Working Girl

It’s Thursday. That means day 6 of this whole adventure, day 4 of work and day 1 of weekend. Yes, Israel works on a slightly different, a little bit more religious friendly schedule than we do at home. Work is Sunday through Thursday and play is Thursday night until Sunday morning when its back to work again. Speaking of work… where to start? As most of you already know (and like I said before) I’m working for a wedding dress designer named Galit Levi. I started work at 8am on Monday morning and literally was put to work at 8:02 hand sewing “Chrystalim” beads to a wedding dress, along with lace flowers, and “diamonds” galore. I have done more hand sewing in the last four days at work than I have in my whole life, which is good because it will be a really good learning experience on that end. The people that I work with are great for the most part. A few speak English and the others, mostly Russian Babushka implants are trying to learn, which has been the cause for many hysterics in the sewing room. My favorite of the Russian ladies is Marina, who is trying to hard to learn English because she says she gets jealous when everyone else can talk to me and she can’t. She is really a riot trying to learn with her odd Hebrew/Russian accents asking “You do chave boyfrend?” (see ta, it’s not only the nail ladies) and “we be like femily soon”. We are teaching eachother our respective languages so we can talk to eachother in the next few months. For the first few days, we had a really sweet lady working with us who was teaching me everything and knew English really well because she just got married to someone from New Jersey (who she’s known for a whopping two months!) but unfortunately she was fired for some reason – it’s a very interesting group dynamic. The others are basically either just business women, real Israeli ballbusters who mean business, or my new ally at work, a 20 something year old who shares a lot in common with me. Everyone works really hard and I have not had a minute at work when I don’t have a task to finish five minutes ago, it’s quite hectic. So yesterday, we had some visitors in the office filming for something or another, some mystery that we are not allowed to know about, but the moral of this story is that I might, one day be on Israeli TV sewing my little fingers off and being talked about as “that girl that came all the way to Israel to do a Stag (internship).”
Other than working, I really haven’t done anything too exciting yet as I have been coming home and passing out by 10pm at the latest out of exhaustion. I am going to Jerusalem tomorrow for Shabbat and to spend some quality time with one of my favorite Israeli families- Hila and the rest of the Cohen family. I can’t wait to get back there and experience another Shabbat in the old city, obviously the best place to celebrate.
I think I am about to fall face first onto my keyboard. Ani Ayefa (hello, Hebrew word of the day- “I’m tired”). I will add to this update soon when I have more excitement to share.
Hope all is well on the homefront. Shabbat Shalom
Xoxo
Dani