Settled In!

I spent my first weekend at my new house in Israel and it was amazing! It is such a beautiful kibbutz & I've already fallen in love with this place.

This is what the kibbutz looks like....It looks a little old, but I promise it's a lot prettier in person! haha

Palm trees everywhere!

We spent Shabbat as a garin (my group) and I think we all became closer than ever from gadna plus spending the weekend together. We had Shabbat dinner together and when we were finished we all sat around the table singing different hebrew prayers as loud as we could. It was so much fun and I enjoyed every second. Once the sun sets every Friday evening, this is a start of Shabbat. Typically we attend synagogue, have dinner right after, and sing many hebrew prayers. Also, we are not allowed to use any form of electricity or technology until the sun sets on Saturday evening and you see three stars in the sky. Usually I do not follow this, but because I am living on a religious kibbutz I must follow it. I do enjoy it because it is a good break from technology and just time to socialize with the people you are with. This past Shabbat, after we all sang many prayers we cleaned up and just played games. We finished around 1 or 2 am and then I was planning to sleep, but me and a few others all decided to stay up later and just chat. We all ended up going to bed around 3 or 4 am...no idea what the actual time was since we couldn't use our phones. We all had to wake up the next day pretty early to go to synagogue, which is about a minute walk from our house. We were all so exhausted, but it was okay because after we finished we had the chance to go back and rest for about an hour. For lunch, we all were set up with a host family to eat with on the kibbutz. The family I had lunch with was very sweet and had four children. I was there for about 2-3 hours and spoke in hebrew the whole time...I must say I was pretty proud of myself for doing that! I felt very comfortable speaking it, which most of the time I'm too embarrassed to speak it so I choose not to. Afterwards, I went home and slept for hours on end catching up on all the sleep I missed out on while on gadna, plus for going to sleep so late the night before. After sleeping for a while, we all had activities we had to attend with our counselors. We just did that and once the sun set, we all sang more hebrew prayers. Overall, it was an enjoyable and relaxing weekend! Now, I start ulpan (intensive hebrew course) tomorrow morning so wish me luck!