My Birthday

My birthday in Israel was out of the ordinary and yet the perfect example of what defines my life right now: random experiences, sometimes frustrating and usually culminating in some amazing experience that makes me step back, shake my head, and think “I actually am living in Jerusalem right now. Crazy”.

Midnight struck and I was on a plane from Rome to Israel. The man sitting next to me was a particularly friendly Israeli man, probably in his 40’s but he invited me to come visit him in northern Israel, haha.  Passport control in the airport was a bit of a pain, they let me through but I was severely reprimanded for not having my student visa yet.

Tel Aviv is about an hour away from Jerusalem, and the best way to get from the airport to home is a “sherut”; a shared taxi van that fits about 15 people. The sherut doesn’t leave from the airport until it is full with 15 people, and at 1:00 am it takes a long time to fill! So I waited an hour to leave and then another hour to get home.  At 3.15am, the sherut pulled up to the house where I was dogsitting, dropped me off, and then I discovered that the person who was supposed to spend the night at the house changed her mind and slept at her own apartment! I was locked outside the house with no keys and no way to get in, in the middle of the night on my birthday!  What a terrible morning!

            I called my friend with the keys and thankfully she was willing to drive to the house and open the door for me.  I slept for 3 hours and woke up to go to my first day of Hebrew Ulpan; a Hebrew intensive course that goes for 5 hours a day, Sun-Thurs, for just over a month.  I actually missed the first two days of Ulpan to be in Italy, and so I arrived on the first day having missed about 10 hours of class instruction.  The class is about 20 people, half of them American and half from other parts of the world, and the teacher is an Israeli woman who teaches in only Hebrew.  Complete immersion, no English!

            Needless to say, I understood very little of what was going on and I was shocked to discover that the entire class could read and write Hebrew, and they seemed to be far ahead of where I was! I figured that I already knew the alphabet and a few words, thus missing the first few days of Hebrew class would have been no problem.  Wrong!  So here I am, sitting in class on my birthday with 3 hours of sleep, having no idea what is going on; and this went on for 5 hours!  During one of my breaks, I started talking to a guy in my Ulpan class. He asked where I was from and I told him Utah.  He got a little smile on his face and said, “I am going to BYU law school in the fall.  I knew you were Mormon as soon as you walked in!”  His name is James, he is just here for Hebrew Ulpan for a month with his wife and then starts school at BYU.  I told him it was my birthday and he invited me to have dinner with him and his wife.  I was so grateful because I had no plans for the day and I was really hoping to be able to celebrate my birthday somehow; it was a turnaround in my not-so-good day. 

            So that night I had dinner with James and Kindra, one of the most amazing couples I have ever met.  I admire them so much! They have been married just a year, James is my age, and this is their second summer they have spent in Israel together.  They just finished doing an archaeological dig in Northern Israel for a month; they go on crazy adventures and you can tell that they get along so well.  They are both very smart and incredibly talented and personable and funny and strong in the gospel. They are a power couple!  I had a blast eating dinner, playing card games, and finishing off the evening with Magnum ice cream bars (my favorite!).

            To complete the Israeli birthday experience, as I was waiting for a bus home, I was approached by a young Israeli man.  He first started talking to me by asking for money.  When I told him I was a poor student, he sat down next to me and in very broken English changed the conversation to asking how old I was and if we could go out sometime. Hahaha. And this is why it was such an unusual birthday and yet such a typical day in Jerusalem.  I went home exhausted but happy.