Oct. 3 Move in to Ben Yehuda Apartment

Shalom chaverim! It has been a few days! I will be writing as many blogs as I can about the past week before I have to prepare our last meal before Yom Kippur.

On Monday, October 3, Rafi and I ran a few errands such as getting enough sheqalim to pay for half of the rent for our new apartment. We packed up all of our bags in Galina's apartment (an easy task because we had not actually unpacked). We also copied our passports to give to Reut, the girl we are renting from (as a security measure). The man at the copy store was not the most pleasant in the world, but at least we had the copy.

We met Reut at 4:00 pm at the same cafe as the first time and she gave Rafi our new keys to the dirah (apartment in Hebrew). The many stairs up to our flat were especially tiring after having ran to the Kotel the previous night. We felt the burn! After making sure we could unlock the door properly, we returned to Galina's apartment to begin moving our bags. We decided to take two trips with our luggage. On the first trip, Rafi and I each strapped on our huge backpacking backpacks and carried our "carry-on" bags. Luckily, the new apartment was only a few streets away from the old one. Shlepping our luggage down all the stairs from Galina's (which were slippery and sopping wet from a man mopping them at that very time) and then lugging them up the many flights of stairs at Reut's was quite a task! We then went back for our main bags and locked the door to Galina's. When we arrived back at the new apartment, we were tired so we relaxed for the rest of the night.

While we relaxed, we wanted to go online and maybe post a blog entry so we asked Reut what network we use. Reut then told us that we do not have wireless in our apartment. Oh no!!! What will we do?!?!? We were dissapointed because we forgot to ask if the apartment had internet when we were searching for places to live. The internet is our only link back home and our way to share our travels with our family and friends, not to mention having the ease of planning trips and volunteer work. Reut said that we can try to find internet in our room from a cafe down below. We tried but did not have any success. We did notice that there were many strong wireless signals in the area but they all required a password. Rafi suggested that we try to ask one of our neighbors if we could use their internet while we are living here until the 29th. It was a strange request and we were both feeling nervous about it, but we needed to have some sort of internet connection. We decided that we would ask the neighbor on our floor tomorrow because it was too late at night to do it now. We ended up reading the rest of the night.