Getting into the swing of things...

Although it hasn´t been long since I got to Israel and started my internship, there is so much to do. At the office I am involved in a few different projects. First off, we are all doing our own research on a particular topic related to terrorism. I have been doing some reading, but I am having a bit of a problem narrowing down my research topic, but hopefully I´ll figure that out soon.
Outside of the office I have spent a lot of my time looking for a place to live. I am currently staying with family, but I do need to find a place of my own. I have also been able to do some fun things with the people from the office and have met new people as well.

On Monday all of the interns and staff played basketball together. I don´t think I have ever played a full game in my life, but I still decided to participate. We were 10 in total, 8 guys and two girls. It was a bit intimidating since everybody else was actually good and most of them are really tall even so, I was able to score six or seven baskets so I was happy.

We also had a barbecue of Wednesday at the house of the US representative at the ICT. We had a great time and really interesting conversations around immigration, safe spaces and political correctness on campus, and just a lot of funny stories.

Some of us at the barbecue :)

On Thursday all the interns got together, since one of the guys was leaving. We all went for dinner at an amazing burger place in Tel Aviv and then played Risk. I had never played Risk before, and I have to say I never want to again :P I was so stressed out during the entire thing that once I got home I couldn´t fall asleep! Even so it was tons of fun and I have a feeling there will be a repeat of that night.

Finally, on Friday  I took a day trip to Jerusalem with the university. It was an organized geopolitical tour of the city. As you may know until 1967, the city was divided into the Eastern Jordanian controlled part of the city and the Western Israeli controlled part. In May of the same year Gamel Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt at the time announced the the Straight of Tiran would be blocked to Israeli commerce, a direct act of war towards Israel. Egypt then mobilized its forces along its border with Israel, which it claimed to be a defensive measure, and on 5 June Israel launched a series of preemptive airstrikes against Egyptian airfields.
The attack nearly wiped out Egypt's air capability. However, Nasser convinced Syria and Jordan to attack Israel by taking advantage of the initial confusion to claim that Egypt had defeated the Israeli air strike. Israeli counterattacks resulted in the capture of East Jerusalem and the West Bank from the Jordanian, and Israel´s defense against Syria in the north allowed it to push Syrian forces out of the Golan Heights. Since then Jerusalem has remained under Israeli control although people from all different religions still live there side by side.
It was an interesting tour and I was happy I was able to meet many other students from around the world.

The Old City in the background