Thoughts on Israel, bilingualism etc.

This December a few weeks after I got back from Kenya a grandmother asked if I would like to go to Israel to help with her two grandchildren. I didn’t get a lot of consideration time, but decided to go, she would be paying the ticket and I would see some of Israel, so I didn’t see why I shouldn’t. I have now been here over a week and I have under a week left. The day after I got here it was the Shabbat, though I didn’t see much proof of that in the park by the water that I was in. everybody was running, fishing, cycling, nobody seemed to be able to hold still on their one day off from work. Apparently everybody who lives in Israel (and are Jews) has to join the military. Men for three years and women for two years, which means that it seems no matter where you look there will be soldiers. Eighteen year olds running around with guns like it can’t kill. The two grandchildren have a Danish mother and an Israeli father. Their mother speaks Danish with them and their father Hebrew, so they are bilingual. The oldest is four and when the other children in the kindergarten started to speak he was annoyed that he couldn’t form words as easily as they could. The youngest is one and a half and the few words he has are mostly Hebrew, but it is amazing to see how he understand each language equally well. The boys also communicate in Hebrew when they are playing and are annoyed at one another. The two words the youngest says the most are “dig” and something that sounds like “mig”. In Danish the first one means you and the second me, but in Hebrew the first one is said as a sort of insult meaning something like stop it, but they use it mostly to annoy one another. The other means water, though as I have heard it more it sounds more like “mein.”  But it is funny how the two things mean different things in the languages, so when the eldest says “dig” when he is speaking Danish, even if he means it in Hebrew, it doesn’t seem like such an insult. I really have to get used to the whole Shabbat thing, Saturday is like Sunday and Sunday is like any other normal day!