Halfway there

It's hard to believe. We hit the ground running, and suddenly we're about to start the 3rd week. Crazy. Most of the instructors headed to Haifa, Nazareth, and the north this weekend, but I stayed in Jerusalem to catch up on sleep.

Some highlights from the week:

Last Sunday, we watched the World Cup final with the MEET students. Both teams were represented by hearty cheering sections!



We were watching the game on the lawn with a projector and large screen, which was all well and good until suddenly, the sprinklers came on! In the rush to save the projector/computer, we lost the connection and so missed a good chunk of the 1st half. Luckily, the game was pretty boring, so we didn't actually miss anything.

Wednesday afternoon was sports day. This consisted of semi-organized games of soccer, volleyball, basketball, among others. There's also this game that the students are obsessed with, but it involves standing in a circle and setting a volleyball to each other. If you mess up, you sit in the middle, and you have to catch the ball in order to get back in the circle. However, once there are people in the middle, if 3 passes are completed successfully, you can slam the ball as hard as you want at the folks in the middle. Don't know why it's so exciting, and it seems rather painful to me, but the students love it.



Thursday was the Parents' Event! This is a fantastic event that MEET holds each year so the students' parents can come see what they've been up to. The event opened with a presentation by Assaf, a short speech by Zach (our incoming CEO), and a short presentation by me about the curriculum. We then all joined in a delicious potluck dinner with local food provided by all of the parents, and much food and conversation was had by all. Additionally, each of the students got to take their parents to the computer labs to show off their work. Overall, it was a fun event, and a fantastic meeting of different cultures.

And now another weekend has ended and it's time to tackle another week! Here's hoping I'm less sleep-deprived by the end of this one.

(Photos coming soon!)

T - 11 hours

The other day I got lost while driving through Jerusalem. I'd volunteered to drop some people off across town, and between all of us, we managed to get where we intended. However, after I left them and headed off by myself, I soon found myself terribly lost. But interestingly enough, it was the good kind of lost, if there is such a thing. Although it was dark and I was on unfamiliar roads and didn't have anyone to navigate for me, I had a general sense of the direction I needed to go and eventually ended up back on a familiar street. It's nice to know that even though I haven't spent much time here, the city is becoming rather familiar. I'm also a lot more comfortable driving than I was two years ago (a good thing, since I'm one of only 2 people who can currently drive the stick-shift van!)

The past 2 weeks have been filled with training, tours, and preparation work. I've gone on a political tour of Jerusalem, toured the Old City, went to a music festival, shopped at an outdoor market, visited Yad Vashem, walked to East Jerusalem to eat dinner, and witnessed a wedding celebration in the street, complete with fireworks. Each of these things really deserve their own blog post. We also had teaching workshops, sessions on teaching in this region, and each team has been working hard to get things prepared. And tomorrow is the day it all comes together. Rather than celebrating with fireworks, we'll be celebrating the start of the 7th MEET summer program. Wish us luck!

(And for those of you back home, enjoy some fireworks for me!)

T - 3 days

So I've been too busy to update, but I'll catch up at some point. But in the meantime, Clare has put together a blog aggregator so you can check out everyone else's blog as well as mine:

http://clarebayley.com/meet2010/

Only 3 more days until the program, and it's currently our last day to use the computers at the university so everyone is hard at work making sure everything is set up correctly. Lots to do!