she set the table -- my mom loves decorating plates with tiny tiny appetizers, and it's hereditary. Here: mint leaves, kiwi, bananas, and half a fig (HI minglingcrab HI :D)


The most amazing potato soup I have ever tasted, from Günter Grass's The Flounder.


"Why, you see, the girls are always buying them, and unless you want to be thought mean, you must do it too. It's nothing but limes now, for everyone is sucking them in their desks in schooltime, and trading them off for pencils, bead rings, paper dolls, or something else, at recess. If one girl likes another, she gives her a lime. If she's mad with her, she eats one before her face, and doesn't offer even a suck. They treat by turns, and I've had ever so many but haven't returned them, and I ought for they are debts of honor, you know."
Sweet pickled limes lemons, from Little Women


...okay this was just rice.


Garlic roast beef, from Bialik's General Onion and General Garlic. My dad bought the the 5 pound piece of meat in the Ramle market that morning.


Iraqi salad from Eli Amir's The Dove Flyer. The amazing thing is that this salad was seasoned with no olive oil and no salt at all, which is like blasphemy for me, and it was still delicious.


Tabule, from Eli Amir's Yasmin, rich with pomegranates and man, so good.


Okay, this one wasn't from a book as well -- my sister had made pie crust for something and then decided not to bake it, so my mom improvised to make the BEST PIE EVER. Check it out:


*____*. Right?


Cornflour pie with nuts and prunes, from S.Y. Agnon's A Simple Story. This one was... a little weird, was. It felt very... appropriately late-19th-centuryish, lol.

One of the awesomest things was how during the course of the meal people kept referring to the dishes by their author's names. "Can someone pass me Agnon?" "Man, the Bialik is delicious." "Seconds for the Eli Amir please!" :D

And finally, the regular birthday desserts, baked with no relation to the themed meal:


Chocolate cake :D It was, uh, bigger than it looks here. And wow, now that I think about it I'm not sure I even tasted it! I tend to gravitate towards:


CHEESECAKE, BABY \o/

Finally finally, I would just like to share how fantastically fantastic (and fashionable!) my grandmother looks at 80:

Just. ♥.

(For the record, it should be said that a nose job and two face lifts were involved in achieving the look; IMO she looks better these days than she did at 60. This does not negate the awesome.)

For my birthday, I invited a few friends to a late 10:30PM dinner at a place that serves breakfast food 24/7 :D Before that, I invited people to go to the demo in Tel Aviv with me. I have a friend who celebrates birthdays by inviting people over to do volunteer work with him, and since I wanted to go to the demo anyway, I took it as inspiration to encourage whoever wanted to come to join. And one person did! Almost, she actually came when it was already over /o\ but whatever.

Anyway, unlike the few previous demonstrations I'd gone to, I actually enjoyed this one, insofar as you can enjoy a demonstration against the scarily deteriorating state of democracy in your state. I actually believed in what I was there for, there were no pointless, populistic shouting, there were lots of people without being stifling or unbearably crowded, there were old people and entire families with kids. Of all the recent events, that included state-employed rabbis issuing a letter calling not to marry Arabs and a few small incidents and then, two weeks ago, the Knesset deciding to found a parliamentary committee to investigate the funding sources of left-wing organizations to make sure no hostile interests were involved, what the fuck, that was the worst, and... I don't know how much of an impact it made, but it felt good to show that someone cares.


"Yes to Zionism and democracy, no to fascism and racism"


"Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies" (you have to imagine that in Hebrew, all of this rhymes)


"Stop the occupation". I think this is like Jon Stewart's "legalize pot" sign; eventually it's going to show up at every left-wing demonstration.


"Fighting for democracy"


"I'm Jonathan Pollack" (a left-wing activist who was sentenced to three months in jail a few weeks ago)


"Leftist patriot"

I spent the time hanging out with some army/school friends, and the demo ended an hour before I thought it would so we sat at a cafe for an hour with another friend of mine and it was really, really fun. And then it was birthday time!


Champagne with litchi \o/

I arrived just in time with my coffee-friend and everyone else was late, which I totally deserve as the most chronically tardy person I know, so it was fine :-) The dinner breakfast included various dishes of poached eggs, which are amazing, and finally dessert:


Pancakes with white chocolate and espresso, here poured over the stack.

...basically I need to stop eating until the end of the month.

Other than one uncomfortable moment (my friend's boyfriend jokingly talked about how his friend was falsely accused of rape. OKAY.), I had a great time and I think most people knew one another and had a nice time talking to the people they were sitting next to, which is always what I worry about when I invite people I know from different places to an event. The best part was when a few people told me individually that they had a good time. So YAY :D I always feel uncomfortable throwing things in my honor, so to speak, so that was good.

The drive home was kind of breathtakingly foggy:


This is the same road I showed a photo of in the rain at the beginning of the post.

When I reached the outskirts of my town, I had to stop and take a photo of this:




It was so eerie and gorgeous and completely different from what it looks like in the daytime.

And some last uni pics:


On Sunday I took my camera to school. It was one of the only days of rain we had, and everything was chilly and green.


The uni's main library.


whee puddles :D


And my secret stash of kumquats in the Gilman courtyard! See the tree on the bottom left? So much fruit.


Easily pickable through the second story window, nom nom nom.


This, however, is what the uni looked like today. Sunny! Again.


I have a window between classes where I have lunch with a friend every week, and somehow we always end up sitting where a rainbow strip slants down from the window. This was from a few weeks ago, but today's was so much cooler:


I kind of hate ending with a portrait photo instead of landscape, but there you have it :-) It's a rainbow, so not so bad, I think, not so bad.

So hey, that took just as long as I thought it would! :D And now for a late dinner and to try and answer this afternoon's meme.