hello hello
here are a few pictures from october and the cruise, more to come. the first is of me and emily, from when her parents were in town. this deserves to be up here because it was a weekend that was remarkably full of raincoats (see: my avi chai jacket and emily's gold lamee raincoat that i bought her as a joke for $3.50) and me shamelessly accepting free food from the hyatts. delightful.


next we find a picture from the u-haifa overseas halloween party. somehow a whole lot of planning and emailing went into what ended up being (nearly) free pizza from pizza hut (im OBSESSED with pizza hut in israel...its problematic... i have it like 4 times a week...and am starting to have a crush on the guy who takes the orders. green card for free breadsticks??) and the movie hocus pocus, which i had actually never seen, since bette midler's makeup in it on the cover picture frightened me as a child...and still does. anyway, we had to come "in costume" and apparently i was one of three who ended up dressing as thug/ghetto. im ghetto detroit. to the left of me is this kid rob, from delaware, and to the right is rafi, from great neck (long island). gang-stas.


the next picture is from the cruise, it's the four of us excited to be entering turkey! left to right is amy o, austen, me and yair. behind is is alanya, turkey. i cant tell if we are pretending to flex or what, but we were certainly excited. it was a gray and kind of gross day, which ended up meaning that we went to the hammam (turkish bath, more on that later) and as we were finsihing up there, we were hurried back onto shuttle vans to return to the ship, saying that we had to get out of port and back on to sea, since there was a storm and the weather was gross. this meant the boat was unbeleivably rocky that night, and though it is several days later, i still have vertigo/wobbly leg syndrome. thats the technical name. i think. let's move on.


um, because of the waves and bad weather, the main show was cancelled that night... this is a picture of the show that didn't get cancelled. remember, this was a $200 cruise, so some tackiness can be expected. it was glorious.

the final picture in this installment is from cyprus. because of some unfortunate shabbat prohibitions, amy and yair didn't get to play with us in cyprus. austen and i ended up playing in lemassol (the city in cyprus) with our new friend tomer, featured in this picture. yes, another gay israeli tomer. this one is 17 and adorable. i wanted to take him home and keep him forever. he won the cruise on some kind of contest on a tv show, and brought his sister with him as his guest. she was kind of a drag, but he was great. anyway, this is us in a store in lemassol, where austen bought a scarf made of llama wool. maybe it was alpaca. anyway, this is us posing with a llama. and yes, austen and i are wearing santa hats. they were 50 cents, and made of felt. excpet that they were 50 cents of cypriot pound, which is really like $17. ok like $2 or something, but whatever. anyway, throughout the streets of cyprus there were wreaths and it was exciting to see christmas stuff, thoguh bizarre because it's just starting to feel like fall. anyway, we got in the christmas spirit because we are tacky americans, and wore the hats all over cyprus. and onto the boat again. it was great.

anyway, those are the first few. ill post more when i can, as well as some actual info about the trip, classes, life here, upcoming excitement, etc. lots to say. fear not. there are more pictures and i will be adding albums to yahoophotos soon. i promise. in the meantime, enjoy this, and look forward to pictures of the gheri-curl isrullet (israeli mullet) that was on our cruise, pics our new friend guy- israel's next pop star, several shots of us jumping (apparently this was a theme of the trip...they are ridiculous), and maybe even a few in which i am eating/drinking/making a sarcastic face. crazy i know.

more to come.
-am