Sushi in the Holy Land

Wednesday was the good day of classes - there was more learning about hating your "brother" and what hating does to you inside. She compared it to walking up the stairs with a ball and chain around your leg. Basically, holding a grudge and having anger against someone bears down on your soul and affects your day to day living. Also, it could come out at any time - she gave the example of a pressure cooker. When the pressure builds up, eventually it blows its top off.

Then she told us ways to get over anger, hatred, and ill-feelings. Very useful, because who really doesn't have anger towards somebody. She did say the best way to avoid holding hatred is to tell the person how you feel - tell the person what he/she did to make you angry. I guess it's good that I'm as honest as I am. :)

The rest of the day was great - learning more about Yocheved (mother of Moshe) and why she was so special, more about King David and the Tehilim he wrote, more about Muktza, and more Perkei Avot.

After classes, my roommate said she was going to a class, so I asked her where she was going figuring it was a shiur (lecture/discussion of Torah). She said she was going to a Jazz class. I said, "Dance? I want to go!" So we went to a dance class.
We went to town and the place is a women-only dance school. It's really great considering there are a lot of women who don't dance in front of men, and where else can they go? Anyway, so we went, and the class turned out to be hip hop, not jazz. It was a great class, and I had a lot of fun, and got to do the exercise my body has been so badly craving, but let's just say I'm a lot older than I used to be.

Hip hop isn't easy - if you do real hip hop, it's a lot of rolling on the floor, and my knees and elbows can't exactly take it for too long. Also, the teacher wanted us to end in some position with our legs in the air and head on the floor - yeah I took one look and knew there was no way that was going to happen anytime soon, so I sat up looked in the mirror and smiled.

After the good workout in class, my roomie and I went to the Ben Yehuda area and stopped by a goodbye party for one of the she'arim girls. We kept walking onto a restaurant called Gong. It's a sushi restaurant! In Israel! I didn't know they had sushi restaurants in Israel, but apparently there are quite a lot of them. After waiting for about an hour, we finally got our food, and it was really good sushi. Not like American sushi, but it was really really good.

I have to say, this being my 5th time in Israel, that it never ceases to amaze me that I can just go to practically any restaurant I want and get kosher food. It's like, I never have to think about it - I can just go, and it's Kosher. It's really really awesome. Although it does make it a bit difficult to go back to the states. I mean I do live in New York, the metro area and city with the most amount of Jews and most amount of Kosher restaurants in the entire US, so I do have it a bit easier than those who live in Arizona, lets say, but still, it's a culture shock.