I'm fine, thanks for asking

So it seems we're at war with Lebanon.
Note to my parents: I'm fine and safe, thanks for calling to check. Oh, except that you didn't.
A terrorist group fires Katyusha's and god knows what else on Northern Israel and you don't pick up the phone to call your only daughter? Are you kidding?

But don't worry; I'm safe and totally fine. And it's probably for the best that I decided to visit a friend in Metullah last weekend as opposed to going up there tomorrow. Because spending the night in the bomb shelter is not really my idea of a rocking good time. Though I suppose we'd have good conversations for lack of anything better to do.

I spent the day in Jerusalem yesterday and slept the night at my cousins' place. And I got my homework mostly done! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! (Sorry, it just happens so rarely...). The bus-ride into town was interesting, in that it sucked. For some reason, I seem to get stuck with the ghetto-fabulous busses where the air-conditioning breaks down just in time for the Mediterranean July (nb: we are not amused), where the seats look so dirty that you just know you're crawling with body-lice the minute you exit the bus, and where the whole thing has a faint smell of, I don't know, garbage/feces/urine/feet/unwashed overweight men. Seriously, why do a large majority of religious men have an aversion to deodorant? Is there a passage in the Torah that I missed? "Thou shalt not smell like you shower once a day"? Seriously, this is something that needs to be taken care of. People! After the age of, like, 11 and a half, you must shower once a day (every other day if you're really stuck, but don't make a habit of it), and you must wear deodorant! And, come to think of it, you must brush your teeth! God, why are people so disgusting? And yes, I'm OCD, but good lord, something must be done! Can't this be one of those lessons you get at the absorption centre when you land in the country? I'm going to contact the Jewish Agency. Where's my phone?

The whole thing makes me itch. And to top it off, the driver had a huge Betar Yerushalayim (virulently racist soccer team) scarf strung across the windshield, which I guess meant that somewhere into the trip, we were going to stop off in Sakhnin and beat up the Arabs. I suppose it's always good to mix it up a little. Keeps the road-rage suppressed and all. At least the driver was polite, which is more than I can say for the jerk who drove the bus back to Haifa from Metullah: Because I knew that the bus was the kind that goes from Metullah to Haifa via every tiny little village on the way, and I needed to arrange for someone to come pick me up at the station, I ask him (and very nicely; I'm such a doormat when I speak in Hebrew to strangers. I speak very softly and use the word bevakasha a lot. It confuses the hell out of Israelis. And Russian Israelis, who yell at me to speak up. In Russian. YANI PANI MAY PA RUSSKI, BITCHES!!!) if he can tell me when we might get into Haifa. And he says "nagiyah bashalom" , which for the unilingual among you means "We'll get there in peace". Which is totally not an answer involving any period of time.
Jackass.

Le sigh.
Hopefully everything will turn out for the best. Lebanon, bus-drivers and all.

-J