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bironicFollowing from the Poland set.
Day 7 (Israel Day 1): Airport, Sea of Galilee.
Our flight from Poland left at 11 p.m. Sunday night, depositing us at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel at 3:30 a.m. Poland time/4:30 a.m. Israel time. Joy. My plan was to sleep as much as possible on the flight since we had another full day ahead of us, but that was unfortunately thwarted by the participants sitting behind me, who were so hyper they spent most of the time singing the Aleph Bet song and trading stories of drunken hook-ups. One of them was our trip leader.
When I gave up on dozing, I looked out the window and saw black, black, black; then black and a sliver of moon; some clouds, dark gray on black; and finally, lights:
During our next "sharing session" our first night in Israel, we were asked to talk about the transition from Poland to Israel and how we felt about Israel so far. The general answers to these were "We had no transition" and "We've only been in Israel for a day," other than a few people who had somehow already fallen in love with the country—in most cases because they'd grown up there. Anyway, what I talked about was how the trip was structured so that Poland served as a lens through which we were meant to look at Israel, and what struck me in that sense was how, as we taxied to our gate in dawning light, I saw a fleet of El Al planes with the Star of David on their tails, and, political issues aside, it was like a silent declaration of triumph, of survival, after all the days we'd spent immersed in stories of persecution and death.
The airport was surprisingly busy for the time of night. Morning. Whatever. It took a while to get through passport control, and there was a decent-sized crowd waiting in the main hall. Among the expectant, between a reuniting family and an Orthodox man all in black, was a guy in an "Everybody Lies" t-shirt. I felt immediately welcome in the country. :)
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roga had suggested we look up when we got to the arrivals hall, as the ceiling there is a graveyard of lost Mylar balloons. She wasn't kidding.
At the airport, we said goodbye to Chaim, our Poland guide, and hello to Assaf, our Israeli guide. I'd been kidding around with another girl the day before about how Assaf would probably be young and pretty and all the girls would be flirting and touching him all the time and it would be annoying. I didn't expect that I would find him so nice to look at! He had the whole brown hair/blue eyes thing going that makes people like Jason Isaacs and Daniel Craig so popular. He was some of my favorite scenery in Israel. Heh. Pictures later.
Someone had asked how long it would take to drive to our first stop, the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinneret), from the airport. Four hours, our esteemed trip leader (Danny, not Assaf) said. Chaim laughed. You drive four hours, he said, and you'll be in Jordan. Israel is not much bigger than New Jersey.
The trip turned out to be two hours, tops. Still, I did sleep on the bus, even though I would have liked to look out the window at something that didn't look as much like upstate New York as Poland had. When I woke up, the landscape looked like this:
We stopped at a guest house to say shehechianu with little wine cups and pieces of challah, have breakfast and go for a swim. It was about 7:30 a.m. (That did not stop the sun from turning the back of my shoulder bright pink where I had not reached with the sunscreen, as I discovered later that night.) Fun swim in the guest house's roped-off area, warm water and nice weather, and afterwards a few of us picked up seashells and watched little fish dart between our feet.
Packed up and went driving again, through the mountains. (Our trip in a nutshell.) It was nice to see some different geography and vegetation. This picture is not mine:
Overall, Israel reminded me of a cross between Arizona, California/Florida, Malta and South Dakota. Other people said it reminded them of places like Spain and … others I've forgotten. Desert beside sea, palm trees beside pines. Many date palms, some of which were planted densely in the area not to tame the soil, as I first guessed, but to provide cover during border disputes with Syria:
Lots of prickly pear (new Hebrew vocabulary: sabra):
And gigantic agave:
Sea of Galilee/Lake Kinneret from a scenic viewpoint. The lake was about this hazy all three days we were in the area. Assaf explained that it's partly the humidity and partly dust blowing in from Syria. Detracted from the stargazing, alas.
After visiting the site of the first kibbutz or pre-kibbutz—I didn't catch it at the time, being exhausted and very, very hot (also our trip in a nutshell, heh), and can't find the place on Google at the moment—, we dropped by a cemetery where Israel's great poet Rachel is buried. The lake was a brilliant, bright blue-green, especially against the palm leaves. It was just so hot and humid.
I have no idea if we did anything after that; I suspect not, although beats me where the rest of the day went. I do remember driving up to the guest house-slash-hostel, where we were tripled up and put in cute cabins, and taking these photos before and after dinner. The glowy bit is a city on the lake called Tiberias that, as you may have guessed from the name, dates back to Roman times.
Day 8: Golan Heights.
Second day was a tour around the Golan Heights, which Israel won in the Six Days' War in 1967. More politics I don't know enough about to judge. Lovely area, though, covered in black basalt and "well-drained volcanic soil," which, as signs at the winery we visited pointed out repeatedly, is good for growing grapes.
A topographical model of the Heights at the Visitor Center shows the Syrian-African rift valley at bottom left and Mt. Hermon at top, the lowest and highest places in the country, respectively, plus all of the plate tectonics-induced fun in between, for we few geology geeks.
Near to Mt. Hermon, the only place in Israel that sees snow in winter, the Mt. Bental overlook afforded us:
a tour of a former military bunker (note metal silhouettes of soldiers in firing position),
nice views of ancient volcanic calderas,
random metal sculptures on the walk to and from the bus,
and a view into Syria.
Oh, right, a picture* of my secret Israeli boyfriend Assaf, whom you see above standing on the edge of the cliff between the bunker and the Syrian border:
* Snatched from a stranger off Facebook. From some other trip, I guess, since he didn't have the mullet thing when he led our group around.
The basalt you see all over the place up there:
Further west, the Hula Valley appears. Settlers drained the swampy area when they found it, only to discover that the land isn't all that arable after all. Bye-bye, ecosystem. Still, down at the bottom are olive groves, more vineyards and fields of sunflowers. Possibly pomegranate trees as well; I don't remember.
Last but not least for that day, the schnitzel (fried chicken cutlets with sesame seeds) that became a staple of our Israel diet:
One of the things people complained about—there were many, and varied somewhat depending on the age of the participant—was the monotony of the food we were given (when we weren't let loose on free time in markets and whatnot). I thought it was tasty, if heavy on the grease—schnitzel, hummous, roasted potatoes, pasta, fresh nectarines, eggs at breakfast—, but then I don't have any dietary restrictions, and I'm also the kind of person who'll pick a food and eat it for lunch every day for two weeks.
Er, weird place to pause, but it's bedtime. More at some point, hopefully soon; we're not even halfway through yet. (!)
ETA: Part 2
Day 7 (Israel Day 1): Airport, Sea of Galilee.
Our flight from Poland left at 11 p.m. Sunday night, depositing us at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel at 3:30 a.m. Poland time/4:30 a.m. Israel time. Joy. My plan was to sleep as much as possible on the flight since we had another full day ahead of us, but that was unfortunately thwarted by the participants sitting behind me, who were so hyper they spent most of the time singing the Aleph Bet song and trading stories of drunken hook-ups. One of them was our trip leader.
When I gave up on dozing, I looked out the window and saw black, black, black; then black and a sliver of moon; some clouds, dark gray on black; and finally, lights:
During our next "sharing session" our first night in Israel, we were asked to talk about the transition from Poland to Israel and how we felt about Israel so far. The general answers to these were "We had no transition" and "We've only been in Israel for a day," other than a few people who had somehow already fallen in love with the country—in most cases because they'd grown up there. Anyway, what I talked about was how the trip was structured so that Poland served as a lens through which we were meant to look at Israel, and what struck me in that sense was how, as we taxied to our gate in dawning light, I saw a fleet of El Al planes with the Star of David on their tails, and, political issues aside, it was like a silent declaration of triumph, of survival, after all the days we'd spent immersed in stories of persecution and death.
The airport was surprisingly busy for the time of night. Morning. Whatever. It took a while to get through passport control, and there was a decent-sized crowd waiting in the main hall. Among the expectant, between a reuniting family and an Orthodox man all in black, was a guy in an "Everybody Lies" t-shirt. I felt immediately welcome in the country. :)
roga had suggested we look up when we got to the arrivals hall, as the ceiling there is a graveyard of lost Mylar balloons. She wasn't kidding.At the airport, we said goodbye to Chaim, our Poland guide, and hello to Assaf, our Israeli guide. I'd been kidding around with another girl the day before about how Assaf would probably be young and pretty and all the girls would be flirting and touching him all the time and it would be annoying. I didn't expect that I would find him so nice to look at! He had the whole brown hair/blue eyes thing going that makes people like Jason Isaacs and Daniel Craig so popular. He was some of my favorite scenery in Israel. Heh. Pictures later.
Someone had asked how long it would take to drive to our first stop, the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinneret), from the airport. Four hours, our esteemed trip leader (Danny, not Assaf) said. Chaim laughed. You drive four hours, he said, and you'll be in Jordan. Israel is not much bigger than New Jersey.
The trip turned out to be two hours, tops. Still, I did sleep on the bus, even though I would have liked to look out the window at something that didn't look as much like upstate New York as Poland had. When I woke up, the landscape looked like this:
We stopped at a guest house to say shehechianu with little wine cups and pieces of challah, have breakfast and go for a swim. It was about 7:30 a.m. (That did not stop the sun from turning the back of my shoulder bright pink where I had not reached with the sunscreen, as I discovered later that night.) Fun swim in the guest house's roped-off area, warm water and nice weather, and afterwards a few of us picked up seashells and watched little fish dart between our feet.
Packed up and went driving again, through the mountains. (Our trip in a nutshell.) It was nice to see some different geography and vegetation. This picture is not mine:
Overall, Israel reminded me of a cross between Arizona, California/Florida, Malta and South Dakota. Other people said it reminded them of places like Spain and … others I've forgotten. Desert beside sea, palm trees beside pines. Many date palms, some of which were planted densely in the area not to tame the soil, as I first guessed, but to provide cover during border disputes with Syria:
Lots of prickly pear (new Hebrew vocabulary: sabra):
And gigantic agave:
Sea of Galilee/Lake Kinneret from a scenic viewpoint. The lake was about this hazy all three days we were in the area. Assaf explained that it's partly the humidity and partly dust blowing in from Syria. Detracted from the stargazing, alas.
After visiting the site of the first kibbutz or pre-kibbutz—I didn't catch it at the time, being exhausted and very, very hot (also our trip in a nutshell, heh), and can't find the place on Google at the moment—, we dropped by a cemetery where Israel's great poet Rachel is buried. The lake was a brilliant, bright blue-green, especially against the palm leaves. It was just so hot and humid.
I have no idea if we did anything after that; I suspect not, although beats me where the rest of the day went. I do remember driving up to the guest house-slash-hostel, where we were tripled up and put in cute cabins, and taking these photos before and after dinner. The glowy bit is a city on the lake called Tiberias that, as you may have guessed from the name, dates back to Roman times.
Day 8: Golan Heights.
Second day was a tour around the Golan Heights, which Israel won in the Six Days' War in 1967. More politics I don't know enough about to judge. Lovely area, though, covered in black basalt and "well-drained volcanic soil," which, as signs at the winery we visited pointed out repeatedly, is good for growing grapes.
A topographical model of the Heights at the Visitor Center shows the Syrian-African rift valley at bottom left and Mt. Hermon at top, the lowest and highest places in the country, respectively, plus all of the plate tectonics-induced fun in between, for we few geology geeks.
Near to Mt. Hermon, the only place in Israel that sees snow in winter, the Mt. Bental overlook afforded us:
a tour of a former military bunker (note metal silhouettes of soldiers in firing position),
nice views of ancient volcanic calderas,
random metal sculptures on the walk to and from the bus,
and a view into Syria.
Oh, right, a picture* of my secret Israeli boyfriend Assaf, whom you see above standing on the edge of the cliff between the bunker and the Syrian border:
* Snatched from a stranger off Facebook. From some other trip, I guess, since he didn't have the mullet thing when he led our group around.
The basalt you see all over the place up there:
Further west, the Hula Valley appears. Settlers drained the swampy area when they found it, only to discover that the land isn't all that arable after all. Bye-bye, ecosystem. Still, down at the bottom are olive groves, more vineyards and fields of sunflowers. Possibly pomegranate trees as well; I don't remember.
Last but not least for that day, the schnitzel (fried chicken cutlets with sesame seeds) that became a staple of our Israel diet:
One of the things people complained about—there were many, and varied somewhat depending on the age of the participant—was the monotony of the food we were given (when we weren't let loose on free time in markets and whatnot). I thought it was tasty, if heavy on the grease—schnitzel, hummous, roasted potatoes, pasta, fresh nectarines, eggs at breakfast—, but then I don't have any dietary restrictions, and I'm also the kind of person who'll pick a food and eat it for lunch every day for two weeks.
Er, weird place to pause, but it's bedtime. More at some point, hopefully soon; we're not even halfway through yet. (!)
ETA: Part 2
no subject
Date: Jul. 23rd, 2008 03:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Jul. 23rd, 2008 10:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Jul. 23rd, 2008 03:59 am (UTC)Topographical maps are so enticing! I don't know what it is about them, but I feel pulled towards them instantly as well. Even if I don't really understand what they are trying to tell me.
I'd say your guide was as easy on the eyes as those views of the sea at twilight. How aesthetically pleasing in every direction. ;-)
no subject
Date: Jul. 23rd, 2008 10:16 pm (UTC)Oh, good, glad you like the plant shots. The agave just floored me. It's probably normal for them to be so big, but I'd never come across one before. Looked alien, with the sprig thing and the sheer size of it.
I feel pulled towards them instantly as well. Even if I don't really understand what they are trying to tell me.
Try growing up with an earth science teacher! You grow to hate them as a matter of principle when you're a kid, and then you take pride in knowing esoteric details when you get older. Heh. I like them for showing what's what without words - giving you a good picture of where you are when you're somewhere unfamiliar.
no subject
Date: Jul. 23rd, 2008 07:06 am (UTC)The kibbutz you were at is probably Dgania, which was the first kibbutz, and on the shores of the Kineret.
no subject
Date: Jul. 23rd, 2008 10:07 pm (UTC)Especially the balloons one, which I love :-)
And I might not have noticed or taken the photo if you hadn't pointed it out ahead of time, so thanks!
And I have changed my opinion about your guide
Heeee, you see the light. He had more of a goatee thing going than in that picture, but the shot's much better than mine, where he kept looking more troll-like. Just think, he's living in your city! You could run into him at any time.