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.]
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