"Maybe you should have done the readings!"

Monday, the 7^th of March / Tuesday, the 8^th of March

Yet another story from my commute today.  As I was heading toward campus I noticed that the left crank-shaft felt “funny.”  I kept pedaling and it kept feeling more and more loose.  So finally I pulled over and noticed that the bolt holding it on the bike was coming off.  This began a process where I would pedal a few blocks, pull over, tighten the bolt by hand, hop on, pedal a few blocks and repeat the whole vicious cycle.  Ugh.  Very frustrating.  I took it to the shop once and they tightened the bolt only to have it come loose again a couple days later so I took it back another time and they replaced the whole assembly.  Problem solved.

Anyways, once I finally got to class everything went really well.  It’s really wild what an incredible opportunity I have academically here.  The Tel Aviv University Buchmann Faculty of Law is one of the highest ranked law schools in the world.  Tel Aviv University is ranked second in the world for dollars generated from patents and top 20 in the world by other measures.  It’s a great school and the law program is its premiere faculty.  So I’m getting the best of that faculty plus the best of the US.  I’m taking classes from profs from UCLA, Yale, Stanford, Michigan etc.  One of my profs has a Pulitzer and was on The Daily Show recently.

Although a lot of my classes have been awesome, my favorite hands down is Comparative Law with Prof. James Whitman.  It’s incredible.  We’re learning so much about the differences between the US and Continental systems of law, but more than that we’re learning about the cultural and philosophical differences that motivate those differences in the legal system.  I highly recommend this book if you’re interested in learning more about the subject.  

Not all of my classes have gone so swimmingly however.  Today in Military Occupation I asked the professor a really great question.  A truly outstanding question.  Such a good one that she’d actually assigned us an entire article to answer it.  Which I had somehow missed in the reading list.  So she asked me “well what do you think?”  “I don’t know.”  “Then maybe you should have done the reading.”  Haha.  Boom goes the dynamite.  

Tonight after class I met a bunch of the Israeli guys at a local pub, Friends Underground, to hang out for a while.  It was my first time but the other guys go there every week.  It’s a great place that’s really chill and there’s a great bartender who takes care of us.  She’s also quite cute and when I walked in she had a conversation in Hebrew with one of the guys.  Later he told me she said I was really handsome.  I think he was just being nice and that’s not really what she said, but I’m going to claim it’s what she really said.