Ani Margish Kmo Mavet

So this week has easily been the most trying one physically. The weather in Tel Aviv is changing rather rapidly and it has become very cool during the night. The sun is down by 4:45 p.m. and even the height of daytime is only slightly warmer than what it is back home.

This past Sunday I started to come down with a little bit of a sore throat and a fever. By Monday morning, I was positive I was swallowing knives and by Tuesday night I was a full-blown biological weapon with legs. Shallow-breathing, congested sinuses, congested lungs, and long bouts of hacking had me pretty much adopting the Eric Foreman mentality of embracing the "sweet release of death."

Needless to say, I missed all of my classes this past week and have only just recently started to feel better. Perhaps no Middle East experience is complete without a bout of the plague. All I can say is thank God I don't have a first born son and it's no longer locust season.

Huoshin dropped by on Wednesday afternoon to check in on me. We had a brief discussion on the Bible during which he provided some cool new insights about how each of the four Gospels details a particular attribute of Jesus. I just finished reading Mark and was trying to figure out which book to read next.

Given my debilitated state at the time, we both joked that Job was the obvious choice. I settled instead on Isaiah in order to curtail any possible onset of depression.

The next day, I visited a doctor during his visit to TAU. He comes by the school twice a week at selected times. As part of our mandatory medical insurance plan that we had to buy for the program, this is considered a "perk." I didn't really see it that way. The doctor was cold, disinterested, and completely lackadaisical in his approach to my situation. He factored in little of what I was telling him about my symptoms and proscribed the equivalent of Dayquil/Nyquil.

But hey! It's free!

Or rather, it's not because it's included in our tuition. But that's beside the point because everyone thinks it's free so therefore it has to be free!

*Insert argument/analogy against socialized health care here*

Fortunately, Titus called me up Thursday night. His wife had made some homemade Oklahoma beef stew and he brought it by the dorms along with packets of tea, vitamins, and some good ole' American Mucinex! Thanks to Titus and his wonderful wife, as opposed to Doctor Dontcare, I was finally able to get the decongestants needed to ward off Pharaoh's revenge.

This is fortunate considering the sheer amount of reading piling up on all of our desks, with our second Hebrew test coming up on Thursday, and with Arabic now essentially taking the form of the heat necessary for the fusion process to melt our brains, one can scarcely afford to miss classes.

Right now, we're in the beginning phases of figuring out how to get to Bethlehem for Christmas following a scheduled trip to the Negev desert with the Overseas Student Program (OSP).

Updates to come shortly. I hope everyone is doing well.

-Drew