Hosting Americans as Israelis

I've written in the past about friends and family coming to visit us in Haifa.  We love having the opportunity to use our guest room and show off our new hometown.  This week we welcomed extra special guests, close friends who will be living with us for a month.

When friends stay for extended periods of time, they turn from guests into roommates. Having roommates means there are extra sets of hands to help out with the cooking and cleaning, which I absolutely can't complain about.  At the same time, they remain visitors which pushes us do things outside our normal routine - go out to dinner, sightsee, and have long discussions about politics and life in Israel.  

These friends happen to be here specifically to learn Hebrew. Both are graduate students and received a grant to come to Israel, immerse themselves in Israeli life and, like I said, learn Hebrew.  They will soon begin a summer ulpan course at the University of Haifa to formally work on their language skills, but in the meantime have been grocery shopping, opened a gym membership and traveled around on the train and buses speaking to everyone they can in Hebrew. I am thoroughly impressed with their determination and persistence to speak in Hebrew at every opportunity, even with each other and with us at home. 

One of the highlights of partaking in their experience is seeing their reaction to Haifa. Both of them have spent some sort of extensive period of time in Israel before (she was once my roommate in Jerusalem), but neither have spent much time in Israel outside the "tourist cities" aka Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. As people working on spoken language skills, being in Haifa has been a huge advantage even in these first few days of their trip. One of the challenges of having an American accent in Hebrew is, when detected by the Israeli who you are trying to engage in conversation, the conversation easily switches over to English.  Turns out that many Israelis are just as interested in using their English as we may be using our Hebrew.  In Haifa, however, this happens much less frequently. Our friends appreciate, just as we do, that local Haifans are more willing to speak to you slowly and allow you to stumble through your Hebrew without making you feel bad that you aren't quite fluent.  Maybe this is a result of us living in a particularly non-touristy part of Haifa where English is much less frequently heard. Maybe Haifa is just a slower paced city. Either way, we feel proud of our city when our friends come home from a day out on the town and express how nice everyone they encountered was.  We hope during the rest of their time here, Haifa continues to live up to their first impressions.  

Shabbat Shalom and have a great weekend,

Stef and Matt