Chanuka...

...is always a really busy time at home, but in the past week and a half or so, I've discovered that it's just as chaotic here, only with better sufganiyot (more on that later). Updates from the last couple weeks:

-The North is no longer on fire; however, entire communities have been completely destroyed. It's awful. I don't know how much coverage this has gotten in the States, but it's pretty catastrophic. A youth village I have friends at (and stayed at last summer) is completely burnt to the ground, as well as a couple of kibbutzim, and hundreds of acres of forest area. It's truly heartbreaking. Anyone who gave me money for tzedaka in Israel, your money is being donated to the JNF to help rebuild and replant the North.

-Our siyur last week was to Chirbat Madras, which is this area near Bet Shemesh with these super cool underground caves. The first time I was in Israel my family got to go spelunking, but I was on crutches, so I couldn't. This siyur was AWESOME. Totally freaky, but awesome. We crawled through these little tunnels so tight that there were spots where I barely fit, and I'm one of the smallest people on my program. I was scared to death, but it was a very cool experience.

-So it turns out that I'm actually a pretty good cook (I'm turning into my parents... it's scary). Since the great feast I made on Thanksgiving, I've made another pumpkin pie, an apple pie (which was amazing), a fusilli alfredo feast, latkes a la Cary Robins (SO GOOD), and a lot of really odd and delicious vegetable creations. I don't have a TV with which to watch the Food Network, so when I'm bored, I look up recipes or surf on , which is the best website EVER. I plan to come home a master chef. :)

-On the topic of food, sufganiyot are a HUGE deal here. You see them in every shop window during Chanuka, even, like, lighting fixture wholesalers. Furthermore, a sufganiya in Israel is far from just a jelly donut. A Dunkin Donuts jelly donut is a deep fried, sugar coated, greasy disc of squishy dough filled with red jelly. A sufganiya, on the other hand, is a more lightly fried, less sugary ball of fluffy, non-greasy dough, filled with any variety of things, and lightly sprinkled with powdered sugar. I've seen sufganiyot filled with blueberry, apricot, and generic red jelly, chocolate, caramel, butterscotch, halva, vanilla or lemon custard, whipped cream, and even dulce de leche (the phonetic spelling of Spanish words in Hebrew is hilarious). I can't eat very many sufganiyot without seriously regretting it later, but I did get to try a dulce de leche one this year, and it was DELICIOUS. Chanuka is a great time to be in Israel. :)

-My Hebrew is improving DRASTICALLY. I can now interact with people on the street fairly confidently, and I understand pretty much everything. There's a homeless man named Albert who visits the Windows office every day because we give him tea and free clothes, and I talk to him in Hebrew all the time. This morning I got in an argument with the laundry people, in Hebrew. I'm not sure exactly what I said, but I'm pretty sure I won the argument. One of the really cool things about living in Tel Aviv, though, is that Hebrew and English are far from the only languages you hear. Half my neighborhood is foreign workers, so I hear Russian, French, Swahili, Amarik, Filipino, Vietnamese, and all sorts of crazy stuff. Today a bunch of Argentinian brothers approached me on the street and asked me for directions in very broken Hebrew. They were thrilled when I answered them in Spanish. South Tel Aviv has its sketchy aspects, and in general I'm not a fan, but it's totally worth living here for a while. Newton just feels SO far away.

-My old friend Katie Simon spent the last few weeks living on my roof, which was great. Although I didn't actually SEE her that much (she made a nest for herself under the solar panels on the upper roof deck, and then hardly ever came down), it was really nice having her around. Now she's off to Thailand and Vietnam, but we're going to miss her! All of the Aardvarks kind of got used to a strange girl living on my roof, and people were sad to hear that she was leaving.

-I'm out of town for the next several days, which should be really nice. I'm spending the weekend in Givat Haviva for a Shabbaton/seminar about the Arab-Israeli conflict, and then Monday through Wednesday I'm in the Arava Valley and Kibbutz Ketura for a field trip complete with day hikes, a seminar on peace, and an arts workshop. It should be really nice. Then I return on Wednesday night, and on Thursday my family is here! YAY!!!!!!!

That's all for now. Shabbat Shalom!