Progress made, by blogger of the month Jacek Jarczynski

Western Wall, Old City, Jerusalem 

Me in red with Julian and Tal.

September is almost through and I can hardly believe that I have been in Israel since mid-July.  A great deal of progress has been made on all fronts with regard to academics, housing, settling in, meeting new people, and getting familiar with Be’er Sheva in general.  As summer turns to fall I can see olives and dates ripening on the trees throughout the city.  There is much inspiration in this area for someone with an appreciation for nature, history and ethnography.  I am quite fond of Be’er Sheva and the new friendships I established here.  The MSIH experience thus far has been fantastic.  The classes are coming along well (taking a break from biochemistry reading to write this entry), I am picking up more of the Hebrew language with every day and the local people I have met here so far proved to be incredibly generous and friendly … and I love my new bed!  No more sleeping on an inflatable mattress!  The things we take for granted until we have to relocate and set up shop all over again in a new place.  Earlier during the month we went on a class trip to Jerusalem.  After meeting with students from the Hebrew University Medical Center we went on a tour of the old city.  It is impossible not to feel the weight of history present in every corner of the old city.  All for now and back to glycolysis and the pentose phosphate pathway.   - blogger of the month Jacek Jarczynski

A week of trying new things, by September blogger of the month Benzion Samueli

This was a week of trying new things. I learned a lot.

One. You can’t necessarily see the thorns on a cactus. And if you pick a cactus fruit from the plant and roll it around in your hands, you won’t necessarily feel the spikes immediately. It could take 20 or 30 minutes before your hand becomes inflamed from all of the prickles in your fingers.

Two. Cheap brandy is disgusting.

Three. When you send registered mail, only the post office from which you sent it has access to the information, and if it gets lost in Tel Aviv instead of being delivered to Jerusalem, you need to complete an investigation form in Be’er Sheva.

Four. There’s an xkcd for every situation. I found one that was relevant to today’s biostatistics class, another relevant to our Global Health lecture (the comic itself is a link to a really cool site), and another on people like me complaining about everything.

You may have noticed that my first two blogs were considerably longer than the third, which was a bit longer than this one. Explanation: medical school is hard, so I don’t have time to write full page parodies anymore. (And here we use A4 paper, which besides being mathematically a really cool size, it’s also longer and harder to fill than 8 ½ x 11.)

Now, I’d like to end off my blogger month on a serious, heart-warming note. (Also my lovely wife Rakefet told me that I should.) In truth, as much as I have been highlighting the strange/annoying parts of Israel in my posts, it’s just to be funny. I truly love Israel and Ben Gurion University is amazing. Professors invite their students to their homes for holiday meals. We’re all far away from our families, which is very difficult, but the closeness I have with my classmates makes it a bit easier. So I’d like to thank my parents for supporting me while I’m here, the New York office for making the application process affable, the Israeli staff & faculty for creating a good learning environment, and my lovely wife Rakefet tolerating my craziness.

Works Cited

“my lovely wife Rakefet” is a play on two things. One, Joel Stein always refers to “my lovely wife Cassandra” in his “The Awesome Column” on the second to last page of every TIME magazine, as well as in his blog More Stories About Some Kid. Furthermore, on the first week of classes, as everyone was meeting each other, I was told by several students, “your wife is lovely.” I told Rakefet and she didn’t believe me. Just as she was saying this, a classmate walked up to us and said, “Oh, is this your lovely wife Rakefet that I’ve been hearing about?” -blogger of the month Benzion Samueli

Nothing I say should be taken too seriously! by Benzi Samueli

(Disclaimer: Nothing I say should be taken too seriously or literally; I take a great deal of poetic license with everything.)

I know I have an upcoming exam in immunology, and if I don’t study harder for microbiology I’m going to fall behind real quickly, but I promised MSIH that I’d write these weekly blogs for a month. Plus I get a nalgene and gift card for this. So I’ll study a little later.

I got an iPad this week, which is very exciting and very useful. A number of students use the Notability app, which lets you import the lecturer’s slides and take notes right on them. Also, all of the textbooks are available in eBook format. All in all, the iPad is a great investment for carrying around all of the lecture slides, notes, and textbooks in a very small device. So when I start studying a little later, it will be on the iPad.

Another personal study tool I use is print-out review sheets taped up on my walls. As I walk around my apartment, I quickly look over amino acid structures and lymphocyte classifications. I took biochemistry in college, and I can’t believe I only just realized this week that phenylalanine is alanine with a phenyl group. The review sheets will be helpful a little later when I start studying.

Most of the professors are very kind in posting a lot of resources online. From Moodle (the university’s official class-resource platform) or their individual websites, you can find relevant articles, notes, assigned reading pages, etc.  I just received a couple of e-mails from biostatistics that some material will be excluded from the final, and also some explanations on the binomial distribution. Unfortunately, these e-mails are going to delay what was once a very timely study session, because I’ll need to look over them before I start studying a little later.

It’s getting late, so I should go to bed. I’ll wake up early to study. Uh-oh, the sirens are going off. One of the directors just sent the class a text message that it’s a false alarm. I discuss with my lovely wife Rakefet how the alarms can go off accidentally. I mean, in high school it was obvious - the building could just detect when we were taking finals and would go off all the time. Anyway, this defeats my early-to-bed-early-to-rise strategy, so I guess I’ll study tomorrow.

Correction from Previous Post: Unbeknownst to me, my lovely wife Rakefet has herself turned into a grammarian (as we say in Hebrew, להתגרמר), and told me that my pronunciation guide to the word octopodes should have included a ə.  - blogger of the month Benzi Samueli

Cool grammar facts, and more! by September blogger of the month Benzi Samueli

As anyone in my Hebrew class can attest by now, I love studying grammar and the rules of grammar. So before I begin my discussion on life in Israel, let me tell a short story that lead me to a cool grammar fact. My friend and I had a difference of opinion regarding the proper definition of a word, so I went to the Merriam Webster dictionary website. In any case, this also brought me to MW’s grammar videos, from which I learned the following:

When the word octopus was brought into English in the 18th century, it was given a standard English plural suffix (octopuses). When fanatic Latin grammar nuts insisted on giving words their proper Latin endings, octopi was entered into the dictionary. Realizing that octopus actually comes from GRΣΣK, other grammarians gave it the proper plural: octopodes (ock-TOP-uh-deez). Incidentally, Octopodes is the name of my alma mater’s oldest a cappella group.

That having been said, I was asked to talk a little bit about my experience moving to Israel under the Law of Return. Once you are determined eligible for citizenship, the State places you into one of four categories, which have almost no practical significance (there are two things that I’ll get to in a minute). They are:

●     עולה חדש* - New immigrant - has no previous legal connection to Israel (me)

●     קטין חוזר - Returning minor - was born in Israel but left at a very young age and returns as an adult (my lovely wife Rakefet)

●     אזרח עולה - Citizen immigrant - was granted citizenship on birth due to technical reasons, but wasn’t actually born here (two of the other immigrants in my class)

●     תושב חוזר - Returning resident - grew up in Israel, moved abroad, and is now moving back

As I mentioned, these categories bear very little significance. The State gives some extra benefits to a New Immigrant that others don’t get (such as 1 year of health insurance; otherwise it costs the market price of $1500/year).

But the main purpose of the categories is to add bureaucracy to the system. (Lesson #4: Everything in Israel is designed to create more bureaucracy, which in turn creates jobs for people to handle the extra paperwork.) Because my lovely wife Rakefet is a Returning Minor, our immigration booklet is green instead of the blue one that other immigrants get. Immigrants who are entitled to a blue book are able to get them at the airport upon arrival, but green bookers need to go to the nearest immigration office to pick them up. But just for fun, if a green booker is married to a blue booker, even though that causes the couple’s shared book to be the green type, then it is received at the airport. Also, if you happen not to fit nicely into one of these three categories (and indeed, someone in my class does not), then you get to play circus with every authority you encounter because there’s no checkbox that accurately describes you on the forms.

Lesson #5: (the most important lesson I will ever give) The bureaucracy is much easier to deal with if you do your homework and really learn the process. For example, converting your driver’s license can be done in the following simple steps: 1) get optician's note; 2) physician signs note; 3) DMV stamps note; 4) schedule & take 3 driving classes using the DMV stamp; 5) schedule practical exam; 6) pay for the exam at post office; 7) take exam and get certificate; 8) bring certificate to the DMV for your temporary license; 9) bring temporary license to post office to activate it; 10) wait for the real license in the mail. Although you may not realize that you need to go to the post office twice in order to get your license, it’s true. So before you ask anything from a government office, it’s highly advisable to know what they expect from you. And while they will expect a lot more from you than their counterparts in the States, it is manageable.

One great benefit of Israel’s bureaucracy, though, is the Population Registry. Every citizen is fully described in the computers of the Population Registry. When you buy a cell phone plan, PO box, internet service, pet octopodes, bank account, or anything at all, you just give your 9-digit Citizen Number (aka TZ). Lesson #6: Unlike your SSN, this number is not private, mainly because in Israel you don’t get privacy. With your TZ, the sales rep can instantly download your phone number, mailing address, birthday, and all-important immigrant classification. Then, you just have to fill out a blank form with your phone number, mailing address, birthday... wait, why did they download that information from the Registry if I have to fill out this form anyway? Whatever, this is Israel.

*Joke

Taught by my Hebrew teacher. Background: Russians usually pronounce the Hebrew/English “oh” as an “ah” sound. Ex. Moscowbecomes Moskvah. The rest of the joke has to be done in Hebrew because it doesn’t make sense in English.

שני עלים יושבים בנחת על ענף של עץ. פתאום מגיע עלה נוסף ומתיישב ליידם. העלים מסתובבים ומסתכלים עליו ושואלים אותו "סליחה מי אתה?" אז הוא עונה להם במבטא רוסי "אני עלה חדש"

Why do I have to go to the post office to pay my gym membership?, and other interesting things about Israel, by September blogger of the month Benzion Samueli

●     Why do I have to go to the post office to pay my gym membership?

●     Why is there a traffic light here?

●     Why are they only open for 3 hours on Mondays... and they take a 30 minute lunch?

●     Why does the English menu have higher prices than the Hebrew one?

●     How does it make any sense to say, “I make for you special deal... buy one for the price of two, get one free!” ?

●     What kind of a name is “Supersol Deal Extra?” Or is it “Supersol Extra Deal?” And why do they sometimes spell it Shufersol?

●     If I wanted a taxi I’d wave one down... why do all drivers ask if I want a ride?

Lesson #1: the answer to every question is: because this is Israel. Although when I tried to use that response when my Hebrew teacher asked why I’m learning Hebrew, she said, “But we’re in Be’er Sheva... nobody speaks Hebrew here.”

To understand what it’s like to study at BGU, you need to understand Israel a little bit. So that’s what this post is about. To sum everything up, I overheard someone say, “Lalala, this is Israel. It’s like a summer camp - most of the normal rules don’t really apply, you’ll get sick and you lose your voice.”

You pretty much don’t get privacy here. There’s a scale outside the hospital dining hall that everyone steps on in front of the cashier and anyone else who’s around. (At first we thought it was a requirement to make sure you don’t stuff your pockets with food, but later learned that it’s an option to help you to keep track of your weight.) The internet guy asked one of my classmates how much he paid for rent; the plumber asked my friend how much she makes and how much she pays for her children’s pre-school; a professor mentioned that Payroll leaves all the paychecks sitting on a table, and then realized that everyone gets paid the same. But somehow I haven’t mastered this culture yet, because when someone asked me if I’m married and how I met my wife and then I returned those questions, she got all flustered. My friend, trying to show off his Hebrew, asked her out on a date with a few different idioms, until she said, “I don’t want to talk about this.”

Lesson #2: It will be a long time before I can get away with “being Israeli.” Last week, in response to hearing someone say חס וחלילה (God forbid), I said חמסה חמסה חמסה (which has a meaning opposite of “Evil Eye;” this is a phrase I picked up from my Hebrew teacher that she always responds to God forbid). In any case, a passerby came over and reproached me for saying חמסה. He explained that I didn’t understand the strength of the word. My Hebrew teacher explained that Israelis don’t like it when Americans encroach on their culture.

But the greatest moments are the Hebrew slip-ups. Here are some of my favorites, some of mine and some of others:

●     יש לך חבר בישראל? A barista asked a customer if she had a boyfriend in Israel. Misinterpreting the word as meaning “Do you have any friends,” she answered, “יש לי שלושה חברים פה” (I have 3 boyfriends here.”)

●     השדים כועבים לך? A medical student tried to ask a older, superstitious religious person if her breasts were causing her any pain, but in a slight mispronunciation, asked if any demons were hurting her.

●     אתה רוצה לצאת איתי? Attempting to ask someone if he wanted to leave school together, I accidentally asked him out.

●     בוא נזרום! While saying “Just go with the flow” sounds cool in English, in Hebrew it means something almost like, “Go be a prostitute.” (Lesson #3: Don’t say anything your friends told you to say. You’ll inevitably end up in a Big Fat Greek Wedding situation.)

●     יש לך השעה? Many English expressions just don’t make any sense in Hebrew. I asked someone if “he had the time,” but as time isn’t something one can literally possess, he answered, “מה זאת אומרת?” (lit What does this say? fig What do you mean?).

Americans have some shared notions about what each foreign language sounds like, and the kind of noises and accents you need to make to imitate them. Ever wonder what other people think of English? When I was walking down the street with my wife one night, a little girl overheard us speaking and came running over and said, “Na na na, speaking English speaking English, na na na.” - September blogger of the month Benzion Samueli