Today is our 30th wedding anniversary. Sorry we are apart, Julie, but happy anniversary anyway.
This morning we walked, instead of running. My body was "getting used to something," so we took it a little easy today. Peter didn't mind.
This morning class time was spent on finishing the first chapter of Ruth. We read the text and the teacher asks questions about it, all in Hebrew. We are free to discuss anything - in biblical Hebrew, of course! We also spend time discussing geography of the land, etc.
At lunch we ate with a woman, Lori, in the Jonah class (beginning level). This picture was actually taken at the mall. She is from South Carolina and runs a greenhouse business with her husband. They had good spring sales, and he knew that she wanted to learn Hebrew, so he told her to come. (I want you to understand: she is not a Bible scholar, but simply a Christian woman who wants to be connected to the Bible directly by learning the language.) She said she happened to end up with no roommate, which was great, but sometimes she wanted someone to do things with. We invited her to go to the mall, in nearby Mevasseret, with us later. So we made plans to leave about 4:30.
After a short nap and studying, we were ready. We walked a little over two miles one way to get there, stopping to read signs along the way. This is a view of the hills toward the east along the way. The highway is a main one and was important during the 1948 War of Independence. It used to go through Tzuba, but now the main highway bypasses the Kibbutz.
We arrived at the mall. This is the front entrance. You may notice the checkstation at the beginning. Everyone who enters passes throguh a scanner and has any bags checked for contents by a security officer. They do not allow close up pictures. The name of the mall is Qinyan Harel; qinyan comes from a Hebrew verb meaning "buy," so I suppose this is the Modern Hebrew equivalent of "mall." You will notice that Modern Hebrew very rarely uses vowel signs. In fact, only a small amount of Hebrew uses vowel signs. Modern printed Bibles do. The vowel signs used today were not written into the Hebrew text until about AD 800-900 by the Masoretes.
The mall is not large, at least by American standards. One of the interesting store is this. This is a Kosher (more correctly Kasher) McDonalds. The word right below teh golden arches says "MacDonalds" and the scond line says "haKasher," giving "The Kasher MacDonalds." The green word is "Discont." It's a lot of fun to read the signs.
Inside the mall I took a couple of pictures. One simply has me in front. The other shows you what it takes to be Kasher: the separation of milk and meat. The meat side is on the left and the dairy side is blue and on the left. They will not share utensils between the two parts.
There was also a bakery with things that looked marvelous (I didn't buy any; I'm trying to be good and drop a few pounds).
There was a large outdoor observation deck with a beautiful view of Jerusalem. Here I am and just one of the photos I took.
All the way to and from the mall we talked, as much in Hebrew as we were able. I'm not as good as I want to be, but I'm getting better.
Brakhot ("Blessings")!
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