On Nicknames and New Friends

Dog & Ruth (if you look real close)

I have a new friend! And by friend I mean pet. And by pet I mean fish! That's right, I went and bought a fish today!!! It's tiny, maybe an inch long, and silvery-white and really cute. I have him in this roundish bowl with blue rocks on the bottom, he's so pretty! His name is pronounced Dog--it's actually the Hebrew word for fish! Isn't that fun? So I took my Dog for a walk today, he came around campus and met some of my friends. He's quite sociable, in fact he might be lonely right now. Poor little Doggy.

The bells are ringing right now, and I love it! We are really close to Dormitian Abbey, a big church--I think the only thing between us and them is a Greek Orthodox mondo-complex; but they're right up the hill, so we always hear their bells ringing and it's so beautiful. Everything echoes here across the valley like no one's business. Last night I lay awake in my bed for like fifteen minutes listening to a dog bark, because its bark echoed so crazily--you could hear one big echo, really clearly, and maybe a smaller one from further down the valley sometimes. It was insane. But the bells are so cool, one of my favorite things about being here. I love listening to church bells ring! I don't have them quite figured out yet. Normally it rings the hour, like 8 rings for 8 am, and then ding for 8:15, 2 for 8:30, 3 for 8:45, and then it starts over again. But right now the bells have been ringing like crazy for literally 7 or 8 minutes, starting at like 5:45. Kind of random, if you ask me. Maybe there's a service now, or maybe someone just got married--probably not that, it's Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) and basically the entire city is shut down, it's kind of neat to see. The Muslim Quarter of the Old City is definitely up and running though; that's where Dog came from. The bells just stopped, I think they rang for 10 straight minutes. It was pretty cool.

I have a new nickname! I thought I would mention it, because this is a completely new one. I have friends at home who call me Ruthis and Ruthie, and I get both of those here, but I have a friend Micah who calls me Rudy! I decided I like it a lot, I don't know where he came up with it but it's fun because no one has ever called me that. Sometimes people call me Ruth with the Hebrew pronounciation, which is like Root except with a really gutteral R sound, I can't do it yet but I'm working on it!

The sun is almost completely set, it's hard to tell when exactly sunset is because of the hills, but the dogs are starting to bark--the really truly canine dogs, not the fishy Dog. I'm sitting in the library trying to do some homework, but sometimes I think simply sitting and listening is just as much of an education.

Shalom!