#like yeah I may not be at all like the stereotypical jew or jewish conversion student

[sorrymyrabbisaidno]

Not trans, but I'm queer of some variety (and am pronoun non-conforming).

And yes, coming from Christianity, I've found a very accepting home in Judaism.

I’m yet to meet a convert to judaism who’s not transgender. There’s something so trans in the conversion soup. Does judaism not allow cis converts? Did I not know that?

[thetravellingvagrant]

Day 12- Krakow: In Which I Visit Bitch City

dI awoke surprisingly well rested for having slept in a hostel dorm. If there's one thing Krakow does better than Warsaw, other than everything, it's have hostels with comfy beds that don't feel like they're going to cause my death during the night. My ridiculously quiet and conscientious room mates had also been a rather pleasant surprise. It was a joy, as it always is to realise that, bar one forty five second bout of incredibly loud snoring from a Malaysian man, I was the loud one in the dorm.

I catapulted my body down my bunk's ladder, shattering both knees and stomping a hole in the floor in the process and wandered through to the hostel's kitchen for the free breakfast they had offered. This breakfast turned out to just be some toast and a bit of cheese, but I'm not fussy. I'll eat toast and cheese for free. Hell, I'll eat from a bin, for free.

I endured the awkwardness of the communal breakfast as best I could (i.e. poorly) and bolted back to the comfort and solitude of my room as fast as humanly possible, to plan my day.

There was nothing in particular that I really felt like I absolutely had to do in Krakow and additionally, I had, now, only a single day to experience the city, which did rather make this planning process tricker than it needed to be. I decided in the end to have a quick walk around the Christmas markets before venturing further afield.

The market here was pretty excellent and boasted some truly top notch tat as well as very delicious smelling bits of animal. I spent some time bibbling around, weaving through crowds as best I could (i.e. poorly) and buying souvenirs, but before long had grown tired of being around so many people, so utterly unable to comprehend the space that their bodies took up and left to wander the rest of old town.

Krakow is a very nice city; every bit as lovely as I remembered it being on my last visit, ten years prior- if perhaps a little more modern and homogenised, now- but there honestly isn't all that much to say about my tour of it. I went around old town, which was lovely, though full to bursting with tourists, past the castle, also lovely but full of tourists

If you squint, you can see them.

Through to the Jewish quarter to see the funny jews with the long hair, less touristy but also substantially less interesting. Apparently if you get there at 3pm sharp though, you can see their keepers feeding them bagels and matzah balls, though. (...if this is for some reason, the first entry you have chosen to read of this blog, I would suggest you scroll back by one to make the previous few lines seem far, far less hateful.)

I had been recommended a restaurant by the hostel staff in the Jewish quarter, though, when I got there, discovered that it was just a bar and so, instead, I bought a sausage from a stand and ate it in the cold. It wasn't nearly as terrible as it sounds.

I pressed on across the river to reach the last of my planned attractions for the day; Oskar Schindler's enamel factory, though, I don't think I really got the full effect of the place, to be totally honest. It was swarming with tourists, with lines for entrance so long that it didn't even cross my mind to wait in them and the building appeared to have been substantially modernized (though I may be mistaken about that), so in essence it was really just kind of like...walking past quite a busy factory. I haven't even seen the film, so I couldn't even recognise parts of it from that.

Hey, look, it’s probably that bit from that film or whatever...

All in all I give it a 3/10. Try harder, Oskar. It's not that difficult...

I trudged back to old town, my pedometer reading in excess of 20,000 steps (as before, the lack of quality in this entry was not through lack of trying...) and stopped off at a ridiculously cheap 24 hour pierogi restaurant, where I had some genuinely fantastic pork and cabbage dumplings. I had the time of my life, though I am well aware of exactly how well enjoying a very basic meal translates to text (i.e. poorly) so I shan't dwell on it.  They were great, though.

After my very excellent pierogi (which where honestly just top notch), I returned to my hostel having failed to have the patience to breech the solid wall of people that now populated the Christmas market. Once settled back into my bed, the Malaysian man (Ing? I think his name was? Ng? Something like that) struck up a conversation. He continued telling me facts about things I had barely even a passing interest in; how many Scottish people there are in Malaysia, how Dutch people are good with money, how boring Australia is. Soon, though we were joined by a new addition to the room, an Italian man with an exceptionally shiny head, and the conversation turned slightly more seedy.

I mentioned that I had just been in the Ukraine. Ing was apparently a fan. He went on to tell me about Odessa, which he visited in the summer.

“Oh, yeah. You would not believe the girls there!” he said, middle aged and awkward.

“mm.” I nodded in faux interest, not particularly enamoured with the idea of imagining how attractive eastern European women are through the filter of a pervy old asian dude.

“They wear almost nothing at all!” he continued, edging closer and closer to full stereotype. “It's bitch city, man.”

“Mm” I nodded agai- wait a second. “Bitch city?!” I laughed, half out of shock, half out of awkwardness and an additional half because “bitch city” is just a genuinely funny phrase.

“yeah!” he nodded enthusiastically, adding an quick “I'm not kidding!”

I didn't quite know what to do with this turn of events other than say “wow...”, which Ing immediately mistook for enthusiasm.

The Italian man piped up “I've never heard this phrase before, Bitch City”. He was also laughing.

“You no hear it?” Ing said, incredulous. “It just means city next to ocean”

“ohhhh!” myself and the Italian man echoed in unison “beach city!”

Ing nodded, laughing as he finally came to understand what had transpired. Boy, let me tell you, I was sure glad that he didn't say 'Bitch City', as up until that point, I had actually quite liked In-

“But you might as well call it Bitch City, anyway to be honest! So many girls and they wear so little!”

...Ah, there it is. I chuckled once more out of awkwardness and quickly excused myself to go and make dinner.

“make dinner” may be a bit of a grandiose term for what I actually did, which was sit in the hostel's kitchen for an hour and a half, waiting for a string of other people to finish cooking, before finally giving up entirely, having had quite enough of the truly vapid conversation that two American girls sitting across from me at the kitchen table with me were having and heading to bed, hungry, angry and early in order to be up in decent time for the journey to the next leg of my trip, tomorrow: Brno.

[josieandthepussycatsofficial]

i have one jewish friend here and it actually makes me really uncomfortable when she does an exaggerated jewish accent as a joke and makes jewish jokes bc she’s always doing it around goyim and it feels like she’s like making a mockery of jewishness for goyim to laugh at (because she’s an actor and a big personality and really likes to entertain and get laughs) and it makes me feel... not good. first of all i dont really enjoy seeing my goyische friends laugh at the way my whole family actually speaks, second of all i feel like gentle, good-natured intra-community teasing isn’t something that should really be performed for people outside of the community. also she does it so inorganically and randomly, like it will make no sense within the context of the conversation for her to jump into jewish mother voice, that you know that she’s only doing it because she knows it’ll get a laugh from our goyische friends (also she never does it when it’s jus the two of us hanging out together).

like the other day we were talking with my other friend about how she’s sort of freaking out because she’s dating a significantly older guy who just bought his own house, and out of nowhere my jewish friend was like (in a jewish accent) “ohh, he’ll be such a good providah, he, he’s got a house, he could pay fah ha bat mitzvah!” and my goyische friend laughed and was like ha ha i love when you guys do that jewish accent but i was like.... that’s not even a funny joke. that doesn’t make any sense. pay for her bat mitzvah? he’s a guy she’s dating, not her parent, and she’s not jewish. my friend was so obviously looking for something stereotypically jewish to insert into the joke to drive home the comedy, so she chose bat mitzvah. it feels like... idk disrespectful? like she’s using jewishness as a comedy prop and it’s no longer appropriate. i think she may have gotten into the habit growing up because she was jewish and didn’t know many other jews so she used her other-ness as a self-flagellating joke to put people at ease and kill the elephant in the room and i appreciate that uncomfortable situation but i still wish she wouldn’t do it anymore. also she’s always talking about her cousins, who are hasidic jews, and how horrible and backwards and regressive and sexist and evil the community is. and i reallllly don’t like that. like i have a lot of criticisms of hasidim too, obviously, but i don’t really feel comfortable discussing that in front of goyim, which she loves to do. and she always brings it up when we’re talking about religion, as if to broadcast to all our goyische friends: This Is Extreme Judaism, and it’s really gross. like our friends know incredibly little about jews and judaism, and theyve heard the story of her craazy regressive sexist cousins so many times it’s probably one of the main things in their mind about jews now. and when she brings them up, it’s almost like she does it when we’re discussing our own religiosity and she’s like yeah i sort of like religion, but i’m not like those fanatics. i really really dislike it and wish she would stop