An Orthodox Shabbat in the Golan Heights

This past Friday we drove up to the Golan Heights so that we could celebrate Shabbat and spend the weekend with my dad's friend, Elaine, and her family. On the drive up drove around the Eastern part of Israel along the Jordanian and Syrian borders. It was very odd to see the border fences of Jordan and Syria. The drive up took about 3 hours and we arrived at Allone Habashan, Elaine's neighborhood at around 4:30pm. When we arrived the family was still cleaning for Shabbat. Elaine's family is Orthodox so they celebrate Shabbat very differently than I have ever celebrated it. Shabbat is supposed to be a day of rest, you aren't supposed to work or use electricity or anything like that that doesn't happen naturally. For example, Elaine's family does not use their computers on Shabbat and they don't turn on the lights either. They also don't write on Shabbat. Shabbat is a time to rest and not go about your life like every other day in the week. Shabbat starts from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. It was very odd to not be able to use my computer or be able to do most of the stuff that I do everyday. Back to our time at Elaine's, not only did we celebrate Shabbat with Elaine's family, we got to celebrate it with two old friends of Chaim, Elaine's Husband. Chaim and his friends are Yemenite and are very interesting people. Chaim spent the first few years of his life in a camp and met his friends, Effi and Zichron, in College. Elaine and Chaim had 6 kids though sadly one of them was killed in a terrorist attack so now their are only 5. We met 3 of the five, Michal, Orit, Avichai. I don't know if Effi has any kids and if he does they weren't at Shabbat dinner. Zichron's daughter Avigal was there with him. At around 6:00pm we went to Shabbat services at the synagogue that is in their neighborhood. Since it is an Orthodox synagogue, men and women must sit separately. Not only do women have to sit separate from the men, women have to sit in the back with a curtain blocking them from being able to see the men. It was very odd to me because at the synagogue that we go to in Portland everybody sits together. After services we went back to Elaine and Chaim's house for Shabbat dinner, candle lighting, and other blessings. Shabbat dinner was amazing. There was soooooo much food! I can't even remember all of the dishes but there were at least 5 courses! I haven't had that much food in a very long time. There were salads, meat dishes, lots of Challah (Jewish bread for Shabbat), potatoes, hummus and other dips, tons of wine though I didn't drink any, cakes, frozen fruit dipped in chocolate, and so much more. It was like a feast! Dinner went on for around 3 hours because we said prayers, sang a ton of songs (or they did, we couldn't because the songs were in Hebrew), talked and ate. At around 11:30pm my parents and I decided to go to bed, though the rest of the group was still up and eating sweet cakes. The next morning my parents and I got up at around 8:00am because we decided that we didn't need to go to services Saturday morning. Because everybody else went to services, we decided to take a walk around the neighborhood. This "neighborhood" isn't like the kind of neighborhood that we think of in America, it is called a Moshav. A Moshav is a community where families live near each other in a small area and on this Moshav they farmed dairy. We did a few loops around the Moshav and on one of the loops we went and saw the barn with all of the cows. There were a ton of cows, baby cows, younger cows, and huge cows. It sort of reminded me of being in Oregon at Tillamook or in Hillsboro at the farms. :) At around 11:00am everybody came back from services and it was time to start preparing for another meal. Lunch was about as big as dinner the previous night. There were tons of salads, hummus type dips, fish, macaroni and cheese and another cake. We ate a lot of food over the past two days. After lunch we walked up a hill to see the Syrian border. We stood on an unused Israeli bunker and looked out over Syria. We saw some towns and cars and of course military stations. It was extremely weird and scary to be standing that close to a country that I'm not allowed in and that would like to see me dead. We stood in awe for a few minutes and then walked around the bunker for a little while and then proceeded back down to the Moshav. This weekend was a very interesting experience and was something that I never expected to do.

The Beach, Jaffa, and more Tel Aviv

My mom and I decided to go to Tel Aviv for a night because my dad would be working all day Monday and Tuesday. We were looking for hotels when our friend, Katherine, who we met on the Fulbright trip, said that we could stay at her place in Jaffa. Jaffa is part of Old Jaffa but it isn't the old part. We took a sherut to Tel Aviv. A sherut is a mini-van that hold around 10 people. They go much faster than the buses so the ride only took like 35-40 minutes instead of 55-60 minutes. Once we arrived in Tel Aviv we took a bus to Jaffa. We weren't exactly sure where to get off the bus because we had never taken buses around Jaffa before, but this nice soldier told us where to get off. When we finally arrived at Katherine's place it was already noon and we were ready to get to the beach. Katherine's place was amazing, all the walls were colorful and the tile floor was colorful and had a very cool pattern. Her apartment is like the exact opposite of ours, hers is very colorful and ours is basically all white. Once we had said hello to Katherine and put our bags down we quickly changed into our swimsuits and started to walk to the beach. While we were walking we got very hungry because it was already 12:45pm. We got a falafel, which was very good, and continued our walk down to the beach. The falafel was very hot and crispy and the hummus was good to. Once we got to the beach we put down our towels and sun bathed for around an hour, though every now and then we would get up and go put our feet in the ocean. :) It was not to hot, but still plenty warm so the breeze from the ocean felt very nice. After we were done at the beach we went back to Katherine's to change and take showers before we went out for the evening. After relaxing, we walked up the beach to the north of Tel Aviv and the Tel Aviv port to go to this shop where we bought gifts for some of our friends. But of course we needed to get a gelato on the way. :) We wanted to get a gift for Katherine and this shop had good items. Once we had walked around the port and looked at the ocean for a little bit we decided that it was time for dinner. For dinner, we went to my favorite restaurant in Tel Aviv, Benedict. We went to Benedict our first week in Tel Aviv and it has remained my favorite restaurant ever since. I get the chocolate pancakes whenever we go. People in Israel don't eat pancakes, waffles, or french toast a lot for breakfast, they eat salads, bread, and feta cheese. The chocolate pancakes are amazing because the chocolate medallions that are melted on top are very delicious and the pancakes are some of the best pancakes ever. I wish there was a restaurant like Benedict in Portland! At Benedict, our waitress's name was Noa and she told us that two girls at another table were also named Noa so my mom took a picture of all of us. I'd never met so many Noas at once. The name "Noa" is very common in Israel for girls, it is sort of like "Mary" of Israel. After dinner we walked around some more and then decided to go back to Katherine's because it was going on 9:00pm and we don't like staying out late on the streets in Israel. For breakfast the next morning I got to have the other half of my chocolate pancakes from the night before because the portions are huge and I can only eat of it for one meal. The pancakes were just as good the second time was they were the first! We hung around Katherine's apartment with her for most of the morning and decided not to go to the beach that day because it was over 90 degrees and humid with a hot wind coming off the sandy desert. The weather wasn't very pleasant that second day. We did a lot of my favorite activities on that trip to Tel Aviv and I really enjoyed doing all of the things that we did.

The Herzl Museum

Today we went to the Herzl Museum. The Herzl Museum is a museum that explains and shows the story of Theodore Herzl's life. Theodore Herzl was a huge Zionist. (A Zionist is someone who believes that the land of Israel should exist.) He was born on May 2nd, (my birthday!!) 1860 in Budapest, Hungary (or then, the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and died in 1904, at the age of 44, in Edlach, Austria Hungary. He died of heart failure. At the age of 18 he and his family moved to Vienna, where he spent most of his 44 years. Though Theodore Herzl was only dedicated to Zionism for a little less than ten years, he put those ten years of his life fully into trying to get the land of Israel to be a land for the Jews. He planned the First Zionist Congress in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland. He was elected president until he died in 1904. There six Zionist Congress meetings in total, the last one in 1903. At one of the Congresses the delegates came up with the "Uganda Project." The "Uganda Project" was an idea that the Jews would be able to have a state to call their one in Uganda; most of the Jews didn't like this plan and that is why the Jewish state is Israel, not Uganda. Herzl wrote a book, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). It was a book that announced why Zionism was needed, it was written in pamphlet-length political program. If you would like to read more about Theodore Herzl's life please go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Herzl The museum that told us all of this information was very nicely put together and designed. It is on Mount Herzl (named after Theodore Herzl). The museum wasn't like any other museum I've ever been to, there were a bunch of rooms with movies that our group stopped and watched about Herzl's life. Though the movies weren't typical explaining-history movies, they were movies that showed how a actor who was going to play the part of Herzl in a movie learned about his character, Theodore Herzl. Watching that kind of movie was much more interesting than watching a typical-learning-about-history movie. One of the rooms was Theodore Herzl's actual study! It was shipped from Vienna. After we were done with the tour we walked around the grounds that surround the Herzl Museum. On the grounds there are a lot of graves, it is sort of like Israel's version of Arlington National Cemetery. Many famous people are buried there, as well as many soldiers. We saw Herzl's grave as well as Yitzhak Rabin and many other famous Israelis. This cemetery was very beautiful and every grave was well maintained and I could tell that these people were very well loved and will always be remembered.

Purim

Purim in the U.S., or at least in Portland, is very different than Purim here in Israel. Purim is a holiday that is celebrated annually and recognizes when Queen Esther caught Haman, the evil royal vizer to King Ahasuerus (Queen Esther and King Ahasuerus were married), plotting to kill the Jews. The King replaced Haman and that saved the Jews. As I've seen Purim celebrated over the years, I've seen the little "carnivals" in temples for the little kids, and there has always been some special food at temple and at places that sell Jewish food, but I've never seen Purim be a holiday that people get more into than Halloween or New Years. But here in Israel, people of all ages get very into costume for 2-3 days! People get way more into Purim then Halloween or New Years, or for that matter the two holidays combined! When we were walking down King George street today (King George street is one of the major downtown streets in Jerusalem), we saw this HUGE carnival with towns of "clown" type people on stilts, tight rope, juggling, dancers and many more types of people getting into and preforming at this carnival. It is hard to describe everything that we saw at this carnival and of other people just on the streets so I hope that the pictures help. Because this is Israel, every event, big or small, has lots and lots of security. There were even soldiers with big guns on top of buildings! Anyway, after we were done hanging out and looking at the acts at the carnival we went to lunch at this fabulous restaurant called Resto Bar. It was amazing! My mom, dad, and I all got the burger. Which was fantastic! One of the best parts was that you could order the burger with cheese because the restaurant wasn't kosher! That made me so happy!!!!! :) It is hard to find cheese burgers in Israel because a cheese burger isn't kosher and most restaurants are. There are many rules to having kosher food but one that makes cheese burgers not kosher is that you can't have meat and dairy together. Not only was the burger good because of being able to put cheese on it, but the actual burger was fabulous! We could tell that the meat had been freshly ground and was cooked just perfect! Also, the french fries that came with it weren't exactly french fries but they were still amazing! They were large slices of fried potato, were the outside was crispy but the inside was creamy. I would gladly go back to Resto Bar again! Today was a very fun and different type of day.

Over the Past Week......

Over the past week or so nothing much has happened here. Today we are 10 days past halfway! :)
My grandparents left last Sunday night so we have been getting back into our usual routine. The most major thing that I've done over the past week was audition for HMS Pinafore, the musical which my class will be putting on in the spring. The singing audition was much more difficult then the acting audition for me because I do not like to sing very much. I'm not thrilled with acting either, but acting is much better then singing. A family friend of ours, Avital, happened to be studying in Israel for part of the time that we are here. Avital is an amazing singer and actress, so she kindly offered to help me and gave me some great tips on singing and acting. Thank you Avital!

My mom and I have, as usual, gone for many long walks around Jerusalem. On one of them we were walking down a very busy street when out of the blue I stopped and said, "Oh my god! Look! A turtle!" In the middle of the sidewalk there was a 5 or 6 inch turtle! It was very cool but odd to see a turtle in the middle of the sidewalk. That is definitely not something I see in Portland.... I have also been doing a bunch of school work. Though I'm still ahead of my class in most subjects! :)

Over the past week or so, more or less since the halfway point, I have really been wondering what we will do for this half of the trip. We have been to almost everything of interest in Jerusalem and going to the Old City gets old after we've walked around it almost everyday for the past two months. We are going to Eilat, the southern most point in Israel, towards the end of March and I'm really excited for that but I'm not so sure about what we will do until that. When we aren't constantly busy, I really miss Portland and my friends. This evening it was raining and my mom and I were walking home from the grocery store and she asked me why I wasn't wearing my hood, to which I replied, "Because the rain reminds me of home." I've had a lot of fun experiences happen in Portland while it has been raining or pouring and walking home while getting wet from the rain reminded me of them. Anyway, I hope we keep doing exciting events for the remaining 41 days of our trip.

Mitzpe Ramon

Mitzpe Ramon is a huge crater in the southern part of Israel. People here call it the "Grand Canyon of Israel." That is a bit of a stretch. It is a rather large crater, but definitely not compared to the Grand Canyon in the US. Because Mitzpe Ramon is in the Negev Desert, everything in the crater and around it is all the same dusty, sandy, tan. When we first arrived at the crater the view was quite amazing but quickly lost its amazement because everything looks the same. The rock formations are cool, but once you've seen hundreds of rock formations in less than an hour, they sort of lose their coolness. We arrived in Mitzpe Ramon at around 1pm with my grandparents and their friends, Bonnie and Rob. My grandparents and Bonnie and Rob are neighbors and friends in Burlington, Vermont. Once we settled into our hotel, my parents, Rob, and I went off for lunch knowing that after lunch we would go hike down part of the canyon. Bonnie and my grandparents went off to visit one of my grandma's friends who lives in the town of Mitzpe Ramon. For lunch we went to the one café in the tiny town of Mitzpe Ramon. The food was very good at the café. I got a Greek sandwich, which had roasted red peppers, super fresh feta cheese, big delicious olives, and baby lettuce in a fresh-out-of-the-oven ciabatta bread. The sandwich was definitely one of the best I have had in Israel. A fact about most Israeli meals is that they are almost always HUGE. Appetizers are usually like the size of entrees in Portland. This fact was completely true about my sandwich, when they asked me if i wanted it on ciabatta or whole wheat bread and I said I wanted it on ciabatta I didn't realize that they were going to give me the entire ciabatta! So I only ate half of the sandwich. After lunch, we walked to the visitors center because that is where the hotel said we could pick up a map about different trails. When we got to the visitors center they told us that we didn't have a lot of time because people have to be back on the main road by 4:30pm and it was already 2:30pm. We were a little upset about this but still made our way towards the rocky and dusty trail that would take us down to the bottom of the trail. We decided that we would walk part way down the trail and do the rest the next day. The trail was very rocky and steep and was very difficult to climb down. It took quite a while to get down the first part, but after a while there weren't as many rocks and the trail got a lot easier and we moved faster. We probably got about halfway down before we decided to turn around because we were getting tired and it was getting near 3:45pm. For my parents it took around as long as it took to get down to get up, I ran up the trail. I don't really know why I decided to run up but it was definitely a great workout. I made it up at least three times faster than my parents did. Once we got back from the hike and had showered, all seven of us went out to the other restaurant in the town for dinner. I got a bowl of soup that my dad and I were going to share and then he would share his chicken with me. The first part worked, but because I didn't like the chicken I ended up eating a lot of bread for dinner. Breakfast the next day wasn't any better than dinner the night before. Breakfast consisted of very stale bread, wilted vegetables, and some disgusting jam. This hotel definitely wasn't known for its breakfast! But lucky for me, I still had the other half of my sandwich from lunch the day before! That sandwich had never tasted better. :) After "breakfast," my parents and I decided that we weren't going to go down the crater again because my mom's knees hurt and it was already really hot outside. So we decided that we would just walk around the rim of the crater. The walk around the rim looked the exact same as the walk in the crater except that we weren't walking on a hill. The only difference was toward the end of the walk when we saw a group of at least twenty Ibex! The Ibex were so cool to see up close! My dad had gone home to shower so my mom and I were just sitting on a rock taking a break when I turned my head and said, "Mom! Look! Ibex!" They were just sitting there and when a big tour bus drove by they didn't move. So lucky for us, they weren't scared of humans. This was good because we could get close to take pictures. Mitzpe Ramon was definitely an interesting experience!

Fulbright Trip

Over the 9th and 10th of February my parents and I went on a trip up north with Fulbright. Fulbright is the organization that awarded my dad the award that allowed us to go to Israel. My grandparents are also here for the next 2 weeks and because the Fulbright trip was picking us up in Haifa, a beautiful port city in the north, the morning of the 9th we decided to go up to Haifa, with my grandparents, the night of the 8th. My grandparents would then pick us at the end of the Fulbright trip on the Sea of Galilee. On the way up to Haifa we stopped in Netanya, a beach town around half and hour drive north of Tel Aviv, for a walk and lunch. The beach was beautiful. The sea was bright blue in parts and greenish blue in parts. The Mediterranean Sea is one of the prettiest oceans, in my opinion. Once we arrived in Haifa and went to our hotel, the Hotel Nof, at around 7pm we took a walk and then went to bed because my parents and I knew that we had an early start the next morning. But before I went to bed a made sure to take a nice hot shower!! Hot water is a rarity in Israel and we don't get a lot of it at our apartment. The morning of the 9th we quickly ate breakfast, said good-bye to my grandparents, and met the tour guide and the rest of the Fulbright people to begin our two day tour up north. Our first stop was a Tunisian synagogue near the beach town of Akko. There were a lot of mosaics in the synagogue. They were all amazingly put together and that clearly pain off because they were all beautiful. The one on the back wall was of the town of Akko. However, there were also mosaics on the ceiling and even some on the floor as well. This synagogue was definitely one of the most beautiful ones I have ever seen. After the synagogue, we went to Akko. In Akko we saw the jail house where prisoners were kept as recently as the early to mid 20th century. One of the neat things about Akko is that when the excavators found it, it was completely buried in sand. Since Akko is a huge town, it was hard to imagine the amount of sand. After exploring the jail, we went to the Knights' Halls. The halls were wear the Roman Knights would be if they were in Akko. The halls were huge and they were all made out of stone, so it got very cold in the halls during the winter. Knights even died from the cold. After Akko, we went to lunch in a Druze village. The religion, Druze, is a form of Muslim though it was made from parts of Judaism, Christianity, and Muslim. Druze cannot marry a person who is not a Druze and nobody can convert to being a Druze. Lunch was made up of pita with many dips and salads, which were pretty good though not the best that we've had. When we thought that the food was done coming and we were all full, they started bringing out pieces of chicken and lamb. The chicken and lamb were very good and perfectly seasoned and grilled, but we weren't hungry anymore so we didn't eat a lot of the chicken and lamb. When very full and done with lunch, we continued our tour to a Circassian village. Circassians are also Muslim though not the typical type. They came from the Ottoman Empire and parts of Russia, though later on some of them moved to the Middle East. The Circassian man that talked to us about he and his people was in Circassian attire. Circassian attire consists of long robes (some with patterns) and tall wide hats. Whenever the man giving us the presentation on Circassians pointed, his sleeves fell over his hands, which made him look like Dopey from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. :) After the presenter mumbled stuff to us (his English wasn't very good), we went to our last stop for the day, Kfar Blum, a Kibbutz hotel in the Hula Valley which is near the Golan Heights. Kfar Blum was much different then Kibbutz Hatzor. Kfar Blum was much more like a place that family reunions would take place. (It was like a hotel, just the rooms weren't connected to one main building.) Our room was very nice and had hot water!!! It was so nice to take another hot shower! The next day we started early again because like the day before, we had a lot to do and see. Our first stop of the day was a water fall in the Golan Heights. The Golan Heights is the area in the far north east of Israel. It is the part of Israel that borders both Lebanon and Syria. It was sort of freaky driving on the narrow roads of the Golan Heights seen signs saying "WARNING! DO NOT GO BEYOND THE LINE. LAND MINES." When the Golan Heights still belonged to Syria, the Syrians put land mines down to help keep outsiders out. The water fall was beautiful. Though it wasn't very tall, it was still beautiful. When the water splashed at the bottom of the water fall it was picture perfect. After the water fall visit we went to Gamla. Gamla is an area that people can hike, though we didn't have time to. Also, Gamla was a village on the top of a hill that the Jews fled to when the Romans were coming after them. All that is left now is ruins. For my mom, dad, and I, our next stop was our last with Fulbright. Our last stop was at the Sea of Galilee. The Sea of Galilee is beautiful; especially the day we saw it. It was calm and a beautiful greenish blue. The sea looked even more beautiful with the sun shining on it. After we saw the Sea of Galilee, we said our goodbyes, especially to the bus driver, Chaim who we became good friends with, and my grandparents picked us up so that we could continue traveling with them. The two days we spent with Fulbright were very packed with lots of adventures!