as a desperate plea to get me to stay, haifa has built a "roll bar" called sanchos...the logo has a donkey in a sombrero... this is as close to a mexican restaurant as haifa has, and it sprung up in the last 2 weeks. apparently 5 months of bitching and someone actually listened... however. as i said to my friend aaron laurito "i dont trust israelis making anything that rhymes with your last name"... mainly burritos. or fritos. or cheetos. or doritos. tostitos. taquitos. fajit...os. you get the point. actually, after a really fun dinner with my friend aviad at a non-specific asian place across the street from "sanchos," he made me go in and look at the menu before casting it off (as a native haifa-n, he is doing anything he can to get me to stay, i think he may have had to do with the building of sanchos come to think of it...). there was one vegetarian thing on the menu, and it was some sort of 'chimichanga.' i dont think so. for those of you who are familiar with hebrew, and those who arent, there is no hebrew letter for the sound "ch" so they use the letter tzadik, which usually makes a "tz" or "ts" sound, and put an apostrophe by it. there were far too many tzadik's in the spelling of "chimichanga" for me to be willing to put my appetite on the line... plus ill be home in 2 weeks for REAL mexican food (and byt hat i mean chipotle...and perhaps proper mexican food too), if ive held out for 5 1/2 months, i think i can make it...nice try haifa. trying to open a mexican restaurant really was one of the sweetest things anyone has ever done for me. but alas, america awaits.

i do love it here. a lot. things are great. you havent heard from me in a while because ive been busy dammit! and because most of my time spent on computers is spent translating documents for work at the shelter, responding to emails, straigtening out things for the end of the semester, and working on my thesissssss....which, already, i get the feeling will be the end of me. and its still december.

some highlights since last i wrote (with pictures! though i must say there are about 8billion more that im still trying to track down from people. in europe adam and i took a combined 1200 pictures, or something absurd like that. since arriving in israel on august 5th, i think ive taken a grand total of 4 pictures of my own... 3 of which were of my friend liz on study tour in a ridiculous grandma bathing suit (leopard print AND paisley [or amoeba, drew]) that she bought at the gift shop so she could go into the dead sea. and i think the other one was of my tan line at its most stark. clearly thats how i want to remember my 5 months in israel. anyway, here are some picutres and updates, hopefully more will happen at some point.

chanukkah! chanukkah in israel involved approximately 219823 sufganiot, which are delicioussss jelly donuts dusted with powdered sugar. they are everywhere, and were often free...including the free one i took on my way into the gym... you know you're in good shape when you find yourself licking powdered sugar off your fingers are you open the door to the gym... (my 2nd time there, ha). it was worth it. do you know how many times i passed the free sufganiot tables and didnt take one?? 8. 8 times i gave up free sufganiot. only taking one showed a lot of restraint. they are so delicious. instead of making potato latkes, israel makes donuts for chanukkah, as the whole religious/traditional significance relates back to the oil that lasted for 8 days...so the point is to use a lot of oil. gross huh? i love being a jew. (and repeating myself, because i feel like i already wrote that somewhere. oh well). anyway, chanukkah started out with my friend tamar from gw (who is at ben gurion university in beer sheva for the semester) coming up to haifa for shabbat. we made a big shabbat dinner, which included austen and some of my roommates. i made latkes from scratch...it was pretty baller. austen and tamar worked on decorations while i cooked, and made a menorah (actually, a chanukkiah... menorah is the generic term for 7-branched candelabra, whereas chanukkiah is the 9 branched one used on chanukkah) out of a sweet potato. we're scrappy. TAMAR still has the pictures of the latke/sweet potato menorah making processes. bother her until she sends them to me. tamar@gwu.edu. haha.

after dinner we went out to kiryat chaim, an area outside of haifa where tomer lives and went out with some of his friends, and appreciated the tasteful decor and music selection of one of the jillions of smoky, painfully loud, trying-too-hard-to-be-trendy bars in israel. a really tasteful trend in many israeli bars is to have tv screens in random corners that play fashion channels...but they are not american fashion channels, so a) the clothes are awful, if present at all and b) more often than not its just 1/2 to 3/4 naked women posing or strutting. it makes things super awkward when you're at a table of 8 and there's only one straight male present, and he tries so hard to not look at the screens when everyone else is shamelessly drawn to them.

in the chanukkah spirit, i got an email from my major/thesis advisor in which we talked about allt he stuff i shoudl be doing, bla bla bla, i had a lot of meetings with professors, bla bla bla...he gave me a recommendation for a restaurant in tel aviv that makes legendary sweet potato latkes. true to fatkid form, emily and i met up in tel aviv one night during chanukkah to try said sweet potato latkes, and clearly got the large order. they were indeed delicious, and that was probably the best restaurant ive been to in israel. leave it to yaron. of COURSE it was delicious and cute and trendy and populated with attractive gay men. obviouslly. clearly emily and i followed this dinner with a trip to max brenner, the chocolate restaurant a few blocks away in tel aviv... it was one of the more impressive food comas we've ever induced. mmmm.

speaking of chanukkah and embracing new cultures (which we werent really speaking of...) last week i went to an indian chanukkah party, at the community center for jews from india. it was AWESOME. the people were so friendly and so welcoming (and forcefed us SO many free sufganiot). i didnt know very much about the jewish community in india, and i actually still dont, but i do know that they know how to throw an awkwardly long chanukkah party/performance. the performers included the von trapp family of the indian jewish world (a family of like 4 hot daughters, a mom, a dad, a little 11 year old daughter, and 12 year old son who only danced in one number but was dressed to match the dad so was thus adorable). they were GREAT and so fun. they even pulled some of my friends up on stage to dance with them (more pictures of that to follow). there was also some singer girl who looked sedated/suicidal the whole time she was up there, her stage presence was overwhelming. and an older man who we thought was getting up to give a speech or soemthing, and instead sang about 17 hindi folk songs, to the delight of the audience. it was great. and followed by a trip to the sandwich place with which i am obsessed. mmm.

the father, far left, was dressed like a sparkly pimp. some wife and daughters in between, and the awkward man on the right was called up and given a cake for his birthday. he stood uncomfortably while people snapped pictures. all in all a great moment.

yair (far left) and micah (awkward white kid in the middle) rockin out w/ the family. micah is from oregon and within the last week-2 weeks i discovered that he is great. he signs emails "cowabunga." im a big fan.

the next day i went to the shuk in the morning, just because i love cheap produce. i took a different bus number, because it was there...and got to see a whole different part of the city and totally different views of the bay. it was lovely. when the bus dropped me off, however, i appear to have staye don too long, becuase im pretty sure i got off in moscow. or st. petersburg. or any other russian city. haifa has a large russian ghetto, basically, and it is right by the shuk, near where i work, and really overhwhelming for non-russian speakers, even if you do speak hebrew, english, and a little arabic... apparently that matters not. woof. anyway, i love the shuk here because i recently discovered a whole underground part! its awesome. AND i bought three avocados, 2 carrots, 5 cucumbers, and 6 clementines for a dollar. ok the clementines the guy gave me for free because he thought i was cute (meaning that i had all my own original teeth and did not smell like beets or dried saliva). but the rest was for a dollar. amazing.

that night, a bunch of us went out for my friend nils' birthday. there are some amusing pictures from that, but i only have like 2. so ill just show you nils and the pyrotechnical birthday dessert... but there were like 8 of us at the hookah bar by the beach, it was loverly.

i really need to get better pictures.

this was the start of last weekend. the next day nils, micah (oregon, in my arabic class, wonderful), eran (also in my arabic class, from missouri) and i went to chag shel chagim - the holiday/coexistance festival i mentioned before. i only got to go for a little bit the week before, so this time we headed out earlier in the day, to maximize the time we'd be there...aka so i could eat as much street food as possible (mmmm...so much multicultural deliciousness). it was SO much fun. ill let the picutres speak for themselves...

israel's klezmer version of the village people. (ps, wtf is the guy on the right playing?)

adorable little arab girls in the street eating corn on the street. i love haifa.

um...these were hot pink pointy pleather boots...that were 30 shekel (like 7 dollars). normally in a group, i can point out something funny and make another girl try them on, but i was the only girl, so i was forced to take one for the team in the name of comedy and try them on... i a) felt bad for the guy selling them and b) have no shame when it comes to comedy, so i bought them... (ps, note my santa hat, its from cyprus)

shortly thereafter, nils ducked into an open stairway and tried them on... they fit him, which is disturbing in and of itself... i think the scarf was the result of some sort of hijaab joke... oops

ok. this post is already super long...but there is more to be reported. next time, look out for christmas parade in nazareth, overseas christmas party, a hipped out bar/"dance space" in the forest, free food, pizza hut jokes, an israeli fashion haircut, thesis adventures, a few more israeli gay guys, and more food.

im off to do some actual work and then head to tiberias for the night to visit my friend aaron! he is on one of the "leading up north" trips, and will be staying after to play with me next week, but im super excited to see him for the first time since early july! yay! and tomorrow may involve another parade (youd be even more excited if i had gotten the chance to tell you about the first one...) in my friend basheer's village. basheer is a pocketsized arab kid who lives in the dorms and shuffles around pocketly...he is adorable, and is the reason i learned to say "come live in my pocket!" in arabic. i also signed in his boytoy last night, but thats neither here nor there. anyway, basheer is apparently going to be in the parade drumming or something, and invited me and some others to come to his vilalge to see it. i hope i get to go! after that its apparently new years eve, which is weird and hard to beleive and not that big of a deal here and called "silvester" for some reason. not sure what will happen there... but theres lots going on, clearly. ill write more and post more pictures soon, and guess what? ill be home in like 2 weeks. crazy. if youre going to be in dc for the weekend of the 13-15, you are invited to my official repatriation party! and how are we celebrating my triumphant return to america? helping me move! oh, and beer. and pizza and/or mexican food,t hough i will have already eaten at least three burritos within 24 hrs of landing.

ok. its freezing. im hungry. enjoy.

-am