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Henrik Kibak » Blog Archive » Entry #13 - Ulpan 4

Entry #13 - Ulpan 4


ulpan beit ha’amSo it is the final day of Ulpan for me. After two months of what is a five month course I am quitting. I now understand and speak as much Hebrew as one would after two semesters of a 4-unit university course. I feel a mixture of relief and regret because the course had become too demanding and yet I know what a pleasure it is to reach a basic communication level in a language.

At least it is Hanukkah. Since it was my last day I went yesterday with Göran to a town called Abu Gosh where I knew there was a typical Arabic bakery. We loaded up with cookies and then headed off for Angel in Jerusalem, a kind of Californized Jewish bakery that I like. There we picked up a classroom’s worth of Sufganiyot. These are the special filled pastries served in Israel around Hanukkah that are like extra large doughnuts minus the hole. Damn good I must say… but I heard that each one is 500 calories :-) Yeah!

So today in class it was double fun. My goodbye party with cookies and juice… as well as the ulpan premiere of one of my classmates movies. It was quite a deal convincing our teacher to let her show the movie. On one hand the student is one of the best in the class on the other hand it was a movie produced in a high school class… from one of those hopeful liberal collaborations where they put kids from the Arabic schools in East Jerusalem together with kids from the Jewish schools in South and West Jerusalem and have them work on projects. In this case the product was two very amusing movies, probably 5 minutes each. Both were in Hebrew so the teacher allowed them, but she was more nervous than I have ever seen. Probably her accumulated experience from many years of teaching in these highly mixed classes was telling her “No! Don’t be a fool.” But we lucked out.

The first movie was about sneaking a dog past the guard at the Botanical Garden… innocent fun and well done. The second was a romance, also set in the garden. Let me tell you there was very quickly some serious tension in the classroom. First of all, there are some very religious people in the classroom, especially one Muslim man who is about 35. All the Israeli and Palestinian women are dressed very conservatively, with hair coverings. The movie was essentially a progression of more and more romantic shots, flowers blooming, fountains gushing, birds singing, written poems, two young people walking side by side down the garden path, two pairs of feet side-by-side sitting on the bench. I could hear the friends of the student who brought the video ask “Is it you? Is it you?” I could see the face of my religious friend becoming stiffer and stiffer. The teacher was not smiling. In the next to final shot we saw the two individuals sitting from behind. One had his arm draped over a pair of shoulders with long dark hair. This was not good. Our star student was always in hijab in class. In the final scene of the movie the camera pans around and finally reveals the faces of the “couple.” The classroom erupts in howls of laughter. It goes on for minutes. My religious friend has tears running down his cheeks he has been laughing so hard. Instead of a beautiful girl sitting next to her boyfriend, the camera has revealed a scruffy long-haired hippie type hunched over a cigarette sitting next to his kicked-back buddy.

A fitting conclusion to a great two months!

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