I think the way I have learned the most about Israeli culture this year is through WhatsApp chats.
In Israel, if you want to contact your teachers, you do so by my messaging them on WhatsApp. As an American, this idea seems very strange to me because in the past when I need to write to a teacher I do so in an email.
I am on 25 WhatsApp chats related to school. That is a lot!! And I get tons of messages from them all the time. One day, within 2 hours, I received 251 WhatsApp messages from chats relating to school. It is very annoying to get so many messages that all say basically the same things, but it is a great way to experience Israeli culture!
I am on 25 WhatsApp chats for school. 18 class/grade chats and 7 private chats with teachers.
One thing that I have found is very different in Israel than the US is that Israelis do not plan ahead. At all. About a month ago, a girl on one of my many class chats wrote at a little past midnight that we were going to have a class zoom right then and to get on the zoom. Then one girl responded saying that was a bad idea and the zoom should be at another time. This seemed very crazy to me at the time, but then again, this is Israel.
I have plenty of stories like this, but I will only share one more. A few weeks ago, another girl in one of my many class chats, asked at 1 pm that if she went to bed at 7 and woke up at 9, how many hours of sleep did she get. First of all, shouldn’t she know how to add and subtract small numbers? But, what is very confusing is, that no one knew if she was talking about am or pm. A few girls answered her saying she had slept for 2 hours. I thought that this was quite a funny moment.
When reading some of my messages, I come across some that are very funny and some that are just strange.
– Naomi