Damn, it's been a while since I last updated this blog. I finally have some time to post all I've been through for the last month on here, so here I go. Before I actually start writing about each day, I wanna be clear -- I loved basic training, and I think I like my new base and everything around me, too. The people are great, I have so many cool, new friends that it's not even funny, and yes - I'm quite happy about the army side of my life.

My draft day - February 21st
So it all started on the 21st of February. I went to the Central Bus Station at the Carmel Beach (which is also the new initial induction/pick-up point in Haifa) with my parents and Elad. We met Adi and David there and we all waited together for a few friends of mine who were being drafted on the same day. While waiting, the soldiers that were in charge of this whole thing kept bugging us about going inside the conference hall. When my friends showed up we went inside and saw more familiar people. Soon after this, Ofra arrived as well and gave me an adoroble greeting card and a Hamsa (five fingered figure) with the T'filat Haderech (the prayer you say before a trip). Some guy said a few things about how we'll all be soldiers soon blah blah blah, and it didn't take long until we had to say goodbye and get on the buses. This whole time I felt like I was there for someone else, it was really weird. Ora sat next to me on the bus and we talked about the army and about the things we did before. When we were already close to the Bakum (the central army base that is also the main absorption base), the trunk opened wide all of a sudden and one bag flew away. Soon the bus was full of faminine whining "it must be my bag, me and my goddamn luck" "No, it must be mine! I know it! I just know it!" it was definitely amusing. The driver stopped on the side of the road and someone went to get it back. The bag was brought back in one piece and it turned out to be Ora's bag! LOL!

The Bakum
The first thing we saw when we got to the Bakum was a group of three or four guys our age. They were wearing uniforms and stupid hats, and were busy picking weed. We all laughed at the ridiculousness of this view, not knowing in a few days we would be doing the exact same thing.
We left our bags in the storage area (אפסנאות) and then went to some room where we got a lecture from some 70 year old man. The man started talking about blessings in Judaism. He described the blessing you give before a trip and was waiting for someone to yell "T'filat Haderech " some girl yelled "נסיעה טובה" instead (which is something general that just means "have a nice trip" and has nothing to do with Judaism). His reaction was "טמבלית!" ("you fool!") and we were all on the floor laughing hysterically. In the end, the lecture was more about "Your Health is the most important thing and you need to take care of it! Be responsible! Take care of yourself! Did I mention how important it is to take care of yourself?!" So this was really nice and sweet but really not realistic. You don't wanna be sick in general, but you really don't wanna be sick in the army. It's hard to find good doctors and get good treatment. That's why I got rid of my wisdom teeth before I started my army service! (No more wisdom teeth! *yay*)

After the lecture we actually started all the induction stuff:
1. We gave our bank details
2. Some of us got our teeth photographed, which was totally weird. Why only some of us? And how the fuck does a picture of our teeth help? I can understand how an x-ray can help with recognizing bodies, but ours were just photographed - they literaly told us to open our mouthes really wide on some mirror thingy and then they took a picture of the teeth with some professional digital camera. Whatever.
3. They took a picture of us for the army ID card.
4. Finger prints! That was a dirty little business. We cleaned our hands from this oily yucky black material with some weird thing that looked like plastic glew and smelled like lemon and felt like peeling creme. We wipped it off on white towels that are meant for this, and they obviously get completely black and dirty in about two seconds (it's ok though, because they keep bringing clean ones).
5. DNA test + two shots (one for meningitis and the other for tetanus). The one for tetanus hurt (as expected), but for me only the actual shot hurt. My arm was fine most of the time but I couldn't sleep on it for about a week. Mor got freaked out by the needles and the thought of blood and got a little dizzy.
6. We got the new ID's and started whining this time about how bad our pictures were.
7. We got the "Kit Bag A" that included all kinds of faminine stuff (pads, tampons, my favorite soap, some magazines, et cetera) as well as other cool stuff like pepper spray *satan face*, locks and more. We got our uniforms in this line, too. The uniform was AWFUL! Lets start with the fact I had to get it two sizes bigger than my normal size because the waist was so high that I could only close it on my ribs *Steve Urkel* (ignoring how horribly ridiculous it looked). Another problem was the hole for that button that lets you close the pants -- it was too small for the button, so we did some vandalism before we even started our army service (maybe that's why they told us to bring swiss army knives to begin with ?!?!). After an hour or two of fighting with the green creatures we finally TRIED to leave the dressing room. It's still not clear why we waited for another hour or so crowded near the exit. During this time the people who didn't have asthma *like me!* started developing asthma. Whatever miracle finally caused girls who stood near the door to move themselves, we finally got to get out and breath. We checked our equiptment and made sure everyone had everything. We also got a chance to get a different belt, which was great for me because mine was WAAAAAY too big. I wished they would have let me get a different sweater though, because the one I got was huge, too. Then they divided us up into our platoons for basic training and I found out I for sure wasn't gonna be with my friends, and a horrible feeling filled me. There wasn't anything left to do, but we still had to wait for three more hours until they took us to our new bases. From some reason I only found what base I was going to on the way there. My platoon left for my base before the platoon all my friends were in left for their base. There was a commander waiting for us on the bus and she just couldn't help showing us of her commander-y manners as soon as we were on. The girl who sat next to me was from somewhere near Haifa (one of the suburbs), so we exchanged phone numbers so we could go to and from the base together (in the end, we didn't use it at all because we both found other friends from our area). My basic training base was Zikim, which is the southernmost (and closest to Gaza).

Zikim
When we got to the new base it was about 6pm and dark. At some point we needed to give our details for the 96,273,748th time and got a silly hat and a dirty canteen. During this evening I also managed to lose my beret after 6 hours of having it. I still claim that someone stole it from me when I wasn't paying much attention. Later we went to the dinning room and ate in the new base for the first time.

_{The dinning room}

Before we went inside I recognized some girl from my group and asked her naturally "do you feel like eating with me, because I don't wanna feel alone and I also know that I'll lose my way back to the camp if I have to find it by myself." That was a start of a great friendship. Her name is Arina, and we spent the whole period of time of basic training together (as much as we could) and I'm sure we're gonna keep in touch. She was in premilitary course, so her friends from her course were there, too (while I was there alone). By the end of the day she already knew a lot of things about me and I knew a lot of things about her, and I got to talk with other people, too, so I felt good and so not alone. They showed us our tent and told us to pick our own bed, so Arina and I got beds right next to each other. Mine was the closest to the entry, and I didn't like it because of the weather and because I had to announce the commander whenever she came in. We stood near our beds (it was really late and we were exhausted from the long day we went through) and got the B' uniform (what we're supposed to wear inside the base) the Kit Bag B, the nasty blankets, and our sleeping bags. I loved to switch to The B' unifrom because the A' uniform was not even close to as comfortable (I also lost my beret and since you're not supposed to wear it while wearing B' no one noticed it was missing). That night I went to sleep around 1am wearing the B' uniform. It was soooo freezing cold there and I got up in the middle of night shivering like crazy. I carfully put on my coat and went back to sleep wearing the coat. From this night on, I didn't make this mistake again and went to sleep wearing my coat every night. I didn't use either their sleeping bag or the blankets, I brought my own sleeping bag, and it worked really well, because this way I didn't need to organize my bed when I woke up.

The second day of basic training - February 22nd
Wake-up time was at 5am, but since we wanted to make sure we would be totally ready in the morning and have enough time for the least that we need, we woke up 30 minutes earlier. Soon after waking up I understood that some dog visited in our tent during the night from the yellowish puddle that appeared near my bags. One of the first things we did this morning was to learn how to organize our beds and keep our tent standardized. For this we needed to take one of the beds that were close to the exits out, so we could all see how we have to fold the blankets and sleeping bag and the way we have to put our bags and kitbags and hide the strips
(קיפול מעטפת, הצנעת סרכים :)
I donated my bed for the sake of the project (and got an organized bed out of it. hehehe.)
Later we practiced marching *Left-Right-Left*. We had an אב"כ lesson and later we practiced putting on the nasty gas mask *!L החזקת הרתמות בצורת* (even though I got to wear this shit plenty when I was four and a half years old during the gulf war, I honestly didn't remember "The Way" to put it on)*!ה-כ-ר-ז-ה.... אטום-אטום-אטום*. One of the girls that we already recognized as a trouble maker argued with the commander about putting the mask on. She didn't feel like doing it. She was really stubborn. She claimed that she was disgusted by putting something on that had been on so many people before her and that it would make her have a lot of zits and whatnot. I'm actually glad she didn't put the mask on. None of us had zits but her! After we all put the mask on (well, other than her) we tried to learn everyone's name. At first everyone said one thing about themselves such as if they had some premilitary course, and if they didn't, they said what they did before the draft day. That girl who got the attention of "I'm a wirdo" earlier didn't try much to cooperate this time either: She said she didn't either want or need to share anything with us, so the commander tried to keep things cool at first and asked her for her hobbies, to that she said she didn't have any. The commander kept trying and asked if she liked music or shopping, hanging out with her friends, reading and whatnot. The girl said she didn't like either music or shopping (if I didn't know she was totally acting I would have put her femininity in question), didn't like to hang out with friends and that she actually didn't have any. The funniest part was when she commented on the idea of reading -- she said "what?! am I a worm?!" funny stuff... The commander gave up out of frustration. Hmmm... later we had a lecture about girls that get seriously depressed while in basic training and even have suicidal thoughts because of it. Most of the girls didn't stop complaining from the very beginning and didn't accept the new system very well, but I gotta say that I didn't run into any case that was even close to what they talked about. I was definitly exetremly lucky. Alomst all the girls drafted with me were going into Intelligence, so I was surrounded by really cool people. My platoon and company were really cool, too. There was some other company that was full of people who were gonna serve as drivers and maintenance people, and you could totally see the huge difference between the groups. Another great thing about basic training was that I couldn't bite my fingernails because they got dirty from all the shit we had to do all the time (and they were kinda long to begin with because of the two wisdom teeth I had pulled out a week and a half before that), so I finally had finger nails *angel face*. Even though all in all there was a good atmosphere most of the time and I had fun and everything, the first days in basic training were really quite painful (physically) because of all the continuous (and very uncomfortable) standing, walking, running, etc. However, that night my group did the "סת"פ" (company shut down = סגירת פלוגה) which means our group (of 15 girls, btw) needed to clean all the bathrooms, trash cans, the smoking area, and other fun little jobs like this. Arina and I got to do them together; our job was to clean the trash cans. It was actually quite easy. While we emptied the trash cans we were telling each other how we met our boyfriends.

*I'm gonna publish the second half of the week in a new post, this one is getting too long!*

(march 18th, 2005)