School and food shopping

Monday's classes were awesome - we learned about Interpersonal Relationships, and how having hate or ill-feelings about someone can really damage you, we learned about Women in the Torah, we learned about Tehilim, and we did some Halacha and Pirkei Avot (teachings of the fathers/Rabbis). The halacha we learned was about muktsa. Muktsa are the auxiliary things that aren't going against shabbos directly, but they are things that could lead to you doing things that are against shabbos. One of those fences Jews like to put around the actual halacha, and since the Rabbis wrote about it, we have to follow it. Either way, the class was interesting (since I don't really have any plans to be so stringent about Muktsa, I took it as a lesson, but didn't internalize it), and I feel like this is the reason that people think Jews are crazy. Well, one of, anyway. The other classes were amazing, and the teachers were energetic, dynamic, and just overall extremely intelligent and interesting people.

Since I went out for dinner Sunday, my friend Francesca and I decided to go food shopping on Monday. After classes, we went to the supermarket in Har Nof not too far from us, and we stocked up. Since our apartment is dairy, we got some fake chicken patties, cereal, yogurt, what I thought was cream cheese (it turned out to be sour cream), hard cheese, pasta, tomato sauce** tuna, pita, and some veggies to make our meals somewhat healthy. I also bought a frozen fish for myself - just in case I was feeling daring enough to really cook. We sort of forgot to buy condiments, or oil, so the only thing we could cook was pasta. We also didn't have salt, or pepper, so the pasta with the already bland tomato sauce was pretty flavorless. Edible, but not crazy tasty. Then we had some cactus-pear-apple juice to drink - g-d bless Spring and their crazy Israeli flavors.
After dinner, Francesca and I attempted to watch some pirated movies she bought in Ramallah. Oddly enough, the only pirated movie that worked on my DVD player was a movie about pirates. The others were video CDs, which my computer cannot handle, nor could I find the right program to download that would work with my 2 year old operating system.
Oh well. So we watched the pirates. "At World's End" started out pretty good, but it got kind of boring, and as it was getting late, we just decided to stop it before it got to the end battle and we'd actually want to watch it.
It was a nice lazy evening - and I'm quite looking forward to the next time I get to have on of those.

**tomato sauce in Israel is concentrated tomato paste, apparently, or at least that's the one that I bought. It's interesting.