work visa...work?

I have my work visa! I went to the Ministry of Interior at 7am with a girl from my program who also needed to get one. Picture the Ministry of Interior then imagine the DMV but 10 times worse. You can't tell by the picture, but it was one guy working the desk with at least 50 people waiting at the same time to get some sort of visa. We ended up having to wait 3.5 hours, and I had to be questioned a bit about the letter from my rabbi...but finally I received a 6 month work visa! For the stress of waiting, Rachel and I (the girl I went with) treated ourselves to a feast of shakshuka. 

Today was our last day of Ulpan. Below is a picture of some people in class so you can get an idea of what my last 3 weeks looked like.

One of our assignments today was to go outside for 20 minutes and ask strangers where their favorite place in Tel Aviv is. We would start off by getting someone's attention by saying "excuse me", then "i am studying hebrew" then asking the question. This is, of course, all in hebrew. Mia and I went out together to ask the questions....

 I saw a guy walking down the street, who was cute (Mia and I decided to ask cute men) and said "slicha" which is excuse me. He looked at me, shook his head and kept walking. Mia and I started cracking up, mostly out of embarrassment. I couldn't believe I had been so flat out rejected. We saw another guy walking down the street...I looked at him, "slicha?"...He looked at me and ignored me again. I couldnt believe it. For once, I thought my "slicha" sounded good because I had the CHHH down, but he kept walking. I started to second guess myself and my hebrew. We ended up being rejected 4 times. 

About 10 minutes later we ran into one of the leaders of Career Israel and I told her what had happened. "Oh, they just thought you were trying to sell them something or were from Green Peace". I felt a huge relief come over me. Why had I not thought of that before? There were promoters of Green Peace a block down from us. Mia and I, with our notebooks, looked like the people that I even shake my head to on the street to and keep walking. I was so quick to jump to the conclusion that they could automatically tell I was a foreigner and did not want to talk to me. 

After class Zo and I went out to celebrate St Paddy for a little bit and now we are back at the apartment. I was supposed to start working tomorrow but my supervisor is in Germany and she wrote me an email saying "you wont start before the 18th"...which I already knew because I told her I couldnt start before then. Everything is so up in the air...so Israeli. I hope she gets back to me tomorrow because I want to start working asap.

Thats it for now. Every day I am here I fall a bit more in love with Israel.