Shabbat at the University of Haifa

On the upside, I've learned how to say the sentence "I threw up last night" really well in Hebrew!

Oye. It appears the antibiotics I finally got for ear infections (probably caused by the diving) aren't sitting too well in the ol' stomache.

It's Shabbat here in Haifa, and I'm spending my last weekend in Israel on campus. It tends to be pretty quiet here in general (as most students live off campus), but it is particularly quiet over the weekends. The minimarket shuts down, the computer labs are closed -- even the library shuts its doors, which took me quite by surprise the first time I realized that!

I've been getting some extra Hebrew help from a generous man named Elan, a Hebrew and Arabic professor who is here on campus chaperoning his 10 undergrad students from Baard College in NY. He tells me that the campus life I've seen in Haifa this summer is pretty typical for Israel.

"Israeli students don't start undergrad until they are 20 or 21, after military service, and then once they do, they usually have to work. They don't have the time or luxury to sit around and only study all day, party at night, for four or five years, like happens in the U.S. They have to actually earn money. The fact they are starting college relatively late, they feel very motivated to get through it, get jobs and have families."

A native Israeli, Elan taught Arabic at Tel Aviv University for 20 years before coming to the U.S. 10 years ago. He said working at a U.S. campus was a huge shock to him when he first got there, because of how starkly different the culture was. He was shocked by how much alcohol and drug abuse there was; and by how many kids endlessly party and never really work very hard.

At first, he said, he couldn't believe that any of these kids actually grew up to have real careers and families -- but he's been teaching long enough to know that the majority of them do. "It's a phase, it's a cultural phenomenon that goes on, and fortunately, most of them seem to grow out of it -- but it still sometimes shocks me to see it," he said.

These are all generalizations, of course, but generally speaking, I can really see what he's talking about. Given that he teaches at a university where the annual tuition is $50,000 (as opposed to, say, a state university), I imagine the phenomenon is all the more true there. Then again there is the infamy of CU-Boulder ...