Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving in Israel turned out to be a pretty good experience. I missed being home- so I came home from Thanksgiving dinner and spent an hour on Skype with the family, keeping me up Quite late- but completely worth it. As it was, I spent the later afternoon over with the friend with whom I had dinner, cooking and talking, and then her roommate came home (whom I haven't really seen in about 4 years- it was nice to catch back up some, not that I knew her so well before) and we had Thanksgiving dinner, the 3 of us.

Thanks to all for the menu suggestions. I ended up baking some butternut squash, and then in the meantime sauteing carrots, a red pepper, and a whole bunch of mushrooms on the stove, and adding brown sugar, soy sauce and a little vinegar, and serving the squash with the vegetables in the cavity, and then topped with a little bit of goat cheese. The last was the suggestion of my hosts, who had some and thought it would go well- and in fact it made a vast improvement to the dish. It was something I had improvised up before, and some of the suggestions made on my LJ reminded me of it.

Thanksgiving dinner was a little last-minute in terms of recipes, as we didn't find some of the ingredients we'd been hoping for (especially cranberries), but it turned out to be quite tasty and very orange. Besides my dish, we had sweet potato with chopped pineapple, baked tofu with vinaigrette (it was a vegetarian apartment), cornbread, and an approximated pumpkin pie that turned out more like squash cake (we couldn't find pumpkin anything), but which tasted quite good with gvinah levanah. ("white cheese", which is vaguely reminiscent of sour cream.)

Rally

I attended my first rally tonight. It was in reaction to a woman having been arrested a couple of weeks ago for wearing a tallit at the kotel. It was a walk and then a big crowd listening to some sort of speakers whom I couldn't understand. So after a bit of that, I left early to walk home with a friend who had to get back to working on application essays for next year. The rally was an interesting mix of people, and included a wide variety of folks I knew- I saw many, many of my classmates, some friends from RRC, other friends from the Conservative Yeshiva, etc, etc.

It got a little confusing as part of the rally ended up being more general "take back Jerusalem from the Hareidim" in ways that were about letting more things be open on Shabbat, instead of being focused on the kotel issue and religious freedom there. One of my friends commented that it was like there were two rallies squished together: one of non-hareidi religious people talking about the kotel, and another of secular folks talking more broadly about control of Jerusalem. So the posters around me said things (in Hebrew, but I'm too lazy to type in Hebrew right now) like "There's more than one way to be a Jew" and "Free the Kotel a Second Time".

At one point some folks behind us lit a very small fire and got some sort of hot air balloon lit and going, and then released it, so that it flew away over the crowd. It distracted pretty much everyone briefly. It was a lovely thing to watch, but left me quite concerned as it was this flying thing with fire in it, roaming freely on the winds. I just dearly hope that it burned out before it hit anything inflammable...