Good to be back!

We made it! The long flight from Philadelphia was uneventful. The only stressful bit was whether or not Ben would make the connection in Philly. He did:

Ben: I just made the connection that US Airways said couldn't be made.
Sondy: But isn't that what MEET is all about? Making the connections that they say can't be made?

Awesome.

So after Talya, Mustafa, Abeer, and Areej drove us back from the airport, we took a few minutes to settle into our apartments. We're staying in Hebrew University apartments in the Mt. Scopus campus. 15 instructors, 15 bedrooms in 3 apartments, 3 bathrooms, 3 kitches...and we have AC! Not bad. Some people went to buy food and cook some dinner, while a few of us decided to explore. We got a good vantage of the Old City and the sunset from Mt. Scopus and saw a bit of our neighborhood, but I'm too lazy (and the internet is probably too slow right now) to upload photos. But the city is beautiful and I'd forgotten how much I'd missed it. There's also a falafel stand around the corner that I'm excited to try soon. But now it's off to bed. Preparation and work start bright and early tomorrow morning!


p.s. As far as I know, this marks the first time in MEET's history that the instructors had working internet upon arrival. Way to go, MEET staff!

Starting a new adventure!

Well, here we are! Now that I've been giving this blog address out again, I should probably make the site look up-to-date. When I got back from MEET 2 years ago, I knew it was something I wanted to do again, and this summer seemed like a great opportunity. I also figured that keeping a blog again would be a good idea, so I'm continuing the same one. You're welcome to go read about my adventures from last time, see how it compares. This summer, however, I will be fulfilling the role of Head of Instructors, meaning that rather than teaching a particular year of students, I'll be doing more coordinating and helping make sure things run smoothly, which will be a different sort of challenge.

As for me, quite a bit has happened since my last MEET adventure, culminating in my graduation from MIT 2 weeks ago. After spending the last week or so in Boston spending time with friends and enjoying things that I won't be seeing for a while (things like cheeseburgers and thunderstorms), I'll be flying out at 5:30pm this afternoon. We're flying on US Airways from Boston -> Philadelphia, then Philadelphia -> Tel Aviv and arriving on Tuesday at 3:15pm local time (8:15am EST). We'll get the evening to adjust/sleep/rest and then it's straight to work at 9:30am on Wednesday! Should be a fantastic, busy, crazy, awesome summer.

Will update again soon, provided I have working internet when I land, but for now, thanks for joining me on this adventure!

Ending

Last Thursday marked the end of the 2008 MEET Summer Program. It's exceedingly difficult to realize that the sumer is already finished. The Year 2 students finished the summer with 4 stellar project presentations. Quite frankly, I was WOW-ed by how much they had accomplished and how well they presented. (This bit about us being WOW-ed was actually part of their goal, and they met that challenge excellently.)

On Friday, the instructors joined the students on a trip to Tel Aviv, where we hung out on the beach for a few hours. The instructors then returned and began the slow, arduous process of doing feedback surveys, completing interviews, and compiling all of the curriculum material, as process which lasted through Saturday into today.

Today marked the real end - the graduation ceremony for the Year 3 students. It was impressive the see the students' maturity as they introduced each other, reminisced on their time in MEET, and accepted their certificates. Thus followed a period of hugging and photo-taking as students and instructors said their goodbyes.

Expect some backdated entries later with more detail, but at the moment it's 1AM. We're leaving shortly to drive a few hours to get to Masada and watch the sunrise. We'll then spend a few days in Eilat, which will be a much-needed relaxing vacation. I fly back to Boston on Thursday.

This has, by far, been the best summer of my life.

Almost there.

So, this is where I apologize profusely about falling behind in the blogging. It seems I've missed recording about 1.5 weeks of MEET, including MEETConf, the Apprentice Event, and 2 awesome Year 2 milestone presentations. Not only that, but I've skipped an exciting trip to the north this past weekend and a spectacular trip to the desert during the previous weekend. What can I say, I've been busy. I plan to work briefly on creating some backdated entries with my own photos, and in the meantime, I'd encourage you to check out Sally's blog, if you haven't already been keeping up with it. Sally, my fellow instructor, is much more proficient on the blogging, and much better at keeping up to date. Definitely read the entry about the lecture we attended yesterday. I couldn't have described it better myself.

As for my students, they're nearing the end of what's been an awesome summer. The Year 2 curriculum culminates in a final presention, which this year is modeled as a pitch to a venture capitalist. This presentation will occur on Thursday, which means tomorrow is the final day to finish everything. This morning, however, my team managed to produce a functioning program, which is able to send both text and drawing messages across the network. The students were positively bubbling with excitement, and it's amazing to see the quality of work they're accomplishing along with their enthusiasm for working together to finish this project. Tomorrow, they'll work to polish their final deliverables (poster, presentation, video demo) and finish up bits of code. It should be an awesome day.

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Also.

Happy Birthday Dad!

Past the Halfway Point!

Yesterday marked the midpoint of the MEET Summer Program. It's rather scary how fast the summer is going.

Project work continues. My group began coding this week, and by now they have a fairly good structure set up, along with some basic functionality, like the ability to send messages over a network using a servlet (which meant that I got to learn about servlets). They've also started their business plan, including researching their competititors and figuring out how they will make their product superior to the competition. Here, Alex, Anna, Amir, and Waseem work to finish the presentation for tomorrow.

And finally, possibly the highlight of the day:
Explanation: We've been trying to figure out ways to make our kids focus in lab. Last week, Zach and Humberto wrote a script that kills all of the games every 1 minute. Yesterday, they altered the script to mute the computer volume every minute so they'd stop listening to music. Today, however, Humberto and Max figured out a way to kill flash, thus effectively preventing them from enjoying Youtube and other internet flash games. Hehe. The best part? Every flash game, every Youtube video will instead display an animated gif I created that says:

"You should be working on your project!"

Excellent.

Free day!

Saturday was an uncharacteristic "free" day for us, by which I simply mean there was no planned activity. However, not wanting to waste the opportunity, we decided to wake up early-ish (~9:30) and go do some exploring on our own. Our mission: see things and buy postcards. Our first stop: the Garden Tomb.

The Garden Tomb is the site where Protestants believe that Jesus was buried. Conveniently, this is practically right down the street from where we live. Bo, Froy, Humberto, Sally, Mike R., and I wandered over there and ended up attaching ourselves onto an English speaking tour. Our tour guide, Phillip, was excellent, filling us in on the history as well as sharing the beliefs and inspirational message attached to the location.


One reason that this is believed to be the site of Jesus' crucifixion and burial is because of the rock formation, which resembles a skull. "Golgotha", the biblical place where Jesus was crucified, means "Skull". We got to see this view later, from the Old City wall:

Next, we wandered into the Old City. After wandering through the market for awhile and debating the possibility of food, Mike, Humberto, and I ended up splitting off from the group and heading back to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Unfortunately, the site was much more crowded than yesterday, so we elected to try to come back on a more peaceful day with fewer crowds.

We headed towards the Jaffa Gate, where we investigated the possibility of walking on the ramparts of the Old City wall, something which we were all very excited to do. We each payed 16 shekels, and up we went. Thus started a multitude of picture taking.

Since there is a break in the wall at the Jaffa Gate and since you cannot enter the Temple Mount area, you cannot walk the entire perimeter continuously. So, we started by walking north from the Jaffa Gate, around the north side of the city, and south to the Lion's Gate on the east side. This took a long time. Maybe 2 hours. Mainly because of the picture taking. Walking on the wall was absolutely amazing because of the many views of Jerusalem, both Old and New cities.
We saw a massive shoe sale outside of the Damascus gate:Also, all the gates have grates right above the entrance. This is so you can dump boiling water or oil on your attackers!

Dome of the Rock

By the time we came down from the wall, it was about 2pm, and we were HUNGRY. We wandered back into the market and managed to find a restaurant that served amazing schwarma!
Before and after lunch, we also walked along the Via Dolorosa, or "Way of Suffering", in an attempt to see more of the Stations of the Cross.Next, time for shopping! Back to the market we went. We each bought some souvenirs/gifts, and also managed to find postcards for 1 shekel each! (Now to buy stamps...)

Our shopping successful, we continued on to traverse the other section of the wall ramparts. This route took us south from the Jaffa Gate, around nearly to the Dung Gate.

Looking north

View to the south

We then came down and debated the tradeoffs between trekking back across the city to the apartment or continuing on our adventure and hoping someone would pick us up before the dinner excursion. Adventuring won.

We continued out through the Zion Gate to Mount Zion, on the south side of the city, in an attempt to visit King David's tomb. This, we did manage to find. However, our subsequent attempt to find the room where the Last Supper supposedly took place was unsuccessful, and we decided that it was probably closed anyway, given that it was late in the day on Shabbat. Instead, we found an interesting sculpture.

Back we went to the Jaffa Gate, where we hung out on the grass outside the Old City before meeting up with Max at the MEET office to go to dinner. Dinner was delicious, and was a fantastic end to an awesome day.

Stairs leading up the the ramparts.

Being a tourist!

This weekend, rather than traversing to some "far away" city to go sightseeing, we're taking a restful weekend and staying in Jerusalem. And by "restful", I mean that we left shortly after 9am to meet up with our tour guide and go explore the Old City. After staying up late to watch "Fiddler on the Roof", this seemed like an early start. However, we were all very excited to actually get a chance to explore this place we've been living. It gets kind of easy to take it all for granted when it's a nightly routine to walk down the street to buy 6 shekel falafel or 10 shekel kebab and then sit and eat by the Old City walls. Yet it's also pretty amazing to be here, in the center of so much history, at this place that is the center of 3 major world religions.

Even though we definitely live within walking distance, we all loaded into the van and the car and drove into the Old City through the Jaffa Gate. Yes, into. It seems strange to me that you can drive in the Old City, but people do. Mike even managed to park. Barely.Yaron, our guide, began by describing some history and the plan for the day.
We then set off walking through the Armenian quarter. I really enjoy the stonework and the architecture.
We eventually reached Jaffa gate again, this time on foot, and so we walked out the car entrance so that we could walk into the old gate entrance. This is the gate that was traditionally used by pilgrims coming from Jaffa, the port. We then proceeded into the market. Based on my past experience several weeks ago and also on stories from fellow instructors, the market was rather deserted in comparison. We attributed it to the fact that it was only 10:30 in the morning. Yaron then led us out of the market, onto the roofs.
Jerusalem is an amazing city for many, many reasons. The current, modern city is actually built on top of the ancient city. There are apparently tours that will take you down into the tunnel system to see parts of the ancient city, and Yaron said he would try to arrange a visit to these during our stay here. Anyhow, above the main roads, there are roads that run on the roofs, over people's houses. (Good thing we had a guide, or we never would have known.) Here, where we ascended onto the roof, we were directly above the bustling market streets. We also happened to be at the center of the Old City, at the approximate point where Jewish, Christian, Armenian, and Muslim Quarters meet. From here, we were right near the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, one of our later destinations.We proceeded to cross the roof, entered the Muslim Quarter, walked through a school for biblical study, and descended back down a narrow staircase to the main street level. Here, we stopped briefly to take a water/restroom break at a store selling multitudes of historical artifacts and souvenirs. We then continued on through the market to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a spiritually powerful building. As a holy and meaningful site for all Christians, it contains the sites where tradition says that Jesus was crucified and buried. Different sects and denominations of Christians now have worship space here, and it also contains several of the "Stations of the Cross".

The inside ceiling of the large dome

The tomb, or "sepulchre"

The Old City also has plenty of anachronisms. Besides the cars driving through the streets, take this as an example:(Rope lights, eh?)

Possibly the neatest place we stopped on our adventure was Helen's Cistern, a large underground cavern that used to supply water for people in the area. The cavernous room has phenomenal acoustics and we all enjoyed Ted's beautiful singing. Then, the MEET instructors together provided a rendition of Row, Row, Row Your Boat (not very pretty) and Amazing Grace (which was actually fairly nice). Unfortunately, Jon then followed that by playing his "I Kissed a Girl" recording... (This song has been circulating around for the past week, much to my chagrin, ever since it played on the radio.)

For lunch, we drove to the top of the Mount of Olives, to a restaurant that has been run by the same family for 500 years. Incredible. Not only that, but check out our seating location!They served us a fantastic spread of vegetables, labane (a white dip kind of like sour cream), other dips, and a bountiful supply of pita. After a while, they also brought hummus and salad. Sam then took a nap while waiting for the main course.Next came the main course: peppers and chicken, beef, onions, and chips (aka fries). Delicious! We then sat around and contemplated life, drank some delicious coffee, and headed off to continue our adventure.

Our next stop was Pater Noster, a convent run by nuns who spoke French. This complex was definitely another highlight of our day. Translations of the Lord's Prayer in just about every language possible cover the walls. They claim that every written language is represented. However, Alice and Mike (our two resident Russian experts) noted that Russian is not there. Nevertheless, it's a beautiful place. Some examples:
The roses were also beautiful. Someone proposed a rose photo contest, so everyone started taking photos of roses. Then taking pictures of people taking pictures of roses.
Next, we drove to one end of the Mount of Olives, where we had a fantastic view of the Old City.According to Jewish (and Christian) traditions, when the Messiah comes (or comes again), he will come to the Mount of Olives first. Thus, being buried on the Mount is highly desired. A Jewish cemetary covers much of the slope.
From the top, we also had a view of the wall.Next, we drove down the Mount a ways to the Dominus Flevit Church, the church where Jesus wept over Jerusalem. The small chapel there was beautiful, and it had another great view of the old city. Jon was almost denied entry for wearing shorts, but luckily they let him through anyway.From here, we could also see the Church of Maria Magdalene, a Russian Orthodox Church.We continued on to the Garden of Gethsemane, yet another of my favorite places from today. The history here is amazing, as are the olive trees, which are several thousand years old. If only trees could talk, I'm sure they'd have some amazing stories.Here also stands the Church of All Nations.Finally, we drove back to the Old City to visit the Western Wall, a very holy site for the Jewish community.

The women's side (men are on the far side)

Behind the wall is the Dome of the Rock, and the al-Asqa Mosque, both Muslim holy sites. This area is closed to non-Muslims on Friday, and hopefully we will be able to arrange a visit at a later date.

When we returned to the apartment, we tried to figure out what the great song was that we'd heard on the radio. Through some jumbling of the Hebrew words, some tricky internet searching, and some help from Max (our resident Hebrew expert), we found the song! Enjoy! It's called רק תבקש. We're still working on translating lyrics. The song came from our favorite radio station: GALGALATZ, which plays a mix of English, Hebrew, and Arabic music, and has everything from this song, to "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" from Monty Python's Life of Brian, to "I Kissed a Girl", the aforementioned annoyance of the week.

Humberto, Mike, and I then went on an adventure to find dinner. We were worried that since it's Friday (the Muslim holy day) and also the start of Shabbat (the Jewish holy day), we wouldn't find anything open. Happily, though, we discovered that the falafel stand on the street was still open and still making falafel in their large vat of oil. Excellent! We enjoyed a tasty meal of falafel and pistachios while sitting by the Old City wall. We also got to watch as a dumpster caught fire across the street. Much to my surprise, no one did anything. Pedestrians kept walking by, some people stopped to watch, but not even the police car that drove by did anything. By the time we'd left, it had nearly burned itself out. Interesting place, this is.
On the menu for tomorrow: Sleeping, more sightseeing, and watching the sun set over Jerusalem!