Maimonides poh baaretz????

I’m starting to speak with an accent. English. I speak English with an accent now. The problem is that my roommate is Australian and I spend most of my time hanging out with her, a person from Manchester, a guy from India, and a girl from Chile who speaks close to no English. I have much less exposure to Americans than I’m used to, and so my American accent is not being reinforced. This could get interesting, seeing as I’ll be here for a while…

All the Israelis who run the program call me “Samantha.” That’s a lie. They call me “SemenTAH!” That’s the closest way I can write out how they are pronouncing my name. They think that since they have difficulty with the “th” sound, they should just kind of shout a regular “t” and that will make up for it. It’s bad enough being called Samantha, because that’s what my dad calls me when I am in trouble, but to be called a bastardized form of Samantha is almost unbearable. Every time they address me I think they are calling me a more feminine form of “cement.” The one Israeli here who doesn’t call me SemenTAH is my ulpan teacher. She decided my name is “Semi.” Which I’m fine with, because my family calls me “Sammy” and so her pronouncing it as “Semi” is pretty damn close. So I guess in Israel I will be “Semi” to Israelis but “Sam” to the English speakers—my roommate, who is also in my level, has decided that I shall forever be “Sam” to her. A question please, to any Israeli or American-Israeli reading this who is familiar with transliterating: how does one spell Semi/Sammy in Hebrew in such a way that it is clear how it is pronounced?

I have to tell you now what happened on my first day. The woman who is our “House Mom” randomly came up to me, and without introducing herself she thrust her fanny pack into my arms and announced in Hebrew that she had “peepee.” She then ran off to the bathroom. I just thought that needed to be shared… Hearing a grown woman use the word “peepee” when she was not addressing a small child was worth a room full of gold.

Also, I just wanted to say that I love my job. It’s not that I love it actually, it’s just that I know that it could be worse. One of my friends has a job picking up dead chickens. Literally, his job is to pick up dead chickens in the chicken house. And then every few days or so his job gets more exciting, since they have to slaughter chickens to eat on the kibbutz. Holy fucking balls. I’m so fucking glad that all I have to do is fold ratty t-shirts and sheets with mysterious stains. It's actually really interesting. With every shirt I fold, I try to imagine the person who wears it. Their family, their job, their likes and dislikes......as I like to say now, "Every stain tells a story."

Today was Yom HaShoah, so they had an air raid siren go off this morning. The entire morning, before the siren, all the Women of the Wash kept saying, “So, you probably do not know, but it is holiday today.” And I wanted to be like, “Yes, of course I know. I know it’s hard for you to understand, but there ARE Jews outside of Israel…” I also wanted to say that, before moving to Israel, I was planning a Yom HaShoah event with my student group at school. But I just said yes. Then the Women of the Wash kept saying, “When siren sounds, you just stand. You do not work.” And I said, I know, and I assured them that I would stand at attention like them. But they would not fucking drop it. Every two seconds in the hour leading up to the 10 o’clock siren, some Woman of the Wash would come up to make and tell me that I had to stop working and stand at attention at 10.


10 finally came. And it was the loudest, scariest thing I have ever heard in my entire life. I felt like such a baby because I started crying—not because I was remembering the victims and the heroes, but because the sound of the air raid siren absolutely terrified me.

Immediately after the siren stopped, this woman I work with ran up to me and started bitching me out about how I was folding fucking towels. So I thought I was gonna start crying even more. Instead I diagnosed her with “Stick-up-the-ass-itis.”

Not everyone I work with is a bitch. Most are pretty nice, and two of them kept saying how impressed they were with the fact that I could understand what they were saying to each other. One of them suddenly asked my zodiac sign, and I told her “Cancer” and then she just ran away. I have no idea what the fuck that means…

All the women I work with are constantly asking me if I have eaten. Actually, EVERYONE here is constantly trying to feed me. Do I look hungry or something? When I say I already have eaten, they offer me cookies.

I learned a lot of words in the past two days. I learned magevet, lkapel (I think), tekes, and I shit ton of words for murder, kill, die, shoot, etc etc…..So I guess ulpan is worth it. Now I can talk to Israelis about folding towels and killing people. Um….

Finally, I just want to say that today during work I kept hearing people talk about “Rambam.” And after a while of hearing it again and again, I finally blurted out, “MAIMONIDES IS HERE?!?!?!” And everyone started laughing. So I got really embarrassed and just kept my mouth shut after that. I just looked it up and I think they were talking about a hospital or something. Shit….I’m such an artard.