Happy New Year

Hey all,

So this past week has been full of holidays and good food. On Wednesday night it was the Jewsih New Years Eve so a big part of the family gathered here in the house and had a nice dinner filled with songs and laughter, however there were no fireworks....which I find werid. On New Years Day we went to Danit's family house for a nice bbq-lunch and more discussions and laughter. On friday me, Adi, Moti and Maya drove 1 hour north to visit Yossi, Yael, Maya and Ella who were in a Zimmer for the holidays. The Zimmer had a pool and we spent a lot of the time in the pool playing different games and of course we also ate a lot of good food, it was a really nice day except for the fact burnt my back a little bit.

During the week me and Adi has found a new passion in life as well....Puzzels! So every night for the past week we worked on an old puzzle that we found in the basement and sunday night we finally finished it but realized that sometime before three pieces of the puzzle had been lost. So after finishing the puzzle on sunday I went to get a new on yesterday and found a really good one in Puzzle-Store in one of the malls here so when Adi comes home its Puzzletime!.

I also have other news for you swedes reading...I'm coming to Sweden on the 29th of sep and staying until the 7th of October so if you feel like hanging out or do something cool please contact me and we'll see what we can do. Now I gotta go plan a CISV-activity for some youth here in Haifa.

Until you read again,

Carl

Looking for work...

Hey all,

Another week has passed and I've been looking for jobs. So far I found a few and emailed them all but havent yet received any good information. I went to an interview last week and it went well but the pay was really low and the travel time was a little to much. While I'm looking for work I'm also learning more hebrew on my own, which is not as much as fun learning together with others but its ok.

This weekend me and Adi went to the CISV Israel leadership training. We meet a lot of CISV friends and some newcomers. The training was for the CISVers from both Haifa and Tel Aviv who are now old enough to create and hold weekly activities with children. So the training consisted of lots of different things ex. what a good leader is or how to talk in front of a big group etc. It seemed to me that the people there learned a lot and had loads of fun doing it.

Last week we also went to the wedding of Orit and Guy this time it was a more regular wedding. It was a night full of food, dancing and people. Everybody seemed to have a lot of fun specially Orit and Guy.

Yesterday I went to Herzelia for a conference called "Who is a friend of Israel?" That was organised by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. What was talked about was just the fact about who is a friend of Israel, what a "friend" is and what "Israel" they in that case were friends of or wanted to be friends with. There were three different panels with 5-6 ppl in each and theses people were famous and important Israeli politicians, historians, journalist etc, there were also politicians from the German Green Party there sense the Stiftung is german. For someone like me who is a Political Scientist it was really interesting both listening to the panels but also to the crowd that was there and asked questions. The crowd consisted of ca 100 people from all ages and political views and their questions and stories and thoughts really made me realize again how many different views there is about Israel among the Israeli's themselves. After a long day at the conference Adi picked me up at the train station and we went home to have a nice and calm evening. Today I haven't done to much some hebrew, some laundry, some cooking and just now I picked up Adi from the train. Tomorrow I'm going to try to find a stream so that I can watch Sweden vs. San Marino in the EC-qualifications.

Til you read again,

Carl