Israel: ABCs and 123s

I'm going to make a quick post between one of our activities and dinner (which is in about 20 min)
Well, after 23 hours in transit, including :40 on the runway in phoenix waiting to get off the plane, and another 1:00 on my second flight waiting to take off, I finally made it to Israel. The trip went very smothly, considering there were a few surprises, one of them being that to get into the gate that left for Israel, I had to go through an extra security screening, and the gate was hidden behind foggy glass windows. This was only surprising because of all the international flights located in the A terminal, I was on the only flight that I had to get my passport scanned, recieve a special stamp on my boarding pass, take my shoes off AGAIN to pass through another metal detector, and then I was allowed to the desolate Israel-only waiting area.
It's a strange feeling to hear people ask me if i'm from America. I mean, yes, yes I am. I know this, but being called American is something quite different than saying i'm New Mexican. All the people in my program are American, but we're from so far away that it would take traveling 7k miles to be grouped together as 'the American group.'

On our walking tour of Tel Aviv, we were accompanied by one of our Hebrew teachers, who stopped and gave us periodic lessons "how much is this" "where is Benei Dan Street" "I Live in Tel Aviv" I don't know how much I picked up from it, and I always wanted to insert arabic words instead of the hebrew that I should have been learning. the two languages remind me of the difficulty between Spanish and Italian. So close, yet so different. When we got to the beach, she taught us numbers by teaching us a song. We learned 3 songs, actually, all of which most Israelis learn in kindergarden and preschool. That's what one of the videos is, it's a game/song. The first part is just jibber jabber, and then (notice when people slow down or stop singing) there is a count from 1-10, and if the person who gets slapped at 10 doesn't move their hand, they're out of the game. After we played a few rounds, some high school studtents who were at the beach came and joined us. They were much better than we were.