Aleph, bet, vet, gimmel, daled, hey...

Grandpa's my new favorite person. Thanks for commenting, Grandpa! At least somebody reads this thing!

We are leaving for Jordan tomorrow morning... and truth be told, I haven't even packed yet. I have a major aversion to packing, and will probably put it off until tomorrow morning :P Oh well, we'll only be gone until Thursday. It shouldn't be that hard to pack for, right?

So we had a Passover meal a couple days ago. Technically, Passover's not until April, but Ophir, our Jewish teacher, thought he'd be too busy preparing his own family's Passover meal if we had it too close to the real date, so he scheduled it for February, instead. I thought it was really interesting, mostly because it was very authentic--Ophir's led many Passover meals in his own family, and knows how to execute the order of events throughout the evening (and it is very ordered--it's sometimes called the Seder meal, and "seder" actually means "order").

It was really pretty fun, too, though I wasn't such a huge fan of the part where you sit there for an hour or so waiting for dinner as you read from the Haggadah (the Passover story). We sang a lot of songs throughout the course of the evening, and our professor told us about some of the things parents will do to keep their children entertained throughout the course of the evening, since Passover meals can sometimes last well past midnight. He even pulled one of them on us--while we were eating dinner, he hid half of a piece of matzah that was needed for the next step in the Seder, and had us running around the JC to go find it :P He talked about how sometimes families will have their kids act out the story of the Israelites' escape from Egypt, and it kind of reminded me of how Christians have their children act out the Nativity for Christmas. I really do love learning about Jewish culture--some of the things they do are just really fascinating to me.

It's been raining kind of a lot this weekend, but I did make it out for a bit today to help draw a mural that we're going to paint in the Princess Basma center. Oh yeah, and I got a cool t-shirt the other day with Andy Warhol Coca Cola bottles on it. Have I mentioned that t-shirt? It is one awesome t-shirt. It goes very well with my Coca Cola sweatshirt. Unfortunately, I can't wear either one to Jordan--they both have Hebrew writing on them :(

Well, shavua tov! La' hit ra' ote! Shalom! I just took a Hebrew test, so I'll probably be spouting random phrases like that for the next few days. Oh, and I have the Hebrew alphabet song running through my head non-stop :P Anyway.

Laila tov!