Well...I have now officially been in Beer-Sheva for 10 days. Though I've been through this city before this is my first time spending any time here and arriving in the middle of heat wave really drained any energy I had to explore. Temperatures were regularly above 100F. When I go out in the middle of the day, I notice which side of the street is in the shade and where there are trees (which are not that abundant given that Beer-Sheva is in the Negev desert). So I make my way from shady spot to shady spot in order to get to the gym or the store, or the multitude of inept government offices I need to go to in order to deal with signing up for health insurance and so on.
Fortunately, the apartment I'm staying in for now is air-conditioned and there are tons of delicious fresh fruit and veggies in the stores. Alon also wisely froze tons of strawberries when they were in season so we can make smoothies.
I'm so excited to start school in 3.5 weeks. I went to the hospital where MSIH-BGUCU (long name...Medical School for International Health at Ben-Gurion University in collaboration with Columbia University)...MSIH is good enough from now on. I browsed through the books we are using next year and bought some of them. There are no absolutely required texts, you can choose which ones you prefer, which makes it hard...I fear I might end up buying them all. A few pics of the city above.