Wow. I did a lot on that cruise.
I'm kind of depressed by blogging about it all week. It is a reminder of how that was just a quick vacation and now it is back to the real world.
E and I went to Bar Ilan University yesterday for a conference on Women in National Security. We went with another girl in our program who is organizing an Israeli chapter of
WIIS.
The day started out as a comedy of errors. We waited for the bus just outside our awesome apartment. Buses came and buses went, but we kept waiting for a bus to the train station. At long last, the bus came and we darted off the the train station. I said to myself "Golly, I wonder when the next train will arrive. I hope it won't be too long a wait." The next train was almost an hour later.
After buying our tickets, E and I walked to the mall to find some food and buy some deodorant. First, it took us about fifteen minutes to find the deodorant. Then we waited in line to order food. They didn't have a menu in English so we just ordered sandwiches (as they are less messy than salads.)
We ended up with the messiest sandwiches known to woman.
We met Julia in Tel Aviv and waited for about three quarters of an hour for the bus that is supposed to come every twenty minutes (the bus isn't late, it's just Israel!). We got to Bar Ilan and decided to find this marvelous bakery. We walked all over the campus and surrounding streets and finally found it (after calling Julia's boyfriend three times). We gorged ourselves on doughnuts and cookies and headed off to the conference...
Where all hell broke loose.
The first speaker on Women in the Military was fine, boring, but fine.
The second speaker was the biggest chauvinist ever. He called women "the gnats on the neck of the rhinoceros" but quickly corrected himself: "women are the PESTS on the neck of the rhinoceros." The audience was getting noisy and angry. One woman (in military uniform)shouted out "don't call us pests!" Oy.
It's not sexist, non-intellectual, anti-feminist, chauvinism, it's just Israeli academia.
The next speaker was the head of Sociology at Bar Ilan and she gave the previous speaker a verbal spanking, thank god. Then, someone in the audience started to argue with her about her political views.
"You are a peacenik, why do you care about the military so much?!?"
She responded: "I care because I don't like institutionalized discrimination anywhere - schools, synagogues, social security, healthcare etc!"
It was like an all-out war. T'was intense.
We returned home to collapse.
But we went to Cafe Cafe with lovely MayBell instead. We talked about dating and boys and how depressing life is. We ended up looking very glum.
Then we went to home and collapsed.
Whew!
