So I passed all my exams, the practical one wasn't too bad, we had to do PHTLS (pre hospital treatment life support, i think) on a person who'd had a motorbike accident, and then do CPR on little anne, first without equipment and then with. Our group's test was one of the easy ones, some groups had it really bad, one pair had to give compressions for 40 minutes, and in some of the others the instructors kept on pretending to be crazy bystanders trying to help and kept on screaming stuff. I think about 5 or 6 people on the course failed, there were about 30 on the course. Yuriko (her dad's japanese) whose in the same group as ben jacobs had a horrible day, it was her birthday and she had her exam in the morning and her and the other 3 people in her group failed so they got to do it later in the day. so for the whole of her birthday she had to wait and practice and then they reexamined her whole group without her because she was upstairs at the time, and forgot she had to redo it, and so she ended up doing it at about 9pm. And then in the morning she found out that she'd failed by about 2%.

So anyway, we (Isaac and Charlotte from my group and Lisa, this South African med student who was on out course) arrived in Ra'anana yesterday. We're staying in the Mercaz Klitah, which means absorption centre, which is where people who move to Israel and don't have anywhere to go live. Annoyingly boys and girls aren't allowed to share flats so i'm just with Isaac in this flat that can sleep 5 people. But today a new person came but we only saw him for 5 minutes, he's from Chile and we can't remember his name. Anyway the only things in the flat are beds, some chairs 2 tables, and in the kitchen the only appliances are a fridge and a hob with only 2 rings. The place is so bare, it's so depressing and horrible and what's more it's fucking freezing in the flat, and we only got given one tiny little plug in heater, and there's no crockery or cutlery or pots and pans either, basically we have nothing, so we ahve to buy everything and try and borrow stuff from relatives. Luckily we all have family in Ranana, it's full of english people. My uncle lives here, but annoyingly he's in australia at the moment and isn't coming back for a week or two, and he's really strange. I do have cousing near but i haven't called them yet. We have been given a budget though, 20 shekels a day, which is about 2 pounds 50, so we're trying to get more money cause it's really not enough, and we also have to take the bus to the ambulance station. We're working at 2 different stations, one in Kfar Saba and one in Herzliya, they're both about a 15 min bus ride away, so we're also trying to get them to pay for our bus fare. Which they should as we got more money when we were living in Karmiel and we got a bus ticket, and they people in Jerusalem at the moment at yeshiva (jewish school if you remember) have been given about double the money we have for some reason. So at the moment i'm rather depressed and also it's pouring with rain at the moment and there are loads of thunder storms.

We visited the ambulance station today in Kfar Saba and it seemed very nice luckily, and it's warm there. We're mainly going to be working the morning shifts (7am till 3) and the night shifts (11pm to 7am) as the israeli volunteers who go to school usually do the ones inbetween. We're all really scared about it, and the guy showig us around was just like you turn up 15 minutes before your shift starts and you ask someone if they're driving an abulance that shift and then ask if you can be on the ambulance for that shift. I might start tomorrow night or on sunday, i haven't decided yet.

Well that's enough blogging for the moment, and i forgot to say that Isaac can be a bit annoying at times, so we'll see how living with him and some random guy will be for a month.