Jerusalem

Yesterday's registration for ulpan was a bit of a bureaucratic pain (at one point I had to fill out the same form twice so that I could keep a copy for myself, and, of course, the form was basically a contact information sheet), but I survived and eventually moved into my apartment in building 4 of Kfar HaStudentim (The Student Village). The Kfar is just outside the main university campus.

My room is also the miklat, the shelter to which we're supposed to go in case the politics in the region get a bit rough. So I have a few extra square feet and a pretty solid second door.

All five of us have now moved into the apartment (along with the apartment's other residents and Hebrew word of the day, n'malim), and it looks like it's going to be a lot of fun. There's still no Internet in there, so at the moment I'm sitting at a cafe in an academic building on the Hebrew University campus in order to get a connection. Hopefully, we'll get some Internet setup in the next few days or so.

Last night, I had the fortune of witnessing the crux of the yeshiva gap-year experience in an area of downtown Jerusalem that may be known to some as "crack square," though I'm told that Thursday night there will be an even more fantastic view into the structure of that intensive year of Torah study.

We've got some orientation stuff later, and ulpan starts tomorrow morning. Oh, and apparently the Israeli government decided to make itself fall apart a bit.