Happy new year everyone! May the year 5773 be filled with happiness, sweetness, and may it be like the head not the tail. (The head not the tail is a very common expression here, but to be honest I don't quite understand exactly what it means. All I know is that it has something to do with fish and that it means something good.)
For Rosh Hashana I had the wonderful opportunity to go to a host family for dinner with my friend Casey (another teaching fellow/one of my temporary roommates). The daughter of the family was in her early twenties and was high school friends with our madricha (counselor/guide). She came and picked us up from our apartment and walked us to her grandmother's house. We were welcomed with warm hugs, but only after an awkward elevator incident. We didn't realize the elevator would stop on every floor because of Shabbat and got yelled at by an orthodox man for pressing a button (oops!). After pressing the button we all stood in the cramped elevator for a few minutes only to realize that the elevator was not going to move at all, so we gave in and climbed the five flights of stairs. This is actually one of the things that puzzles me. Shabbat is all about being the day of rest and not doing any work, but in the end everyone goes out of their way to avoid work and ends up working more. I don't get it.
Anyway, the Rosh Hashana dinner was wonderful. It was different from the Rosh Hashana dinner I am used to though, as they bless each and every vegetable, meat, etc. present on the table. Each individual person (13 including Casey and myself) said each blessing which took a while. Thankfully I was just able to say "Amen" because it would have taken at least another hour if I had to say each blessing myself. After everything was blessed I was served chicken hearts without knowing what they were. A few people told me that they were delicious, but one of the cousins sitting across from me refused when her mom tried to give her one, so I was a bit scared. I decided to try it anyway, as I have been very "seize the moment" these days. It wasn't that bad, but it also wasn't that good. It was just really tough and chewy but the flavor was okay. I only had one though and do not plan on having them again any time soon.
The majority of my dinner was actually just meat, couscous, and veggies. For dessert we had cookies with pomegranate and cactus. The cactus was surprisingly pretty good, but it had lots of seeds which were annoying to spit out. After dessert they brought out a variety of different nuts for snacking on. I found this to be very interesting because it seemed like some of them were eating more nuts than actual food. After talking to the others from my program, it seems that this habit of snacking on nuts after dinner was something unique to my host family.
My favorite part of the dinner was talking to everyone at the table. There was a twelve year old girl and a thirteen year old girl who were absolutely obsessed with us by the end of the night and were bummed when we declined their invitation to have a sleepover party. At the beginning of the night they barely spoke to us because they were shy, but once we mentioned something about Justin Bieber they started talking more. Their English wasn't perfect and they had to ask their cousin a few times to translate certain words. They were amazed that I knew the colors in Hebrew and loved asking questions about our lives. They have invited us back for Passover and I can't wait!
Happy New Year!
Melanie
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