I Survived Bet Plus

Yet again I find myself at the Ben Gurion Airport at a ridiculously early hour. I really need a nap. But instead of trying to curl up on hard airport lounge seats, I will write a blog post.

Yesterday afternoon I wrote my final exam for Hebrew level Bet Plus. I read the text, filled in some blanks, conjugated some verbs and prepositions, and wrote an essay about my Uncle Bob. Those essays are like mind bender games; how can I make a coherent essay, fitting is as many grammar points and vocab from the course, while limited to my very small bank of vocab that I can remember and spell? I wrote the exam early because of my trip home, and consequently when the class started everyone was asking me how hard it was. Meh, after surviving Statistical Mechanics, no exam seems that hard.

Then it was class party time. Ariel, the Chilean songwriter, serenaded us and demonstrated why he has songs on the radio and MTV made famous by pop stars. The man has skills, I tell you. He has come to Israel to study at a yeshiva and to get married to a yet unidentified girlfriend.

Our class has lost a few people to frustration and evil work schedules since the beginning but let me introduce you to some of the others:

Achlam works as a psychologist, and has some really scary stories about very large, very angry, very paranoid, mentally ill people.

Shelly, American expat who spent a decade in Germany, has followed her husband to Israel who is a genius expert in languages. Needless to say she finds it really frustrating that she works so hard at our simple Hebrew and her hubby can learn entire languages in a flash. She too is flying home soon for her son's wedding and to perform her duties as mother of the groom: "smile, shut up and wear beige"

Oliver and Max are our UK expats. You wouldn't guess it to look at him, especially with the British accent an all, but Oliver used to work for Jack Layton.

Nomi was our teacher this term. She speaks Russian, Hebrew, English, Spanish, some French and German and is researching connections between Aramaic and Hebrew for her PhD thesis. I am humbled.

The class is always lively and often funny. Besides the funny students, Nomi does her best to not use English to define words so it is amusing to watch her charades for things like the difference between "to kill" and "to be killed" and to describe the ongoing war between her cats to introduce the words "themselves", "itself", etc.

It seems like everyone in Ulpan has an interesting story. Even though I really don't need to take more lessons, the fascinating people, the challenge of the language and the great teachers has led me to sign up for another term of torture. Two weeks off then I start level gimmel!