I don't know if it's appropriate to consider Yom HaShoah great, but I think I spent the day appropriately. I woke up at 8 with a group of friends to go to the Old City. We wanted to hear the siren that sounds throughout the country to remember the lives lost in the Holocaust. Everyone at the Kotel stopped praying, stood up and was silent for a number of minutes, until the siren stopped. Immediately then, a bar mitzvah celebration continued. A woman began talking on her cellphone. I guess those talkative israelis don't like to be shushed...even if it's for a memorial moment.
I then went to school with the intention of getting a new Student ID and doing some ceramics work, but the studio was closed. However, I happened to walk into a Hebrew University-wide Yom HaShoah ceremony complete with acoustic guitar and poetry readings. When that was over, I went to the piano room, pecked at the keys for a while, and went to the gym. All they had on the gym TVs were holocaust movies. I happened to choose a treadmill with a screen broadcasting a very interesting documentary called "A Film Unfinished." Granted, most of it was in Yiddish/Hebrew, but I surprisingly understood a lot. The raw WWII footage was so horrifying, it filled me with energy (fear) to keep sprinting.
The next day I went to the beach in Tel Aviv. The weather was perfect. I went bodysurfing twice. At the bus station, I went back to the Lost and Found, latching on to a glimmering hope that my wallet resurfaced. I got so burnt (after applying sunscreen that morning, mom! I must have fallen asleep and hadn't noticed my skin crisping). My lobster appearance caught the attention of a woman working in a TV station. She pulled me aside to ask if I wanted to be in a Cellcom commercial. All I had to do was tell a love story. I told them I wasn't in a romantic mood. And on the way back to the kfar, an official orthodox "little person" asked me to model for him. I told him no thanks, but he pressured me into giving him a (fake) phone number. I told him my name was Ocelia from Sweden.
I just came back from a beautiful 9 km hike across the Judean hills in Jerusalem. It was only four girls from my program and two tour guides...one of them was our tour guide for our slichot expedition in the Old City. The other was an alum of the Amitim Bronfman program. A different year, though. I got even more burnt (I put on sunscreen twice, mom! It must be that expired "Native Tan" sunscreen from the pool shed.) We walked through a beautiful vineyard, saw some scummy springs carved out of the mountains, and our guides made us tea and coffee with this little Bunsen burner. I'm exhausted from the hike, but i made whole wheat pasta for dinner...didn't want to "undo" all of today's intense calorie cremation.
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