Yesterday I woke up at 10:30 and was exhausted. Rach, Chelsea and i got ready and at 11 we left to walk to Rachel's cousins house for shabbat lunch. It was so hot out. We got lost and got directions from dozens of nice people. It took about an hour and it was mostly all uphill. Lunch was really nice and her cousin is about to get married. I liked them both. It was crazy because they are getting married in november and dated for only about 5 weeks. It is such a different style when looking for marriage. They were 31 and 28 (i think) but most people get married when they are early 20's, some even earlier! So weird! The food was soooo good and it was weird because they gave us wine (along with water) to drink with our meals! They then took out some other type of wine so we can taste it. It was sweet white wine or something like that..it was good. Will I be able to drink wine on shabbas with all of the adults when i get home?! just kidding. Dessert was also delicious...brownies and fresh fruit (pears, apples, peaches, nectarines). After dessert we said the prayers after the meal and they gave me a brechat hamazon book that had the english word(s) right under the hebrew word. It was so great because you can see what each word you are saying means.

After lunch we hung around their house for a couple of more hours. We played a couple of games. One of them was bannanograms. Mom--get this game. It is so fun! You can read the directions but it basically is like scrabble but each person makes their own board. We played about 3 rounds of that game and then we played dad's favorite game...drumroll please....SET! haha. I ended up winning! Yay! We then looked at wedding albums that the photographer rachel's cousin and his fiance are gonna use. The pictures were beautiful. I have never been to a religious wedding before. I'm 99% sure im gonna go with rach to her cousin's wedding. The pictures were unbelievable. I cant wait to actually be at a religious wedding. Maybe ill meet a religious, single guy who wants to marry me. Then i can have my own religious wedding! ha jk mom and dad. but did you guys see that caption of the one pic i took of the underwear/shirt for the preg-o woman? I thought you guys would appreciate it.

After shmoozing for a little longer we decided we should head back. Rachel's cousin's fiance told us where to go but none of us really paid attention...we were too tired! So we just kept on going down hills and finally i asked for directions and we ended up going the right way! When we got back we just hung out for a couple of hours. Britty then told me about sleechot services at the great synagogue (or something like that). So at 9 30 about 7 of us went onto a bus to go the shul. Rachel had my bus pass and she wasnt with us so Katie decided to hand me hers after she showed the bus driver. She was so unslick and ended up dropping the bus pass when trying to hand it to me from behind her back. So i bent down to pick it up to pretend i dropped my pass. When we took a seat all 7 of us were dying. The bus driver then went on the loud speaker and was speaking to us. He was asking to see our bus passes. I immediately stood up and i was like "here's mine." (while holding katie's). The bus driver wasnt even talking to me though! Luckily we wasnt too suspicious. When we got off the bus we walked passed these semi-religious boys and i hear them say "poke-a-dot it. country-fy it. then hip hop it...." Me and some of the people we are with turn around and start cracking up. They realize we are laughing and they sing louder and laugh too. Since we are walking away from them they yell "DO THE HOEDOWN" and then some of us yelled back "THROWDOWN." hahaha.

We get to shul and it is huge! The synagogue is on the 2nd and 3rd floor (women sit on top). I really liked the choir because they were not only good but wore tallits. I'm used to Temple Israel style of a church gospel singing. I love it...but they are not Jewish. The Rabbi also had a big and good voice. The service was difficult to follow though. I thought we were only there for about 15 minutes but when someone checked the time we were there for over an hour! It was getting close to 12 and 12 is when the last bus comes. So, we had to leave early, but I really enjoyed it. We bumped into some friends of ours because they were also leaving shul. They were going to ben yehuda and so since they would be out too late for the buses to pick them up, i took one of the guy's bus pass. On the bus there were some rude israeli boys who were blasting their music from their phones. Luckily a fight did not break out.

I then walked home with a couple of people who were on our bus but were coming back from ben yehuda. One of them was really drunk and he was amusing. When we finally got back I hung around the apartment for a bit and talked to stephanie who no longer has braces!