teen aliyah

Long overdue entry log--I've been busy!

School starts soon, both high school and ulpan--but I'm only doing ulpan to start. It's 8:00 to 1:30 five days a week of speaking, reading, writing Hebrew. On Fridays, there's no ulpan but the plan my parents and the schools have come up with is for me to go to the high school on that day and get to know the teachers and students and the routine. It's a half-day so its not so bad.... I should have been keeping up the blog but I've been distracted--reading emails (thanks, everyone) and cruising on the 'net, enjoying having a summer off for a change! NO homework!! That will change on September 1st--ulpan has lots of homework. Worries me a little.
We've been checking out shuls. My friend Effie was here and we did the Kotel, and a shul down the street from us, and after he left my parents and I went to another near-by shul that was Sephardic---really cool building and great music. The people are nice, too, but the siddur is different so the service is hard for me to follow at times. We went to an Anglo shul when we first came here and we'll try that again; and we went to an Israeli shul that was really big and had lots of people and good nigguns and might go back there again. Haven't made it to Chabad yet but we're working our way in that direction.... The interesting thing about non-Chabad shuls is that all the bar mitzvah and older wear tallit, not like Chabad where only married guys wear them. I'd like to wear a tallit--maybe I'll get one for when we go to non-Chabad shuls.
Today we took the day off and went to the Israel Museum--we were trying to get there earlier but between doctor's appointments, tutoring, school stuff, insurance stuff, visitors, etc. we never did the tourist thing. I really like the Israeli museum. There are two museums right there-- the other is the Bible Lands Museum which is across the parking lot, which I haven't been to yet. The Israel Museum has this really cool model of the ancient city of Jerusalem during the reign of Herod--it shows the second Temple and the city dwellings, the houses of the Cohanim, the Hasmonean palaces, and the geography that made the city so defensible. It also showed the Roman fortress, the Antonia, built next to the Temple Mount -- all those strong walls and fortified buildings and great geography didn't do any good if you let the enemy into the front gates and allow them to build a fortress next door. I liked being in the museum--the stuff was really neat but my feet got tired after a while. There's so much stuff its hard to make sense of it all. I think it would be neat to work in a museum.

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