My daily life at the Techion - lots of hills!

This is my building - the Department of Education in Technology and Science

After a slow start, my daily life at the Technion has gotten a lot more fun and exciting lately! When I first arrived, it happened to be exam period, which was followed by a break between semesters. That is a little confusing to me, because we are about to have a week off for Pesach...so why didn't they just time the semester around that? Who knows.

Fortunately, this week the campus has totally come alive with students. It feels like any college campus in the US with students hustling to classes, hanging out in the student center and lounging on open fields when the weather is nice. Oh, and the weather has started to get really nice, like 80F and sunny!

Like the rest of Haifa, the campus is extremely hilly. Walking from my building to the student center is a pretty serious leg workout!

Today I sent an email out to the international student mailing list to see if anyone wanted to meet up at the student center for lunch, and ended up having lunch with a group of about 12 people. It's a really international mix! I was expecting it to be mostly american jews and a few folks from the UK, but I was completely wrong. There are students from all over, and for the most part it was their research that brought them here. I'm not sure what percent is Jewish, but it's surely less than 50%.

At lunch today we had students from Italy, Germany, China, South Africa, India and more. It makes me feel really lucky that I am a native English speaker. I learned English with no effort at all - but I'm so impressed with all these students who speak 2 or 3 or more languages and are taking classes or doing research in English, which is not their first language.

This is one of the few flat areas of campus. It's right outside the student center so it's good for hanging out. The building in the background is a new computer science building.

Caroline and I have definitely made the Technion a center of our social life here, and it's kind of nice being back in a university community like this. I've got all these international students to socialize with, and Caroline has the Masters swim team.

This is the indoor pool. It's olympic length (50m) which is really hard for me, but I'm getting better. In a month or two they will also open the outdoor pool. Fun!

The Technion has a beautiful swimming pool, and the the whole facility is free for technion staff and students. We got Caroline a pretty cheap membership, so now we can go twice a week to swim together. Caroline is swimming with the aforementioned Masters club, and I am doing my best to learn to swim. We try to get in the pool 30 minutes before her club starts, and she gives me a mini-lesson and some things to practice for the day. I'm still a very poor swimmer, but I'm getting better. I'm hoping that by the end of the time here in Israel I will be able to swim 400m without stopping. Right now I can only do 50m, so that is definitely a big improvement!

In just a few days, my parents will be coming to visit, and then soon after that my siblings are coming too. It'll be a really nice couple of weeks to have them all here. I haven't seen my siblings in half a year!

More updates and photos coming soon.

We did it!

We finished our half marathon (my first one)! We feel great, just a little tired. We'll post pics when we're back on wifi.

Some luck

Remember when Caroline was running the Boston Marathon and then the weather turned out to be a very-uncharacteristic 92F?

Well, the forecast for Tel Aviv tomorrow, when we run our half marathon, is once again: 92F.

The good news/bad news is that they have moved the race start time earlier. We will start at 6am (UGH!) so we'll hopefully be finished by 8:30am, avoiding the worst heat. However, that has thrown a total wrench in our plans, because the earliest train from Haifa to Tel Aviv arrives at 6:15am, so now we have to go the night before, book a hotel, etc. etc.

It'll all work out fine, but this is some last-minute excitement we could have done without :(

Half marathon on Friday

On Friday we're doing the Tel Aviv Half Marathon.  Here's the course:

This will be Sam's first half marathon!  We're looking forward to (getting) it (over with)!

Tonight we will go to Tel Aviv to pick up our packets with our race numbers and shirts.  Apparently they don't give you the medal until you cross the finish line :)

Learn about energy and global warming!

Brief post here - I just wanted to share a little bit about the work that I'm doing at the Technion. As I mentioned in a previous post, I am making a set of web videos to teach middle school kids about energy.

You can check out the first unit on YouTube here, or if you want to just watch one video, check out the video about global warming below.

By the way, I have received no feedback or review on these yet, so if you have suggestions to improve the videos please let me know, or if you think any of my science is inaccurate or confusingly stated, please tell me!

Pictures from India

Here is a list of some stuff we did in India, with some pictures.  Most of this was based on recommendations from friends who have lived in or visited India (thanks Jayson, Sarah, and Matt!):

In Delhi, where we started:

• Eat choley bhature (sorry, no picture.  Just imagine chickpeas in some yummy green stuff with delicious greasy bread) 
• Qutab Minar

• India Gate

• President’s house

• Lotus temple

• ISKCON Hare Krishna Temple

• Red Fort, also known as Lal Qil'ah, which is where Shah Jahan lived

• Eat at at a dhaba - a traditional punjabi 'diner' with absolutely amazing food (secret ingredient is butter in everything) 

• Mahatma Gandhi Park in New Delhi near the Red Fort

• Jama Masjid which is a giant mosque in Delhi

That was just in Delhi, but I figured that was enough for now.  I'm going to do 2 more posts, one for the rest of the Golden Triangle and one for Kerala in the south.  Stay tuned!

Daily life in Haifa - Work, language and more to come

I have been pretty negligent about posting updates since we have arrived in Haifa, so I wanted to get caught up a bit in a post. We've been in Haifa just under two weeks now, and it does feel like we're starting to get settled in. Daily life here definitely has some differences from Santiago!

Work
Caroline has already posted about her work at the Israeli Science Museum, called Madatech. Seems like she is having a lot of fun building some sort of landscape from Mars for an upcoming exhibit.

I am working as a research assistant for a professor at the Technion, a science and engineering university here in Haifa. Her name is Miri Barak, and she is in the Deparment of Education in Science and Technology. Her research is all about using web and other tech tools to improve the effectiveness of elementary and secondary science instruction.

My project is to create a curriculum for a study on the "flipped classroom" model of teaching. This is where all of the lessons are done by video, which students watch as homework. Then when they come to class, they spend the whole time working on practice problems. The classroom is flipped in the sense that students are now listening to lectures as homework, and doing homework in the classroom.

There is a Jewish middle school in the US that is interested in using the curriculum we create, and they are willing to let us study the effectiveness of this approach. My job is to make a curriculum to cover topics related to energy, and then record all the lecture videos and make the exercises. It's right up my alley, and I am really enjoying the chance to slow down and think more about how to teach a subject, instead of having to rush to get things ready for the next day of class like when I was teaching.

This job leads to a very different daily routine than what I had in Santiago. There, I was working as a tutor, so I was mostly free during the day and then spent my afternoons and evenings taking buses around the city and giving classes. Here I have more of a standard 9-5 job, and I even have my own office. It's nice to be more on the same schedule as Caroline again.

Language
Obviously the primary language here in Israel is Hebrew, but for those of you who have never been, you might be surprised to hear there are a lot of other languages that are pretty common. English is very widespread - we both are working primarily in English with our colleagues, and even in markets and shop you can count on people speaking at least enough English to do a transaction with you.

There is also a lot of Arabic - many official signs are trilingual with Hebrew, Arabic and English. Haifa in particular is known as one of the few places in Israel where Arabs and Jews are fairly integrated. On top of all that, there is also a lot of Russian here, due to the wave of Russian Jews who immigrated in the early 1990s after the end of the cold war. Haifa has an especially high concentration of Russian immigrants; there are many shops with signs and labels in Russian and you hear it on the street (or you hear a Russian accent to people's Hebrew).

Caroline is planning to take a Hebrew class at the Technion that starts in a couple of weeks. The timing is really good because it happens to be right before a swim club also at the Technion that she wanted to go to anyway.

I have been practicing my Hebrew and I can feel it's already coming back and improving. My experience learning Spanish in Chile has really boosted my enthusiasm for working on languages. I had considered taking a Hebrew class at University of Haifa, but it would take up nearly half my work day and in the end I don't think I will do it. I am looking for a class nearby, or maybe I will just get a workbook and try to find a conversation partner who wants to improve English.

Coming soon, I'll post more about the city, daily life here, etc, but I felt like I needed to get caught up so I'm starting with the basics.