Kibbutz Ramat Yochanan

This is my second day being on Kibbutz. Since it is Shabbat, everyone will eat together in the dining hall tonight. From what I have heard, it is a meal not to miss...then again, if you miss it you're stuck with snacks from the supermarket and semi-warm water from a rustic water fountain. Moshe, a family friend, drove me up from where I was staying 2 nights ago in Herzliyyah to the Kibbutz. The Kibbutz is located about 20 km east of Haifa and about 2 km from the nearby town of Qiryat Atta. It's a very nice Kibbutz with the vast majority of its income coming from the plastic factory PalRam. The big news around here lately is that for the olympics a big shipment of PalRam's plastic was sent to Beijing. This yielded a huge payoff for the Kibbutz so it's a win-win situation for the Kibbutzniks who will be happy, and the Ulpanistim who will be happy since the Kibbutzniks will not be terse with us. Speaking of which, the kibbutzniks have not been bad. While they will not openly come up to us and start engaging in conversation, we have been able to speak with a few who have been fairly pleasant. At the moment there are about 10-15 kids with a total number expected at 48. The countries so far have been the US, England, Australia (my roommate who is 25), Germany, Argentina, and of course...Russia. Everyone seems to be pretty laid-back. While I would not say that we all fit together like hand-and-glove, for the most part the group seems somewhat cohesive. That's all for now. Proper shabbat attire (even on the Kibbutz) awaits me.