Haifa v'bechirot

Monday night I went up with Haifa to attend a journalism coverage night with some other OSP (overseas students program) students. The panel consisted of a reporter from CNN, a journalist from Haaretz (Israeli local left-wing newspaper), and an editor from IBA (Israel's only local english news station). The discussions were informative about the many challenges of news coverage both within and about Israel. The woman from CNN got heated at times, it was actually kind of awkward but interesting none the less. Darya and I decided to stay with Abe in Haifa for the night since we had Tuesday off from Ulpan due to the bechirot, elections. Abe took us to Barbarossa, a nice bar in Haifa. Tuesday we went to Abu Shakar, an AMAZINGG Arab (of course, they make it best!) hummus place. Abe is pretty much best friends with the woman who works there and ordered for us in Arabic although he wasn't all that sure which types we were getting, haha. Anyway, after eating an absurd amount of hummus and other delicious dishes, we took the Carmelit, Israeli's only "subway" to a cafe to study.

The Carmelit is the smallest subway system in the world as it only had 6 stops. A portion of Haifa is built on Mt. Carmel and the Carmelit goes from the top to the bottom. The seats on the train are actually slanted to seem more level since the train travels on a slope. This makes for an interesting feeling at the point on the route where the track is more level, since you can't really figure out if you're level or the floor or the ground at the station. I'm not sure you can really tell, but here's a picture...

After the cafe we got some gleeda before heading back to Abe's. That's an important word morah Gil taught us last semester...ice cream :). It was actually gelato and it was delicious. After waiting for a bus that wasn't running for far too long Darya and I finally made it to the train back home.

So the elections...I'm not going to pretend I know enough about Israeli politics because they are so complicated that would be just be a lie, but I have learned some things. So currently it looks like Tzipi "won" with the Kadima left-of-center party and their 28 of the 120 seats in the Kinesset, Israeli Parliament. Israel, however, has a multi-party system and the 120 seats are going to be split between 12 parties (it depends on how many votes each of the 30-something parties gets in the election). Netanyahu and his right-of-center Likud party most probably have 27 seats, and here is where one begins to understand the complexity. Basically, if the majority of the newly-elected seats agree to have Tzipi lead the government, then they form the coalition. If not, it will be Natanyahu. We shall see in the next few days.

-Lauren