Ballet Accomplishments

I recently - that is, on Sunday - restarted ballet. After three weeks of nothing, it was good to be back. Yes, it was work. "Ballet is hard, and then you die."

Today, when we were traveling across the floor, I managed to do my first-ever double pirouette in which I stopped at the end on balance. Supposedly, everyone in Boston Ballet Intermediate 2 is supposed to know how to do that, but I never could. So this is major, and a great source of pride for me.

Of course, the rest of my pirouettes for the day were utterly horrible, but now I know that I am capable of doing a successful double pirouette (that was something doubtful earlier on). So it may well have been chance, but I'm going to take pride in it for all it's worth.

Why the Hour Hand is Important

Today I woke up, looked at my watch. I thought it was seven thirty.

Then I started freaking out over the fact that I'd totally forgotten over my sort of large amount of grammar homework and rushed through it. By the time I was done, I thought it was 8:10. I took a rushed shower and packed up all my stuff, running back and forth between my room and the living room, finding everything. "I'm gonna be late," I moaned, noticing that it was now "8:30."

"It's seven thirty, isn't it?" my mom said. "I'm not making it up, am I?"

I looked at the clock. Seven thirty, staring me in the face. I had woken up at six thirty.

So, let this be a lesson to you all - look at the hour hand, it's just as important as the other one. Now I will proceed to go through my day on one less hour of sleep. We'll see how that goes.

Quote of The Week: I Procrastinated Edition

Yeah, what the title says. I was sitting around reading Paper Towns instead of doing any work, which I distinctly paid for last night. Oh well, it was kind of worth it. Especially because I got a quote from there! I actually have more, but this one is the only one I have so far committed to memory because it's the shortest.

"Ninjas don't splash other ninjas."

~Paper Towns by John Green

Hear that? Any ninjas out there, you better not be splashing.

The Fog is Upon Us

Today in last period French I looked out the window. There was fog.

But it wasn't the normal stuff there is back in Boston; it was this scary yellow color. The high-rise apartment buildings next to our school, which are gray, were tinted ocher by the thick air. The sounds in the basketball court below were magnified, as if we were on the ground floor.

I'm not really sure why, but this weird fog seems like it's anticipating something. There's a feeling of something waiting to happen.

The question is, what is it?

School-less Friday

Today, at school, it was the day that they got report cards.

Having only been here for three weeks, I don't have a report card. So the teacher said that instead of coming for forty-five minutes, I didn't need to come to school at all.

Instead, my mom took me to Allenby Street, which is in the heart of Tel Aviv. It's mostly got a combination of clothing stores, some fancy and some not, and other designer stores. We walked along there for awhile, pausing to go into a few shops. Then we reached Nachlat Binyamin Street, where every Friday there is an artists' market. After passing the security guard, we bought some backpacks for me and my brother in a small shop near the end of the market. When we finished, the market was mostly up and running for the day. There was a collection of things that you would be hard-pressed to find anywhere else - handmade clay flowers that looked real, all sorts of jewelry, small figurines of all kinds, stained glass, wood crafts, fabric, hairpieces, leather products, cuckoo clocks in all kinds of shapes. We met up with my aunt and went to a café with a very nice outdoor area to sit in. My uncle joined us as we were reading our horoscopes off of a newspaper that was left on our table. I got a hot chocolate as well as a chocolate croissant. This is a very Tel Aviv-y thing to do - sit in a café on a Friday morning, read the newspaper, and have coffee (or hot chocolate, I suppose). The artists' market is located in old Tel Aviv, which has beautiful, albeit fairly run-down, buildings.

After the café we went back to Allenby. We passed the Carmel market (on Carmel Street), which is mostly full of food, and the Betzalel market, which is mostly clothing. There were more stores, but we kept walking. Close to Betzalel market (or Shuk Betzalel as it's called in Hebrew, "shuk" being the word for market), we passed a juice stand, where they were selling strawberries. Here it's strawberry season right now, so we bought one kilo strawberries and two juices - I got a strawberry slushie made from fresh strawberry juice.

After that we continued to Dizengoff Center for some electronics, then caught a bus and went to my grandma's house for what is called in our family "Friday meal," when the whole family comes for lunch. My cousin was telling hilarious stories about the army and the rest of the family telling stories about anything that came up. I don't think I've laughed more in my life.

Cups of tea: 39

Quote of the Week: I Totally Forgot Edition

Erm, ehh, ah, I...forgot. Yeah. That's precisely what happened.

So this week I got an account on Teen Ink's website. Teen Ink is a magazine for teens, by teens. You publish pieces if writing and/or art on their website, which in turn are reviewed by editors and published online. Select work is put into the print magazine.

This week I submitted a poem about being a child. As I was typing the writer's comments, I remembered something that I heard Natalie Babbitt say when I went to an author gathering:

"Children are people....[When we were children] we were not just inanimate lumps of something. We did understand. We did know."

~Natalie Babbitt

To me this is an amazingly true quote. Children don't know the amount that adults do, but they are not nothing. Sometimes people forget the amount that children do know.

Cups of tea: 37ish

Report Cards

Here, they are getting their report cards tomorrow. Which means that the already short day is greatly shortened for some, depending on the time slot in which they confer with teachers about their grades and receive them. First period (which begins at 8:45!) is supposedly going to be some sort of class conversation. And since I haven't been here long enough to get proper grades, I get to go home after that!

Which adds up to forty-five minutes of school. Probably the closest thing here to a two-day weekend. Is that awesome or is that awesome?

Cups of tea: 37ish