Chanukkah week and Pardes Khana weekend

For the last week of Chanukah we had special classes and activities pertaining to Chanukah, for instance shiurim about the importance of the Chanukah story and the significance of the holiday. It was also cool to go on an hike Tuesday that tracked the important places in Israel that were important to the Chanukah story, as well as a visit to Ammunition Hill, a place that shines light on a dark but valorous time for the IDF and showed the bravery of the army back during the 1967 war. The next day we had a scavenger hunt to find different important facts in Israel's history from a specific neighborhood which was quite clever and interesting. The rest of the day was spent hanging out in Jerusalem at shops, cafes and ice cream shops waiting until our volunteering stint at a nursery home for Chanukah which was really sweet to help elders light their chanukiot and sing Chanukah songs to them during the holiday, it was a really big mitzvah. On Thursday morning I woke up late to go to the bus stop in Jerusalem to get the train with my boyfriend to Binyamina to visit my dad's kibbutz friends. When I got to the bus stop in Efrat to find myself getting passed by three buses after an hour and a half of waiting for the bus finally one stopped, so I got to Jerusalem with not as much time as I wanted but I still got my dad's friends a thank-you-for-letting-us-stay gift and catch the train at 5:40pm to get to Binyamina at around 8pm. It always nice to stay with dad's friends, they're very authentic people as well as eccentric and its always great. We had a great shabbat dinner on Friday night and indian food on Thursday night which was nice too. Their son came with his family on Saturday for his birthday and we watched a couple of movies to have a nice relaxing day. A fairly uneventful week and weekend but was still relaxing and nice I really enjoyed it and now I'm enjoying getting back into our normal seminary schedule for this last weeks of midrasha. For the weather: right now there's a storm going on here on the kibbutz, it snowed last night and has been raining nonstop, did I mention its so cold here I'd rather be in Canada.