Changeover time

I'm writing now from Matan's family's apartment in Herzeliyah, where his dad generously offered to host me and a few friends for this changeover vacation period. The apartment is spacious and comfortable (not to mention absolutely gorgeous), and located in the new area of Herzeliyah Pituach, right by the tayelet and the mall. Our window is a view of the yachts, sea, and sunset, and Pam, Arielle, and I had trouble putting our cameras down yesterday evening. Our time here so far has included fancy dinners of sushi, all-you-can-eat meat at Papagaio (We even convinced Pam, the pickiest eater I know, to sample nearly every piece!), and a Yehuda Policker concert (where we were by far the youngest people in the crowd), all courtesy to Matan's dad. In less than a half an hour, I'm scheduled for a professional massage, and then maybe I'll go take a dip in the pool. Life is not bad here. My only complaint is that we came too late--it's a bit too chilly to go swimming at the beach. We'll at least go later to sit on the sand and bask in the beauty that is Herzeliyah and vacation. Paid-for, luxurious vacation. ;)

This week marks the end of our Jerusalem study period, and the beginning of our "Israel Experience" period. After spending days anazlyzing each of the thirty volunteer options and locations, we each made our top-ten lists and then left the rest for the counselors to determine. My first choice was Ben Yakir, an Ethiopian Youth village, and I found out the other week that I was indeed assigned to it. I know very little about what my next three months will be like.

What I do know:
-I'll be working there with just three other girls from yearcourse: Aliza Belcourt, Becca Abelman, and Arielle Miller
-I'll be living at the youth village, which I imagine to have similar facilities and a similar design as an American boarding school.
-The village consists of boys from grades 7 through 12, 80 percent of them Ethiopian. I'm not entirely sure whether they themselves are new olim, or whether they are children of new olim. Either way, the school serves to help ease the integration into Israeli society.
-I imagine I'll be playing some sort of madricha role. According to Sara Davidoff, who worked there last year, I'll be assigned to a group of boys and I'll be with them for most of the day. They don't know any English, so hopefully my Hebrew will improve.
-I'm expecting it to be hard at the beginning. I've been told that the Ethiopian community tends to be somewhat closed-off, introverted, and seeing as I am not 100 percent comfortable with my Hebrew it might take some time to connect with the kids. But I've also heard that after they get to know you, they tend to cling to you and really start to open up. I'm hoping the experience will be rewarding.
-I see the next three months as a sort of break from my program, and a taste of something really Israel. Or really a part of Israel. I won't be seeing much of yearcourse participants or counselors, except for on my free weekends, which might only be every other week. Then, after three months, we'll all be reunited in yearcourse apartments in Bat Yam or Holon (near Tel Aviv), volunteering some place around that area.


****Massage time, gotta run...***

Back from the massage. One hour of utter relaxation. Ahhhh....

It's nice that I'm away from the hostel for at least these few days. The place right now is way over-crowded, with kids from every section staying there until we move to our third trimester locations. With four people to a room (sometimes five, if the fifth decides he was assigned to roommates that snore too loudly, or are too messy...), it's a hectic, hectic time. To add to it all, everyone at the hostel is still on a sort-of lockdown, as the Israeli terror alert rises during the Annapolis Conference. Lockdown, meaning we're supposed to avoid public transportation and open public spaces. Meanwhile, in my eyes the conference has little promise, seeing as Livni and Qurei weren't even able to agree on a basic statement coming into the few days in Washington. The best I hope for is that it won't spark a third intifada... Well, who knows. Maybe some progress is miraculously possible?


I think I'll go relax some more, maybe read a bit or walk to the beach, before we're taken out to another gormet meat dinner tonight.

Ein Gedi!

Friday morning Raviva and I ventured out to a crowded pre-Shabbat shuk and pushed our way through the challah-buying masses. Our goal: to buy enough food to sustain us for a shabbat on the Ein Gedi beach. After splitting the cost of apples, dried fruit, nuts, Bamba, and of course, the standard humus and pitas, we were off to the tachana mercazit (central bus station), where we met Nat and started on our way.

The weekend trip took little to no planning. I had heard that some of my yearcourse friends were heading down there this weekend, so I tagged along and brought a few friends with me. We packed in backpacks and brought our sleeping bags to sleep on the beach by the Dead Sea. Total expenses included only some food, a two-way bus pass, and 12 shekels to get into Ein Gedi for the day.

After a mere twenty minutes on the bus from Jerusalem, the scenery changed from busy streets and residential areas to sand dunes and ... more sand dunes. It's really incredible how quickly and completely the landscape changes here. We arrived in Ein Gedi after around an hour, and walked over to the nature reserve to try and get in a few hours of hiking. There we ran into some trouble. The sign told us that to enter, the adult fee was 23 shekels and the youth fee was just 12. Youth were "5-18," so naturally, we asked for youth passes. When the ranger asked how old we were, we told him without hesitation that we were eighteen. Mistake. Apparently, in Israel, "5-18" means up to (and not including) eighteen.
--A word of advice: when in Israel, ALWAYS SAY YOU'RE 17. At least according to Egged (the Israeli bus company), and most tourist attractions, every foreign teenager here for the year is just seventeen. For the whole year. You'd think they'd catch on at some point.---
Seeing as it was later in the day, it wasn't worth our 23 shekels for just a short hike. We chilled instead on the Dead Sea beach for a bit (about a half mile down the road), where we'd be sleeping later that night, and waited for my yearcourse friends to arrive.

In the end, there were around 25 of us at our campsite. Mostly yearcourse section one-ers, but also some from sections two and three, a few girls from Nativ, and Raviva and Nat. The combination of desert and sea and sunset was surreal. The sun went down early and quickly, and we all snapped as many photos as we could while the scenery changed from pink to blue to too-dark-for-pictures. The photos were postcard-perfect, but futile, in a way--it was difficult to capture the vastness of the place with a petty digital camera. Even one with "color accent" (which is SO COOL! Nat and I spent a good amount of our trip playing with Viva's camera...). When the sun went down, we figured we should practice our Judaism a bit there in the desert, and we lit some shabbat candles and even prayed Kabbalat Shabbat. We prayed where we could find light, which happened to be by the public bathrooms, and we used a small piece of toilet paper as a mechitza. It felt funny a bit when we bowed towards the toilets during the last verse of L'cha Dodi; one of my more memorable prayer experiences.

The next day Nat, Viva, and I, plus two girls from sections two and three, headed out a bit earlier than the rest to hike. We chose "Wadi Arugot," and this time when we entered we were smart enough to remember that we were actually 17 (cough cough). I'd done the hike at least once before with my family, but the scenery and pools were gorgeous all the same. We stopped to swim in the "Hidden Waterfall," and then continued on a bit to some more pools, where we rested, admired the scenery, and fiddled with the super cool features on Raviva's camera until a ranger told us we had to start heading back.

The bus ride home felt a little longer, seeing as the bus was so crowded that we were forced to sit on the floor in the aisle. (Not the first time I've done that.) Despite this small discomfort, the weekend was relaxing and beautiful and one of my most worthwhile Israel weekends so far.
Note to self: I should have more weekends like that. :)

Friday is Bezalel and Galiah's new baby's bris. So I'll probably be spending the weekend at a cousins house, playing with babies and getting lots of nice sleep. After that there is only one weekend left in Jerusalem, and we'll be on lockdown for security reasons. Crazy how this trimester is almost over! And I don't even know where I'll be next trimester, though I hope it will be Ben Yakir, an Ethiopian Youth Village. I find out my placement tomorrow! *crossing fingers.*

[I have to give credit for the above photos to Pam. Zero special effects in those.]

Our journey is masa ;)

As our time here in Jerusalem nears its end (we're dispersing after this trimester), it seems that everything's becoming so much more hectic. Our weeks are filled with MASA events, little outings or movies planned by our counselors, charity rallies and walks, and of course, some classes and homework in between.

Hm. Now that I think about it, it's likely my own doing that my days are busier. My mindset has shifted a bit, as I realize now that my time left in Jerusalem is limited, and I fill my schedule trying to fit in all I can. I appreciate the city--am less frustrated by the presence of so many Americans and so many tourists/tourist attractions/touristy things (I would hesitate to call the kotel, for instance, an "attraction." Just seems off). There are perks to Jerusalem--things in this city that I wouldn't find in any other city in Israel, much less anywhere else in the world. Where else can I go out on a Monday night and be absolutely guaranteed to bump into at least a few people I know? I've run into my old camp counselor on Emek R'faim, my sister's friend across from the bus station, and a dozen old camp and school friends near Ben Yehudah. It's an odd night if I don't find someone I know, or someone I once knew (and with whom a short reunion with an awkward exchange of "hey!"s is completely necessary). I also have friends here, good friends--friends not on yearcourse but on other various programs around the city. Of course, leaving Jerusalem won't really be leaving them, seeing as everything in Israel is "just forty-five minutes away!" but I'll be seeing them less, and our get-togethers will require annoying planning in advance. (I don't like planning. And I'm not so good at it. Uch.)

Anyways, some highlights from my busssyyyy week. The photo above was taken at a rally for the captured soldiers, that is, the three soldiers captured last year before the war in Lebanon. The backdrop was blown-up pictures of Gilad Shalit, Ehud Goldwasser, and Eldad Regev, sequinced curtains, and neon lights. The performances followed suit--high-tech and a bit flashy at times--but nonetheless meaningful, touching, and seemingly effective. (Effective might be the wrong word, the real effectiveness of the event might yet to be determined, but we were definitely a large presence.) Memorable parts of the night included a short speech by Ehud Goldwasser's wife. You wonder how she keeps living.

In a small change of mood, Halloween fell a few nights after. You wouldn't think the holiday is big in Israel, but as I said, Jerusalem is a city of Americans. Of teenage Americans. Essentially, yearcourse brought Halloween to Israel. Our costumes were creative and elaborate, and included a "nudist on strike," Little Red Riding Hood, Waldo of Where's Waldo, and animals of all sorts. I am shown in the photo above (as a pirate) with a "piece of metal." To summarize, it was a fun night, beginning with filling an entire public bus with American fools in costumes, and ending with some silly kids dancing on the streets downtown while we searched for a cab.

The week ended in excellent fashion with a MASA-sponsored Ha-Dag Nachash concert. MASA-sponsored, I soon found out, does not only mean that the event cost me a mere 35 shekels. It means that the event was more of a carnival-type-event than a simple concert, complete with clowns and men on stilts and a group dressed in "Na-na-nachman" hats dancing around a fake Torah scroll. After these festivities, we gathered in the auditorium to watch the band perform--we being participants of MASA programs around Israel, which is most year programs, meaning I saw ALL of my in-Israel friends and random acquaintances. But before the actual band came out, we were treated with multiple loud and excited playings of the MASA theme song. Yes, they have a theme song, and yes, it is excellent. ("Our journey is Masa," the title of this blog, is in fact a line from that very song.) Finally the real concert began, and in the end, it was no less than amazing.
MASA gave us backpacks too. Nerdy orange ones. Yay for loaded organizations.

That ultimately ended the week, and shabbat was spent with my mom, aunt, uncle, and some cousins down at my aunt and uncles "caravilla" in Ein Tsurim. I think I slept more than was awake. And I played with babies. It was grand.

Until next time, Lehitra'ot