The Beginning of Israel

To be quite honest, it still feels a little bit surreal. I stepped off of the plane into Ben Gurion Airport on Friday afternoon and felt what I hadn’t really felt three years ago when I last visited Israel. This time, the signs in Hebrew seemed comforting and the sign reading “Welcome Home” was really beckoning me to enter the country and feel comfortable here. After I had zipped through Customs (I always walk through with confused glances at the guards wondering why they aren’t stopping me to look through my luggage) that feeling of welcome was intensified by the warm smiles and hugs that greeted me as Ofra and Eitan (family of my close family friend) stepped forward from the group of welcomers.

We proceeded to spend a very nice few days together, though I didn’t really practice my Hebrew other than trying to understand what was being said on the TV. Even that, though, managed to serve as a fairly universal language. We spent hours watching World Cup matches, commentated in Hebrew, and then discussing them in English. I’ve received promises, however, that when I meet more of the family, I’ll need to be able to whip out the Hebrew since other family members don’t speak English. Thank goodness!

As it turns out, the best form of motivating for utilizing an unfamiliar language is lack of alternative. I learned this today as I wandered around Hebrew University’s campus, trying to find my way from the dorms to the building with the internet (my success in this pursuit is responsible for the previous two posts finally having made it onto this blog.) I realized that if I didn’t want to become hopelessly lost, I needed to ask for directions. Though I’m pretty sure that either the directions that I received were quite incorrect (probably from a misunderstanding of my pronunciation of the building name) or my understanding of them was hopelessly flawed, I was pretty excited by my first modest attempts at utilizing my Hebrew. One can only hope that in the coming days I can report further success on this front and in my explorations of Jerusalem…