Dig update
Jun. 20th, 2007 11:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theyellowhobbitI've now been doing registrar work for the past 3 days. There's a notebook that is divided into sections for all the different types of artifacts, and I'm responsible for recording the artifacts in the right place as they come in each day. And then I paint pieces of pottery with clear nail-polish and write the registration numbers on top of that. Of course, I have to write really small, and this part of my job sometimes hurts my hand, since I grip the permanent marker too hard. But I stop when it hurts, and I still finish everything relatively quickly. The work takes about 2-3 hours per day.
So I get up later than people who dig, and I finish before them, and thus have a lot of time for internetting.
There's no store on Lotan, so every week the group is bussed down to Eliat for the afternoon. So I went yesterday. We went to the mall and I bought some essentials, and I helped 2 of my friends find phone-cards. We also went to the office supply store so they could buy pens and pencils, and I bought some fine-tipped sharpie markers and mechanical pencils for my registrar work. Then we walked back towards the supermarket, and stopped in the Eilat museum, which is this tiny museum that shows the history of Eilat. At one point there's a display with people from Eilat, and it looks like they just found the randomest people ever. But it was amusing, and the museum wasn't expensive.
In the supermarket I helped my friends find meat, cheese, alcohol, charcoal, and some other things. I forget that most people in my group don't speak or read Hebrew, and that the contents of a given package of food are not necessarily self-evident. In cases like these, it feels good to "know Hebrew" (or at least as much as I need to get around.)
Then we all met up at the bar to go home, except that I ended up staying, because my cousins were coming to Eilat and I was going to meet them at 8:30. After everyone else had left Eilat, I sat around and read, and then at 8:40 I found my cousins. We went out for steak at a place called Entrecote. I don't remember the last time I've had steak. This was really good steak. Though the fries weren't crispy.
We discussed a lot about the Reform movement, since my cousin works for NFTY. She organizes the part of the trip where the kids come down to the desert for a few days.
When I went to Israel with NFTY in 2000, there were about 1500 kids on NFTY trips that summer. This was right before the 2nd intifada. The next summer the trips were cancelled. After that, in 2002, there were 10 kids on one lone NFTY trip. In 2003 there were 33. In 2004 it started getting back into the hundreds.
But now, even though things have settled down, they're only getting about 500 kids per summer. Which seems like a lot, but it's really not. The summer NFTY trips used to be a major source of income for NFTY, and they subsidized the semester in Israel program, EIE. So apparently now they're doing a lot less of the field trips and stuff one EIE, and the program isn't as good as it used to be. And the reason why the number of kids coming to Israel is so small is because of Birthright (we think). Parents are saying "why should we spend $5000 on a summer trip to Israel when we can wait a few years and our child can go for free?" Of course, birthright is only 10 days long as opposed to 5 weeks, and they don't get to see as much, and there's like no downtime, and everyone spends the trip drinking, but the parents aren't necessarily thinking about that.
And I got back around midnight, and it took me forever to fall asleep. So I had trouble waking up this morning, and I moved very slowly. Yet I still managed to get my work done today by 10:45. Usually I finish a lot earlier, but usually I'm not this tired.
And this afternoon I'm going to my cousins' kibbutz to do laundry, since unlike Zahara, Yotvata does not have free laundry.
So I get up later than people who dig, and I finish before them, and thus have a lot of time for internetting.
There's no store on Lotan, so every week the group is bussed down to Eliat for the afternoon. So I went yesterday. We went to the mall and I bought some essentials, and I helped 2 of my friends find phone-cards. We also went to the office supply store so they could buy pens and pencils, and I bought some fine-tipped sharpie markers and mechanical pencils for my registrar work. Then we walked back towards the supermarket, and stopped in the Eilat museum, which is this tiny museum that shows the history of Eilat. At one point there's a display with people from Eilat, and it looks like they just found the randomest people ever. But it was amusing, and the museum wasn't expensive.
In the supermarket I helped my friends find meat, cheese, alcohol, charcoal, and some other things. I forget that most people in my group don't speak or read Hebrew, and that the contents of a given package of food are not necessarily self-evident. In cases like these, it feels good to "know Hebrew" (or at least as much as I need to get around.)
Then we all met up at the bar to go home, except that I ended up staying, because my cousins were coming to Eilat and I was going to meet them at 8:30. After everyone else had left Eilat, I sat around and read, and then at 8:40 I found my cousins. We went out for steak at a place called Entrecote. I don't remember the last time I've had steak. This was really good steak. Though the fries weren't crispy.
We discussed a lot about the Reform movement, since my cousin works for NFTY. She organizes the part of the trip where the kids come down to the desert for a few days.
When I went to Israel with NFTY in 2000, there were about 1500 kids on NFTY trips that summer. This was right before the 2nd intifada. The next summer the trips were cancelled. After that, in 2002, there were 10 kids on one lone NFTY trip. In 2003 there were 33. In 2004 it started getting back into the hundreds.
But now, even though things have settled down, they're only getting about 500 kids per summer. Which seems like a lot, but it's really not. The summer NFTY trips used to be a major source of income for NFTY, and they subsidized the semester in Israel program, EIE. So apparently now they're doing a lot less of the field trips and stuff one EIE, and the program isn't as good as it used to be. And the reason why the number of kids coming to Israel is so small is because of Birthright (we think). Parents are saying "why should we spend $5000 on a summer trip to Israel when we can wait a few years and our child can go for free?" Of course, birthright is only 10 days long as opposed to 5 weeks, and they don't get to see as much, and there's like no downtime, and everyone spends the trip drinking, but the parents aren't necessarily thinking about that.
And I got back around midnight, and it took me forever to fall asleep. So I had trouble waking up this morning, and I moved very slowly. Yet I still managed to get my work done today by 10:45. Usually I finish a lot earlier, but usually I'm not this tired.
And this afternoon I'm going to my cousins' kibbutz to do laundry, since unlike Zahara, Yotvata does not have free laundry.
