Making friends!

Today was our first day of training for the actual Israel Teaching Fellows program! Israel Teaching Fellows (ITF) is a program in many different cities so all the different cities got bused (bussed?) to a pretty conservative college, Talpiot, that was about 40 minutes from where we live. We took a bus with the ITFers from a city even more South than ours, Be'er Sheva. Apparently, their city, as well as many others in the program are pretty slummy and boring. As you've hopefully been reading, ours is not that way. Everyone else couldn't believe that we spend hours upon hours at the beach. They were just slightly more than jealous. If you forgot, I'll remind you what it looks like.

When we got to the college, they had free coffee for us THANK GOODNESS. We were dying. And my not-able-to-go-to-sleep-before-4am problem isn't conducive for real life things. But so we were welcomed by the CEO of Masa (the grant organization that got us here), a few representatives from the Israeli Ministry of Education (I keep hoping they'll one day say Ministry of Magic), and the president of the college. And they gave us free legal pads! Who doesn't love free school supplies? Then we learned about the Israeli school system a bit, which was interesting. The classes here are big-ish (35-40 kids) and extremely heterogenous in skill level, economic status, and nationality...all of which makes teaching English very difficult. They really charged us that we have the Israeli school system in our hands because they need so much help. Things here aren't as systematized as they are in the US by any means and they basically desperately need us. It really made me excited to start working in the classroom!

Finally, we split off into our cities to do different workshops which we'll be rotating through throughout the next two weeks. Today ours was something like "Using Story Telling as a Springboard for Other Activities."Mildly interesting...not too much I didn't already know, but whatever, we got another free backpack. That makes THREE backpacks I have here. Here are some pics of us from today:

A guy on my trip, Matthew, made this for me!

All of us chillaxin in between workshops

It was fun meeting kids from the other cities. A couple of them seem cool, most of them don't. It made me appreciate my roomies and city more, which is always a good thing. A couple girls were there from GW...only one I recognized but they were all nice.

But really the best friend I made today was the owner of the hardware store near our apartment. We go in there a lot and we became friends the first day I was here, but today when we went in he gave me a huge hello and I was practicing some hebrew words with him. He would tell people prices and I actually knew what they were in English! I was so excited. And then he gave us all a matana, a gift. He gave it to all four of us that were in the store, but I know he likes me the best :) It's a small little dish thing, but you can tell it's genuinely Israeli-made which is cool! I can't wait to decorate my room with eclectic Israeli things. I'll share pictures as I do! Talk to you soon!