After two months in Jerusalem I just finished my first week of class. It’s weird to throw a batch of new classes into my comfortable routine here. What’s weirder is that that the university is no longer ruled by the international students. All summer we’ve felt like we owned the place: chances are we knew or at least recognized everyone we saw playing Frisbee on the field and sitting in song circles with guitars. We’ve been downgraded to a small segment of campus.
Walking through the university I’m overwhelmed by what feels like The Rock on speed. With every stride I’m bombarded by another free giveaway, flier or sign up sheet shoved my way. What’s worse is that the university is essentially just one giant building used by more students than Northwestern’s entire campus. Waits at coffee shops and book stores easily eat up the thirty minute breaks between classes, especially given the stereotypical inability of Israelis to stand in lines.
The international school has been more of a global encounter than the expected specific cultural immersion into Israeli university. All of our classes are in a separate building used for undergraduate study abroad programs, graduate studies in English and Israeli university preparation for foreign students. As a result, I know and recognize way more European students than Israelis on campus.
The French students are the most visible to the North Americans, primarily because of their infamous “French parties,” our campus equivalent of frat parties. In some ways, French parties are quite similar to frat parties: unrecognizable faces pounding in tandem to loud music, previously white apartment floors covered in beer and mud, scents of smoke and alcohol wafting nauseatingly through the room and toilets inevitably covered in anonymous vomit by the end of the evening.
But then there are the obvious reminders that the French parties are across the world from the American fraternity scene: anise in place of cheap vodka, house music (which my musically-ignorant self believes is the same as techno or trance) and the resonant patriotism in France from the students who left their country and moved to Israel.
Last night during a French party the music stopped and a boy standing on a couch started a cheer “Ole ole Paris! Ole ole Paris!” The whole room saluted in unison to the city they hardly left when they moved to Jerusalem.
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