let it fly in the breeze and get caught in the trees

so, this week has been my attempt to get in contact with family week. i called Sergio, and he was supposed to call me today if he was free to meet me and introduce me to his kids. so far no word, so I'm thinking its a no go for this shabat, but maybe another time. I also got in contact with Tuvia through a long game of phone tag. i have no voicemail, which sucks. people leave me a message and all i get is a text message with the number and a whole bunch of little boxes. anyways, im gonna try to go visit him in tel aviv sometime soon. i still have to call him and make a plan, but we'll see. i really want to see the blind museum and hang out on the beach in tel aviv. it looked so beautiful when we went last week, but they didnt let us go :(

i did meet my kibbutz family on thursday. the mother is sagit. she is really nice. she picked me up on her scooter/moterbike thing and we went to the pool to meet her family. she has 3 sons who (i think) are 16, 13, and 8 ish. she also has a daughter who is about 3, netta. i think netta is my favorite. she is cute and too young to be weirded out by the fact that some random girl is gonna be hanging out with her family. i didnt meat the eldest boy, but i met the other 3 kids and the husband. i forget his name. the 8 year old i think is names reah, and the 13 year old is uri. it was nice. sagit spent a year in annapolis so she speaks english pretty well. the kids are learning in school (netta isnt old enough yet i dont think) but they pretty much speak hebrew. i can pick out a few words of what they are saying and get the gist of it tho, which is nice. sagit said that she hates making plans ahead of time, so i am supposed to just call her when i have free time and see if she is available. its a little weird for me, but it seems like thats the way they do it in israel. people dont make plans.

yesterday we had class but the regular teacher wasnt there. we had our old teacher, sarahle. sarahle is really nice. we have tests every friday, and she gave us the test, but it was nothing like what our other teacher dina had said it would be. she told us to study the infinitive forms of 10 verbs, but the test was on all forms of the verbs (not that the different forms are so hard except for the infinitives, femenine is with an h or t, plural masc is with ימ, and plural fem is with ות so its not that bad, but some of the verbs we hadnt learned and some of them we hadnt even heard of, so i was pretty pissed. i have been trying really hard cause we have been having trouble with the classes. we were supposed to have kita alef, bet, and gimmel, but we only have kita alef and gimmel. that means that the classes are big and there are a lot of different levels in each class. a few people moved down from gimmel cause it was too hard, and there are some people in alef that are really struggling, and some people that find it a little to easy. we are trying to get another teacher for a kita bet, but israel takes a while to do anything. anyways, i am hoping that we get a kita bet class and i can go into that one. they said it wouldnt be necesarrily the next level, but more like a kita alef honors, where it just moves faster than the class im in now. so thats my goal right now.
anyways, back to the class on friday (yom sheeshee). the test took me about 20 minutes to do, but she gave us an hour, so i had a 40 minute break. then when i came back, she told us that that wasnt the test and that she found the real test, so we took that and it was shorter so she gave us 30 min, but it only took me about 10. so i had a 20 min break. then we played memory games with our neighbors, had kabalat shabat, and left. i think i was on break more than in class. it was okay cause i wasnt feeling great.

i ended up passing out while watching the office (a tv show) and turned out i was really dehidrated, and felt really awful. i had been to the pool, had some beer and no water, and just hadnt been drinking at all in the heat, which is no good, lo tov, so i got sick and felt really bad. it was a shame cause friday nights is when we can go to ultrasound, the huge club on the kibbutz. its the biggest one in northern israel. there was a special dj playing. we had a whole plan to go see a free movie on the kibbutz, then go to the pub, then go do ultrasound. but i just couldnt get out of bed. my friend brian came and took care of me. he got me nice cold water from the waterfountain in the other building, and made sure i was okay, and made me promise to drink the entire waterbottle, and then left me to fall asleep. it was very nice of him.

today i feel a lot better. im a little upset with myself cause it would have been a fun night had i just drank something. and i slept through dinner yesterday, which is where you get food for shabat, cause the dining room isnt open on shabat. so now i have to wait for dinner until i can eat something, and im hungry!

love love,
ella