Today was a great day despite spending most of it studying. We went to Sucar again, the great coffee shop I study at frequently (it's my poor substitute for Heritage House), and spent about seven hours there. Several fun stories emerged from that eventful afternoon.
First, for background you have to understand that Assaf, the guy studying with me, is very good looking (NH). I can say that with confidence because after hanging out with him for several months now I have seen the way women react to him. In fact, yesterday a random girl came up to him on the street as we were walking back from class and started straight-up hitting on him. I didn't have to understand a word of their conversation to know exactly what was going on. So by now I'm used to being the "funny, if somewhat festively plump, American friend of Assafs" wherever we go. It's ok because I know I "have a great personality." Anyways, today at the coffee shop our waitress came to bring our menus and when she came back to take our orders she blurted out, "I knew I recognized you!" I just assumed she was talking to Assaf but lo and behold, she meant she recognized me! She said she had seen me at one of the parties the law school threw. Actually, it was the karaoke/dance party I mentioned here. I started laughing because as those of you who know me know, I love to sing and dance, even though I am terrible at both so given the chance to sing Hebrew songs and dance Middle Eastern dances I of course jumped at it and took full advantage of the party. Which I guess made me somewhat memorable. Either that or being blonde(ish), festively plump and pale (and/or bright-sunroasted-red) made me stick out somewhat. Assaf protested to the waitress that he was there too but she didn't remember him. So for those of you keeping score at home that's Matt: 1, Assaf: 38 or so.
After we had been there for a while the air conditioner started leaking near me. Our friend Topaz, the first waitress, was now off-duty and sitting with a group of her friends at the table next to us but they hadn't noticed the leak yet. So using one of my very limited number of known Hebrew words I got the attention of the waitress and informed her (using my somewhat more expansive English vocabulary) that the air conditioning was leaking. Her response: "What a shame!" (said in a very dry tone of voice) And with that she turned and walked away. Topaz and her friends, along with Assaf, burst out laughing. It was just such an Israeli response to the situation. "What do you expect me to do about it?" (FN1)
Topaz's friends turned out to be quite the group of musicians and they used the piano in the coffee shop (yes you read that right) to put on an impromptu karaoke show. I think maybe it was designed to lure the "blonde(ish), festively plump and pale (and/or bright-sunroasted-red)" singing and dancing fiend back out. If so, it worked. Katy Perry's Hot and Cold was all it took for me to start dancing in my chair (while seated because I was studying in a coffee shop so I'm not getting too crazy, besides, I happen to think that dancing while seated is my forte) and singing along. All in all, it was a great afternoon of studying.
Before all that studying though I went to church and one of my Israeli friends went with me. I realized while sitting there that taking a friend to church for the first time is like bringing a girlfriend home to meet the family. You really love your family but there are all these things that you feel like you need to explain. "Ok, be ready, because my family really loves to play this game called Redneck Life
and it's fun, I promise, or at least I think it is but we've never actually finished a game of it." Or "if anyone says 'bifocal contact lenses' and everyone busts out laughing it's not because my dad actually wears them, but because when he did, he loved them so much that he told everyone about them, even people we met during the middle of our 2006 marathon together, and now it's just a standing joke in the family." I love my family and I have 26 glorious years of history with them. The silly things they do that seem (or are) strange have a wonderful, deep, meaning that's just lost if people are meeting them for the first time. The same goes for Christians. We have beliefs that might seem strange at first, maybe because we take them for granted and don't explain them well or maybe it's because God's ways aren't our ways.Also, we Christians are bad about using "code words" (everybody does it really, lawyers call them "terms of art") that we know exactly what we mean but others don't. For example, he asked me today what the "praise team" was. When you think about it, that's a strange term yet people in church would never bat an eye at the term since we all have heard it forever.
Plus, church here is pretty different from PCA services back home. I had to fight the urge the whole service to say "what he means by that is," or "that statement is actually well supported both in Scripture and in scientific literature," or "no one interrupts the preacher during the sermon to share a story back home" (that's an Israeli thing) etc. All in all though, church was good and I'm really glad he came, I just hope he gets to know my Christian family because I love that family, even if first impressions are probably a little bit quirky.
FN1. The rest of the story. Turns out that our sweet waitress' response was lost in translation. She actually did mean it was a shame and was just going to get the remote control to turn off the unit. She fussed at everyone in Hebrew for laughing at her while I sat there with my awkward "I'm not sure what's going on so I'm going to look happy enough to not scare any one but not too happy in case what's going on is bad and I shouldn't be happy" smile.
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