The week, aside from snow

I just realized that I never wrote about last week's Israel Seminar Day (Wednesdays). This past week was on women in Israel. We heard one amazing feminist speaker and then I went to the Jerusalem Battered Women's Shelter. I've been to a few such shelters in California, and this was sadly similar. There were only two aspects that I thought were particularly "Israeli" - one, many of the women in the shelter are Ethopian immigrants (many of them who still don't speak Hebrew) who suffer from their husbands' response to the sudden lack of a patriarchical society. And two, during the Intifada the shelter was almost empty, because no matter how bad it got at home, women didn't want to leave their houses.

Thursday night was burrito night with Jaimee, Helayne, and Matt (thank you Becca for the fixings!). Early Friday we left for Holon. My sister's birthday is March 25th, so we had a joint celebration. It was a fun couple of days, but crowded - at the dinner, and staying in the apartment, were me, Jonathan, my father, stepmother, sister, brother, my stepmother's sister, and her daughter. Plus the dog. At least I got to speak a lot of Hebrew. We also saw an American friend of mine, Deborah, who's studying medicine at Tel Aviv University. She, Jonathan, and I met in the bus station McDonald's, of all places, because it was easy to get to and open on Shabbat.

I'm excited for school tomorrow, because it marks only TWO WEEKS LEFT until we go to Europe!