I'm taking it as a good sign that I dreamed in Hebrew last night.




I'm two days into the intensive language course and already we've covered the same material we did in two weeks of the old class. I'm so glad I decided to wait and upgrade. I think this teacher is better, and there also seem to be few know-it-all students (strangely, there are an unusually large number of old-timers in Ben's class), which makes the pace just that much calmer and more digestible. You feel a lot more at liberty to struggle and hold the class up a bit, since most of the rest of the class is struggling too. I think I may actually be pretty fluent in six months...

But now I have an announcement to make: I am now -- and will always be -- a tourist in Israel. This is not a statement regarding my subjective feelings about the country or my ability to integrate. It's a factual statement. If you don't hold an Israeli passport, you are a "tourist." Period. At least, this is what I'm told in my language class, where we learned both words today (talyaret (tourist) and olé hadash (new citizen)).

Another fun fact is that you do not "immigrate" to Israel. You "upgrade." The term olé (of ole hadash ) means "to upgrade" or "to ascend." (Keren, chime in here if I'm wrong, but...) As far as I can tell from my language teachers, there is no other word for "immigrate." No wonder they only confer it on a chosen few.