(guilty of copying and pasting some of what rach put in her blog)

MONDAY:

Monday was a very special day. 50 of us did not go to our normal volunteering. Instead we went into Judaean Samaria to a border patrol base and planted trees with soldiers. Now JNF's idea of planting trees is not exactly us planting trees, rather it is us holding the tree up that is already in the whole and pushing dirt back in the whole and then tying the tree to a pole. It is all just for show. Before this, though, we had refreshments and we met some nice, flirtatious soldiers and some soldiers who didn't want to deal with us. I'm happy I finally got some pictures of me with men in uniform! Boaz goes March 11, hopefully I'll be able to get at least one pic with him in uniform!! We then watched four soldiers in different demonstrations on how they capture terrorists. It was very interesting and boy are dogs fast. Afterwards some of us got our faces painted in army paint. Mine was green and brown. People thought mine was really cool. Awesome. Some people who had done the black/green look put on some outfit and went to pretend to be a rock. Camouflage is amazing. You really are not able to find them unless you are close enough. We were then able shoot some paintballs at targets. Afterwards was a quick movie about the border patrol and then a Q&A with some soldiers who had made Aliyah and about their experiences with the Border Patrol and everything else with Israel. There was a girl on the panel and she is actually in combat and was from America. After the Q&A we had lunch with the soldiers--it was a feast for Tu B'Shvat. It was not normal army food--it was yummy. After Rach and I went looking for a bathroom where we met Ephrat, who is from Jerusalem. She gave us toilet papers (there is never any in the bathrooms) and she offered to give us face soap to wash our faces. And here we thought that we were going to go to Ulpan with our faces like that. We quickly washed our faces and raced back to the bus. As we got on the bus Katie was ready to kill us b/c she still had paint on her face.

Ulpan was boring and after that I had to rush home and shower quickly for garin tzedek. We did homework with them. Sawzi is really smart because he catches on and understands what he has to do after I initially help him out. When I came home I waited for a bit and then Boaz came. Shir, Rach, and I met up with him at the mall and then all of us walked to the beach where we got ice cream. Boaz got falafel and I was hoping I would see my friend that works there, but unfortunately, he wasnt there. We bumped into some friends and after meeting up with Katie, we finally went to victory. It took us so long to decide what we wanted. The woman working there loved speaking to us in English. I got many samples. It was funny because when Shir spoke to her in Hebrew, she said in English "Wow! Your hebrew is really good!!" hahahahaha. After the ice cream we walked back and then after hanging out for a little, I didn't get to bed until 2ish.