lo ivrit?

First of all, I attend the Seeds of Peace binational seminar this weekend at Neve Shalom. I'm exhausted, but it was an incredible 2 days. Seeing some of my campers from last summer made me so so happy, even if I didn't really have much time to talk to them at all. Hopefully I'll be seeing many of them again soon on a more individual basis.

The point of this blog post is just to say that it is infinitely frustrating for me to not speak the language here. I firmly believe that if you're going to be in a country for more than just a couple weeks you need to make every effort you can to meet the culture you're living in at least halfway. While I am learning a little bit of Hebrew in my classes at Pardes, it's not modern conversational Hebrew, and I'm spending the vast majority of my time around English speakers speaking English. And I'm not in an English speaking country!! Yes, it is true, most people here speak English. But not everyone. Not necessarily the checkout lady at the grocery store or the cab driver who took me home this evening. And I may be able to manage sometimes with just a couple words, but it's not because I understand what's being said, it's because I'm picking up on social cues. When the cab driver turns to me and asks a question and the only word I understand is "yerushalayim" aka Jerusalem, I can figure out that I need to give him the name of the street where I want to go.

However, I am building my vocabulary. This weekend I gained a bunch more Hebrew words (yay for being around Israelis!), and I even learned a few new Arabic words as well (yay for being around Arabs!).

More to come... lilah tov!