Tut sadeh, not tut etz

First of all, I need to stop being such a narcoleptic. I took a nap yesterday intending to sleep for an hour and ended up going catatonic for four. Last night I slept for six hours. Hopefully, since I only slept for about two today, I will sleep the full night tonight. But I've been having ridiculous nap dreams, so when I sort of wake up I just want to go back to sleep to pick up the rest of the dream. This is not helping my jet lag case, but oh well.

Yesterday the only real work we did was picking cherries, which was obviously pretty easy aside from the fact that the wind was basically blowing us out of the trees. I won't lie, I probably ate more good ones than I collected, but that's life, eh? (Sidenote: Giselle says "eh" all the time and I find it hilarious. Wooo Canadians!)The afternoon held my insane nap, and in the evening several of their friends visited and we barbecued these amazing chicken wings. I don't know what they were seasoned with, but I want some of it. Incidentally, I also met the apparently infamous son of their former prime minister Ariel Sharon, which is kind of interesting. I also met all of the kids, who are fun. There is their daughter Amit, who is 16 and speaks english almost fluently, their son Tomer, who is 13 and autistic and doesn't speak much to us at all, and their daughters Rez, 5, and Ziv, 3, who like to speak to us A LOT but in very, very fast hebrew and I think I understand about 5% of everything they say. Rez has a little tude when it comes to helping me with the language (which her ima told her to do), but she's so cute she makes up for it.

Today we got up early and went to work with their partner, Gilad, who lives about 20 minutes away. We picked strawberries for like, four hours. My knees and back were dying, and so was my stomach since I ate so many of them. But we had some good conversations, and I'm quickly learning how much of a conundrum I am to people in the fact that (a) I am in israel, (b) I know some hebrew, but (c) I am not jewish. I also learned that the word for strawberry is "tut", but it refers to two fruits. One, "tut sadeh" or strawberry of the field, is what we picked, and the other is "tut etz" or strawberry of the tree. I still don't know what this refers to, since nobody seems to know the english word for it. Afterward, we had lunch and stopped in Masadeh, which is a Druze village in the valley below us. I still don't understand exactly what the Druze are, except that they aren't Jews and they aren't Muslims and some of them think they still live in Syria. More on that later. Anyway, we stopped to buy some zatar, which is basically the best spice ever, and also ended up buying pickles. Which, I might add, came in a plastic coke bottle. I found this mildly amusing.

Came back and folded and ironed about 9 zillion sheets and towels while watching Bob the Builder and Thomas the Tank Engine.......in hebrew. Now that, that is a weird experience.