Shalom,
after the first days here in Haifa I thought, I should tell you a little bit about the seminar and the first two days in our colocation.
We had two and a half seminar days in which we talked about several things. About how living in a colocation will be, what could happen in it, how to prevent conflicts and organizational things for our voluntary. But that is boring so I won't tell you much about it. Besides that we got known to the other volunteers and, and that is the most interesting part, we divided the volunteers into different shared apartments. That was pretty heavy, because the Israeli Volunteer Association (IVA) gave us some conditions. For example one collocation should be without guys and every collocation should have several nationalities. Of course I became closer with some people and I hoped, that I could live with them all together, but that is impossible, so everybody had to make compromises. After 45 minutes of discussion, we finally had a good division for everyone. Sadly I won't live with one of my musical friend (Daria), but luckily I live together with Kathy, Mirjam and Luca. These three are the German ones and with Luca I will share my room. He has the same taste of music and is a little bit old school, so I am happy to live together with him. The French people (Joao, Hugo and Loris) seems to be very enthusiastic and cool too.
The day was long and hard but at the end I was swimming in the sea and we tried to look very acrobatic, but...you see it in the picture.
Yesterday was more exciting. After we talked again and enjoyed our last good meal -the meal here is awesome, generally the whole hostel was very very good- we finally took our buses to our colocations. The excitements were big and the expectations low. After five month of speculating, how the apartment will be, we finally gonna see it. As we first came in, we saw the overview over Haifa and it was beautiful. We saw the kitchen, which has not really stuff to work with, but the living room is very big, with two couches and the beautiful overview. Our rooms are very small and our beds are not very comfortable but it is good enough for sleeping. We have design cupboards from the military with enough space and two showers.
In the end the apartment is as expected. Not luxury but good for living.
We quickly made a plan all together. Generally our communication works very good, what surprises me. So we wrote down, what is missing and what we had to buy. Then we took the bus to big mall and bought new sim cards. The Mobile-Flatrates are extremely cheap here. I bought a flatmate with 50 GB, free calls and free sms for 8€ per month. After that we went to the supermarket and bought a lot of stuff. Food, cleaning stuff and drinks for the night. We spend nearly 800 Shekels (200€), but it was necessary. And we bought many things, we just need once. Excited about how good we worked together and how helpful everybody is, we took the buses back to our colocation.
In the colocation we cooked, put our clothes out of our baggage and had our first meal. We all talk English together, but sometimes I must work as a translator for the French people. Then we opened a bottle of vine and celebrated our new home.
In the next blog you can read about the next blog...
Best regards,
SK
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