Yom Kippur and an Elevator

I thought all I would have to write about this week would be my experience on Yom Kippur.  Oh, how wrong I was.  Let's talk about what happened on Sunday, shall we?

So Sunday evening, the seven students who study Arabic were invited to go to a dinner with Arab students at the Shenkar College near us.  We arrived at the college with no difficulties, but then we went to get into the elevator and things went downhill (quite literally).  Because none of us read Hebrew, none of us managed to read the sign in the elevator that said you could only fit four people in it at one time.  (You can see where this is going, right?)  So, the seventh person steps into the elevator, the professor who came with us moves to get in, and...

The elevator dropped -- shockingly slowly, actually -- until there was only about a foot of the floor that we could see.  I will never forget the look on my professor's face -- the "oh no, I've killed half the program" look.  Once he got over that, of course, he leaned down and took some pictures of us in distress before figuring out what number to call to get the elevator fixed.  While we waited for an electrician to arrive, the Shenkar students kindly brought the food and drinks down to the ground floor and handed us food through the opening between the floor and the top of the elevator.  All told, it was probably about half an hour of being stuck in an elevator (though I don't know for sure, at some point it felt like we'd been in there for two hours) before we were slowly lowered to the bottom floor and let out of the elevator.

Aside from that debacle, the meeting with the Shenkar students was very fun!  It was a chance to practice my Arabic -- which badly needs practice -- and they're all very friendly people.  I just won't be taking any elevators any time soon...

But back to Yom Kippur, which happened on Saturday.  I woke up in the morning to the strangest sound I've ever heard in a city: complete and utter quiet.  On Yom Kippur, no cars run, no buses run, no planes fly in, nothing is open -- the entire city stops for a day.  There's the sounds of people out for walks, or biking around, but no construction, no vehicles -- nothing to suggest that you're living in a city as opposed to a small country farm.

After lunch, I headed out with a few friends to go biking along the highway.  It was such a surreal experience -- see below for pictures.  Everything felt so calm and serene.  Also, now I know what it'll be like when the apocalypse happens -- everyone riding around on second hand bikes with no cars to be found.  I don't think I can quite capture what it was like to be in a city that completely stopped for an entire day, but I hope you have some sense of what it felt like.





I leave Friday morning with three other NYU students to go to Egypt for fall break and will be out of commission for next Wednesday's post -- but expect a resume of blogging on October 18th, with a long post about Egypt!

Katrina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Orientation Week and Settling In

The Start of Classes and Eurobasket 2017