Christmas in Israel

Wow, so I haven't written anything for about a month and a half... sorry about that. In early November, after weeks of almost no work being required for my classes, they suddenly started asking me to do things and I discovered that I had a lot less free time all of a sudden (well, not that much less, but still). I am currently in the midst of finals, and by "in the midst" I mean that I had one today, none tomorrow, and three on Wednesday. I feel I may have mis-planned my schedule a bit for this, but it's too late to change it now.

If anyone has been keeping up with the news, you know that Israel has bombed Palestine and now everybody over here is upset. There are currently large crowds of protesters outside the university yelling for their respective causes. On one hand, we have the Arabs, who are mad about the bombings, and on the other hand we have the Jewish Israelis, who appear to be mad because the Arabs are mad. As near as I can tell, they appear to be at an impasse. What I find most interesting is both international reactions to this whole and and how the media is reporting it. Granted, my view is almost certainly being skewed by the fact that I am over here being educated by Israelis, but it seems like the media is being unfair. Some of the articles I read made it seem like Israel was specifically targeting children on their way to school. Most don't even mention the fact that Hamas has been shooting rockets into Israel quite a while now. During my terrorism class last Wednesday, the teacher was keeping us appraised of how many rockets had been fired into Israel so far that day and by the end it was upwards of 80. What's more, Israel made very clear statements about how, if those rockets actually killed anyone, then Israel would retaliate, which is what appears to have happened. It just doesn't seem right that people are getting that mad at Israel over this. I mean, if Mexico shot 80 rockets into California in a single day, I don't think our government would respond differently. But whatever, I just had to get that out of my system. Oh, and I am fine, all that stuff is happeneing way far away from me.

On a lighter note, I am completely baffled by how Israeli customer service works. In America, waiters are nice to you, so you tip them. In Israel, waiters treat you like crap, and you still tip them, it makes no sense. I know this is somewhat contrary to things I wrote earlier, but this sentiment is being caused largely by one incident which I will relate, verbatim, below. I went with Lea and Popper to a bar called Dunk because it had been recommended to us. It was a really small place, maybe 20 people could fit inside it, so you had to go and talk to the cook people in order to get food. They also weren't kosher and had bacon & eggs, so I went over to order that. Here's how it went

Me: Hi, could I have the bacon and eggs?
Jackass Waiter: Sure *calls my order back to the cook*
Me: Uh, do I get any say in how the eggs are cooked?
Jackass Waiter: No
Me. Are you serious?
Jackass Waiter: Yes.

So I went back to my friends and they convinced me to go and try again. Here's how that went.

Me: Hey look, I would really appreciate it if I could get my eggs over easy.
Jackass Waiter: You get them how we cook them. If you don't like it you don't have to pay

Now, I thought that was fair, rude, but fair so I sat down. When my eggs arrived they were over medium-ish, but close enough. Here's a transcript of the conversation which ensued

Me: Hey, these are almost how I like them
Jackass Waiter: Yeah, shut the fuck up. We made them how you like them

The worst part is that Leah made me tip him afterwords.

Moving on from my new found hatred of Israeli waiters, I will now tell you about my admittedly kinda lame Christmas in Jerusalem, followed by the decidedly more interesting Christmas some friends of my had (and which I could have tagged along for, were I not such a huge wuss). So we had minor bus drama on the way down which does not really bear mentioning largely because I am not entirely clear what the problem was. Anyway, we (Me, Leah, Orli, Collette, Zack, Jake, Netta, and Gabby)get to Jerusalem and it is FREEZING. I did not know it was that cold there going in, but fortunately, I only have my heaviest coat here so it all worked out. The group promptly split into 2 groups, one (Leah, Gabby, Jake, and Zach) went on to Bethlehem (in the West Bank) while the rest of us went to the old city to find our hostel. Now, interesting fact, the old city at night is really, really creepy. It's all boarded up shops and winding alleyways. Eventually we found the hostel and it was really nice. The only downside was that I was in a room with some Polish dude who well, I want to say he snored but that is not quite right. Snoring implies, to me at least, some bass notes to the sound which were not present here. However, it was deeper than a wheeze, so I am not quite sure what to call it, all I know is that it was irritating. Oh, another fun fact about Jerusalem in winter, it sleets. As we were wandering around later, Colette said "Well, at least it's not raining," at which point it promptly began to pour. On our way back to the hostel we passed a girl caught in the rain who yelled "I'm so UNHAPPY" right as we passed her. I found that hilarious. My Christmas Eve dinner was penne pasta in spicy tomato sauce at a little bistro (I don't know what a bistro is, but it seemed like the appropriate word here)in the new city. I ended the evening by putting on dry socks and going to bed, serenaded by by snore-wheezing roommate. The next day I went out and bought things, including a keffiyeh, which I have been wanting for some time. Now, it turns out that keffiyeh's especially in the pattern I bought, are symbols of Palestinian solidarity (whoops) but I did not know that when I bought it. As it is, I only wear it in my room because it keeps me oddly warm (I don't know why keeping my neck warm keeps the rest of me warm, but I am not questioning it either) and because I keep getting yelled at/severely judged by my Jewish friends for wearing something that is not overtly pro-Israel. The way I see it, I bought it, it looks good on me, it is warm, and I am not involved in this whole Israel-Palestine thing, so screw them. Of course, I still am not likely to wear it in public, but that's more because tensions are running a bit high right now and I would prefer to remain invisible (man, am I a hypocrite). Anyway, the purchase of the keffiyeh also marks the one time I have successfully bargained for something since I came here. The original asking price of the Keffiyeh was 370 shekels (roughly $100). That is, obviously, was too much for what is ultimately just a very large piece of fabric, even if it is (allegedly) hand-woven. So I tried to leave the store, which he mistook for a bargaining tactic, so he lowered the price. This happened several times, with me pausing each time to reconsider and decide it was still too much. Unfortunately I had se a base price of 150 shekels (roughly $34) at the beginning and eventually he gave in and offered me that price and threw in this headband thing (which allows you to wear the keffiyeh as a hat) free of charge. Now, because he agreed to that price eventually I am pretty sure I got scammed, but I feel better about it because I consulted with some people and they told me that I got a fairly high quality product so whatever.

Now, while my Christmas was, admittedly, rather lame, a bunch of other people (Henning, Max, Valentine, Jake, and Zach) actually did some pretty cool stuff on Christmas. Henning, Max, and Valentine (German, German, Swiss) went down earlier than we did and went to a town meeting in Bethlehem earlier in the day where they were given tickets to the Midnight Mass in the Church of the Nativity, apparently at random. At the mas, they got to se Abdul Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, in person. They then stayed the night in Bethlehem and proceeded to visit Jericho (The Church of the Temptation), Ramala (where the people are actually much nicer than the media would have you believe), and the tomb of Yasser Arafat. So yeah, their Christmas kicked my Christmas' ass.

Now on to the future: I will hopefully go to Nazareth on Thursday, after all my finals are done. I will then leave Haifa on Thursday night to go to Jordan (finally). I will return on Sunday and have several days to put my affairs in order before coming home. I may also make an effort to actually visit the Baha'i Gardens, the Stella Maris Monastery, and Elijah's Cave, because they are literally right down the mountain and I have not been to any of them. I guess we will see. Oh, and the picture is of a rainbow over the Dome of the Rock, during the one moment where we saw the sun while in Jerusalem.

More Later

Tel Aviv, Take 2 (Subscript: I Think My Fridge Is Possessed )

Alright, so let me begin this entry by apologizing to my family for not blogging in a while, but I really didn't have anything to write about. So that being said, here is an update on how things are here. My classes are going in interesting, if not especially challenging, directions. In Terrorism and Responses the teacher almost always has a handgun in his waistband while he is teaching, which I think is funny but which freaks out Baeli and Regine. It is looking like I am going to have to do an oral report on the Aryan Brotherhood, or the Aryan Nation or whatever they are called, for that class. This is lame because I had wanted to do a report on the Tamil Tigers, but someone else got there first. Oh well. Psychology has been intriguing not so much because of the subject matter but because of how the teacher and I interact. You see, his English is not that great and I have a habit of talking quickly, quietly, and with a decidedly unusual choice of words. This means that eventually I will ask him a question and he will not entirely understand me, but he does not want to admit that he doesn't know what I said, so he gives a vague and open ended answer which doesn't really answer my question but doesn't really not answer it either. I know he is doing this because I do the exact same thing every time he asks me a question. Regardless, I remain optimistic about the course as a whole. Speaking of optimism, my Honors Seminar is finally getting interesting. The teacher had to start from square one of International Relations Theory because he did not know how much we knew seeing as how we all come from different institutions. Fortunately we are finally getting to some stuff which, while I already know it, is still interesting nonetheless. Arabic is going well, we can now conjugate regular verbs for every person in the past tense (yay?). I really don't know if that means we are going at a good pace or not, but it is working for me so far. And finally, Rabbinic Lit is beginning to drive me crazy. We have spent 4 WHOLE classes just getting clear on when someone can say the Shema (the morning/evening prayer). That is an entire month on a few lines of text. I stand by my original statement that Rabbis are crazy, or at least that Talmudic Rabbis were crazy and this craziness has just lingered around for the last several hundred years.

Now for the one interesting thing that has happened so far since my last post, another trip to Tel Aviv. This trip was born partially out me being spontaneous and partially out of a conversation between myself and a guy named Alex Popper, who usually goes by his last name. He basically said that me and him and Baeli and Regine should go down to Tel Aviv some weekend and go to some clubs or something. Now it happens that Beali has a friend named Anat who is from Yemen and who lives in Tel Aviv and who Beali stays with when she goes down there. One fine Friday I decided that, since Beali was already down in Tel Aviv the rest of us should go and meet her. Anat also happens to have some sort of in with the people who are involved with the club scene in Tel Aviv so she always knows where the good places to go are and can get us in for cheaper than normal. So I called Regine, but she had homework, and then I called Popper and he said sure, but he had to wake up and pack and whatnot before he could go. Because it took him so long to do these things we ended up rushing down the mountain to make the last train, which we still managed to miss. The one funny anecdote from this part of the trip was from when we called the cab to take us to the train station. Popper called and asked in English for a cab and was told that it would cost 70 shekels. When we tried to haggle down the price the guy hung up on us. So we asked the guard lady to call another cab guy, which she did. When she spoke to him in Hebrew we got a cab for 45 shekels. The moral of the story is that one should always have someone who is from here call for services.

Anyway, we missed the train and had to settle on taking a bus down instead. On the bus I ended up sitting next to a woman who was from Tel Aviv but had spent the last several years in Virginia doing "Alternative Research." When asked what that entailed she listed two areas of study as examples: meditation and ape psychology. Needless to say I was very hard pressed not to laugh at her career choice. On the long, long walk from our stop to the beach we kept asking people for directions, even though it was a straight line from our starting position to the beach. I noticed that Israelis give directions in English the exact same way that they give directions in Hebrew, To clarify, when you ask where something is in Hebrew, the answer usually goes something like "yashar, yashar, yashar, smalah, yashar, jaminah, etc." This translates as straight, straight, straight, left, straight, right. When we asked for directions in English, the answer we got was "Straight straight straight, straight straight, straight straight straight, left." Each straight, in both languages, indicates about 5-15 minutes of walking, so as I said it was a very long walk.

Eventually we stopped for food at this Russian place. We had pickled herring and potatoes and mushrooms in piquant sauce as appetizers and chicken stir-fry for the main course. They also served some truly excellent freshly made lemonade. The appetizers were disturbingly tangy and the pickled herring could not be eaten on its own, you had to eat a potato chunk at the same time or else it just tasted too weird. Part-way through the meal a whole bunch of elderly Russian people from America who were on a tour of Israel (I don't know why) came in and Popper had a long conversation with a woman who also happened to be from Santa Monica, which is where he is from. After the meal we called Baeli to see what was going on and she said that she had to get ready so we waited for her by this fountain by the beach. After a while we got bored and started to make use of what I thought was playground equipment. It turned out to be exercise equipment, but it looked like it had been designed by Ronald McDonald. Regardless, it was very amusing and after Beali showed up we went back to Anat's apartment, changed and got ready to go out.

The girls, of course, took a lot longer to get ready, so Popper and I went out to some bars to pass the time. We ended up back at Joey's Bar (which is where I started my first night in Tel Aviv back at the end of the Ulpan). This time the place was a bit more populated than it was the first time I was there but not a lot more. This was due to the fact that the nightlife in Tel Aviv starts late and ends late, as I was to experience over the course of the evening. We were there at around 11pm, and things were just barely getting started. So we left pretty quickly after we arrived. The music was also rather intolerable. The only way I could describe it is that if you took a manic four year old with ADD, gave him an iPod, let him upload music that best fit his mood, and then set it to shuffle, that was the music in that place. Also the beers were really expensive.

After that it was off to the club. Anat recommended a place called the G-Spot, which I thought sounded like the name of a strip club but apparently it wasn't. It ended up being a very interesting night and I spent 5 hours at the club without even realizing it. I labeled this effect the "Techno Time-Warp," so called because a person's perception of time distorts greatly when exposed to excessive amounts of techno music. This is caused by the fact that all techno sounds the same, so while I thought I had only been there for a few songs, I had actually been there for four hours. Afterwords, my ears were ringing for about a day and a half, so if I end up going back I am definitely bringing ear plugs in order to avoid permanent hearing loss. I got out of the club at about 5:30am and we all went to breakfast at a place called Dixie's, where I had my first bacon and egg breakfast since coming here. Granted it was not bacon like I have back home, but it was close enough to keep me happy. Once breakfast was over with, Baeli and Anat went back to Anat's place to sleep and Popper and I were cast out into the streets of Tel Aviv. Fortunately the sun had come up while we were at breakfast, so we went down to the beach. They were setting up these lawn chair type things there, which cost money but are less expensive than a hostel, so we decided to just stay there. Popper ended up sleeping on a lawn chair for about 6 hours, while I read a book, then went for a walk (I didn't end up sleeping at all that night/day). Baeli rejoined us around the time that Popper woke up and we all lounged about on the beach until public services began again (this was all during Shabbat, remember) and then went back to Haifa. Overall, it was a very good trip and look forward to going there again.

On the topic of trips, Regine, Baeli, and I are trying to plan where we want to go during the rest of the semester. In addition to Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey, we are also thinking of going to Nazareth and possibly Hebron (because I want to see the Tomb of the Patriarchs) assuming things aren't too dangerous there.

Two final things. The first is that my refrigerator may very well be possessed. The damn thing, no matter what I set it to, will constantly freeze everything I put in there. I had a can of olives in brine which would periodically be frozen solid for not apparent reason. This would also happen to my mushrooms and my jelly to a limited extent. Last night, I discovered that my carrots had all been encased in a thick coating of frost and they are no where near any water at all. The second thing is that the best part of getting my own internet connection will be that I will no longer have to come up to this horrible lounge. Something about the lounge which I have somehow forgotten to mention, I think, is that it ALWAYS smell like cat poop. Always. This is because the cats use the planters, and occasionally the floor, as litter boxes. There was, at one point during the breaks, a 4 day period during which there was just a big ole lump of cat crap right in the middle of the lounge and no one would clean it up. I seriously cannot wait to have internet in my room.

More Later.

So Now I'm Homesick (But At Least the Tunderstorms Stopped)

Alright, as you may have guessed from the title, this post is mostly going to be me complaining about things because I have begun to grow rather tired of this place. Also, I am not entirely sure that I am homesick, seeing as how it was my understanding that homesickness is mostly being sad because you are not home, whereas I am just severely irritated because I am still in Israel. To put is simply, this country is too tense. I've talked to some of my friends here about this and they all pretty much agree that there is a near constant tension here. To me is seems like a constant sense of "MINE, NOT YOURS" coming from literally everyone, and it is starting to get to me. Needless to say I will be very glad to get back to nice, relaxing California in two months. Additionally, everyone I know got homesick (the sad kind) all at once (this is about 4 days ago) so no one is really doing anything fun right now. This situation is being exacerbated by the arrival of all the Israeli students because their school year finally started last Sunday. So now there are new people everywhere and its getting on everyone's nerves. I personally will be happy to get internet in my room in a few days because the Wi-Fi lounge has become way to crowded. Most of my friends are interpreting new people (and therefore new roommates) as an invasion of their space (since we have been here all by ourselves for 2 months now). I don't share this opinion, but then again I only have one Israeli roommate (whose name I can never remember) and he will be sharing his internet with me and Sebastian so I have no problem with him.

On a completely different note, I am really looking forward to my next care package because this one will contain books. Now, my normal enthusiasm for books notwithstanding, this is a wonderful development because books in English here are expensive. For example a paperback book regardless of length will never cost less than 60 shekels (about $20). I think I have spent more on books that will be giving away (or reselling) at the the end of the year than I have spent on food so far. So, yeah, those books will be a relief.

And now for things which are funny/interesting:

We (all the international kids) had a big American College-style Halloween party on Halloween (obviously) and that was actually pretty fun. I went as a swimmer and my goggles kept giving me a headache. The best costumes that I saw were a guy dressed as Quail Man from Doug and a girl dressed as a Cat from Haifa (basically a cat outfit, but dirty and with garbage taped to it). I had a good time and look forward to the next party. This event had the unexpected consequence of making my friend Regine (from Denmark) want to have Thanksgiving and Christmas as well, which may or may not happen.

During the election the international school had an all night thing to watch election coverage as it happened. I decided that my time could be better spent by sleeping and then waking up early to find out who won once the polls had closed. To clarify this, the all night thing started at 2am and went until 7am. I went to bed at 11pm and woke up at 6:30am and caught the last 30 minutes. It was kind of funny listening to the people here talk about who they would support. In general, the Arabs liked Obama, because he is new and vaguely Muslim. When we were in Dahab, we talked to some Egyptians there and they said that McCain could not be trusted because he had been an POW and received a head injury and was therefore crazy. It was pretty funny, especially when I thought about how my Aunt Tish would reply to such a statement. The Jewish people here, however, preferred McCain because he is more strongly pro-Israel and, well, Obama is vaguely Muslim. Because everyone (but me) stayed up to watch the election coverage, most people were too tired to celebrate Obama's victory the next day and, in fact, most did not even go to class in the morning. My Arabic class had only three people in it that morning. On the topic of Arabic, we now know half the alphabet and can conjugate verbs in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person singular in the past tense. Also, I can now write my name, but because there is no "p" sound in Arabic it looks like Luuk Ban Hall, oh well.

In closing, here are some irritating nicknames which I have had before, but which have managed to spontaneously reappear over here as well:
1. Lukie-Poo
2. Luke-cifer
3. Kooky Lukie

Truly, I lead a charmed life. More Later

Hike Like an Egyptian (or How I Spent My Succot Vacation)

Alright, so this is going to be a fairly long post about the absurd amount of hiking I did during the Succot vacation. So, to begin with, I ended up going on the school trip to Masada and the Dead Sea. This entailed a 4 hour long bus ride very very early in the morning, which actually wasn't so bad. Now, the thing to remember about Masada is that its sole purpose was as a fortified escape encampment. This means that it was built on top of a really big hill. Really. Big. However, I was unaware of that because we approached and hiked Masada from the Roman Ramp, so called because the Romans built it to lay siege to the place. The history of Masada is actually pretty interesting, it is where the Jews made their last stand during their rebellion and it has some very impressive reservoir things for catching and storing the water from flash floods. What I found most interesting about Masada though, was the way down, aka the Snake Path. The Snake Path's name is derived from the fact that it is a series of switchbacks which seem to be literally stacked on top of each other, like a snake winding up the side of the mountain. This was a rather terrifying trek for me, but I really felt for the people going up the path (I was going down). What was especially funny were all the little kids, like 5-8 yr olds, whose parents were dragging them up this horribly step winding path on what I can only assume to be the worst vacations imaginable.

After we were done hiking down the mountain we went to the Dead Sea to float, which is really all you can do in the Dead Sea. I got in the water and found it very hard to keep myself actually in the water itself, so instead I just went with it and floated for a while. I also helped a bunch of people from our group pick salt crystals from the bottom near the shore, because they look cool and apparently make good bath salts or something like that. The principle downsides of the Dead Sea were these: The smell and the burns. I am not sure if the entire Sea smells like the part I was in, but that part reeked of sulfur and methane (it was like swimming in farts). Additionally, the salt started to eat at you after a while and the little cuts on my hands started to really sting. I also discovered that most people can only stay in the water for a few minutes before their nether regions begin to burn something awful. Which brings me to a funny story one of the guys in our group told me. When he was on his birthright trip (a thing where Jewish kids go to Israel for free and have fun for a weeks or something) there were two among their number who decided to just have lots and lots of sex while on birthright. In accordance with this decision, they decided to try and have sex while in the Dead Sea. Both had to be rushed to the hospital immediately (I found this hilarious). After I got out I rinsed of thoroughly and we set off for our next destination.

That next destination turned out to be a Bedouin camp where we spent the night in this massive tent. We also made our own food and I was on pita patrol, which meant that I helped build the fire and cook the pita which was being made by other people. I mostly just stood there and held a plate where people put the cooked pitas. I would say that the other people on that particular job ate about 1/6 pitas that they cooked, but whatever. Afterward we had some horrible wine (it was like sangria but almost painfully sweet) and went to bed.

The next day we woke up and got ready for yet another hike, this one to the En Gedi National Park, which is a lush and beautiful oasis in the middle of the desert and right across from the Dead Sea (but without the smell). I don't have any pictures of En Gedi because we were hiking in water most of the time and I didn't want to risk my camera. That being said, I hiked then entire time in my brown hiking boot looking shoes which, it turns out, are mostly water proof. So once I got water into them it stayed there until I emptied my shoes again later, which was irritating. Also, on the way back I kept nearly getting scalped by the trees. But it was an incredibly beautiful hike which made me think of the Grand Canyon but with trees. After this point in the trip everyone else went back to Haifa except for Summer, Miri, and I who waited for a bus to Eilat so we could continue on to Dahab, in the Sinai Peninsula.

There isn't really much to tell about this first trip to Eilat really except to mention that the entire city smells a lot better a night, because during the day it reeks of pee, rot, sewage, and garbage. During the night it just smells like the ocean. Eilat is also called the City of Sins, but I didn't see anything which seemed to warrant that epithet.

When we reached Taba, the border crossing between Egypt and Israel, we were initially going to take a bus to Dahab which is about 2.5 hours away. But Summer (who speaks Arabic and spent a semester or something in Cairo last year) haggled a taxi down to a reasonable price of 30 Egyptian pounds. As a reference point, that is equal to about $6. She had to fight with the cabbie the entire ride down to Dahab (and managed to consistently call his bluffs about abandoning us by the roadside) until he finally delivered us to are destination: the Penguin Village. This turned out to be a very nice and reasonably priced hotel. We got three nights with complimentary breakfast, a sunset camel ride, a night hike up Mt Sinai, a snorkeling trip, and an all day hike to the Colored Canyon and the White Canyon all for approximately 75 euro (about $110). The next few days proved to be very hectic and I didn't get much sleep.

Once arrived, settled in, and had a delicious dinner, we went on our sunset camel ride. I was surprised by three things about camels. The first is how their legs work. If any of you have some free time I would recommend trying to find a video on the internet of a camel sitting down because their leg joints bend in a decidedly weird way. The second is how snake-like their necks are. My first impression of them was that someone had taken a furry snake and jammed it into a camel body. The last is the sound they make. For some reason I was under the impression that camels were mute, like giraffes or rabbits. It turns out they make this odd yet vaguely frightening sound. If you remember the tyrannosaurus from Jurassic Park, imagine that thing giving out a really large watery burp instead of a roar and that is what camels sound like. My camel was named Shakespeare for reasons which are entirely unknown to me as he did not seem overly creative or theatrical. Our guide was named was a Bedouin guy named Ramadan who we would later ran into a couple more times in town. We rode the camels for about 20 minutes (which really hurt my inner thighs) then got off and hiked a bit to the top of a small but rocky hill to watch the sun set over the town of Dahab and the Red Sea. We also drank an absurd amount of Bedouin Tea, which is a welcoming tea they give to guests. It is served in these little shot glass things and I must have had 5 during our break, then 2 more at Ramadan's uncle's house, then 2 more at Ramadan's house. I'm not quite sure why we went to those places, but I think they were just being hospitable while our ride back to the hotel showed up. At the end of this I had to tip Ramadan (on account of me being the only guy in the group) and in Egypt you apparently have to tip by placing the money in you palm and then transferring it via handshake. As you might have guessed, I was incredibly bad at this and really awkward about it to boot. After we got back we had about an hour to rest before heading off to Mt. Sinai.

The drive to Mt Sinai took about 2 hours and sucked because the van was very full and my available leg room was about 4 inches shorter than the length of my upper leg, so I was sitting sideways the entire way. We arrived at the mountain at about 1am and commenced hiking. We had yet another Bedouin guide but I cannot remember his name. What I do remember is that he struck me as being like and Arab Peter Pan due to his ability to practically fly up and down the mountain and suddenly appear in places he could not possibly have reached without being seen. Now, much like at Masada, there are two possible paths of approach for hiking up Mt Sinai: The Camel Path and the 3,700 Steps of Repentance. Needless to say, we took the Camel Path, which meant about 3 hours of hiking (but we took the Steps back down). The hike itself was pretty uneventful, the only thing worth mentioning is the little old lady who was in front of me on the final 750 stairs before we reached the summit of the mountain. To put it simply, that lady was booking it and I was struggling to keep up with her. She had a cane in one hand, a flashlight in the other, and an apparently indomitable determination to reach the top before dawn. Once we actually got to the top I rented a blanket and Summer rented a ground pad and we sat down on a very inclined portion of the top of the mountain to wait for sunrise. Of course, it turned out that we were on the wrong side of the mountain to see sunrise, so we ended up standing behind this huge crowd of people waiting for the sun. I have a lot of trouble standing on inclined planes for long periods of time without falling over, so I kept sitting down because even though the sky was getting lighter, the sun wasn't there yet. Because of this I nearly missed the sunrise due to the fact that the sun rose incredibly fast. Once it began to be visible over the horizon it was fully up in about 20 seconds. Then of course we had to get down the mountain and that took a while because there were probably a couple hundred people up there. We left our guide at the to to look for straggler be he managed to magically appear stretched out between two rocks near the bottom like some sort of middle eastern leprechaun (I never saw him pass me and there was only one path) to give us instructions for later. At the bottom of Mt Sinai is St Catherine's Monastery which houses one of the largest extent collections of Orthodox Iconography in existence. I would have gotten pictures of this, but the monks wouldn't let me. They also made me wear this sarong looking thing because the bottoms of my knees were showing beneath the end of my shorts. It was kind of embarrassing.

When we returned to Dahab we changed into our swim stuff and went out to the Blue Hole to go snorkeling. The Blue Hole is a coral formation which drops about 285ft about 20ft from the shoreline and a lot of divers die there every year. I had to teach Summer and Miri how to use their snorkels, which took a while because Miri had never used one before and Summer was afraid of sharks for some reason. During our snorkel time I discovered that I can no longer see in focus under water, which made me sad. That being said I could still make out a whole bunch of fish and corals, the only ones I could name being lion fish and brain coral. My inner fisherman really wished that I had a net and a fishing license, but seeing as how I had neither I somehow managed to restrain myself from trying to illegally fish with my bare hands. After this we had dinner and I finally got to sleep.

The next day we went hiking in the Colored Canyon and the White Canyon, both of which were highly reminiscent of pictures I have seen of the Grand Canyon. The two hikes together took about 12 hours. Our guide didn't speak English though for some reason so I don't really know anything about either of them. The one thing worth mentioning is that at one of the many (there are like a thousand of these things) checkpoints on the way to the canyons, the Egyptian police dudes took my and Summer and Miri's passports. We asked if we would get them back and our guide's response was something in Arabic which meant "If God Wills it," which is most definitely not what I want to hear when it comes to my passport. They had to hold them because we did not have visas to enter mainland Egypt (only the Sinai). Now, we were still about 9 hours by car from mainland Egypt so I'm not quite sure of their logic but whatever, I got it back in the end.

The day after that we checked out and hopped a buss to Taba to cross back into Israel. Unfortunately, there were 6 guys on the bus who had to get out at every single checkpoint and this caused the 2 hour drive to extend into a four hour drive which, in turn, meant that we missed all buses to Haifa from Eilat (it was also the last day of Succot so everything had closed early). This meant that we were stranded in Eilat until the next day. Of course, seeing as how Eilat is the beach vacation city of Israel, there were worse places to be stranded. So we checked into the same hostel we had stayed in before and went to go get dinner. It is important to mention that I was feeling very very sick for some reason at this point and could barely stomach food. This problem was further exacerbated by what appeared to be either a broken water main (hopefully) or a broken sewer line (hopefully not). I say hopefully on the water main because as we were walking a police car sped past us and completely soaked the left side of my body in whatever it was and I very nearly lost it right there. The next we sunbathed for 3 hours then went to the bus station.

Eventually we made it back to Haifa (after a 6 hour bus ride) and I got to sleep for about 6 hours before having classes all the next day. The day after that we had a big thunder storm which shut down the dorm's elevator so I now have to walk up 9 stories to get to literally everything. My favorite part of the trip was that everyone in Dahab thought I was Arab. Some thought I was Egyptian, but most said that I looked Moroccan or Tunisian. However, in Israel, no one thinks I look Arab. I plan on using this to my advantage when vising other Arab countries in the future in order to avoid being hassled.

And Now for Pictures:
1. Ramadan taking a smoke break on the mountain overlooking Dahab
2. Me on a Camel
3. Me in the Colored Canyon
4. A bush which is either the burning bush or its descendant
5. Sunrise on Mt Sinai
6. Me floating in the Dead Sea
7. The Snake path down Masada (it ends at the building in the upper right hand corner)

Endless Holidays

Well, I am currently in the midst of what is quite possibly the longest stretch of holidays I have ever experienced. That, however, is not the reason why I haven't posted in a while. No the reason for my lack of posts was an incredibly irritating bout of illness. It began as a mild sore throat and stayed that way until I went out to a bar called Morrison's, which is themed along the lines of the lead singer from the Doors but only seemed to play techno-remixes of Madonna songs. It was also incredibly smokey and quite loud. After that I had a sore throat which prevented me from talking and I couldn't walk or stand for more than a few minutes before having to sit down. This all occurred last week during our break for Rosh HaShana, which is the Jewish New Years holiday. While everyone else I know went out to bars or visited Egypt, I was reading in bed, eating soup, and drinking chamomile tea with honey to soothe my throat. Needless to say, that kinda sucked.

After Rosh HaShana, we had two days of school before our break for Yom Kippur and Succot. I had another good intro to rabbinic lit class and in Arabic I learned 4 more arabic letters, 5 out of six arabic vowels, 2 additional pronunciation markings, and about 10 words. I also had my first Psychology of Conflict Resolution class which, in all honesty, seemed like a moderately sized group therapy session. The entire class was comprised of questions about the reading, but they questions about how we felt about the reading, you know... what it made us feel. Now, I hadn't done the reading because I was not in the last class. That being said, here is a near direct record of my sole contribution to the discussion:

Teacher: You, how does that make you feel?
Me: How does what make me feel? (I hadn't been paying attention)
Teacher: Everything.
Me: Everything?
Teacher: Yes.
Me: Uh, everything is... good?

Regardless of how free form that class is I think I will stick with it, if only because it is completely unlike any class I have had before and may prove interesting. Also during this time I tried to arrange a trip to turkey for me and some other people during the Succot holiday (which commemorates the Jews wandering in the desert and also has some harvest-related meaning). But all these people were in Egypt for all of last week and I was too sick to make it to the travel agency's office so that didn't end up happening. But since with my new schedule I now have four day weekends every week so I can probably go there for the weekend later on. Now I am trying to figure out if I want to go on the international school trip to the Dead Sea. I am torn because the trip includes some time at the Dead Sea, then a hike up Masada (King Herod's mountain stronghold) and then camping in a Bedouin tent for the night. Now, as most of you know, I hate hiking and I'm not really one for camping either. On the other hand, it would be a good opportunity to meet some of the other international students and apparently the sunrise when viewed from Masada is one of the most beautiful sights in Israel. Oh, well, I'm sure I will come to a decision eventually. Also, The Succot holiday will last for all of next week as well. This means that we had a week of school, then a week off, then two days of school, then a week and a half off, then two and a half months of school. All of which roughly equates to me working my ass of on research papers and oral presentations about a month earlier than I would back home because of how condensed the semester is.

The last thing I want to mention is that I watched half of the first presidential debate and all of the second one last night and was kinda (not really) surprised to find myself agreeing more with McCain than Obama. Granted this may have been because Obama's goal for the second debate seemed to be to not directly answer any question he was asked, but I digress. Also, from both debates, I noticed that McCain is really, really good at getting in the last word, it was quite impressive. I would like to talk about the debate in a bit more detail but I am little pressed for time right now so I may do that later, I don't know.

More later

Longest. Night. EVER.

Ok, so I know that I just posted yesterday, but last night was one of those things that you have to write down while it's still fresh. To celebrate the end of the first week of classes, several of the international kids came to my suite for dinner and drinks before going out to a nightclub or something. I made tuna rosy (thanks for sending me that recipe Grandma, it's delicious), and there was much rejoicing. The number of people kept increasing so an initial group of about 4 eventually became a group of 10-12. At this point we left my room and went down to the rooms of those guys who live next to me (Brandon, Adam, Jake, and Zach) and there was additional alcohol and the eventual decision to go to a club called Nirvana which is on the beach. So taxis were called (it took 3 of them to get everyone there), and we were on our way. However, upon arriving it became excessively clear that one of the girls had had way too much. She stumbled out of the cab and ran for a nearby grassy hill where she promptly began crying, vomiting, and stumbling towards the sea. Some of the other girls (Leah, Summer, and Baeli) went to help her out wile I stayed with the rest of the group to wait for the last taxi to arrive. When everyone got there it became yet clearer still that, not only did this girl need to leave, she needed to go to a hospital. To put this in context, she is tiny, like 5 foot nothing, and had been chugging vodka for some reason. She was almost completely unresponsive, vomiting a lot without really producing anything, and her skin was very cold to the touch. My CMC freshmen year orientation training kicked in when I noticed these things and I so I mentioned that there was I distinct chance that she had alcohol poisoning. It was decided that me, Beali, and Summer would go to the hospital with her while everyone else went to the club. I had Leah get some water and a garbage bag from inside the club just in case. This turned out to be a spectacularly good idea. We had a helpful Israeli girl hail a cab and set the fare, then I had to pick up the drunk girl (who was completely ragdoll at this point) and we left for the hospital. You may be wondering why we took a cab instead of an ambulance or something, and the reason for that is that we called the Madrichim, who are social activity coordinators/RAs, and they told us to take a cab instead. Because I was the one carrying her she was on my lap the entire time and man oh man was I glad that bag was there because she threw up at least twice more on the ride over (at the end of the night I was still miraculously vomit free). There was one horrible yet hilarious moment when Baeli had the window down in the front seat and the wind inflated the bag... it was so gross.

We got to the hospital, paid the taxi, and then got a very interesting introduction to Israeli health care. So we get inside and there is a medical guy there and he has me put the drunk on a gurney. Then, and this really enraged Baeli and Summer, he had me push the gurney through the hospital. Now, putting her onto the gurney was hard, because she was completely limp, and so her head did hit the bars on one side of it (I felt bad about that), but pushing that gurney was really really difficult. Those things are really hard to steer and I kept hitting walls. When we got her into admission and they asked us for her insurance information we discovered that the drunk girl had left her purse in the first taxi she took to the beach, so she had no money, no phone, and no identification. Also, those of us there barely knew her. So we filled in the information as best we could and Summer ended up footing the bill for the hospital stay because we couldn't get her insurance info. While this was going on I was allowed to wheel her back to where the doctors were, but seeing as how I have never been in a hospital before (let alone an Israeli hospital) I had no clue where I was going. And that is when I learned that Israeli doctors can be marvelously unhelpful at times. Picture this, if you will: it's about 2am and I, an obviously confused American am wheeling a small obviously sick girl through a hospital. I see a doctor and ask here where to take the drunk girl. The doctor responds "There" and points in the general direction of a hallway. I go towards that hallway and it splits off into several directions. So I ask another doctor where to take her and she says "There" and points in the general direction of another hallway. So I got towards "there" and it splits again. I get fed up with that crap and go back out and ask the doctors where specifically I should take her. The doctor looks at me angrily and says "I already told you." I very nearly started yelling at the doctor because, you know, she had not already told me, but then another doctor led me to a room full of people on hospital beds and we got the drunk girl squared away. I then traded places with Baeli because her Hebrew is better than mine or Summer's so we thought she should be in there with the doctors and whatnot. When I got back out to the lobby, Summer was on the phone asking the Madrichim when they would have someone there to help the drunk girl. They said that they wouldn't, because they had to lead a hike to the Golan Heights the next day. They also advised that we go home and leave the drunk girl at the hospital. This advice only served to further enrage Summer, who proceeded to lay into them about how we don't speak Hebrew, it is a foreign country/hospital, the drunk girl had no money, no phone, no ID, they (the madrichim) are being paid to help the international students and how, even if it was our responsibility to care for her, we (Summer, Baeli, and I) were not well enough equipped to help in this situation because we don't speak Hebrew or know Israeli hospital procedure. After a few minutes of this they conceded and said they would send someone in an hour. Baeli went back to sit with the drunk girl, while Summer and I sat in the lobby to wait.

We got hungry after a while and went off in search of a restaurant which was advertised as being in the hospital and still open. This when I discovered that Israeli hospitals also contain malls. Had we been there during normal business hours (it was around 3am by that time) we could have eaten at a McDonald's, bought some clothes at the Israeli equivalent to the GAP, and gotten some books and the Israeli equivalent to Borders. But it was the middle of the night so everything was closed except one restaurant called Aroma. We got sandwiches and Beali and Summer had coffee and it was very pleasant. While we were talking over food I realized two things. The first was that this was the first time I had ever been in a hospital, at least insofar as I remember. The second thing was that everyone helping the drunk girl (Summer, Beali, and I) were half black/half white. That doesn't really have any bearing on the situation, but it seems kinda improbable all the same.

Around 4am or so someone from the University got there as did Eytan (they guy I went to Jerusalem with who also happens to know this girl). Eytan said that she was going to be fine and that he would stay with her for the rest of the night so we could go home, which we did. We left the hospital and went to this sketchy little kiosk/bodega thing to see if we could hail a cab. We turned down 3 cabs because they wanted too much money for the ride (they wanted about 70 shekels), but we finally found a guy who would take us back to the University for 50. The one condition was that he wanted to pick up a friend of his first which was a 10 minute or so trip out of our way. We agreed because it was very late and we were tired. The interesting thing about the taxi driver was his voice. Do you remember in Star Wars episode I, that fat little alien hummingbird thing which owned Anakin Skywalker when he was a child? Well this guy sounded exactly like that hummingbird thing. When we got dropped off at the University (it is now about 5 am), we talked with the security guard for a while, because he is also a student and happened to know Baeli. Apparently he had warned her never to drink with Americans because something like that always happens when you do. I can't help but agree.

More Later.

Set Your Watches to Jewish Standard Time (aka The First Week of Classes)

Alright, it's been a while since the last post but that is because I have been adjusting to my new apartment and going to classes. On the topic of my apartment, it turns out that my roommate is Sebastian, the German guy from my other room. This was a nice surprise seeing as how I already knew Sebastian and we get along fairly well. It was also nice, however, because he cleaned the entire apartment, including the floors and the moldy cabinet beneath the sink, without warning while I was in the computer lab one day. He cleaned everything to such a degree that several cupboards still have a harsh antiseptic smell to them. Needless to say I felt both pleased, because everything was clean now, and guilty, because I didn't help. Sebastian also go on the housing people to get us a working burner/hotplate thing and a trashcan and he bought a great deal more cooking supplies and cutlery than I did. Of course, he is going to be in Israel for a year so that makes sense. I have also found out that my apartment is right next to the apartments of several people I either roomed with or sort of got to know during Ulpan so there are people around to socialize with. But enough about my room, on to the classes.

I am currently signed up for five classes: Modern Standard Arabic Elementary I, Introduction t Rabbinic Literature I, the Honors Peace and Conflict Studies Seminar, Terrorism and Responses, and a class on the Iraq War. I am probably going to drop the Iraq class in favor of a class called The Psychology of Conflict Resolution for reasons which I will get into later. The first class I went to was intro to Rabbinic Lit, and I really enjoyed it. The first half of class was kinda dry because the teacher was basically telling us about the formation of the "Jewish Bookshelf," which is to say, the various religious works which form the basis of Rabbinic Literature. After that we actually started examining some of the Midrash, which are commentaries written by rabbis about the Jewish Bible (apparently the Torah is the first 5 books of the Bible, not necessarily the entire thing). The commentary we looked concerned the part of Genesis when Cain went out with Abel to the fields and killed him. That particular passage of the bible contains a phrase wherein Cain says something to Able immediately before killing him, but it does not say what. So the commentary was from the Rabbis about what they were arguing about. One Rabbi posited that they had decided to divide the Earth between the two of them, as their inheritance. One said that he wanted all the immovable property (land, buildings, and other real estate) while the other wanted all the movable property (everything which is not real estate). This led to a conflict because one was on the other's land and the other was wearing clothes which now belonged to the first, so Cain killed Abel. Another Rabbi said that they were arguing about where to build the Temple. A third rabbi said that they were arguing over who got to have/wed one of their sisters. We were supposed to figure out which was the best explanation or if the rabbis were crazy. Now, I happen to know that Cain killed Abel because God liked his (Abel's) sacrifice more than Cain's, so I thought that this was a stupid exercise. When we started talking about it, though it came to light that the entire question was a metaphor. The rabbis were basically saying that it is ridiculous to kill people about 1. Property 2. Religion and 3. Sex/Women. So I can't be as literal as I would normally be because this class is considerably more philosophical than I had thought.

The second class was Arabic, and that was interesting. It turns out that we will spend the entire semester just learning the alphabet. There are 28 letters in Arabic and each one has about 3 different forms depending on where it is located in the word. That class was fairly straightforward, but the teacher is kinda scary looking. Around this time I became aware of something called Jewish Standard Time. When one is operating on Jewish Standard Time, one is about 10-15 minutes later than one should be, which makes it remarkably similar to Bartmen time in my family. So pretty much every class I have been to has started late. Fortunately they are all about 3 hours long each so that didn't really make much of a difference.

The third class was my honors seminar. That was also fairly straightforward and I am looking forward to the portion where we deal with game theory. The only irritating thing about this class is that it is highly Constructivist. In international relations there are several schools of thought: realism, liberalism, constructivism, etc. I mostly adhere to the varying forms of realism, which basically say that states are motivated by a strong desire for power and security and will make decisions with those two things in mind. Constructivists say that the international system as we know it has been constructed by people and can therefore be changed and rebuilt by people. I think that this is a rather useless way of looking at things, but whatever. The strangest thing about the course is that I am actually really excited to write my term paper. I'm currently thinking of examining how America constructed the image of the Soviets as enemies during the Cold War and how the process got out of hand with the rise of McCarthyism, but that's just a preliminary idea. The most interesting thing from the class was when the teacher mentioned how differently countries define national security issues. In America, the principle national security issue is terrorism. In South Africa, it is crime, which is seriously destabilizing the country. In the Netherlands it is the ocean, which is currently trying to reclaim the Netherlands as its own.

The Fourth class was probably the best, Terrorism and Responses. The class is taught by a Major in the Israeli Army who has been working in this field for 25 years and regularly advises the FBI and associated organizations on issues surrounding terrorism. We spent the entire class coming up with a definition for terrorism while he surprised us with random hypotheticals and stories from his career to drive home his points. He turned out to be a rather polarizing individual because most people either really liked him (pretty much every guy in the class) or really, really didn't (pretty much every girl in the class). In either case I am sincerely looking forward to it, but I am annoyed by the fact that I probably won't be able to win any arguments against him seeing as how he has decades of experience on me and has killed people. These two factors make it rather hard to gain any high ground in an argument because 1. He knows his stuff at this point 2. He is arguing from a position of practical authority and 3. My self preservation instinct is constantly telling me to shut up (because, you know, he's killed people). In either case, definitely the best class.

The last class was also the worst, the one about Iraq. The subject matter seemed like it may be interesting, but the teacher's English wasn't very good ans she talked in a very boring manner. Also, she was a bit too focused on the variety of theories and opinions about why Iraq is the way it is then I would prefer. By that I mean, yes it is important to hear all those theories, but I would only want to hear them so that I could form a theory of my own to argue for, which we apparently would not be doing. The class sounded like it would just be her telling us what everyone in the field thought about Iraq, not so that we could from opinions, but so that we could regurgitate this on the final which counted for 80% of our grade. So now I'm hoping that I like that psychology of conflict resolution class. Also, since I will not be taking the Iraq class, I now have 4-day weekends every week. My life is awesome. More Later

PS: The pictures on top are two shots of Haifa at sunset, taken from the dorms.

Irritations Great & Small

Well, it turns out that the suite I have been occupying is slated to be a girl's suite during the school year, so I had to move to a new suite one tier above and on the opposite side of the elevator from where I was. This new room has proven to have both pros and cons, though at this point the cons are greatly outweighing the pros. For example, there is no one else currently living in the suite, so I have managed to rather consistently scare myself multiple times before going to bed on account of how quiet it is. Also, because there is no one else there, there are no pots, pans, plates or other cooking supplies to be found at all. The largest con, however, would have to be that the previous tenets have left the place extremely filthy. I would have posted pictures of this, but a great deal of the aforementioned filth is not of a visual nature. It is a smell of something, somewhere rotting (I have yet to find out what or where). It is the inexplicable but no less disgusting sticky feeling on surfaces which have absolutely no business being sticky. It is the thick layer of something more than dust but less than dirt which coats the floor. Above all, it is the bizarre and disturbing lump of presumably organic matter which is quickly scabbing over the drain in the kitchen sink. On the plus side, I now have two pillows (I kept my old one) and my new shower doesn't leak like my old one did (it would make a small lake on the floor every time I used it).

In light of these conditions I have begun to accrue cooking and cleaning supplies. Yet, I am somewhat hesitant to buy everything I will inevitably need because sooner or later there will be other people living there and quite frankly I do not want to pay for all the cooking utensils and all the cleaning supplies. So far I have managed to acquire 1 pan, 1 bowl, several forks, several knives, and 2 cups. I still need a skillet, a cutting board, several more bowls, maybe some plates, and some spoons before I will be able to cook with any degree of efficiency. It irritates me that I cannot currently cook in the manner to which I have become accustomed, largely because it is not a very complicated system. Every dinner I have made thus far has been prepared as follows:
1. Cook either rice or pasta
2. Take large things (meat, onions, garlic, mushrooms, etc) and cut them into tiny pieces
3. Boil the pieces in oil
4. Add an absurd amount of pepper and a pinch of salt
5. Mix it all together in a bowl
6. Eat

I also need to clean pretty much everything. I had initially hoped that I would be able to wait until more people had arrived to both help and buy stuff, but it's starting to get to me. Fortunately, classes start on Monday, so by Saturday I should have my international roommate(s). The rest of the University doesn't start till the end of October, so I shouldn't have any Israeli roommates until then. I know I had an Israeli roommate in my old room, but that was only because they are still somehow having finals (they have been having finals for 3 months now, it's starting to get ridiculous). At least they have October off. Ok, that's it for this post which, as you can probably tell, was mostly for the purposes of venting my frustrations regarding my new room. More Later

My Time in Jerusalem, The Holy City

Ok, so I spent Monday-Thursday in Jerusalem and it was AMAZING. I went with Baeli, that girl I met a week ago, and a guy named Eyton (I don’t know how to spell it, but it is pronounced A-tawn) who speaks Hebrew fluently and is the incredibly fraternal brother of Ilan Wurman, a guy in my class at CMC (they look nothing alike). I’m going to go through the entire trip by day so to begin with there was…

DAY 1: We got to the central bus terminal in Haifa and took a bus down to Jerusalem. Once we arrived we then took a taxi to the Old City, which is surrounded by this giant medieval looking wall. The wall has several gates (Damascus Gate, Jaffa Gate, Dung Gate, Zion Gate, New Gate, etc) and we went in through the Jaffa Gate near the Tower of David (Also known as the Citadel of David). Once there we were utterly dependent on Eyton’s rather astounding sense of direction to navigate the narrow winding streets of the old city. Eventually we arrived at the hostel we decided to stay at, the Citadel Guest House. The interesting thing about the citadel guest house is that it looks an awful lot like a cave that was hewn from the very rock which the Old City stands upon (it turns out that the old city does not stand upon any rock at all, but I will get to that later). Literally everything in that place was built for very short people. I hit my head on the ceiling, on light fixtures, on the shower nozzle (which was at nose level with me); needless to say it got rather irritating. The dormitory style room we were staying in looked even more cave like than the rest of the place with a high vaulting ceiling of stone and many beds spread throughout it. We came to call it The Cave, or occasionally the Bat Cave, over the course of the trip. Baeli and I also had a hard time sleeping in there because it smelled funny and was uncomfortably warm (Eyton can apparently sleep anywhere at anytime). We still had several hours of daylight left so we decided to go out and see what could be seen in the old City before it got dark. The first place went was the Western Wall (aka the Wailing Wall), which is the last remaining piece of the Jewish Temple which was located where the Dome of the Rock now stands. The square in front of the wall was swarming with people, but it was not very hard to get close to the wall itself. I had to put on one of those little skullcap things in order to approach the wall, and because I have no experience with such things I had to hold it onto my head to keep it from blowing away in the wind. Anyway, I went up and touched the wall and said a prayer for my family, as we have been having some rough times recently. Then I went back aways and took some pictures. After we had finished up at the Western Wall, we exited the city through the Damascus Gate and went to a café on top of a hotel for lunch. The food was ok, but the view was amazing, so I took yet more pictures (overall I took 225 during the entire trip). While we were on our way out Baeli had a sudden attack of claustrophobia when she realized that every street in the Old City was narrow, winding, and full of people trying to get her to buy stuff, it was pretty funny. On our way to the café, we passed a few places where some very irritating children had left lit firecrackers near sidewalk, so my ears were ringing by the time we arrived. After we ate we returned to the city and wandered a bit until we stumbled upon the fourth station of the Via Dolorosa (which translates to Way/Street of Pain/Agony), aka the Stations of the Cross. It was then decided to go back to the first and follow the Via all the way to Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Most of pictures from the Via Dolorosa and the Church itself aren’t too great since many of the stations were just plaques commemorating places where Jesus did something while on his way to be crucified and the church itself was very dark. On our way there we were passed by several groups of people, probably church congregations from other countries, carrying large wooden crosses and singing as they followed the Via. We then went on to explore the Church of the Holy Sepulcher which was interesting but very Catholic. I couldn’t really get into it though because a lot of the stuff there didn’t match up with what I remembered from the story of the crucifixion. After we left the Church we went back to the Western Wall to see if we could get a tour of the tunnels beneath the wall and found out that we could not without a reservation. So we made one for the next evening and sat down for a while to come up with a plan of action. The sun was beginning to set so we decided to hike up the Mount of Olives and watch the sunset over Jerusalem. On our way to the mount, we passed the Church of All Nations and a Church dedicated to St Steven, both of which were very pretty buildings. The hike up the mount itself was easily the steepest hike I have ever done, but it was worth it because the sunset really was quite beautiful. Not as nice as some back home, but they don’t have enough smog here to achieve the same variety of color. Regardless, my pictures don’t really do it any justice. After the sunset we wandered back to the city through an old Jewish graveyard and returned to the hostel. It is believed by the Jews that when the Messiah comes and the dead are raised, all that stuff will begin on the Mount of Olives, so there are A LOT of graves there. At the hostel, we watched about half of the movie Say It Isn’t So, largely because it was on and in English, and then went to bed. A word of advice, never ever watch that movie. It is weird and disturbing in the extreme. Also, I discovered that it is Ramadan now (who knew?) so on our way back all the Arabs were celebrating and eating and such since they had been fasting all day. Over the course of the visit I began to feel kinda bad for the Arab restaurant owners who had to make and serve food all day while not being able to eat themselves. This was off-set by how funny I thought it was when we would pass Arab carpet salesmen who would invariably be napping on a pile of their rugs, on account of how it is easier to avoid hunger if you are asleep.

DAY 2: We began day two by waking up at around 11am or so and going out to the New City because Eyton wanted to visit the Holocaust Museum there. It was petty interesting, but I had seen a lot of the stuff they had on display at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. There were also a lot of soldiers there and I still get really awkward around large groups of soldiers here for some reason. The three of us actually got into a bit of a debate about the soldiers and their ever-present guns. Apparently Eyton and Baeli feel safer with all those guns around because it decreases the chances of something bad happening. I said that all the guns imply that the area we are in is inherently unsafe so, while the soldiers and policemen with uzis may make things safer, it does not make me feel safe. We ended up agreeing to disagree. After the museum we wandered through the New City and went to a large pedestrian marketplace type thing. I bought a shirt and learned that I like three new foods. It turns that hummus is not that bad, so I now like hummus. I also tried schwarma, which is beef or lamb roasted on a spit served in pita with hummus and salsa and other random things. It was fun to watch the guy selling stuff remove the meat from the spit because he used something which looked like a power sander to grind off little chinks of it. The place went for schwarma was easily the best place I have been to thus far. The last thing I tried was gelato. I had a sample of Italian Vanilla at the museum and thought that it tasted like cake batter, which I enjoyed. When we were wandering I stopped by another gelato place and ended up getting some waffle flavored gelato, which was also excellent. Then we had to power walk back to the Old City to make our appointment for the tunnel tour. This tour goes through the tunnels underneath the old city and runs parallel to the course of the Western Wall, which continues beneath the Arab Quarter. Apparently after the Muslims took Jerusalem the Mamlukes built their city (which is now the Arab Quarter) on top of a series of arches which filled in a valley next to the Temple Mount. This means that all the streets I had been walking on were built over nothing. This thought continued to haunt me for the remainder of my time in the Old City. The tunnels which ran parallel to the subterranean sections of the Western Wall were also too low for me to walk upright in, so my head was tilted uncomfortably almost the entire time we were down there. At one point we passed a section of the wall which was closest to where the Holy of Holies was when the Jewish Temple was still standing. I repeated my prayer for my family there too (it couldn’t hurt, right?) and got a picture. My favorite story regarding the tunnels is this one: Two explorers traveled through the tunnels until they came to a large pool dating from the time when the Romans ruled the city. They waded into the foul water using doors as flotation devices and carrying torches above their heads. Unbeknownst to them, the far side of the pool opened up into the basement of the Convent of the Sisters of Zion. When the nuns who lived there went down into their basement, they found two men (gasp) riding doors and carrying torches who appeared to have come out of nowhere. The nuns believed that the explorers were ghosts and promptly proceeded to freak out. They eventually managed to get everything sorted out and the nuns built a wall to partition the pool in order to keep out further (male) disturbances. I also got some pictures in front of the Nun Wall. After the tour we went out into the New City again. We had drinks and sushi at a Japanese restaurant, then went to a pub, and later to a salsa club because Baeli and Eyton both like to salsa dance at least once in every city they visit. I ended up getting a crash course in salsa when Eyton had to take a break (he was dancing barefoot because he only had flipflops and the floor was tearing his feet apart). After all this we went back to hostel once more.

DAY 3:

On the third day we got up early and went to the Temple Mount, which was only open in the mornings on account of Ramadan. I got some really good pictures of the whole thing and read some fun stuff about the Dome of the Rock in Baeli’s guide book. It is believed that the summit of the Temple Mount (aka Mt. Moriah) is where god rested after he created the world, where the creation of the world began, where Adam was created, and where Abraham nearly sacrificed Isaac. It is also where the Arc of the Covenant was kept during the time of the First Temple. The summit is directly beneath the Dome of the Rock, and no one is allowed inside it. Beneath it there is supposed to be something called the Well of Souls where the souls of the dead gather to pray twice a month (this image amused me greatly). On the Temple Mount we encountered two British students who were staying in the same hostel we were. They were named Laura and Saul and stayed with us for the remainder of our time in Jerusalem. After we left the Temple Mount we went down to see the City of David, which is where King David first established his capitol in that area. However, there were a lot of stairs involved and everything cost money, so we decided to not do anything there. After sitting and trying to think of something to do, we ended up wandering through the Jewish Quarter and going to the Tower of David. Now, this is kinda interesting. The streets in the Arab Quarter were narrow and windy and smelled funny and were full of people constantly yelling and exhorting and such. But it was also very colorful and lively. The Jewish Quarter streets had the same architectural design, but were cleaner, quieter, and more sparsely populated. Of the two, I think I preferred the Arab Quarter, despite the smell and increased chance of being pick-pocketed. We also stopped at a small café, in the Armenian Quarter I believe, and had the most marvelous iced lemonade ever. It was simply sublime. I spent the rest of the day drinking lemonade in an attempt to experience that joy again, but all I got for my trouble was a horrible stomach ache in the middle of the night because of all the sugar, oh well. Back to the story, the Tower of David is one of the oldest structures in the Old City. One of the original walls which once protected Jerusalem still stands within its courtyards and the observation point on top of the Citadel itself provided an amazing view of the city. The Tower mentioned in the name is actually a minaret from an old mosque and has nothing whatsoever to do with King David, but people thought it did at one point so the name stuck. All in all it was a very pretty ruin and it contained a museum about the history of Jerusalem that was mildly interesting. After we left the British folks split off to go visit an orthodox neighborhood and we went back to hostel to rest for a bit seeing as how we had been walking nonstop for several days. We agreed to regroup at a market in the New City later. We then proceeded to meet up with them, have a small dinner, and then went to some pubs and another dance club. After all this, I was dead tired, but didn’t get much sleep due to that stomach ache I mentioned earlier.

DAY 4: We woke up, packed, and then left to go to the Israel Museum so we could see their exhibition on the Dead Sea Scrolls. I was feeling very sick the entire time, but I managed to get over it after I ate some chips (salt tends to quell my upset stomach most of the time). Because it is currently Israel’s 60^th anniversary year, the museum actually had several feet of the scroll of Isaiah on display. The scroll which contains the Book of Isaiah is the oldest complete copy of any biblical text discovered so far, and in addition to that they also had displays of other scrolls which were important to the Qumran Community, the sect to whom the Dead Sea Scrolls originally belonged. Among these other scrolls were the rules and tenets of faith for the Qumran Community as well as a number of apocryphal works such as the Book of Jubilees and the Book of Enoch. I would highly recommend looking up some stuff about both the apocryphal scrolls and the Qumran community itself as they all seemed very interesting, but I don’t have the time or patience to write down everything I learned about them right now (sorry). After we saw the scrolls and learned a bit about the Aleppo Codex (one of the oldest existed copies of the complete Jewish Bible or Torah or whatever it is called), we went back to the hostel, grabbed our bags, caught a cab to the bus station and returned to Haifa.

Now to explain the pictures above:
1. A large mausoleum in the Jewish graveyard we passed through on our way back from the Mount of Olives
2. A subterranean section of the Western Wall. The large section with the holes in it near the bottom of the wall is the largest stone in the entire structure and weighs about 500 tons. No one is quite sure how they managed to get it there or lift it into place, as even modern cranes cannot move that sort of weight
3. The Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount
4. Me in front of the courtyard of the Tower of David. The Tower itself is visible to my right in the picture.
5. People praying at the Western Wall itself

Laziness & Recreation

Well, I looked over my plan of things to visit during my break and decided that, if I actually tried to see all the stuff I wanted to see during this break it would not make for a very relaxing vacation. So, I spent pretty much all of last week doing nothing, or as close to nothing as I could. That being said I will be going to Jerusalem tomorrow and staying there for 4-5 days of sightseeing (with my camera this time, I promise). I will be going with a girl named Baeli (pronounced Bailey), who is from Portland and has entirely too much energy, and we may meet up with a girl named Ali (pronounced Alley), who is from New York and was in my Ulpan class. I am definitely going to see the Dome of the Rock, the Wailing Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulchure, possibly the Mount of Olives, and maybe the museum where they keep the Dead Sea Scrolls. Hopefully it will be a good trip.

I also received the pre-registration form from the University asking me which classes I would like to take. I signed up for: Spoken Arabic, Terrorism & Responses, a class about the Iraq conflict, a class about Jewish philosophy, and an honors seminar 0n the initiation and resolution of international conflict. However, I am probably going to switch Spoken Arabic for Modern Standard Arabic, which will allow me to take Intro to Rabbinic Literature instead of the philosophy class. From what I have gathered, spoken arabic would allow me to converse with Arab people here in stores and stuff, but modern standard (which is comparable to Shakespearean English) is used in more formal situations. I am still unsure as to which would be the better choice for my time here, but considering how modern standard would allow me to take an interesting religious studies class I will probably end up taking that. Something odd about the classes here is that you only have each class once per week, but it lasts for 2-5 hours depending on the class (except for language classes which are 1-2 hours long, several times a week). We also do not have classes on Fridays. So my current schedule will have three day weekends every week with Tuesdays off as well, which is pretty nice.

Yesterday, while I was eating the delicious Nilla Wafers my family sent me in that massive care package I may or may not have mentioned already, I got a call from Baeli asking if I felt like going to a barbeque at the Technion (the Technion is like Israeli MIT) with a bunch of Germans. I said sure, because I was really bored, and met her at the bus stop near the dorms. Now, funny thing about Baeli, she has the absolute worst sense of direction of anyone I have ever met, including family members. However, I didn't know that when we got on the bus. So we ended up in one of the city centers, got on another bus, and ended up at the beach. The Technion, however, in only a little ways down from the summit of Mt. Carmel (where the university is). So we caught yet another bus, back up the mountain this time, which spit us out about a 20 minute walk from the Technion, then missed the bus which would have gotten us there in about 7 minutes. Upon entering, we met a German friend of Baeli's who was at the Ulpan in July (and who had the most stereotypically German accent imaginable) and he led us to the barbeque which was being held in a dorm called Canada Village. There were no Canadians in Canada Village that I saw, but there were a great many Germans, as well as a Russian and few Israelis. Overall it was an ok barbeque. Everyone thought that my being from California was very interesting, they had some Turkish beer that was pretty good, but the only wine they had was Cabernet Sauvignon (my least favorite type of wine). Eventually we left because Baeli got a call from an Ethiopian friend of hers who was at a nightclub called Luna (which is, apparently, the only nightclub in Haifa) and could get us in cheap somehow. So we went to this nightclub, and it was hilarious. It was hip-hop night and the place was full of these Arab guys trying to be "gangsta" and just failing miserably. It was also faintly reminescent of my high school's dances in that periodically a big circle would open up in the middle of the dance floor and random guys would break dance for no apparent reason. However, the guys at my highschool could do some fairly impressive stuff while these guys really couldn't. I wanted to laugh at them so badly, but I felt bad about making fun of them when they were obviously trying very hard to whatever it was they were trying to do. Around 3am I got tired of all the second hand smoke (they actually had a smoking allowed sign in the club, it was a picture of a cigarette surrounded by a cheery green circle), and we left. The conversation in the cab the entuire way back was some variation on this:

Baeli: My Ethiopian friend is sooo tall and gorgeous and she's such a nice person, but she looks too much like me and I like looking unique. But it doesn't bother me. Nope, it doesn't bother me at all.
Me: Obviously.

Needless to say i was very glad to get to bed because my legs were killing me.

My final thoughts concern how a lot of people I have met here who are from the US, but who aren't Jewish, don't really like Israel. They seem to feel that everyone here is unaccountably rude. Shivani (the Indian girl from Ohio) said that a lot of the security folks were racist in addtion to being rude and unhelpful. Baeli mentioned how the waitstaff in restaurants seem to overtly hate all their customers (instead of covertly hating them like in the US). All this stuff strieks me as odd seeing as how everyone here has been really nice to me. The security guys pass me right through without incident, everyone I have met at restaurants have been helpful and nice, and even random people on trains and buses have been very pleasent (as seen during my first few days here). I am so unsure why I have been having a better time with the Israelis than the other American gentiles, but I really hope that continues.

More later, possibly with pictures of Jerusalem (and sorry about how haphazard this post was, but not that much has been going on)