Friday – Day 242

March 31, 2013

Passover has made my posting a little sporadic in the past few days, but I’ll do my best to keep it up. Friday I got up late, worked in my room for a while and then headed to Hillel for a good few hours to eat as large a lunch as I could manage. It didn’t keep me very full, as I kept eyeing food all afternoon.

After that I went to my office, coded for a bit, sat thinking for a little. Research is difficult. At 3PM I headed to my TA meeting, where Val Tannen decided to announce my news to all the TAs, embarrassing me greatly, though I had to give him a little leeway given his status as my referee. TA training was mostly unexciting, however I did compose a neat little one liner (plus variable instantiation outside the function) for recursive calculation of fibbonacci numbers with memorization. Hooray for ternary statements!

Made it to shul on time tonight and had a pleasant dinner with the usual crew. After dinner the Shabbatones and the Penn Bloomers were performing. The Bloomers were surprisingly excellent, and their skits as an all female musical comedy troupe were actually funny enough to laugh out loud!

After the performances, I chilled with Ariella, Hannah Dardashti Madeline Brown and Alexis Block for a number of hours, telling stories from my travels! Made it to bed well past midnight.

Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday – Day 239/240/241

Tuesday with the Koloski’s was great again! The goers to synagogue in the morning at the local Chabad institution had their interest aroused by the presence of a new unknown individual in their midst and an Australian at that. An elderly Hungarian cohen was also interested in how such a small boy had a decent sized voice to sing with, and told me that I should come more regularly.

Following that, lunch was back at Aviva’s grandparent’s, and was comprised of some excellent Moroccan fish, alongside some excellent spreads and salads. Absolutely delicious.

The rest of the afternoon was spent both napping and play bananagrams, an old favourite of mine that involves creating crossword like structures from scrabble letters. I didn’t rest until I had won a game against Josh and Jeremy, Aviva’s identical twin brothers, one of whom shared my name as his middle name. Quite exciting.

Seder that night was pretty similar to the one the night before, but was equally as enjoyable. I got even more into it this time as the tunes were now familiar and the people too. We finished even later this night, at around 1:30AM and I was glad to get into bed, waking up a little late for synagogue the next day.

Lunch on Wednesday was Moroccan lamb, something that brought me back to my own grandmother’s cooking and made me feel a little sad I wasn’t back at home with everyone, regardless of the fact that Aviva’s family had made me feel incredibly welcome. Following lunch, Aviva, her mum and I walked over to her friend Michelle’s house and on the way gave me a modern history of Philadelphia. I was quite shocked by some of the neighbourhoods we walked through and the stories of gangs and crime that we told to me. It made me realize quite how lucky I am to live in a place such as Melbourne and in the country of Australia. We really are blessed the way things are at home. Low crime, strong education, healthcare, a sense of enduring mateship that even though it may not seem apparent at home, is definitely put in perspective once overseas. Spending time in Philadelphia reminded me of why I want to live in Melbourne.

A large portion of the conversation at Michelle’s centered around couples marrying and moving off. Very few decided to stay in Philly, understandably, and many were moving to Israel. It was a little sad to hear of a community being so depleted!

After chag ended,  I rang home to tell them of my news from Monday, and they were considerably excited. Possibly even more so than me. I’ve decided to hold off publishing here exactly what it was for another week or so, but needless to say, it was a dream come true. We then drove back to Penn and life resumed as normal.

Wednesday night I was frantically trying to catch up on everything I had missed and the one hundred and forty odd emails I had received in the two days I had missed. Thursday was much the same, albeit the morning contained a physics lecture that I really enjoyed and managed to grasp sufficiently.

The afternoon was work work work, a quick interview, and then office hours from six until midnight. At least I’m slowly building up some savings, despite the various costs associated with Glee Club, my rent and of course, tuition.

Sunday/Monday – Day 237/238

March 29, 2013

Things didn’t stop going well over the next few days. Some of my best times at Penn. Sunday was a full day of work. After I woke up that is. Coding till so late the night before, didn’t exactly give rise to a full day of awakedness. Bits of group project work and lots and lots of physics. I didn’t realize that much of the physics on the assignment we hadn’t actually covered yet and so I spent hours trying to figure out what was going on, with much futility.

Had a new ‘chevruta’ (learning partner) in the evening with Shlomo Klapper, that was most fulfilling. Thankfully too, it came with dinner and bagels, the last chametz of the week!

After that I headed to Kiwi with Yoni Weider and Ariella and we had a good chat over some real US style frozen yogurt!

I didn’t sleep much that night, had another minor argument with someone and it just kept replaying in my head. I’m not a fan of conflict.

The next morning I was up early for minyan, siyum and biur chametz (prayers, meal and public burning of bread), in preparation for Pesach (passover). There was a small crowd there but everyone got very into it all. Had a short day, with a midterm that went excellently despite little to no study for it. I then packed by bags, walked with Aviva through the rain to drop off her homework and ran to the car where her dad was waiting for us to take us to her place.

The details of what happened next I’ll leave to further posts, but needless to say my next few hours were exciting.

© 2012-2024 Shaanan Cohney