Day 52

Friday. The 21^st of October.

Everyone was stressing over Ludlow’s test this morning. At my breakfast table they were quizzing each other, it was pretty funny because every question they asked I didn’t know because I didn’t think they were important. And I can confirm to you that nothing they talked about was on the test. I like to think I’m pretty good at not studying the useless information. We had two hours of Islam after OT. And if you were to look around during that class you would see nearly every single person looking at the study guide and paying no attention to poor Bashir. Well not that poor because he is our worst teacher here. After lunch we finally had Ludlow’s class, he was going to lecture to us and then have us take the test after. But after many complaints he let us take the test first. I can tell you that for the amount of time I studied I think I did quite well. I didn’t do great, but the questions I missed I had no idea what the answers were. So I was justified in missing them. Since we took the test first we had to be back by a certain time for the lecture. And I obviously finished the test pretty quick, so I went and took a fifty-minute nap before I had to come back to class. We had another humanitarian activity right after that and since were such an extraordinary assembly line group, we have been given an additional seven thousand school kits to assemble on top of our ten thousand hygiene kits. Although I was such an essential book bagger in the line, so great that I got about ten paper cuts, I had to leave early to go to Synagogue. Every student gets to go to one synagogue with our Judaism teacher. About twelve girls got to go. A few of us were a little late getting up to our van, one girl Katie had to go to the bathroom real quick and ended up getting left behind! Because one girl had gotten on the van even though she hadn’t signed up, so the van was full and they thought everyone was there and we left poor Katie behind. We tried to get the driver to go back, but he wouldn’t because we were full. Sadness. We felt really bad about it. We drove to the West side and picked up our teacher Ophir and two of his kids, probably the cutest kids I have ever seen. We’re all obsessed with his kids, they are beautiful kids and they each speak Hebrew, English, and Swedish. They’re great. We went to one of the most prominent reformed synagogues in all of Israel. Out of the about four thousand synagogues in Jerusalem only about twenty-five are reformed. It’s not as traditional. I felt like it was just like something you would see in the US, minus the fact that it was in Hebrew. It wasn’t quite what I was hoping for, but it was still a good experience. I’m glad I went, but I wish that I hadn’t signed up for the reformed. We got back with a few minutes left of dinner. And then we had our Friday night movie. We watched another Indiana Jones movie; it’s the one with the Nazi’s and the Holy Grail which happens to be in Petra, where we will be next week. Once the movie was finished I went to the gym to bike with Leslie, Katie, and Kaitlyn. But we ended up playing volleyball instead. I was much more impressive with volleyball compared to basketball. It was a lot of fun, my team killed the other team. But now I just want to play real volleyball. Where people actually know the rules and can actually play well. I sort of cycled with the girls and Josh Ludlow for a few minutes after volleyball. But I really just ended up sitting on the bike and talking until about eleven thirty. I’m sorta on an exercise kick, we’ll see how long that actually lasts. Shabbat Shalom.