First Day at Wall Street

So today was my first day of training at Wall Street. My first day of my first full-time job. I was pretty excited for it. I don't know why, but throughout the day I kept being really conscious of the recurring thought that today was a significant day of my life. Strange feeling. Hard to describe. Like the start of some kind of exciting new chapter. And I was very aware of it.

Even though I only live 20 minutes away from the Azrieli centre, I woke up 3 hrs before I needed to be there. This was partly because I had some errands to do before I left... like buying bread and milk and nana (mint leaves)... and returning a trolley wheel thing to the cafe- we borrowed it to schlepp a stove from around the block to our place. Whoah- what a mission that was. Eli and I struggled to get it down the 3 floors of the block where we got it from.. then we wheeled it to our place, but we live up 3 floors as well. It was an impossibility. So after an hour of futile attempts, we decided to leave the trolley inside our building and we moved out of the way, behind the stairs where no one would really notice it. Then an hour or so later, I'm having a nap, Eli's playing music, and then he hears what sounds like a stove being dragged.. and he looks out our window onto the street, and sees our stove walking. So he runs downstairs in his slippers, and a screaming match ensues between him and some guy who lives in our block and who's sort of like, the care-taker of the building (we just found this out the hard way) and he had dumped the stove in the trash across the road and he's yelling at Eli saying that nothing is to ever be left inside our building, that it's not a dumping zone, that druggies will do anything to break into a place if they see something they can sell, and Eli was therefore somehow attracting druggies to our building, and Eli's yelling and cursing, telling him he's too poor to afford a removalist, and that he carried this stove here by himself, and he explained that he was just leaving it there for one night and tomorrow morning his friend was going to come and help him...

anyway- The guy's wife was also downstairs, and apparently she had told him to go and ask all the neighbours in the building who owned the stove before he went and chucked it out... and now she was listening to Eli's sob story, and she felt sorry for him, and she yelled at her husband and told him off big time in front of Eli and then demanded he help Eli with the stove. So Eli, still in his slippers, and this big angry man, already sweating from having dragged the stove out of the building and across the road, then helped Eli carry the stove up 3 flights of stairs to our cosy apartment.

So anyway, after I returned this trolley thing to the cafe downstairs this morning, (and got my free borekas from the guy that works there... nyahahaha :-) )-for those who don't know, borekas are yummy warm pastry things filled with yummy things- like cheese or potatoe or mushrooms..
I made my way to Wall Street. I was part of a group of 14 other people who have been employed at the same time and will be doing the training with me. There are 7 branches of Wall Street around Israel. The Tel Aviv one (my one) is the biggest and serves as the head quarters. It's going to be an intensive 2 week training process because not only are we being taught All about Wall Street, (today we learnt about its inception, its history, development, and current status in the world English teaching market) we learn about the international company, and we are also being taught it's unique English teaching method, the system, and of course, many of us are being taught a bridging course to English grammar. We had a full tour of the centre today and had lots of people do workshops with us. Our group is a mixture of receptionists, personal tutors and teachers. They think it's important that everyone understands everything about every position in the company. I'm a teacher. This means I teach people of all different levels English, and all different ages (between 18-80) but the maximum people ever in a class is 8. It's English only at Wall Street so not a single word of Hebrew is spoken throughout the centre. I'm the only Australian. Females dominate Wall Street with a ratio of about 5:2. They kept reiterating to us that there was a huge filtering process as part of their recruitment so we should all be very proud of ourselves for getting this far. Yay!! They spoke about exciting things like Wall Street international transfers.. like right now, they're working on sending one of their staff to teach at Wall Street in Japan and another to Switzerland. (Wall Street has about 360 branches in about 30 countries throughout south america, west europe, asia and the middle east)

Anyway, it was a good day. I had fun. It was so easy to tell which ones in the group were native Israelis and which ones were foreigners. A hell of a lot to take in for poor little me though. I haven't needed to use my brain for anything non-thesis related for quite a while. During our lunch break a few of us went up onto the roof of Azrieli to eat. Such amazing views. That's it- tomorrow I'm taking my camera. I promise (myself and all of you) more photos!!

Oh! And today, not 1, but 2 people told me I looked like Uma Thurman??!! Weird Israelis. Nevertheless, perhaps this explains why I was feeling so good today.

I came back home after a full 8 hours and went grocery shopping and was really proud of my purchases- no one knows how long it took me to decide which cous-cous to buy- there was a ridiculous variety to choose from! And same with the eggplant dips. And the date spread. But I did so well! I bought products with absolutely no English on them. And I was so excited to come home and tell Eli all about my day and all about my purchases... and you know, it's important for me especially because this is about the most exciting and truly eventful day I've had here in 3 weeks and I know that if I had my first day at a company like this in Sydney, my family or a couple of my friends would call me afterwards to find out how it went... but when I came home, first of all I was surprised to find Eli home because he's supposed to have uni til late in Jerusalem- but he said a friend marked his name off and he escaped from class because he wanted to come home and play for 2 hours. So he wasn't interested in listening to me and told me he had to play now, that's why he came home early, and he'll speak to me in 2 hours. I told him any normal human being would want to know how my day was. He said he's not normal. Accept that. He'll talk to me in 2 hours.
gggggrrrrr..... So this brings me to the end of this. I finished reading my Steve Martin novella. I think he should stick to acting.

Oh- one more thing- they actually encourage playing boggle and scrabble with students at Wall Street!!!!! Have I landed my dream job or what??!