Well, I have my final exam for this ulpan session tomorrow, and I had a big oral presentation today, so I'm pretty wiped out and busy. Ergo the written update; I don't have time to edit a video right now! But I'll post another video soon. But after tomorrow, I have a week off and start the last session of ulpan in September!

By the way, I finally put up a lot more pictures, including a lot of our weekend adventure in Tel Aviv, pictures of the Old City, plus the view from various places on campus, etc. Check them out!

Things have been pretty interesting here lately. Somehow it doesn't have me at all worried for my own safety, but there is most definitely growing unrest with recent events. For those who don't know, after several years of relative peace, there has been a lot of militant action in the area during the past couple of weeks, with plenty of rockets and gunfire being exchanged by both sides between Israel and Palestine, as well as with the essentially ungoverned Sinai peninsula (technically part of Egypt, though as I understand it the violence there has involved people from Gaza that got into Sinai). Don't ask me to take a stand, endorse or condemn either side, or really try to tell you all the facts. I couldn't even tell you for sure who started it all! My awesome flatmate Jack has been sifting through tons of news sites and articles on many different sides of the issue for about a week now, and she says that essentially nobody is telling the same story.

All I know for sure is that things are getting tense among the civilian population due to the border violence. There's scheduled to be a big pro-Palestinian protest on August 26 at a mosque in the Old City, and a formal warning has been issued by my university advising us to avoid the Old City entirely until the 27th because you just never know with protests; even though this one is scheduled to be peaceful, sometimes things get out of hand. People are also just day-to-day more one edge. There have been numerous serious threats of terrorist attacks on Jerusalem in the past couple days, so security has been very high and a lot of people have been avoiding public transportation and large crowds (the favorite targets for suicide bombers and such). There are a lot of helicopters constantly flying over the student village to and from the West Bank. We've seen a couple big plumes of smoke coming from the West Bank. Several military security checkpoints have been set up on Mount Scopus, right where the campus and student village are, within a couple miles. It's very interesting.

Due to all the security fuss, I'm not entirely sure how easy travel will be during my week off. My flatmates are talking about going camping, but I'd rather go to Galilee or maybe make it to Jordan to see Petra; I've always wanted to go there! But buses can be expected to be cancelled and/or delayed due to the threats on Jerusalem and the traffic caused by the military checkpoints and such, plus public transportation just isn't the safest in such times, so I'm not entirely sure if I'll even make it out of Jerusalem this upcoming week. I sure hope I do; I'm in such an amazing area, I ought to get beyond the walls of my apartment! But I'll have another week of at the beginning of October, so hopefully if I don't get any good traveling or sight-seeing in this week, I'll get another chance then. And if I do just spend the week relaxing, that could actually be nice. Ulpan is terribly confusing and tiring, but I'm proud to say I've completed 100 hours of Hebrew immersion! But I haven't been budgeting my time well, which has resulted in chronic sleep deprivation. Icky. Fortunately, when I found out that I'd gotten only 69% on a test last week that's worth 10% of my grade, with another test that's intended to be a bit harder and worth 35% of my grade coming up tomorrow, I was very happy to find out that it wasn't too late for me to be graded pass/no pass! I'll be doing that, to spare my GPA.