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Shalom again! I’m back with some more updates! It is now the middle of February and we just finished our ulpan for the semester!! Ulpan was such an incredible experience because I went from knowing no Hebrew to being conversationally fluent in Hebrew. Now that our ulpan is over, we have a 10-day break! Many students are headed to Europe and I am too! I will be traveling within Spain and visiting some of my other friends that are abroad. Once we get back from our break, we will finally start classes which is really exciting. 

Now that I have been in Tel Aviv for 5 weeks, here are my top 5 favorite things to do in the city:

  1. The beach: As I mentioned in my last blog, the “winter”
     in TLV has been exceptionally warm! Many days after ulpan we would hop onto the bus and go straight to the beach. There’s nothing better than friends, sun, and good food!
  2. HaCarmel Market: also known as a “shuk”, these open air flea markets are where many Israelis will buy their groceries. It is by far my favorite one— mostly because they have the best Venezuelan arepas in the world! The food that you find in this shuk is unmatched. 
  3. Nightlife: The nightlife in TLV is incredible! TLV is such a young, diverse city and you can meet different people from all walks of life just on Dizengoff Street. 
  4. #FoodieLife: I am a HUGE foodie! I love to eat, cook, look, and talk about food! Many people would think that there’s only Israeli-style food here (falafel, shwarma, hummus) but they would be wrong. TLV has such a diverse cuisine scene with Japanese, Chinese, Iranian, Middle Eastern, Turkish, Mexican, etc. In fact, outside of Tokyo, TLV has the most Japanese restaurants.
  5. Shabbat: My friends and I love to cook a nice Shabbat dinner every other Friday night. We will buy fresh challah and other fruits/veggies from the shuk, hang out, watch a movie and relax like you’re supposed to do on Shabbat!

I hope you all get to experience all of these things in Israel as well! So long for now!

Shalom! My first few weeks in Israel have been so incredible and I couldn’t wait to share! I landed in Tel Aviv two weeks ago with so many emotions running through me. I was excited to be in one of my favorite cities, anxious about making friends, and naturally slightly concerned about safety. However all of my fears have been settled over the past few weeks. Tel Aviv is such an incredible city with a lively nightlife scene, picturesque beaches, and security measures like I’ve never seen. I am also fortunate to have the greatest roommates. We spend almost every weekend on the beach, eating hummus, and doing ulpan (intensive Hebrew) homework! Although life has been mostly carefree, I have stumbled upon some challenges in these past few weeks. The first challenge is the schedule of our ulpan. Our intensive Hebrew class is 8:30am-1pm from Sunday-Thursday with a test every week for four weeks. The teachers are incredibly talented and I am shocked at how great my Hebrew has gotten since I’ve been here. However, the schedule is very demanding and the amount of material can be overwhelming at times. The second challenge has been budgeting for city life. As we all know, DC is one of the most expensive cities and I assumed that TLV, like some other major Middle Eastern cities, would be relatively inexpensive and affordable. In reality, Tel Aviv is definitely comparable to Washington DC in terms of living expenses, which is something I wish I budgeted more for. Lastly, one of the biggest differences between Israel and America is Shabbat. Shabbat is observed from Friday afternoon-Saturday afternoon. Because of Tel Aviv’s secular society, some stores and restaurants are still open, however most of the city does shut down which makes travel and social gatherings very difficult. Despite the smaller challenges I have faced, I am looking forward to traveling within Israel and to other countries, starting regular classes, and continuing my education on Israel and all it has to offer. Lehitra’ot!

By Deah Dushyanth

I have always defined myself as a global citizen. Yes, I grew up in New York and sound distinctly American, but my passport will always display the trio of lions that make up the State Emblem of India. In fact, until very recently, I was a complete foreigner in the place I’d called my home my entire life. After twelve years of waiting, I received my Green Card a few days after my 17th birthday in 2016. Officially receiving that small piece of plastic meant that I was finally entitled to most of the same rights as any American citizen. In my mind, it meant that I had as much a reason to be here as any one of my friends. Still, did this finally make me American? But even more importantly, did I even want to be American?

If there’s one thing the immigration process taught me, it's that there are certain passports you want to have, and others that will result in waiting. A lot of waiting. Growing up, I likely spent just as much time at the USCIS building in Manhattan as I did on the playground with my friends. I’m not here to spin a sob story about my lost childhood in my family’s pursuit of the American dream, because that would be a lie. Yes, I missed out on a lot of the carefree aspects of being a child that my peers were able to enjoy, but growing up immigration office-hopping was actually an incredibly rewarding experience for a kid. I learned how to tell where a person was from based on the color of their passport, which helped when I trying to decipher people’s conversations in every language I would hear in the waiting room, consumed by boredom. Even then I was incessantly nosy and annoyingly friendly. I learned the importance of patience, protocol and attention to detail, watching my parents fill out every form in the known universe, and failing, on many occasions, to do so correctly. Most importantly, I learned resiliency and the art of getting through to people who only see you as another face in a sea of individuals who want the same thing. My particularly unique childhood was simultaneously foreign and inherently American, something that every immigrant child grapples with.

My identity has always been something that seemed to be working against me. I festered over it all: my cultural identity, my identity within my family, and my duty as a member of a global community. For a long time, I was ashamed of the fact that I didn’t have roots in the place I called home. I often found myself wishing I’d won the geographic lottery and stuck the landing in New York instead of Bangalore, India. Conversely, I wished that my parents had never left India, saving me the energy of understanding how to grow up in a completely new country. I came to understand, however, that my cultural bipolarity is an integral part of my identity. The Indian side of me helps me understand things on a global scale, and see beyond the idyllic cultural bubble of the northern hemisphere. I understand that people lead different lives in every part of the world because, for a time, my life wasn’t what it is now. But I would be lying if I said there isn’t a big part of me that is completely American. I credit my sense of agency and often bull-headed inability to accept failure to the country that I grew up in. The combination of these value systems is what makes me believe that everybody should be a global citizen. In an effort to not sound like a broken record, I urge people to take the advice of those PSA’s on getting little kids to eat vegetables: you won’t know what its like till you try it. It's exactly that approach that leads millions of people to immigrate to the United States and millions of others to set out around the world to explore how they can be members of a global community beyond geographic and cultural borders. Its why I cherish my annual summer visits to India, and why I am skeptical of forfeiting my Indian passport when I am up for American citizenship in a few years (don’t worry this hasn’t all just been a ploy to get India to offer dual citizenship). Finally, it is why I made a conscious decision to make studying abroad a key component of my college education. What better way to learn how to be a universal thinker than by exploring the way people think all around the world?

By Benjamin Aviv

Today it rains in Jerusalem.  This rain has not stopped me from really appreciating how well my first week has gone in the state of Israel! I began my time here in Israel spending a day with my cousin and his family who live in Jerusalem. Although, for most of that day I was jet lagged and really tired, so I slept a lot. However, the food I ate in that day was really good home cooked food.

Day One at Hebrew University I am the last one to my suite because my cousin and I, along with a language barrier that I hope to be able to completely overcome by the end of the semester, got lost on where to drop me off. The dorm is really nice, each person has their own room. After settling in they gave us a campus tour beginning with the walk from the student village to the main campus. (כפר הםטודנטים). On the main campus they showed  us the two different areas in which there are beautiful views of the city.

Day Two was the first day of Winter Ulpan, in which I began in Aleph 6 - which is the highest level of the beginning level of Ulpan. Ulpan is intensive Hebrew. However, on Day 3 I tried out the Bet level and liked the fact that I could understand the lesson and it wasn’t all review so decided to permanently move into that class.

Anyway, the first two days are what have set the tone for the semester because they went well, and the first week has been a really good week. I am just excited for the opportunity to get to experience the culture of Jerusalem, the culture of Israel in general and the culture will be experienced through my lens as a student for the first time in Israel.

For the next blog, look forward to hearing about my trip that I will be taking to a local kibbutz for a chocolate tasting, along with the classes I will be taking and whether or not I will add to my experience abroad in Israel by seeing what it is like to intern and be a student in Jerusalem.

Signing off,

Ben Aviv.

By Taylor Garland

Today marks one week since I’ve been home from Singapore and honestly, it’s incredibly bittersweet to watch the city I’ve grown to love from afar. For fun, I finally sat down to watch Crazy Rich Asians, the box office hit that was monumental in its representation of Asian characters, and its efforts to plunge Singapore on the world stage. Though there can (and has been!) lengthy debate on its depictions of Singaporean culture, of the country’s diversity despite the ethnically Chinese majority, my heart felt so light watching the characters move through the streets I did, and I felt a kind of pride in knowing that I had my own memories in the same places the characters did.

I’m not sure how to advise or best report the feeling of longing for somewhere you barely had time to get accustomed to. Four or five months pales in comparison to the rest of my life, and the times I’ve spent living in any other place. Maybe it’s because I’d invested so much emotional energy into “making it” while I was studying abroad – I sought local friends, a true cultural and social immersion, and wanted authentic experiences outside of what a “visitor” might – but it was so hard to say goodbye. It was hard to part with my routines, my friends, my room, and the city. It was hard to say goodbye to the food, the hawker centers, the aunties and uncles, the SINGLISH, the architecture, the intersection of Chinese, Malay, Indian and the West.

For anyone considering going abroad, I’d say do it. Even if it seems impossible, make it a reality. There are things I’ve done while abroad, in countries I’ve never even considered going to, that I will cherish for the rest of my life.