First Day of School! First Day of School!

Hello, my dear readers! The title of this post is not just a Finding Nemo reference...today was my first day of classes at Hebrew University! With MEN O.O Sooooo interesting. And exciting :)

I started the day with a walk around campus with Alison and Martina. We wandered about, taking some pictures, and wound up in Rothberg, the international building. Martina wanted to see which classrooms her classes were in, so Alison and I tagged along. There we ran into Rob! Happy 20th birthday to him! Fun fact: because daylight savings ended today, his birthday is 25 hours. Awwww yeah! Then Martina disappeared, so the three of us continued and wound up circling the outside of the entire campus. Sadly, because of our detour, I didn't get all the pictures that I wanted because it was time for me to go to class. Dear readers, this means you must wait for the campus tour blog post!

So I went to my first class (The Battle Over the Bible: The Eyes of Jews, Christians, and Muslims) and met up with Kate. We're both pretty sure that we're going to drop this class because we've heard that it actually presents a very unbalanced view, but as I have mentioned, my adviser encouraged me to visit as many classes as possible during shopping week, because who knows what surprises I might find? But having found courses that I think sound more appealing, I needed to be impressed to commit to taking this class. We had a great chat with another girl in the class, Ellen, a former psychology and religion major (woohoo!) about religion's role in public policy and the relevance of ancient sacred texts to modern life. Hello, reason I came here :) The chat wound up being quite long...I got to class about 15 minutes early (which was good because there were NOT enough chairs) and we got to talk for about 45 minutes. Why? OUR PROFESSOR NEVER SHOWED UP. (Remember what I said about needing to be impressed? Not so much.) Eventually someone went and got Arlene, the fabulous administrative assistant, and she said that the professors had plenty of notice that classes begin today, and they'd been trying to get a hold of him but he wasn't answering his phone. We're welcome to have one extra day to check out the class (because shopping week is supposed to guarantee us two days to make a decision), and she was extremely apologetic. She handed out the syllabus, and we left.

An hour and a half before my next class...what's a girl to do? I grabbed a sandwich from the cafe in Rothberg, then Kate and I were going to walk over and explore the campus store. But it was closed :( So we came back to Rothberg and I sat down to eat my sandwich, look over the syllabus, and obsess over my iCal. Around 14:10, I headed back to the cafe, grabbed an iced coffee, and walked to my next class -- in the same classroom as the first one!

Well, it wouldn't have taken much to improve on my first class, but this one (Jews in the Greco-Roman World in the Second Temple Period: Assimilation, Adaptation, and Resistance) was amazing! There are only ten people currently registered for the class (half of them male!), so it'll be a nice small seminar :) The professor Rivkah Duker-Fishman, is fantastic so far! She also has twin baby granddaughters, awwww. As each person came in she asked them where they go to school, what they major in, what other classes they're taking, etc. She said she wants the population of the class to guide the direction of the class, especially because there are so few of us. She also has an advisee in the Imadi program (one of the freshman programs) who was recently admitted to MHC -- she passed along the girl's e-mail address so I can meet up with her and tell her about how awesome it is :D How cool is that?!? The way that she teaches, based largely on primary sources, reminds me of Michael. (She told us, you can't make wine without grapes -- you can't study religious history without the sources!) I am absolutely keeping this class. (Something my friends from Michael's classes will appreciate -- I'm going to try and do an oral report on Paul at the end of the semester! D-d-d-diva!)

Finally I scurried off to my last class of the day, which also happens to be one of the classes I have been most excited about since my father and I found it in the course catalogue this summer -- Perspectives on Islam: Religion, History, and Culture. This, too, did not disappoint! First of all, my dear friend Arielle is in the class with me -- and will also be in my Israeli Politics class, yay! The professor is an older Palestinian gentleman who lives in Jerusalem and Ramallah named Nafez Nazzal, and he has had a very interesting life: he was stranded as a student in the US during the Six Days' War (he was raised in East Jerusalem, so he was a Jordanian citizen when he left, but now home was in Israel -- yikes); he taught for some time in the US, helped found a university in Libya, and then spent over twenty years teaching half the year in Israel and half in the United States (Harvard, UPenn, UCLA); and he has two very American sons with very Arab wives and four grandchildren. His goal for the class is to promote understanding and acceptance of Islam, and to help people distinguish between Islam and individual Muslims. He's not afraid to share his opinions (which I LOVE), and has promised to do his best to distinguish between opinion and fact. The first few classes are providing context for the rest of the semester: pre-Islamic Middle East and the advent of Islam. It's a bit dry, in my opinion, but I recognize that it's important to our understanding of issues we'll discuss later. He's also VERY funny!

At 18:15 I walked back to the Kfar with Arielle and we met up with Alison, Steph, Kate, and Karen, our new roommate. Kate and I had agreed that the first day of classes meant we had to celebrate with falafel, and the others tagged along as well. (We'll celebrate almost anything with falafel, especially since they've been closed for the holiday and Shabbat since last Tuesday!) When we got back Kate, Karen, and I at together and chatted about our lives :) Now I'm planning on spending my evening Skyping with Ian, watching How I Met Your Mother, writing this post, and gearing up for tomorrow's busy day. What's on the schedule?

8:30 - 12:00 -- Hebrew
12:30 - 16:00 -- The Emergence of Biblical Israel
16:30 - 18:15 -- Israeli Politics

I will come home TIRED. I barely have time for lunch! But fortunately, Tuesday is light: interview at AISJ in the morning (eek/yay!), then probably a quick trip to the shuk, more campus photography, and one class from 16:30 to 18:15 :) I'm glad to have such a light, easy day in the middle of my week!

In other exciting news, I just got an e-mail informing me that enough people are interested in Intensive Hebrew for them to create a class. Huzzah! The extra 90 minutes that constitute "Intensive Hebrew" are between other classes that I have, so I'd be spending that time on campus anyway -- might as well spend it productively :)

Well readers, it's time for me to rest now to gear up for tomorrow's crazy day...I'll hopefully be going to sleep quite early! I promise a post later this week about the rest of my classes and, at long last, a photographic campus tour <3