The shuk is great, and a little overwhelming at times. Basically a few streets in the section of the city called Hadar are lined with stalls and shops selling pretty much anything you can think of, although most of them are fruit/vegetable sellers. At the good bakery place I got some more warm pita, along with a couple of little apple strudel-like pastries that were really good. I also bought some cucumbers, tomatoes, and almonds. At one of the nut stalls we found 10-shekel bags of various dried fruits, and a few of us together bought one of each kind and then divided it all up when we got back to campus. So now I have a huge bag of dried mango, kiwi, grapefruit, pineapple, banana, kiwi, apple, and strawberry. I think that one thing I definitely need to do before I leave here is to go to the market and buy lots of nuts to bring home with me, because they're cheap and really good. In particular there's this kind of sweetened pecan, which I didn't buy but my friend did, that is really great.
One thing I still need to work on here is correctly hearing prices when I buy things. It's not that I don't know Hebrew numbers -- I could count into the millions if I had to -- but when people tell you how much things cost, they speak so quickly and sometimes I don't know whether I've misheard them. Not to mention that the money itself is still somewhat unfamiliar to me, and it's a lot more coin-based than American money, so sometimes it takes me a while to fumble for the right change. Most times I just end up shoving some amount of money at the cashier and hoping that it's enough and that they won't just stare at me blankly because I haven't given them enough (the worst was early last week when I thought the 1/2 shekel coin was a 12 shekel coin and tried to use it for something that cost 12 shekels... but let's try to forget about that).
So anyways, that was my day today. Tomorrow I have to wake up bright and early to get on a bus to Tzfat at 7:15. Saturday is my weekend day, and Sunday it's back to class. Ulpan is halfway over and I have to say I'm kind of glad about that. It's been a good experience to be here and I've done some fun things, but I'm ready to leave. Three weeks from Monday I'll be on my way home.
One interesting thing here that I didn't anticipate is how this experience has made me rethink my own language. There are students here from 28 different countries, and they all speak English. They have to; the International School conducts everything in English, so if you don't know much Hebrew or English, you'd be pretty lost. I'm just amazed because although I knew before about how much better other countries are at teaching languages that the US is, this is the most complete experience I've had with it. I've met people from Russia, Finland, Italy, Germany, France, Switzerland, Poland, Denmark, and the Czech Republic who speak not just English but also maybe several other languages in addition to their native one. It's just amazing to me that someone could get to that level of being so proficient in so many languages, and I just think it would be so neat to know that you could travel to countries with various languages and still be able to get around fine. I doubt I'll ever reach that level... I don't think I'll ever become anywhere near fluent in Hebrew, and I haven't even started learning any other languages. But it's just so neat to see.
I'll try to keep updating this more. I'm counting down the days until I fly back home.
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