The IDF Disco.

Next door to me lives a soldier. A soldier who REALLY likes Mika. A soldier who REALLY likes Mika and wants the entire world to know. I like Mika a lot, so having the IDF’s discotheque next door is no problem. The problem though is that the discotheque is not next door—the music is so loud that it’s like a dance party in my head. In fact, I think the music is so loud that terrorists in the Gaza Strip are setting down their weapons (temporarily) to groove to this physically overwhelming bass and the deafening singing. Meanwhile entire communities along the shores of the Dead Sea (which will be called “The Sea of Death” soon after this song is over) are being wiped out by terrible tsunamis caused by Mika’s catastrophically powerful rumbling bass. All over Israel, from Rosh HaNikra to Eilat, Israelis are being informed by Mika that big girls are beautiful, that Mika can be multiple colors, and that in any other world we could tell the difference.

Oh well. He’s a soldier, so I’ll forgive him. As soon as he gets out of the army though, I’ll kill him. (Hahaha, just joking…..or not….)


Anyway, more reasons that I love this country:
With extremely little effort, I was able to get an Ivri Lider song as a ring tone on my cellphone. I love this country!

I also like that I’m sitting in a hotel lobby and the desk clerk’s cellphone went off. And its ringtone was a song that was basically just a list of every offensive word in English the singer could possibly come up with. Like, it was offensive to the point where I let out a little gasp. And the desk clerk looks like an extremely polite and refined woman, yet she was not embarrassed in the least to have this ringtone. I love this country!

I also really like the yogurt containers where you just rip off the top and you bend the container in the middle so that strawberry/chocolate/chopped-nut goodness pours into your yogurt and you get to mix it yourself. I like this more than pre-mixed yogurt because I get to decide exactly how well-integrated I want my added ingredients to be, and this is extremely important to my happiness. Because some days you want your strawberries in a layer on top of the yogurt, but some days are days where you want the chocolate to be well-mixed in every bite. I’m sure something like it exists in the US but since I didn’t discover it until I got here, Israel gets the point for this one. (Am I keeping score?)

Also: I friggin love my Hebrew class. My Hebrew vocabulary is starting to get enormous. Well, maybe “enormous” is stretching things, but I’m still excited. In addition to talking about folding towels and murdering people, I can now talk about joining the army, weather, cleaning things, medical experiments, ceremonies, managing a soccer team, orphans, childhood, being desperate, and having a broken heart. All extremely crucial to daily life. Aaaaa, I love ulpan! I just want to be in ulpan all day for the next few years and not come out until I stop sounding like such a dumbass in Hebrew. Well, that might take a lifetime…

On the subject of what I brought up yesterday about being sad that I have no family here: I had an interesting conversation with someone yesterday. It was kind of a difficult, broken conversation because neither of us really speaks the other’s language, but here was the gist of it. She asked if I was staying in Israel after ulpan to live here as an Israeli, and I told her that this was my intention. I asked her if she was going to do the same, and she said that she wanted to live in Israel forever--more than anything else in the world in fact--but she couldn’t because her parents don’t live here and don’t want to move here. She said something about how my parents must be moving to Israel with me. And I said, no, I’m the only person in my family who lives here or who is going to be living here in the near future—in fact, most of my family hasn’t even ever been to Israel. And she just seemed horrified, and asked how I could do that—it wasn’t like what I was talking about yesterday about how people feel bad for me that I have no family here. This was her basically thinking that I was some sort of heartless monster for abandoning my family. Shit. I feel like such an asshole.

Oh well. Tomorrow I am going to Jerusalem for the afternoon, so I’m quite excited. I’m not even going to tour around—I’m just running errands—but I’m still excited. If I ever stop being excited about going to Jerusalem, will you please kill me? I may have already said that on this blog, but I think it’s worth repeating. It’s kind of a more severe version of the whole “Jerusalem, if I forget thee….blahblahblah” thing. And, on a broader level, if I ever stop being excited about being here in Israel in general, please kill me then as well.

Thank you in advance,

Sam / Semi / SemenTAH

P.S. Where—which radio stations or music stores--does one find country music in Israel? (Country, as in Garth Brooks or Brad Paisley) Is this just something I’m going to have to learn to live without?