Posts Tagged ‘Tzanchanim’

Where to begin…

Posted: August 19, 2011 in Advanced Training, Tzanchanim
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I don’t know what to say… I haven’t written a post in over two months. A LOT has happened, and I feel a little bad about not writing about it. I still constantly update my Facebook page, so be sure to check that out – The Lone Soldier Facebook Page.

It’s not that I haven’t wanted to write the blog, it’s more that when I do come home from base (which is less frequently now) I’m so overly exhausted that all I want to do is lay in bed. If I somehow pull the energy out of myself to get up and out, I want to go out and do normal people things. Go to a bar, go to a movie, hang out at the beach etc. Since I have my iPhone it’s much easier for me to write quick updates and send in a few pictures here and there to Facebook. Writing takes thought and time – neither of which I want to use on weekends off.

Since we left last time, here’s a general run down of what’s happened so you can all catch up:

  • We finished tironut (basic training) and have moved onto imun mitkadem (advanced training)
  • my commander that I told you about? The batshit crazy one? yea, he got kicked out. I have many different feeling about it, some good, some bad. I think he was a great commander in that he knows his stuff and is insane in the way that you want someone that’s gotta protect you during a war. He also was WAY too hard on us, considering we were just in basic training. I personally think he would be an amazing commander in the gdud (battalion – referring to working on the line, not at a training base). He is someone I want to command me during war, someone that isn’t going to lose his cool and isn’t going to be scared – he was just a little too tough for training, that’s all.
  • I got a new commander, great guy. After guarding with him at the front gate recently I found out that he speaks nearly perfect English. It’s not that I want to be speaking English with him all the time, but it’s a great relief from my previous commander who hardly understood English at all. I’ve been here 10-11 months, sorry but my Hebrew still isn’t fluent. Sometimes I just HAVE to say something in English, especially when I’m frustrated and can’t remember Hebrew for the life of me. He’s not as “balls to the wall” as my previous commander, but I think he’s a much better (more caring) commander for training. He legitimately cares if we learn our lessons, and what our problems are. He doesn’t mind having a laugh with us either, which helps reduce the constant stress I’ve been feeling.
  • We guarded in STIFLING heat near Ein Gedi (around the Dead Sea). The army treated us and we got to go to the pool at Kibbutz Ein Gedi for an hour!
  • We went to some other base for a week and had “team building” exercises and lots of interesting lessons. It was a nice break from our usual run till you drop schedule. I learned a lot, and think it was great for our machlakah (platoon) to learn more about each other.
  • Our pluga (company) completed one of our first very long masaot (hike/journey). 25+5KM 30% (in layman’s terms: 25 KM, another 5KM with stretchers loaded with sandbags, all while carrying 30% of body weight). This was one of the hardest masaot for me yet. 3 people passed out on the way from any combination of dehydration/overheating/lack of energy. My boot over the past couple weeks has developed a whole in the lining near my heel.  I did my usual of putting on two pairs of socks, and didn’t think twice about it – bad idea. After the first 10KM or so I started getting a blister, another couple KM’s and I had a hole in my foot, and little after that I just kept telling myself my foot was on fire and everything was fine. Needless to say, for a week or so after I had to put gauze and tape on my foot until it healed up. I’ve now learned about a great product: Leukotape! It’s expensive stuff, but it really works to protect your feet in the spots you know you’re going to get blisters… It’s like a second skin.
  • We took a ride on a Black Hawk helicopter!!! Out of all the infantry units, ours is the only one to get to do this, so it was an amazing experience. I can hardly explain to you the weightless feeling when you take off: it’s like when you’re at the very top of a roller-coaster…but not exactly? With swirling clouds of dust and pebbles flying around you, the chopper’s loud and powerful engines launch you off the ground in a matter of seconds. Half a minute later you don’t even recognize where you are, several hundred feet up and far enough away from where you took off that the surroundings are new and mysterious. We only flew for around 5 minutes, but they were some of the most memorable 5 minutes from the whole army so far…After the helicopter ride we did a 5+5KM 40% Masa – I didn’t think it was as hard as our previous Masa, but it still wasn’t easy.

Not the one we went on, but the same make and model...

  •  This past week all we had been doing was guarding and working in the kitchen. It sounds like a break, but it’s really not. It was only our machlakah (platoon) on base, so we had to cover everything ourselves. We were guarding 2-4 (2 hours of guarding, 4 hours off in-between) and alternating working in the kitchen all day. Four hours off isn’t really four hours off… 2 of those hours you’re kita konenut (I’m not positive about this one, but it’s basically a squad of people who are always ready to respond to an emergency on base) which means you can’t take off your uniform (including knee pads and boots). In addition, if you hear the words to respond, you have to be ready with ALL your gear in 1 and a 1/2 minutes. Let me tell you, that’s tons of fun being woken up to for a drill… The other two hours you technically have off, but you’re always going to be sleeping so you never get undressed in the first place. I didn’t shower or take off my clothes for 4 days. I smelled TERRIBLE. You have to be back to guard 20 minutes before the hour and it takes 5 minutes to walk there, so basically it works out that you guard 2 hours, sleep/rest 3 hours – and that’s if there isn’t something planned for you to do in between.

In conclusion, the past two months have been very smelly, very tiring, I’ve learned a lot and experienced a lot of cool things. Since I don’t know when I’ll be updating next, stick to Facebook for the real up-to-date posts. The next 2 months is going to be even harder, so I don’t know what I’ll be able to post about – but just know I’ll be hiking further than most people think is possible, sleeping half as much as a normal person and jumping out of a perfectly good airplane numerous times…

5 months

Posted: June 3, 2011 in Basic Training, Tzanchanim
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Disclaimer!!! I wrote the following a couple weeks ago and never finished the blog. I’m not as angry and annoyed as I was then, but things do still tend to irk me from time to time. I’ve begun to try to accept that this is just the way the army is… Plus I have a working iPhone again which makes me happy, and a great girlfriend to massage my nervous wreck of a self. Without further ado, I present to you all an outdated, unfinished blog entry! Enjoy!

Wow, tomorrow will be 5 months since I started this crazy ride called the Israeli Defense Forces. That means only another 34,186,670 seconds left till I’m out. The reason I’m counting the seconds is because 13 months or a year and a month seems like such a short amount of time. When I started this adventure I didn’t realize that I would be checking every second that goes by. Whether I’m in the army timing EVERYTHING I do because the commander says to, or because it’s on the weekends and I don’t want to waste a second – I’m always checking the tick-tock of the clock.

It’s come to that point in my service where I’ve realized that not everything is perfect in the IDF, very far from it in fact. I won’t go into far reaching details with you now, but I’ve started to become a little cynical due to the broken promises that I’ve grown accustomed to.

Some of the promises are from the IDF, some are from companies, and others are just from people in general. The army promises that Lone Soldiers get out at 6am on Friday’s, I can’t remember the last time I got out before 9am. It doesn’t seem like a huge difference, but when you have less than 48 hours to get everything you need to get done for the week, it really makes a difference. It especially makes a difference because most of those 48 hours are “shabbat hours”, meaning NOTHING is open or working. When the phone company charges you a ridiculous $183 in a month, and they’re closed on the weekend… it doesn’t really help that you can’t call them to straighten it out. I’m starting to hate shabbat, it’s more of a time of being annoyed that I can’t get anything done, rather than a restful time.

OK, so now that I got my bitching out of the way, I can also say that I just completed one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my entire life this week. The day before we left base we had an 8km masa (Journey/hike). The last kilometer we ran with a stretcher full of sandbags, and for the entire 8kms I went with the pakal mayim (water bag). This bag has 15 liters of water in it and so all together weighs around 40 pounds. Add this 40 pounds to the 25-30 pounds of equipment I already carry (1.5 liters of water, 6 loaded magazines, combat vest, dummy grenade, M16 and other small assorted items) and I’m carrying around 70 pounds of stuff. I’ve lost around 15 pounds in the army so far bringing me down to a skinny (semi-anorexic, as my girlfriend says) 150 pounds (68 kilo’s for you non-poundage people). I was carrying 46% of my body weight!!! what?!?!?!

First Week of Tzanchanim

Posted: March 26, 2011 in Basic Training, Tzanchanim
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What can I say, I’m a certified skirt wearing Tzanchan (paratrooper) now… well at least I will be in 8 months from now.  I’ve just done the equivalent of going from being a senior in high school to being a lowly freshman in college. The last week or so of being at Mikveh Alon was great, we all had “broken distance” with our Mefakdot, meaning we learned their names and some details of their normal lives. They also stopped being giant bitches 24/7, so that kinda made them bearable. We were on top of the world, newbies were coming into the base that we got to laugh at their misfortunes while we walked around hardly doing anything. That was then… this is now.

Now we’re at the Tzanchanim base, we’re the scum of the earth. The people without red koomtas (berets), without wings, without anything but our girly looking skirts having proved nothing yet. For those of you that don’t know, Tzanchanim, the paratroopers, wear a “tunic” which everyone refers to as a skirt. It has something to do with the british S.A.S. blah blah blah. I wasn’t really paying attention when someone was telling me, because I was just thinking if I looked pretty in a skirt or not.

tzanchanim skirt ehmmm, tunic... (yerkit in hebrew)

This first week at Tzanchanim was an experience to say the least. We, the Mikveh Alon group, had been on the base the week prior to learn some random stuff about the army that they thought was important for us to know instead of having the week off. Some of it was interesting, but I really would have much more appreciated the week off to do nothing. Basically, as you can tell, I never even wrote a blog last week – that’s how much I cared for that week. While most people’s first week at Tzanchanim was dominated by working around the base picking weeds and other manual labor jobs fit for scum, I was at another gibbush.

“ANOTHER GIBBUSH!??! I read about the hell you went through the first time, why would you do it again?” That’s what you just asked me right? – OK, well if you didn’t ask, you should have, because I’m about to give you the answer. This gibbush was for the sayerot (special forces) units of Tzanchanim. The units are the following – Maglan, Duvdevan, as well as the “Gadsar” units, Palsar (reconnaissance), Palchan (demolitions) and Orev (anti-tank). They all do they’re own special things which you can read more about on your time (it really is intriguing stuff once you get into it).

To make this a shorter blog entry, read the previous blog about the first gibbush, then multiply it 12.5 fold. This gibbush was 50 straight hours, not 4. The entire first day was crawling. I make no exaggerations – other than half an hour of wind sprints in the beginning of the day, we crawled. We crawled straight, we crawled in circles, we crawled up hill, we crawled down hill. We crawled all day… I must admit that I’m actually misleading you a little bit, we did have “breaks”, 5-10 minute ones every hour or so… during which we had to piss and drink our full meemiah (canteen), which is about 3/4 of a liter then run and refill it at the water truck that was parked a good 5 minutes away. Oh what’s that you say? That’s not enough time to drink, piss and refill up the canteen? Of course it’s not, that’s the point. When we got back, obviously late, we had to do push-ups because we were late.

The whole time during the gibbush we were eating the same thing we ate in the shetach at Mikveh Alon, Manot Krav (combat rations), which included bread, canned tuna, corn, beans, pineapple and a little brick of halava to split between 8 or so ravenous guys. I don’t know about you guys, but that churns my stomach a little bit. I won’t lie, I may have had some skidmarks by the end of the gibbush…

After a “pleasant” night sleep (which included getting up twice in the night to do 15 minute guard duty rotations) in a two man tent on the dirt ground, the second day of the gibbush was a little different. We ran up and down hills for the whole first half of the day. Up and down… up and down… up and down. The Mefaked (commander) doesn’t say do this 5 times, he just says “do this”. It’s up to you to do it as fast as you can, as many times as you can until he says stop. This is how they judge you, they want to see your motivation to push yourself. Then after an hour or so they’ll switch up the path that you need to run, usually by making it longer and harder. Oh, haha, I forgot a key element. You’re running with a 10 kg sandbag on your neck/back.

Sometime after the running we started doing a Masa (hike/journey) with aloomkot (stretchers) The stretchers all have 7 sandbags on them, that’s 70 kilo’s, plus the weight of the stretcher, split between 4 guys. Let me tell you that 20 kg’s is not fun to run with at full speed on your collar bone. The second half of the day started off with… you guessed it. Crawling – again. I actually thought the first day was all the crawling we were going to do, obviously I was wrong to assume that. After some more crawling we did mind games! Finally a physical relief. We had to give directions from a map that they had given us the first day. We were to have memorized it in our non-existent free time. I managed to memorize mine while we were doing our hikes, killed it. We did some “game” of trying to tie a not with a rope without letting go of our partners hands (hard to explain without a picture), we did a “rocket defense” game by giving directions to others in the field that were blindfolded. All in all very cool stuff I thought. Later on at night we slept on the concrete floor of the shooting range nearby, since I think they felt bad for us that it was pouring rain at this point. Again, guard duty rotations at night.

The 3rd morning we had one last thing left to do for the gibbush. We had another map test. This time we were given a satellite image of the base and had to walk with the mefaked to find locations on the base using just the map – wooh boy scouts, I killed this one too. After taking down our tents and having one last delicious manot krav meal, we went back onto the base. Here we waited for our interviews and our doctors visits (to make sure we weren’t dead or dying). The interview was to be with 5-6 reservists, probably aged around 30.

My interview went a little like this (but all in hebrew [p.s. they had a form I had filled out the night before]):

Mefaked: so it says here that you don’t want sayeret, why did you do the gibbush?

me: ummm, It was fun, it was a test for my mind and body… not a test for the army.

mefaked: so why don’t you want sayeret?

me: I would have to do 3 years, right now I’m in Machal and only have to do 1 1/2 years.

mefaked: ok, we understand. So what do you want to do in Tzanchanim?

me: I want to go to pluga (battalion) 202

mefaked: ok, if you want to go there, then you will go there. Good luck! See you later!

me: thank you so much (shook all their hands)… thanks again, good day.

 

All in all, I really think I would have made it into sayeret if I had wanted it. I was never last (actually I was right in the middle and very consistent with my physical tests and killed the mental parts)

I’m happy I tested myself. I had fun. I didn’t have to clean the base like everyone else. I’m proud of myself. End of Story.

During the gibbush we all talked about what we'd rather be eating. I said I wanted a steak. I was lucky enough this weekend to go for a BBQ picnic with my girlfriend and family at Mt. Carmel park. If love was in food form... this would be it.

 

GIBBUSH!

Posted: March 9, 2011 in Mikveh Alon
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“Wow, what did I get myself into?!?!” “Why am I doing this to myself again?” “My muscles are searing in pain, my lungs are on fire, WHY?!?!?!” “run faster… you’re being a little girl!” “BIGGER, FASTER, STRONGER!” “JUST DO IT!”

Those are just a few of the things that were going through my mind as I was at the gibbush (tryout) for Tzanchanim (paratroopers). There were doubts in my mind, my body hurt – but it made me feel alive. I’m here, once again at my girlfriends writing a blog, but this time I’m enjoying writing about my experience because it was a truly interesting one. One that I won’t forget, and I’ll surely remember when I’m being pounded on for 3 months through basic training (and then even longer through advanced training). I’ll remember because this is what I asked for and what I came here for. Training to make myself better, training to make myself physically and mentally stronger than the average human. I’ve always considered myself a pretty average joe, but always working toward improvement (that could be a whole blog by itself so I’m gonna stop now).

The gibbush took place at Bakum, the same place I was my first day in the army. It’s a base for all the new people in the army, as well as a type of sorting ground for people going to new units. We arrived around 8-9am after sitting on the bus from Mikveh Alon for around 2 1/2 hours, not really sure why it took so long – army busses are slow… always. The first day at the gibbush seemed like a big joke, we got there and were split into groups and were told to start cleaning dishes in the kitchen… seriously? I thought I came here to test my physical and mental aptitude for an elite group of paratroopers in the Israeli Army??? Oh well, I guess I’ll scrub the living hell out of that plate… and the next one… and the next one. While washing plates, utensils and other cookware, we clearly got a bit tired of the tedious work and started screwing around a bit. Luckily the guy in charge of us was all for it and we all ended up pretty wet in the kitchen.
A delicious lunch (Bakum food is amazing… and that really is not sarcasm), and some hours of usual army waiting around later, we eventually got around to changing into sports clothes. We were about to be doing our “Barour” (a basic test of physical strength). While there we found out that they wouldn’t be including the pushups and situps portion of the test, just the run. I didn’t like that very much because I can easily max out the 75 pushups and 86 situps required, where as my running ability is a bit lacking compared to some other peoples. Oh well, I guess I’d just have to put everything into the run.

The run was 2km – the same as what we had practiced at Mikveh Alon the week prior, this time however it was on rolling dirt, gravel and sand hills – oh ok. I knew it would be a little harder than running on a nice paved road, but also knew I needed to run faster. I was shooting for around the same time I had gotten on my first attempt (7:47) so I ran behind the same guy I did at Mikveh. Igor is quite a bit faster than me in long hauls so I knew I’d need to push myself. The first kilometer went easy enough, hardly a strained breath at all. The next half kilometer I was sweating and pushing myself, but it wasn’t until the last 500 meters that I really started to feel myself breaking. Igor began to pull ahead one stride at a time, but I didn’t put too much thought into it – just thought “keep on running”. I struggled to make myself sprint the last 100 meters or so but to no avail, I felt as if I was still moving the same speed.

I stopped my watch and told the register table the number written on my arm so they could record my official time. By my watch I had gotten 7:54, a bit slower than my previous attempt but good enough for me as I saw plenty of other people lagging behind. I was happy with my time considering I was still under 8 minutes and it was a much rougher course. For the rest of the day we didn’t seem to do much, just ate and wasted some time. We went to sleep extremely early and were told we would be need to be outside our tents in uniform at 3:30AM. Oh, so I guess that’s the time when I was going to start hating myself right?

After sleeping in my uniform, since we had heard we might get woken up in the middle of the night (we didn’t), I arose to a chilly and dark dawn of the day. We waited in formation for our mefaked (commander) for nearly half an hour… someone must of overslept – and it wasn’t us. First things first – chug your entire water bottle. 3/4 of a liter? No prob, I used to do this with beer in college every weekend. Yum, stale water out of an old plastic canteen. They say it’s to prevent against dehydration during the day, I guess we’ll be working out? Next was to take off our undershirts – bare skin against uniform. They say it’s to prevent against heat stroke during the day, I guess we’ll be working out hard?

We go to a meeting area where everyone else is, and eventually get re-split up into smaller, different tzvatim (groups) of about 20 people each. It seemed like almost everyone in my tzevet was from Mikveh Alon, I guess they wanted to keep the coloring book kids together? We received two jerry cans of water, a stretcher and a few back packs. We also each received tags for our uniforms that identified us with a number. Although I remember what we did and mostly in what order the details after this won’t be exact because my mind sort of just went somewhere else for a couple hours…

We stretched for a while with our mefaked and did a few short warm up laps around the perimeter of the area we were in. A decent enough warm up, but the sun still wasn’t out so it wasn’t like I was sweating from it. We were told to pick up a sand bag from the pile on the side and walk with the mefakdeem, at this point 4 other guys had joined our head mefaked. I immediately noticed that the sand bags were no where near even. Some looked to weigh around 50 pounds, while others couldn’t have been more than 15 – if this was on purpose or not, I’m still unsure. As we were walking the sun began to spread some light over the terrain we were going over. We passed a few other tzevet’s and eventually got to our area we’d be calling home for the next hour or so. We placed everything down on the side, and the mefaked had me place a sandbag about 35 meters (a hundred feet or so) up hill from where we were standing. Shloshoht! (lines of three) He said a bit in Hebrew that I wasn’t really paying attention to, and then said to run there and back in 14 seconds… GO! And we ran. And ran. And ran again. Every time we’d get back he’d say to run again. In the beginning we’d have 5-10 seconds between each run. After a while, it was just get back and run again. We were doing this for around 20 minutes. Then they added an interested variable into the equation… the stretcher. The stretcher filled with 7 sandbags.

Now every time we returned from the run we would have to run another time, unless you were one of the “lucky” first four people. The first four would be running again, but with the stretcher on their shoulders. Although It doesn’t sound good, it is good if you’re carrying the stretcher, because that means you were first, you were standing out, and the mefakdeem would be writing down your number. We did this for around another 20 minutes. I got the stretcher twice, not as many times as some people, but more than many. I had a secret…

Although I was working hard this whole time, I wasn’t putting in 100%… probably closer to 80%. Some of the “sprints” were more of a run for me, not a full out sprint. I was still gasping for air, but not like a lot of the people were. I knew we were going to have a lot in front of us so I didn’t want to kill myself in the first hour. Whether the mefakdeem noticed or not, I’m unsure – but It was fine with me because I had energy for later.

Next we would be holding sandbags over our heads. I unfortunately grabbed one of the bags that was closer to 50 pounds. Normally this is something that is very easy for me since I used to work out a lot with weights, but I guess it’s been a while.  I completely failed during this part of the gibbush. I was the second or third person to drop the bag from above my head and was told to stand in the center of everyone there. I had to put the bag back up, and I kept on dropping it – but every time I hoisted it back up. If I was gonna fail, I was gonna fail trying.

We put the bags aside and ran a few more times. Then we got the bags again… This time I made sure to get a little lighter bag and didn’t drop it once. It was a much shorter amount of time than the first but still made me feel a little better about my battered self esteem.

Almost done? Not even close. We set our water bottles down, oh yea, by the way, we were sprinting with full water bottles in our hands this whole time. Full because we weren’t allowed to drink from them. With water bottles aside, we were told we would be crawling up the hill to the point we had run before. YES, something I’m good at! Army crawling, for whatever reason, I’ve always been good at. I was in first or second every time we crawled… which was around 5 times. Just a warm up for later.

At some point when we were there we had a group discussion about whether we thought women should be allowed in combat roles. Positives/Negatives, that sort of thing. My opinion is that it was for two reasons; 1. To give us a 5-10 minute break. 2. To see how we think under stress. Sorry if things get a bit mixed up in the time line, The gibbush was over a week ago at this point (this blog was written at two different times).

We moved all of our things (stretcher, canteens, sand bags…) to another area to the side. The mefaked had us draw a star of david and then a paratroopers logo on the ground out of whatever we could find. Team work, leadership, creativity were things that came to my mind for why we would be doing this. In the same area was also a big wall, a log, a barrel, and a tire. There was an area of “mines” we weren’t allowed to go in and had to get everyone over the wall with just the log, barrel and tire. Again – team work, leadership and creativity. Interesting stuff, reminded me of scout camp when I was younger…

From here we jogged over to an area with a rectangular bar over head. We all had to face outward with our eyes closed and hang from the bar. The mefakdeem would jump to make it sound like someone else near us had dropped. Eventually I remember being patted on the shoulder by one of the mefakdeem and being told I could get down… I looked around and everyone was down already… oops? We ran to a nearby fence and this time faced each other hanging from the bar. And ran, and hung,  repeat over and over. We were allowed to have 3 people not hang at a time, I hung the whole time. Spit in my grip, a constant stare forwards and I didn’t move once. I was getting into the zone at this point, they couldn’t break me.

Next we jogged over to another area of sandy hills. CRAWL! I don’t know for how long we crawled, but up and down the hills we went, over and over again. My obliques were searing in pain like I have never felt before. Eventually I just stared at the sand below me and kept pushing, I looked down to know I was moving because It didn’t feel like I was. I came in 2nd nearly every time after this guy named Chaim. I may have been in second, but I was crawling low to the ground in proper form… he was crawling high and on his knee’s – he would have been shot if it was for real. This went on for ages. Getting to the top of a hill was such a relief, because then you would have 15-20 seconds of easier crawling/sliding down hill, until the next hellish hill.

When we finished crawling we had another discussion, this time about money in professional sports. All in Hebrew, and a random topic to think about after you’ve been in the middle of no where crawling on the ground for 30-45 minutes. Afterward we picked up all our gear and were to be going on a masa (trek/journey). It only ended up being around 2km, for me it was a nice cool down, for others it seemed like it was a little harder. We ended up back where we had started the day. Our mefaked congratulated us, told us to drink a lot of water, and told us to go with the midrachah (girl guide). We stretched for a while with her and were eventually released.

We had time to shower and relax for a little while before our interviews. The interview was interesting, and wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. It was more of me talking than them asking questions. Two officers sitting in front of me writing things down, once in a while asking a question. They asked things such as “What did you do before the army?, Why are you in Israel?, Why the army?, Why do you want to be in Tzanchanim?, Would you be interested in Sayeret? (special forces), Would you be interested in officer school?” I won’t write down all my answers, I’ll leave that for you to wonder about 😉

We helped clean up the base for a couple hours and had a late lunch. Eventually we were on the bus back to Mikveh Alon again. Everyone slept.

Showcase tank at the Entrance/Exit of Bakum


I didn’t find out until this Monday, exactly a week later but… I MADE IT! I was 1 of 3 in my whole machlakah, 1 of 11 in my pluga and 1 of 19 out of all of Mikveh Alon! About 1/3 of the people who went to the gibbush made it. I’m really happy about it and we’ll see what it means for me in the future. So long as they don’t make me sign for more time in the army, I’ll be in Tzanchanim after this Sunday. It’s gonna be a while, but I can’t wait for my tag, red koomta (beret) and paratrooper wings!

Our Testeem

Posted: February 26, 2011 in Mikveh Alon
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As usual I want this blog to be short, but it will likely end up being longer than I originally expect it to be because I’ll slowly remember what we did this week as I type. At this point I despise when I know I need to/should (you know there isn’t a word for “should” in hebrew?) write a blog, especially right now.

I’m laying in bed with my girl watching the Big Lebowski… BREAKING NEWS: she just said she want’s to play Resident Evil on playstation with me… seriously, she gets more awesome every day. She listens to Guns & Roses and Pink Floyd. She watches family guy, two and a half men, 30 rock and the big bang theory. What is going on… stop kissing me… this isn’t fair.

Let me stop for a second and excuse my blog for being terrible this week – it’s Rotem’s fault. But Rotem is also being great and letting me write this in the first place so let’s all give her a round of applause. ::clap, clap, clap::

The title of this entry has nothing to do with genitalia – although I’ll admit, being in the army has forced me to see more penis’ than I’ve ever wanted to see. From Bear’s casual drop of his towel for no reason, to this kid Ben’s massive penis… I digress. I don’t know where I was going with that. Testeem is actually what the commanders call our tests, it’s always hilarious when they attempt to translate an english word into hebrew. The real word for test is “Meevchan” but for us stupid kids at Mikveh Alon, they say testeem.

We had our Hebrew test this week to see how we’ve progressed in the course as well as a physical called a “barour”. I think I did okay on the Hebrew test, not “mooshlam” (perfect) but good enough. I spoke very well, but royally screwed up the reading and writing part. oh well. It’s ok because I destroyed the physical. 80 pushups, 86 situps and I ran the 2km in 7:47. BAM!

Here’s a “quickie” about this weekend –  I started off in my kibbutz, went to Tel Aviv with my adopted family to see a flamenco show, saw my good friend Edan who may be joining the army as well? Went to Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk to see my friend Liana who extended her birthright trip a whole week just to see me! Today (Saturday), Rotem picked me up from the kibbutz and I had dinner with her at her house. Tomorrow it’s back to the army…

I have my gibbush (tryout) for Tzanchanim (paratroopers) on Monday and my Teckas (ceremony) for the end of Mikveh Alon on Wednesday. BARUCH HASHEM!!! (praise g-d… for you non-jewsers out there) I’m so glad this course is finally over and I get to go to the “real” army.

Well, I could have written more but I’m seriously getting distracted by all the awesome things going on around me… playstations, family guys and a certain girl laying next to me.

Peace out guys and gals, till next time.