The Last 7 Weeks: Deconstructed (Destined to be a groundbreaking treatise in postmodernist thought)

Well, a new semester... a new toenail... a new Brooke?
It's quite true that I've had a quite event filled 7 weeks. I was listening to "Love in this Club" this morning. Love in this Club had been this summer's pseudo-anthem simply for no other reason than that it was playing constantly. I don't think I went out once this summer without hearing that cathchy little ditty. Nevertheless, listening to that song this morning I found that I was having a very challenging time relating to the "myself" of 7 weeks ago. I've spent a little time the past few days trying to analyze if and how I've changed. To be honest, though, any character changes are inapparent. Perhaps my inability to relate to "Love in this Club" is simply the result of 1,000's of miles and 1,0000's of new dramas in my new home. It's odd, but so much of my life at home is irrelevant, yet that's my real (bad articulation of what I mean) life. These days "Yam" by Hamoshava is for more likely to resonate most strongly with me. My weeks, days, minutes, and seconds here are so full that I've had a hard time thinking about anything but the present.
I do have to confess how nice it was to have my family here for the last 10 days. It was a Depenbusch-family excursion so there was no shortage of angst-filled moments but we also did a ton and mostly had a lot of fun. Moreover, I finally got to do some of the traveling through Israel that I've wanted to do ever since I got here. We were in Tel Aviv(beach [an entire day on Shabbat, I got incredibly sunburned], Carmel Market, various shopping districts), the Old City of Jerusalem (Muslim Quarter [we were staying in an Austrian Hospice/Convent in the Heart of the Muslim Quarter and also doing a lot of shopping in the bazaars], Jewish Quarter [Kotel, shwarma, burnt house, running into Joel and Aaron], Christian Quarter [Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Citadel, Peter in Gallicantu, Church of the Dormition]), the Mount of Olives (observation point, camels, Jewish Cemetary, Gethsemane), the New Jerusalem (Yad Vashem, Israel Museum, Jerusalem Forest, Dead Sea Scrolls, Ben Yehuda Street [I think I may have found the Israeli Anthropologie!!!]), the West Bank (Bethelem, Hevron, dad forgot his passport when we went through the checkpoint so they detained us, searched our luggage, had a dog sniff the car for bombs), the Kinerret (Tiberias, Capernaum, the actual sea of Galilee, about 5 churches), and Be'er Sheva to campus and my dorm. That sentence runs on horribly but I think it suffices to get the basic gist of our trip across. There are a million other anecdotes (relevant and humorous) from the trip of which I'll list just a few:
-Standing on the Mount of Olives overlooking the Dome of the Rock on a Friday in Ramadan and seeing thousands and thousands of worshippers lined up and singing
-Trying to walk in the direction opposite the Dome of the Rock on a Friday in Ramadan and nearly being swept away in a deluge of Muslim faithful.
-Dad having 500 dollars pickpocketed.
-Dad being really, really excited about every single Corinthian column he saw (probably around 75).
-Dad taking exactly 256 pictures (there is one perfect picture of him and I on Temple Mount).
-Various creepers (Mari and I walking by some guy on Ben Yehuda and hearing him say to us, "Very nice" in an Israeli accent that made him sound strikingly similar to Borat; creepy taxi driver who offered to come pick me up later, the 12 year-old Israeli who told me he had big nuts in Hebrew).
-Going over the Palestinian/Israeli conflict ad nauseam with my father (perhaps gaining a more holistic understanding of the conflict).
-Having my clothes smell like the Old City (a mixture of vegetables, sewage, bodies, saffron, and diesel) mixed with the Mediterranean. Yum!
After 7 weeks of being entirely independent it was quite nice for me to be completely dependent once again. During the week I wasn't even carrying my bag, meaning I had no phone, no credit card, no cash. I decided to let my dad take care of all of that. Basically, he and my sister completely took care of me for a week, which was good because I really did need to be taken care of. I also have to confess that though there were moments when my family grated on me, the 10 day break from boys, dancing, friends, alcohol, smoky environments, and not sleeping was incredibly needed. I now feel incredibly refreshed, physically and maybe even emotionally.
I had intended to blog about my experiences during Ulpan also, but just this blog took me an hour and I have to run to class quite soon. And, to be honest, I haven't the slightest idea how to express anything about the first six weeks and what they meant to me (both positively and negatively).
Hmm... having reached the end of this post I feel that the title is pure hyperbole.