Eli's birthday week

Well it's been a week since I last wrote. I've been at Wall Street every day since then (except, of course, Saturday) and things are moving along very fast. I teach my first class tomorrow. In fact, my first 4 classes tomorrow. All very exciting! I'm not going to go into what I did every day, but let's just say I've done an intensive crash course in English grammar and educational psychology. Anybody know their past perfect tense? What about present progressive? Or future simple? Nups.. I didn't think so. Anyone care? That's right... so read on.

I also did a lot of observing classes (where I was there to basically watch the teacher and take notes) and this was very interesting- especially the beginners class where they speak ZERO English, but we aren't allowed to speak any Hebrew, so the students get extremely frustrated and love to remind us in Hebrew that they paid a lot of money to sit here and not understand a thing. In fact, no matter what level class I observed (there are 60+ levels), in most classes, at least 1 frustrated student would bring up the fact that he paid lots of money for this course, and if other students have wasted 10 minutes of his time at the beginning with asking questions or taking their time answering the teacher's questions, or whatever, these frustrated students like to demand that they get their full 50 minutes' worth of class and then insist on speaking broken English non-stop. Israelis are soooo impatient it's unbelievable!
Anyway, I work with a nice bunch of (mainly) girls. There is one guy amongst us and he is gay. He loves to advertise this fact too. All of us are in our 20's, the eldest being 29 (and she looks remarkably similar to me, which confuses the crap out of some of our 1000 students!)

Apart from Wall Street, I'll try think of some of the highlights over the past week. Uh-huh, we found an excellent Indian restaurant/bar around the corner from our house-there's a vegetarian buffet there and cool couches and stuff, and you can pay whatever you like (Jord, I am taking you there immediately.) Eli and I hung out there a little bit. Eli was meloncholy about the end of his 20's fast approaching, so we drank more than usual this week. We celebrated his 29th bday over three nights. Actually, 4. 2 nights before his birthday, we celebrated with cocktails at this Indian place. Then the night before we went out for dinner and had a huge feast where each main meal came with 3 free side orders (??!!), then on his birthday some friends came over to our place and later we went out to a well known bar at the beach called Mike's Place. It's a popular American touristy bar (I'm likening it to Scruffy Murphy's in Sydney) where there was a bomb there a couple of years ago. A drunken Irish guy picked a fight with Eli because he didn't like the way Eli played pool??. Eli played too cool for school, and also, he was having problems understanding anything this Irish guy was saying, so the Irish guy was getting very pissed off about having to repeat himself all the time and he thought Eli was playing games with him as Eli could evidently speak English. Then the guy tried to bitch about Eli to Danny, our Spanish friend, and Danny told him he doesn't speak English very well- which is true, but the Irish guy had heard Danny and Eli speaking English with each other, so this was too confusing for the poor drunkard and he was convinced the 2 of them were evil and mocking him... it was very amusing. One MASSIVE communication breakdown! haha :) I was the only one who understood the whole situation.

Anyway, oh yeah- there was a massive fire across the road from our house! [Exhibit b---->]

I'm telling you, things are really happening where I live!
Anyway, on Friday, Eli and I went to Eli's grandma's place which is near Haifa. Winter has kicked in very suddenly, and it was cold in Haifa. It's been raining over the last couple of days too. But Tel Aviv still seems to have the best weather in all the country. Yay!
Shabbat was cool. Very loud, as usual. I'm finding it hard to get used to the loudness thing in Israel. It's just not in me to yell. I keep getting on the sheroots here (the shared van taxi things) and whenever I want to be dropped off, I walk to the front of the taxi, maybe a block away, and tell the driver and wait near him. It's a habit. Today the driver yelled at me, 'Okay I'll stop there for you, but whyn did you come to tell me this, sit down and scream to me, this is how I listen best"
Eli's grandma for example, who is mostly quiet, yells everything she says, when she decides to say something. Albeit, she is 80 something years old, but still... we got into a conversation at the dinner table about perfumes and aftershaves and deoderants (for those who know Eli well, and Lena, I think this is mostly directed to you- you'll understand where this conversation was heading and what Eli's opinions are about the matter...) anyway, the grandma had hardly spoken a word throughout dinner, and then all of a sudden she just screamed out of nowhere, "I have many many deoderants and perfumes... all my life people were giving me these for presents and I never wore perfume or deoderant not a single day in all my life! Never! And I don't smell! I never smelt!" This outburst cracked me up for the rest of the night for mnay reasons. You have to imagine this tiny woman, yelling out this fact, in such a serious manner...It was very funny and I'm only sorry I couldn't take a picture of her (it was shabbat)

After Shabbat dinner on Friday, Eli and I went with Maor (Eli's brother) to his bar, where he works late shifts (as in, 11pm-6am). Due to popular demand, I am posting this pic of Maor:
It was a fun night.

Now I have to get to work and then meet up with my uncle Henry and aunty Guta. Yay, more clothes have arrived for me! Finally! I'm through with wearing Eli's mum's shoes... even if they are cool boots from zara that fit me perfectly.. still, I have a thing about wearing other people's shoes...

Oh- and check out my recent photos online at http://au.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/sarahknopman/my_photos
Sorry they're not very interesting. I've been really bad with remembering to take my camera places...

see ya
xxxx