Chag Kasher v'Sameach, everyone!

Hello! So as I'd predicted, monday and tuesday this past week WERE pretty tame. i slept a lot, spent a lot of time reading and going on the internet...A few things happened of note, though. Monday, I found out that my friend Sarah was still looking for a third to share her apartment next year. She lived there last year with three girls I am not on good terms with, who are luckily all moving out. Moving in will be this really cool skater-chick named Kelly who's friends with Sarah and whom I've met several times, and...ME! It took me a while and a lot of arguments before I convinced my parents that this is SUCH a good deal--less than $500/month, EVERYTHING, and i mean everything, included. big room. kitchen. 1 bathroom with bathtub! I'm sooooo excited. now i just gotta find a bed over the summer, and i'm set to move in in mid-late August. 

Also on Monday, i discovered that Jaime's ex-girlfriend Nadja was in town with her family for the holiday. We made plans to have breakfast the next morning. So tuesday i got up early, and headed down to the King David Hotel (ZOMG so amazing) and met her in the lobby, then we walked to Emek Refaim, a big shopping/food street, and got breakfast at HolyBagel. I got yellow cheese on a whole wheat bagel, toasted...and omg i need to not think about that during passover! anyways. you can see my DiTL (photo blog of that day) over at my other blog, http://shainamaydel.livejournal.com. Tuesday ended kind of crappy, as you can see from the DiTL, but all is well now. 

Wednesday, I got up pretty early to eat and prep for our few days at Emily's cousins' house. Made pancakes as my farewell to chametz...:-( She got back around 11:30 from her trip to Cyprus (which by all accounts was fun but very unorganized, and with its fair share of drama, so i'm almost glad i didn't go), and a few hours later we called a taxi to take us to her cousins'. Once there, we hung out with the family--her mom's first cousins Debbie and Shelly (who lives in Tucson), Debbie's husband Alon and their kids Avigal (21), Guy (20), Gil (16ish), and Shai (13). They are really, really nice people! Around 8, Alon's mother and sister showed up along with his sister's "boyfriend"...what interesting people! his mother is fine, really sweet actually. His sister...well. she's unique. let's leave it at that. and her boyfriend didn't even acknowledge me or Em. We eventually sat down for Seder...They're pretty secular Jews (Alon's sister, Dvori, said at one point: "you come to my house for seder, i give you bread!"), so they kind of zoomed through the first half, not even really doing some of the parts like Karpas or Urchatz (dipping green veggies in salt water, washing hands). After the meal, Alon's family left, and we never finished the seder. we just hung out, i think we watched a movie...The next couple days were just relaxing. i did not put shoes on for three days! we just hung out, read, watched tv and movies (including "Penelope", which i STRONGLY recommend for anyone!), played with the dogs...Alon's niece Shelly came over on thursday with her two dogs, bringing the house total to 3 teeny lap-dogs and one REAL-sized dog. she's pretty neat--taking into account her mother (the odd sister from seder), she's surprisingly cool. yeah. fun. That's...about it.

Yesterday, we got up and had breakfast and all, hung around some more...then around 5 or so we called a cab to take us back to school (Debbie paid both ways, which was really nice). Got back, chillaxed some more, watched "Blue Crush"--we borrowed about eight movies from Debbie :-) 

Today we went to Ben Yehuda street, because emily had american money to exchange and stuff she needed from several places around there. Then we went to the HUGE Mr. Zol that is there, and got some more supplies for Passover. chicken, cheese, fruit, etc. also in the department store we got new pans, which is very exciting because our old one is pretty disgusting. they were on sale if you had the store card, but the nice lady gave us the discount anyways, which saved us around 150 shekels (around $35)! sweet! um. yeah. then we stood outside in the sun waiting for a bus, but they just weren't coming...for some reason the traffic today was HORRIBLE--maybe cuz of easter, or maybe cuz of more construction. dunno. eventually we were geting worried about our perishables, so we took a cab home. now we're just hanging out, waiting to make dinner plans and such. think we're having chicken tonight :-) 

That's it. Might go to my cousin Judy's on Tuesday, haven't decided. hrm. we'll see. other than that i'll just be relaxing all week, as well as trying to get some homework done and such. 

The End.