MONDAY 7/9/12

TEL AVIV

Caught up on some sleep, repacked and did some washing. Made plans to hang out with Nissim (Milagro) a local Bethelite. He said for us to meet him at Bethel @ 7p.m. Mom and Paul got packed just in case they could get a flight out. Headed to Bethel and found a good parking spot half a block from Bethel. As we parked some police men walked by and didn't say anything to us, so we figured we were ok. When we got to Bethel the brothers hadn't finished family study yet, so we waited outside and decided to take a few more pictures outside, then we see the cops writing a ticket. I ran to them but they said they had already written out the ticket just to leave car there since we had already received the ticket.

We walked over to Nissim's apartment since Bethel is so small only 2 couples live there and everyone else lives within 5 minutes. He changed into casual clothes, although we were under the impression that we were going to a restaurant, so we were all dressed up thinking that everyone would be dressed up since it would be right after the family study, oh well. Then he took us over to another Bethelite couple's apartment where they had the table with lots of local food.

They had also invited a Russian sister and her 2 kids. She now lives in Canada but since her son lives in Israel, her daughter and her decided they would come for the international assembly.

After we ate, we went around the room and everyone said how they came into the truth and if raised in the truth how they made it their own. It was nice to hear all the stories after that the hosting couple had made a game from their new song book. They scrambled the song's phrases and we needed to try and put the song together. We were scared cause, Milagro told us that they  get together to practice the songs.  We told them that the words to our spanish songs are different from the English songs so not to expect too much from us. We got the words to the English song and they got the words to the Hebrew songs and said they had just received their book 2 days before the assembly so we were all on the same boat. That made us feel bad, since we have had our song book for over 2 years and have only practiced when we were told in the KM to practice. One thing we realized at this assembly is, how much we take for granted all the literature that we do have! Anyways, we had a great time and our team finished one song (cheating a little). Because we won we had to sing it and the other team had to check and see if it sounded correct, which it was. Since we said our songs had different words they decided they wanted to hear us sing in spanish. I had the music and the song on my phone and all 4 of us sang it in Spanish, we sounded awful but we sang it anyway.

 

Milagro told us that evening there had been an earthquake at about 5 p.m. Which we did not feel at all,  but figured everyone at home would be worried if they found out. Milagro was so excited that we were here for earthquake so we could tell everyone but we told him that we have earthquakes all the time in California.