Kfar Ha-Studentim

So we live in this little structure in a place called French Hill on top of Mount Scopus (Har Ha-sofim). French Hill has a bunch of little shops, a Domino's pizza (blech!) and a grocery store called Mr. Zi's, which means "Mr. Cheap". It's a little over a mile from the campus, so we grab a group everyday to head to and from school.

Our room overlooks the Old City and we have an unobstructed view of the Dome of the Rock, which has been shining especially beautifully since it has been overcast here.

We had to wait in line for hours to figure out housing, with me getting increasingly cranky. It turned out that Rachel Sievers and I would be roommates, as well as Molly, which was excellent news. by that time, I was more interested in hanging on to those friends than in branching out. We had a third roommate, Danielle, from Kansas who is also really nice. Our last roommate arrived early the next morning. Bethany is from New York and she and her boyfriend, Josh, are both here for the semester. She is a really strong Christian, so her perspective has been really thought-provoking. Josh unofficially lives here, which is awesome because he's one of the coolest people I've ever met and makes me coffee in the morning.

Our apartment is brand new, in fact, they finished it the day before we moved in, which explains why there were cigarette butts in our shower and a bag of sand in the toilt (Actually, that doesn't explain the bag of sand at all, which continues to puzzle me.) The craftmanship was a bit shoddy. When demonstrating how to open the bathroom window to my fellow housemates, the entire thing fell out of the wall. The whole window. So, I popped it back in and now we keep the handle at a very specific 67 degree angle to ensure it stays in place. It doesn't matter anyway, because all of the windows have a cage in front of them or a steel curtain covering them.

The best part was that we each have our own room. Danielle's room is the "safe room" and has an outside steel door and is "bomb proof', a claim which I am highly doubting after the window incident.

A little bit after we moved in, a housing coordinator came in to tell us that we would actually have to move, since girls aren't allowed on the ground floor. I informed him that we were actually women, and he gave me a puzzled look and left. We called after to ask when this move would happen, but were ignored. We were all a little confused as to how such an oversight could happen, since we all checked "female" on our housing application, but it seems to have been some kind of oversight. So we didn't unpack for a week and kept checking with housing, who (when they remembered who we were) just told us to keep waiting. It seems that the Israeli motto toward foreigners is "We wish you'd stop asking so many questions and go home". Finally, about 5 days ago, the same housing coordinator came in abruptly and told us we'd be moving (we had unpacked by this point). We told him we'd rather not, and after he took a turn around the house he seemed satisfied that we were safe and left again.

The rooms didn't come with any thing, not even toilet paper. So the first night there, after about 36 hours awake, they took us to the mall. We were told to meet back in 2 hours. It was like a reality TV show in which they drop 100 foreigners outside of a mall and tell them to buy everything they'll need in 2 hours without knowing the language or currency. It's funny now, but at the time it was not so good. We ran through this ridiculously crowded home store trying to find everything we'd need. We tried to buy as little as possible, since we can't keep any of it, and I'd rather spend money on other stuff than on such boring things. We still don't have a trash can and have only a pot and pan and steak knife with which we cut everything. It makes our frequent dinner parties interesting.

Now that we're all moved in, we've established a great routine and I couldn't be happier. We all get along really well, despite being really different. I had thought I'd live with people from all over the world, which would have been cool, but in some ways it has been nice to adapt all together. I really look forward to coming home because there is always someone here for me to hang out with. We normally cook all together, we have a lot of mutual friends, and it's fun to do our homework all together.