Walks are the devil

Yesterday, before shabbat, I bought two little boxes with arab desserts from a kiosk in the mall; a Druzi bakery had set up shop in the Horev centre, and since David told me that I should buy knafeh during Ramadan since it's the best then, and the Druze were selling the knafeh, i bought a box of it and a box of baklawa (not baklava, because there is no 'v' sound in Arabic, y'all). I then proceeded to leave both boxes at my auntie's, because I seem to be leaving everything everywhere (my favorite v-neck teeshirt and my favorite American Apparel sweatshirt are off having a party together, somewhere in the annals of eretz israel. If you know of their whereabouts, please contact me at 052 535 5590. Reward is offered; i have some baklawa left over...).

So today, after doing laundry, I got the bright idea that it would be totally okay to walk over to Aunt Shirley's, pick up the desserts and the three bottles of hairspray from Superpharm that I also left behind (of course), maybe grab a bite to eat, and then go back to the dorms.

It took 1 and a half hours.

What the hell.

I was even offered a tremp (a ride, usually offered by someone picking up hitch-hikers), but my stranger-danger warning went off, so I politely declined. And then I saw the dead dog corpse, just hanging out in front of me, very dead, very squished, very vomit-inducing. Yuckyuckyuckyuck. So i tried to figure out how to cross the street, thereby avoiding having to cross over the corpse, without getting run over by a car. Having failed in that thought process, i just held my nose, closed my eyes, and jumped...and landed far away from the ex-dog, praise be to Allah.

And then walked for a bloody hour and a half.

Finally arrived, exhausted, even though it's a downhill hike all the way (it was just long), couldn't find the hairsprays, so I waited for Savtaleh to get home. She feeds me. We made havdalah, i raced back to the dorms, and thus began my Haifa International Film Festival Adventure

So it's the Haifa International Film Festival Weekend, if you didn't get that from the previous bolded statement. Arielle, Jessie, Jessica, John (who by the way, is the love object of nearly all the girls here. Wouldn't it be funny if he read this? Because I really feel that he's totally oblivious to the entire thing. It's great), Hila, Ilana, Anna and Rebecca and this other girl who i met tonight but i totally forget her name, and I all went down to the Carmel Centre, where all the action is happening. We stood in line for a bit for tickets, then decided we didn't want to pay to sit through a movie if there's a free screening happening in a park (which by the way, is a park with a playground and a bar. A freaking bar. Like, "hey honey, let's let the kids chill on the swings while we have our nooner." This is such a great country), which there was.
There was also this artisan's fair (read: open air market), which we went through, we being me, Jessie, Anna, Rebecca and Arielle. We took our sweet time, stopped at Aroma, which is perhaps the best coffee i've ever had, anywhere, noshed, drank coffee, and chatted.
And then at this park, the one with the playground and the bar in it, they were showing free movies on a huge screen. So we sat through half of Spiderman 2, and really liked it, and we were being the loud obnoxious Anglos who get all the jokes without having to translate from the subtitles and missing the nuances, but it's really quite cold here all of a sudden, and everyone wanted to go home :( . I'll just have to download it.

Acco tomorrow morning with Jessie, Jessica, Anna and Hila, then Tel Aviv until tuesday
-J