Five month marker!!

So this week started out sucking. I felt like I a drain on society and a waste of my own time. Oh, and I got rejected from both art schools I applied to, so I was having a career/life crisis on top of it. But that was just Sunday. 

On Monday, I went to ulpan, which automatically made me feel slightly productive and then I had two (!) people call me back and set up interviews for Tuesday. 

Tuesday, I enjoyed my last day of ulpan (!), had PB and cucumber sandwiches for lunch (weird but oddly delicious) with my friend Ruth, then ran over to one side of Jerusalem, rocked my first interview (!) and then ran across to the other side of Jerusalem and rocked my second one (!!). Now both of these interviews were for non-paying internships, but I think they will be really good work experience and help me network. THEN I went home for about 5 minutes before heading out again to take my adopted little sister to get her hair cut. We had dinner together and hung out for a bit and then I crashed early.

Wednesday, I took my ulpan exam, which I am pretty confident about, though returning to the world of standardized testing was less than enjoyable. But, I met up with my soldier friend afterwards, and got to catch up with him and grab a late lunch. Then I met up with my other adopted little sister and hung out for a bit, before going out with my roomies to play pool. Oh, and when I got home I had an email saying that the first internship (the one I wanted more) hired me as their Events Planning Intern (!) so next week I will be starting at Presentense and learning about how to get social initiatives off the ground.

Today was all about prepping for the big holiday, so after fighting my way through the grocery store and its pre-chag madness, I spent a few hours in the kitchen cooking up a storm. I have once again, made way to much food, a problem I entirely blame on my mother. And maybe a little bit on my sister, as this upcoming holiday is all about the dairy food, so there was a lot of pasta and cheese involved.

Tonight is Shavuot, one of the three big ones on the Jewish calendar. It falls exactly 50 days after Passover, on the day that we recieved the Torah on Mt. Sinai. One of the traditions for this holiday is that we stay up all night learning Torah, and one of the traditions in Jerusalem, is that after that, we do "aliyah ba'regel" which means that we all walk to the Kotel (western wall) for the morning prayers. I have done this twice before and it is incredibly cool. You spend all night learning and then at about 3 or 4 am start walking towards the Old City. The closer you get, the more people you meet and by the time you are passing through the gates of the old city there are hundreds of people walking with you. We all get to the Kotel just as the sun is rising, and everyone prays before heading back home to crash. It is a special mitzva (good deed/brownie points) to walk up to Har Habayit/ the Old City on Shavuot, so this is not something that is done that often. Also, because it is on the holiday, it is a very different feeling from say, Yom Yerushalayim, when we all went to the kotel in a big singing and dancing mass. This is much quieter and relaxed, but still has that holiness and positive energy of thousands of people gathering in the name of God.

Shavuot leads straight into Shabbat, so it is going to be a long stretch of holiday, but I am really looking forward to it and hope it will just be the beginning of an awesome new leaf, as I am hitting my 5 month anniversary tomorrow!