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Well, it’s definitely been a couple of weeks. So here’s the update.

Christmas Eve

The strangest thing about Christmas in Jerusalem is how normal the day felt. Stores were open, people were all around. No Christmas lights, or Silent Night on an endless loop. To be honest, it didn’t feel like Christmas at all.

Since Chinese food is hard to find, and the movie theater is far away, we decided to fore go the usual Christmas Eve festivities.  So what to do instead? Well, Jess and I ended up doing different things, but in the same line of though. So what did we do? Well…we went to Midnight Mass. Ironically, in Jerusalem it seems like a cool thing to go to Midnight Mass and see how Christians celebrate. In the states, I would probably never go to Mass. Figure that out?

Well, Jess went with her friend Nikki (grew up Catholic and converted to Judaism about 4 years ago) to a service in the area, while I went with a few people to Bethlehem to see how Christmas is celebrated in the city where Christ was born.

I’m not sure what I expected in Bethlehem. First off, it’s in the West Bank. We needed to bring our passports and go through a security checkpoint to get in. Once across the fence, the entire landscape changed. We went from nicely paved roads, nicer buildings, and Hebrew signs, to very rundown, dirty, and Arabic signs. It was a bit of culture shock, and it was only about 30 minutes from where I live!

We got there a few hours early and they had this whole concert set-up. The weird part of it was, they had a lot of the groups were singing in Spanish. Huh? They would say all of these pro-Palestinian lines at the end, but again it was in Spanish, so nobody was really listening until they said something like ‘Viva Palestinian!” and then everybody would cheer.

Around midnight, we tried to get into the services, but tickets had been sold out for weeks. This is the service that a lot of the big wigs show up to. Supposedly Abbas was there. Outside of the building were a ton of dignitary limo’s with flags from all different parts of the world represented.

We were able to go into the Church of the Nativity by entering the ‘Door of Humility’. Basically it’s a door that is about 4 feet high, so you have to bow to enter or exit. From there, we were able to go to an alcove and listen in to the services, which we did for a few minutes. Unfortunately, we had no clue what was going on, so it wasn’t that impressive.

The most interesting part was just walking around and watching the people. Palestinians were walking around in Santa outfits handing out pro-Palestinian rhetoric. People were there to celebrate, others were there for the free music and festive atmosphere. It was a cold night, and tons of people were walking around selling two from what looked like the tea kettle from their house.

Jessica on the other hand, went to the entire midnight mass, and probably had a much more interesting experience since she was able to get the play-by-play.

New Year’s Eve

So one of the students organized a New Year’s Eve celebration for any of the students that wanted to join. She rented out a bar, organized the open bar, decorated the place, and bought snacks. The theme? Prom. So you know what this means? In the mighty words of Barney….SUIT UP!  So everyone got all gussied up in the finest clothes that they brought to Israel.

Ever weeks of trying to get up the courage, I finally was able to ask the girl I was interested in if she wanted to go to Prom with me. Thankfully, she hadn’t been asked yet and said yes. So Wednesday night finally came along, and I showed up to pick up my date in my finest suit. There was much dancing and hanging out with friends, and midnight came and went.

Overall, a very fun evening. To top off the evening, we caught up with almost all of Jess’s family on Skype.

Packing and Finals

So this week is Finals for Jess. She has had 2 ten page papers to finish, one oral exam in chanting Torah, and 4 additional tests. Needless to say, she has been a bit stressed. As of right now, she is over half done as she handed in both papers, took both the oral exam, and one of the written exams. I’m just tired thinking about all of the work she is doing. Right now, her and a friend are studying Hebrew in the main room.

We are also leaving for Africa late Thursday night (Jess’s last final is Thursday morning). So this week, I’ve been finishing up work and trying to remember where I placed all of the things that I want to make sure to bring with us to Kenya and Tanzania.

This will probably be the last post for a little bit. If we have the opportunity, we’ll try and post while we are traveling, but if not…there will be a long post when we get back with hopefully a ton of pictures!

Here is an excerpt from Al Gore’s most recent speech:

“There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenge of a present danger. In such moments, we are called upon to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes. Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment. The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk. And even more – if more should be required – the future of human civilization is at stake.”

A shortened version of the speech:

The full speech:

So I thought I’d take this opportunity to discuss our apartment. Before we left, there were a lot of questions concerning how we’re going to live, what the apartments were like, etc. After living here for the last 10 days, I have a better idea. In fact, instead of telling you about it in text, we posted our first video on YouTube!

So that’s it. Any questions?

Some of the more cool features of our place are the drying rack, our laundry line, and our 2 different hot water heaters.

Our drying rack is cool just because it’s part of the cabinets and I’ve never seen it before. The laundry line is great because our clothes dry in less time then using our dryer, and it’s much better for the environment.

The two heaters are pretty cool as one is a passive solar water heater and the other is a tankless water heater . The passive system uses the suns heat to naturally heat up the water without any electricity, while the tankless water heater only uses energy to heat the water you’re using. This differs from the American water heaters as our system is constantly keeping gallons of water hot all day long, regardless if you are home or not. Basically a huge waste of energy.

I’m basically loving the more environmental parts of the apartment. Not much else is different from an American apartment. The plugs are different shape and a different voltage and the TV is PAL instead of NTSC (which is why our Mario Kart displays in Black and White…grrr….). Instead of a mops we have floor squigees.

That’s all for now. Later on, we’ll post about live outside of the apartment. Wahoo!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF_anaVcCXg

This is pretty much the best argument I’ve heard about why we need to take action now and stop talking.

He’s got a bunch of other videos, but this one is a follow-up to one he put out  a while back that has fine tuned the argument and also answered a lot of questions that people had of the first video (and subsequent videos).

 If you go to his youtube channel, you will find all of the follow videos that he’s made to this video that discusses all of the more geeky details.

 http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=wonderingmind42

Read it….send it out…make it viral.

For years now, I’ve been fighting the habits of my youth and the habits of society. Habits that for some would mean changing the way they live their daily lives. The one question that gets back to me is, how do you make your live greener without actually having to spend money, or make huge personal changes? I know that overnight, people are not going to become more green. They’re not going to stop driving their cars, and riding public transit. They’re not going to suddenly move much closer to the people and activities that they do, so that they go walk instead of drive.

 What we can do is reduce WASTE. Waste can be defined as ‘use inefficiently or inappropriately’. For this post, I’m going to define waste as the use of resources that have no absolutely no use in your daily lives. Ok, so that is a bit of a broad definition. So lets get some examples:

• Leaving the lights on when no person or animal is around. If you were like me as a kid, you got yelled at for doing this.
• Leaving the TV on when no ones is around to watch it.
• Credit Card offers that go straight from your mailbox to your recycle bin without even being opened.
• Leaving your computer running, even though you’re not using it.

Those are just a few examples. Notice that changing the negative activity into a postive will not require any money, and only a slight change in habits. Unfortunately, the environmental impact of one person getting his/her name taken off a mailing list is minuscule. How about the amount of trees saved and toxins from the ink when 100,000 people get their name taken off of mailing lists for products that they don’t even want in the first place?

 So here are a couple of sites that can be helpful:

• Catalog Choice - Get your name taken off of mail order catalog mailing lists. Reduce your waste before you ever even get it.
• OptOutPrescreen - Drop the amount of unsolicitated credit card offers and other mail by 90%.

Those are just two sites that we use to reduce our carbon footprint without having to really change our daily lives.

Hope everyone has a happy holidays, and if you are shopping on Black Friday (aka Buy Nothing Day), I hope you limit it to what you need, as opposed to buying things just because they were on sale.