The Wonders of Ulpan Etzion

4/10/2012 Tel Aviv

The plan from the beginning had been that once I would make Aliyah (move to Israel and take on an Israeli citizenship) I would spend five months at Ulpan Etzion (in Jerusalem) learning Hebrew and becoming acclimated to Israel along with a couple hundred other new immigrants my age from around the world. We’re talking Canada, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Russia, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Iran, France, Spain, Turkey, UK, South Africa, Ethiopia  and Australia, just to name a few. 


There were approximately 300-400 international students living in the dorms and taking classes throughout the day, with the afternoons free to pursue whatever we wanted to do. We had a cafeteria and were fed twice daily, although I’m not sure you can really count it as two meals. To give you an idea, some of the students began referring to the food as “brown” because pretty much all of the food options contained a ton of trans and saturated fat. At the meals I would often marvel to myself how in a country that has an abundance of tasty fresh fruits and veggies (just go to the shuk (open market) and see for yourself!), that this institution could not prepare a fresh salad, no matter what day of the week! Sunday, day 1 of the Israeli workweek, you had 3 different salad options with one of the salads inevitably having gross soggy tomatoes. The same deal with the soggy tomatoes was to be expected on Thursday, the last day of the workweek, and all the days in between for that matter, except now the leftovers from the three salads were all mixed together for a combined soggy and gross salad option number one, and if we were lucky there was some old cabbage salad, delicious in comparison. But that’s enough about the Ulpan food for now.

In my free time I literally had no choice but to work off all the calories my strange new diet afforded me. A friend and I began teaching bootcamp style workout classes twice a week that became quite popular. It was my first time teaching and I had a lot of fun doing the classes! On top of teaching twice a week I participated in a running group with a couple of friends from the Ulpan and also attended yoga classes taught by another fellow student. It’s kind of funny though that with all this physical activity I weighed the most I have ever weighed in my life, thanks to all the “brown” food I was eating! For a while I was also leading a startup group that had high hopes of developing some cool new product, but it quickly lost traction once I drafted a Non-compete and Non-disclosure. Looking back I still don't know what I did wrong-maybe I scared people off with the agreement?

On weekends people normally stuck around the dorms, but I always traveled (by bus) to Kiriyat Gat to visit Adar and his family. Weekends turned out to be the only time I would get to see him thanks to Ulpan Etzion rules of not having overnight guests. While I know that the Ulpan certainly felt like a frat house at times, we were all adults living there and capable of making decisions for ourselves, like we had been doing for many years prior to living there. But with 24 hour security there was no getting around the overnight guest policy. The best thing you could do was to argue with the staff and try to make a case for yourself about the ridiculousness of the overnight guest policy. Had I known about this rule prior to beginning the Ulpan I don’t think I would have attended considering the strain it would put on how often I could see Adar. After all I didn’t move halfway around the globe not to see my boyfriend! Basically his class schedule afforded him the flexibility to come and visit me, but since I had to be in class every morning at 8:00 there was no realistic way for me to visit him during the weekdays. The distance between us could take up to three hours or more by bus, depending on traffic! So I approached the Ulpan staff about my dilemma, and I was told to speak with the DIRECTOR of the Ulpan about my scenario. The conversation I had with the director couldn’t have been more awkward had it been with my father! In the end he granted permission for Adar to stay over so long as he didn’t stay over frequently, he slept in a guy friend’s room, and we used protection. Okay, so I just told two truths and a lie, but the first two were actually true…and he followed up!

In the midst of teaching classes, taking classes, and arguing with the staff of the Ulpan, sometimes Adar and I would go check out some apartments in different cities to get an idea of where we wanted to live. We ended up finding an amazing apartment in North Tel Aviv (intersection of Nordau and Ben Yehuda) for what turned out to be a good deal. Here’s a handy map for reference.

View Ben Yehuda פינת Sderot Nordau in a larger map


We sat on the decision for a bit then realized that all of our other options couldn’t even come close to matching the one we had on hand so we decided to take the apartment. That meant that I would be leaving Ulpan Etzion (thank god!) and moving to Tel Aviv. I’ll save you the grief I went through trying to sort out the final payment with the Ulpan for another post.