Moving in

I'm finally moving my clothes out of the suitcases and into the closet. (Well, בערך. One suitcase is being turned into an underwear drawer, and the winter-clothes suitcase is staying packed for now.)

What took me so long? Well, part of it is my laziness and insensitivity to clutter. But part of it is that there just isn't much room here. Living spaces in Jerusalem tend to be small and cramped. My room here at my grandmother's house is actually well-sized — about as big as my sophomore year double at Swarthmore. But when the fold-out couch is folded out, a lot of the space becomes difficult to use. More importantly, the bookshelves, closets and drawers are almost all full, and all of the horizontal surfaces are piled with my grandma's things. (I should add that I really do not mean to sound like I'm complaining about my completely-free NSA housing! Anyway, I should be moving in to an apartment of my own soon enough.)

The big hassle of the past few days has been getting a cell phone. Here in Israel, the phone itself doesn't come with the cell phone plan, and the cheapest machine costs ₪500 (almost $150)! So I'd like to get a cell phone from the someone in the family instead. Now it's looking like one of the cousins on my mom's side has a girlfriend who has a phone that she doesn't need, but the battery is someplace else, so she can pick up the battery and drop off the phone somewhere in Tel Aviv this weekend, and then maybe I can pick it up on Sunday if I go to TA with an aunt from my dad's side. (Oh, and by the way — Sunday is not part of the weekend. The weekend is Friday and Saturday. So Thursday night here is equivalent Friday night in the US. Fact!) If all of that goes according to plan, I'll have the machine in my hands. And THEN I have to choose a cell phone plan. COMPLICATED.

Life's been a little stressful and a little noisy. (My grandmother listens to the radio at all hours, and I'm finding that the constant loud-and-fast stream of Hebrew news commentary and radio jingles gets me edgy.) But tonight is Friday night, so things are supposed to quiet down in our ultra religious corner of the not-quite-Halachic-State. נחיה ונראה (we'll live and we'll see, ≈ time will tell). Look for more frequent updates soon!