Basketball

Most nights during the first semester we'd go out and play ball at Gan HaPaamon. There were public courts set up and most of the hoops were close enough to ten feet. Usually you could get a handful of guys together to play a game, but the scheduled night for ball was Wednesday. About thirty of us would head over and play ball for a couple hours, but almost everyone cleared out by 11:30 or so; everyone except Brian, Moshe, Aryeh, and myself. We'd stick around getting in on pick up games with local guys. A lot of them were religious guys studying at Yeshiva, Arab Israelis, and once we played with a few guys from a tank unit in the army.

We played regularly and we recognized a lot of people around the park…we also happened to hate a few of them. One of these guys was an older guy from a Yeshiva named Aaron. He played violent basketball, called for the ball every ten seconds, yelled at his teammates, and had the ugliest damn shot I've ever seen. What's worse: it went in (probably a bit too often). Aryeh usually got stuck defending him and he looked forward to getting a chance to put Aaron in his place every week. Aryeh speaks great Hebrew and I'm positive all the trash talking Aaron thought we wouldn't understand only made Aryeh play better.

Long after everyone else had left the park, the four of us would still be hanging out. It was a great time to be with people I love playing basketball. We'd stay out until the lights would shut off (about 2am); then we'd walk up the street to the 24/6 market, SOS, (not open on Shabbis), and get snacks. Each of us would get a 1.5 liter of Fanta Orange Mango, Fanta Exotic, or Fanta Lemon and a big bag of chips. I usually went for the Terra Chips, Aryeh and Moshe liked to get a variety of stuff, but Brian would always, ALWAYS get the flaming hot Doritos. Every week he'd talk about getting something else, but he could never bring himself to do it. We'd take our snacks outside, sit on the couches in the courtyard, and talk about how we had to wake up for classes in the morning.

We'd usually be out there until about 3am, but even after we walked back to Beit Nativ we'd sit in the lobby until about four. I'm really not sure how I got to Hebrew class every Thursday morning...