Orientation

I've been here a few days so I guess I should talk about experiences so far. We've started the orientation process so we're learning about our classes, issues that might come up, scheduling stuff, etc. Not really all that exciting to blog about really. I've now gotten to meet most of the staff here. The international staff, of course, lives here at the center so I see them all the time. We got to meet most of the local staff yesterday at lunch.

The other interns seem to be very cool people. I almost feel sorry for Tommy as he's the only guy living with a bunch of women, but he seems fine with it (except that there have been several chick flicks watched, which interests him not at all).

Nablus is interesting so far. We haven't been out very much. We've gone grocery shopping and we've also visited a juice shop near the center (AMAZING place, he makes the juice fresh while you wait) and a yummy falafel place (SO cheap as a falafel there is 2.5 shekels which is approximately 63 cents) as well as a place to buy cell phones and sim cards. The center itself is a pretty nice place to live and makes commuting very easy (Time for a meeting? Just go down a floor or two). I also have my own bathroom connected to my bedroom, and there's a huge balcony patio with a great view of the city. On that note, pictures!

Part of the view from the balcony.

Another bit of view.

And more.

A mosque we can easily see from the balcony (you can see it in the first picture.)

My Palestinian cell phone. Look how tiny it is! Absolutely basic functionality. Reminds me of a slightly smaller version of the cell phone I had in middle school.

So now you have some visual context for where I am :) We've got some trips into Nablus coming up so I might blog about those (that will probably be rather serious as we will be visiting a refugee camp and the poorest section of the city). Until later!

And here I am.

I am safely arrived in Nablus. The flight was about what I expected, not much fun. I swear my arrival gate and departure gate in the Newark airport were as far apart as they could possibly without having a train to make things go faster. The best part of the ten hour flight was that I had a large selection of movies to watch including Brave and The Avengers :D The woman sitting next to me said that The Avengers was a bad movie, silly lady.

Arriving in Tel Aviv was interesting. I got detained at immigration though I think it was mostly cuz the guy at passport control didn't want to deal with me. He only asked me a few questions before sending me off. The woman who questioned me after that didn't speak very good English so I'm not sure what she was supposed to get out of that interview. Oh well. I got through that and met up with the other interns and the intern coordinator picked us up and I'm now here at the center in Nablus. I didn't sleep very well last night or rather I slept great from 6am to 10:30am when I got up and dozed every once in a while the rest of the night. Stupid jet lag.

Today is just a lazy day. Tomorrow begins the whirlwind of orientation.

Preparations

My flight is booked! I leave Chicago on September 5th and arrive in Tel Aviv on September 6th! I'm not looking forward to the jet lag.

Things that I will miss because I'm out of the country:
-Thanksgiving--my favorite holiday
-The release of the Avengers on DVD
-The new season of Doctor Who
-Most of the football regular season (Go Packers!)

But I'm sure I'll be doing so many cool things, it will hardly matter.

An Old Blog for a New Adventure

I've been accepted to an internship in Nablus, Palestine. I'll be out out the country for about three months woking with a non-profit called Tomorrow's Youth Organization. I'll be working with kids which I love while living in and learning about a part of the world I haven't experienced yet. The internship starts on September 6th and goes through November 29th.

In order to document this experience, I decided to resurrect this blog. So here's the beginning of a new chapter! Stay tuned!

(Note: I realize I never actually wrote that last post for my return from Japan. I blame jet lag, reverse culture shock, and how emotional I was about the whole thing; leaving my host family was incredibly hard. Obviously I got home okay.)

日本, さよなら

This is not going to be a full blog post. While I could describe my last few days here in Japan and post some pictures, that will have to wait until I'm back in America.

I am just here to say goodbye. Goodbye to this wonderful, confusing, busy, cultured, ancient, kind nation that has been my home for over ten months now. Tokyo has become home to me just as much as Los Alamos or Galesburg. And my host family has become real family to me.

I have cried and will cry again before leaving, but as my program's resident director Watt-sensei said "I hope you too shed a tear or two before you leave. That's one kind of evidence that real contact was made".

Blogging as a form of procrastination.

It is finally that time. That horrible time when schools decide that they actually have to make sure we learned something. That's right: finals. It may be mid-July, but I'm in the midst of finals. Monday I had my final sociolinguistics paper due, today was my final group presentation in Japanese, tomorrow is my media studies exam, and Thursday is Ainu. Basically, yuck.

What does this mean for you? I'm blogging because I'm tired of looking at old powerpoints from the media studies lectures.

I will go back to Wednesday of last week. Despite a very bad morning, I decided to go to class and go through with plans I had previously made. It was a good means of distraction. Besides I didn't want to hurt the feelings of Mami's parents. They had reserved a really nice restaurant for dinner. This place had these little private parlors with a traditional set up (tatami, table with a pit under it so you sat at floor level) and a view of the garden. You can sort of see our view in the above picture. This dinner was meant as a farewell for myself and Jeremy (he leaves Japan at the end of the month).

The only way to get Su-chan to be quiet and to sit still at this fancy restaurant was to bring the PSP loaded with Anpanman episodes with us. Looks pretty cool in those headphones doesn't he?

Here is my main dish (there were several other courses, but this was the only one I remembered to get a picture of). This is the BEST STEAK I have EVER had. Seriously. Interestingly, they gave us forks and steak knives (even though the steak was already cut). I actually didn't notice until after I'd finished eating. I've gotten too used to eating everything with chopsticks I guess :P

Here is a picture of Jeremy and Mami's father (Jeremy is Mami's parents' host student if you don't remember). I was going to get a photo of the whole group, but my camera's batteries crapped out on me.

The best part of the evening came after dinner when the restaurant turned off all the lights so we could see the fireflies. It was so wonderful just to sit in the dark and watch them. Very peaceful. Except for the loud laughter of some rather inebriated men in a room nearby. Sadly, that was probably the last time I'll see Mami's parents before I leave. They are wonderful people.

So this picture gets lots of explanation. Last Saturday I went to Hakone, a place about an hour outside of Tokyo that is well known for it's onsen (hot springs). I went to what I like to call a hot spring amusement park with some friends (many of the same people that were are the Fourth of July beach party).

No pictures from inside as I didn't bring my camera and even if I had, would not have much to show for it since water + camera = dame desu (if you don't know what that means, I'm sure you can guess). There were a LOT of weird baths (chocolate, coffee, wine, sake, green tea, etc.). The weirdest of all was this bath with fish in it that would eat the dead skin off your feet. It tickled SO BAD! But it worked rather well. There were also water slides and some more normal baths.

Now the picture is of a plushie I bought of the place's mascot. It's called a spakoneko (spa kitten) and I thought it was adorable so I bought one for myself.

Other than that, life has been rather boring and more than a little stressful. I've started to feel that I have too much to do and too little time. Seriously. On top of finals, I have to cancel my health insurance, cancel my cell phone, close my bank account, pack, go to little farewell get togethers so I can say goodbye to friends and family (host family that is).

Just as a warning: this may or may not be my last blog post from Japan. I can't guarantee I'll have time in the next six days to update again. However, I will be doing at least one wrap up post when I get home so it's not like I'm just going to end it here. Thought I'd warn you though.

Just a few pictures.

So I decided that I'd stick a few of the Fourth of July photos that Cat took on here just for those of you who aren't on Facebook. I'll post about my recent exploits (which include a wonderful dinner with Mami and her parents) sometime later when I'm feeling less down. As a few of you know, I recently had a tragedy occur in my life so my heart just isn't in the blogging at the moment.

First picture is me, Paula, Peter, and Rachel (Tackett--not the Rachel I usually talk about here, that Rachel is Rachel Leppert--strangely enough I know FOUR different Rachels here in Japan). Not sure what we were going for in this picture, but Peter decided we looked like a band of super heroes. I think Cat's going to be drawing a comic about us now...

Me looking perhaps a little too eager with the sparklers. I believe these are the ones we put on the USA birthday cake we made out of sand.

And nighttime. Here I am lighting some fireworks. The wind was crazy so lightinng stuff with a lighter was super difficult. What we'd do was light a sparkler and then use that (because it wouldn't blow out in the wind) to light the bigger fireworks. I feel some of our pyrotechnics were a bit abunai (a Japanese word meaning something like "dangerous") but we all came away safely.

Hope you enjoyed this small selection of photos...