Time for school

After our first week of having only lectures, it is time for us to get down and start learning the language of the Hebrew Man. By this I mean, that it’s time for us to start our Ulpan classes.
Yesterday, after taking a 4 hour course, we were put into our groups of Hebrew. The test is like a placement test. We sat in a room and took a reading test. We then had to answer questions based on the reading. One of our stories was on JK Rowling and another was on Roni Klien (the soldier who jumped on a grenade and saved his soldiers). We then had a personal interview with the teachers of the Ulpan, where we were asked questions, such as our name, age, where we lived, where our Hebrew comes from and so on. After this came the Army Hebrew test. We were giving passages to read and again had to answer questions. We were also told to change sentences from singular to plural, past to present and so on.
In the afternoon, we were given free time to do whatever we wanted. Then at night we had an activity about the army. We were all given a question and had to answer it by doing things such as writing out the answer with our bodies, arranging ourselves in a certain order or doing something else funny.

Today, we started our Ulpan. I'm placed in a great class. There are 9 of us and right now we are learning how to conjugate verbs. We also worked on our reading and writing. It was fun to do. We were also told that we will be doing Gadna in two weeks. Gadna is army training for 11th graders. They go through basic army courses and see what it’s like to serve. We were also told that this week we would have a free weekend. This means that we are allowed to leave the Kibbutz and go to our family houses. I can’t wait to go and see my family (by family I mean grandparents and cousins).
Tonight, the Kibbutz is going t open up the pub for us. We are all so excited because we have never gone before and everyone here is 18 and over so are legally allowed to drink. Hope I don’t wake up tomorrow with a headache. That wouldn’t be too good for school :).