Vacation!

I love vacation:) But I get ahead of myself…

After Yom Kippur, we were back to school for a couple of days. Wednesday we had our Israel Seminar, where we learn about current Israeli life and society. Last week we went to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum, and Har Herzl, the military and political cemetery. Yad Vashem was incredibly well done and moving and emotional. The museum was redone a couple of years ago, and it has some incredible features. The museum is designed as a triangle, and the exhibit rooms zigzag back and forth from the tip to the wide base. Down the middle, you can see from one end to the other, so you can always see the movie at the beginning, depicting Jewish life in Europe before the Holocaust, and you can always see the huge window at the end, looking out over Israeli beautifulness. But you can also see that you still have a long way to go through the museum. It’s as if they’re trying to constantly give you the feeling of the never-ending situation, or something like that. It was an interesting design of the museum that we all had comments on. I thought the museum also did a fantastic job of emphasizing life. It is a multi-media experience, and in every room there are pictures, words, objects, and audio/video interviews. The words, objects, and pictures on the walls tell the majority story: sadness, humiliation, separation, death. But the videos, the soundtrack to the whole museum, are all of survivors. So while reading about mass deportations, you are hearing the story of someone who escaped, snuck away, succeeded, survived. There are seats in front of most of the television screens, so when you’re tired from walking through a very long museum, the place you sit and rest is in front of stories of survival. It’s fascinating. The museum does not end at the end of the war, however. It continues with stories of displaced persons camps, immigration to Israel, and the independence of the State. It has apparently been toned down from the old version of the museum, but it is an interesting extension of a Holocaust Museum to logically extend to the formation of the State of Israel, as if the story really continued an extra few years from what most history books say.

From Yad Vashem we continued up the hill to the top of Har Herzl, where Theodor Herzl, the “father of modern Zionism” is buried. His grave is at the very top of the hill, surrounded by a large plaza, with no other graves around him. Apparently this plaza is the location of the beginning of the Independence Day celebrations every year. It’s a very different focus from the States, to really start with a tribute to the people who died for independence and worked so hard for it. I wonder if that will change as Israel ages; it’s such a young country that many soldiers who fought for independence are still alive. We also visited graves of past Israeli Prime Ministers and Presidents. They are all uniform, as it is a military cemetery, except for the grave of Yitzhak Rabin. Because he was assassinated, his grave is much more ornate and different from the others. We also visited different parts of the regular military cemetery, including graves of soldiers who fell in the war in Lebanon this past summer. It’s sometimes hard to remember that this country is defended by kids so young. Most of the people buried in that cemetery are younger than I am now.

After the heavy, emotional day, I headed home for a little while to regroup and get happy. Then it was off to the airport to pick up Michael! It took a long time for him to come out, and then I think he got a much less happy reception than expected…because I was trying to figure out why he wasn’t carrying a suitcase! He was supposed to have a huge bag, mostly filled with my stuff that he was bringing for me. El-Al misplaced it somewhere between DC, Frankfurt, and Tel Aviv. Then I realized that while the bag hadn’t made it, he had, and I got much happier! I still had to go to class on Thursday morning, and afterwards we went with a group of my friends to the all-you-can-eat meat restaurant that I had been to once before. It was a fun and delicious start to vacation! After lunch, Michael and I did a little shopping to try and get some clothes for him, since El-Al still had not figured out exactly where the bag was, let alone when it would be delivered. Thursday night was cards night with my friends, as usual, and he got in on the guys’ poker game and did quite well:) Friday we did lots of walking around the city, looking at all the sukkahs going up outside every restaurant. Two phone calls within 3 minutes of each other while we were downtown walking around, and about to go get falafel: my tallit came in! And Michael’s bag was found and would be delivered in about a half an hour! We took a quick detour to pick up the tallit. It’s gorgeous! And then we walked home to wait for the delivery people, who came eventually. And then we went back out for the promised falafel, and returned home to look through the bag and get ready for Shabbat. (Missing items, all meant for me: m&m’s, Trader Joe’s Traveling Chocolate, Oxo can opener for incompetent lefty, receiver for wireless mouse. At least they left mom’s cookies!) For Shabbat, we went to services at Shira Chadasha with a group of my friends, which was slightly disappointing this week, with a very shortened Kabbalat Shabbat, but it was still fun and enough to impress Michael! I’ll drag him back there for a hopefully-better service next visit. For dinner we went to a friend’s place with a group of HUC people, the usual Shabbat dinner experience, and everyone sat and talked and hung out for a while after dinner. Saturday we went to lunch in the HUC sukkah with some of my classmates who were still in town, and we sat there for a couple of hours eating, talking, hanging out. Saturday afternoon involved reading, sudoku, Shabbat napping. We went out for a yummy dinner after Shabbat ended, and then headed to Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv was a great couple of days of relaxing, spending time on the beach, walking around the city, eating, sleeping, sitting by the pool. Exactly what a vacation should be! And we found a Mexican restaurant (none exist in Jerusalem; it made me SO happy) and had chocolate fondue for lunch one day. Clearly, a good vacation. Last night, sadly, I took him back to the airport. It was a fantastic visit, and I can’t wait for the next one! December…hurry up and get here!

I had another adventure on the way home from the airport by myself. Michael’s flight was at 1am, so we arrived at Ben Gurion around 10pm Monday night. There isn’t really anywhere I could go in that airport without a ticket, so I didn’t stay for very long before saying goodbye and going outside to get a shuttle back to Jerusalem. Airport shuttles to Jerusalem leave as soon as they are full (of 10 passengers) and drop off each person at home. The airport is about 45 minutes away, but depending on drop-off order (I’m somehow always near the end) it can take a little while. Last night was very, very long. I got onto the shuttle somewhere between 10:15 and 10:30. I was one of the first ones to get on. There were planes arriving, but few people who wanted a shuttle to Jerusalem. We didn’t fill up until just after 11. The other times I’ve taken the shuttle, it took a couple of minutes to fill and no longer. Once we were full, I fell asleep very quickly. There were several very religious men on the shuttle. (i.e., black suits, long black jackets, peos, black hats…one of them fur.) We went to the neighborhood where we were dropping off one or two of them, and got stuck. It’s the middle of Sukkot, and there was a lot of celebrating in this neighborhood. With all of the parked cars and people walking around (hundreds of them), the road was only wide enough for one. Which was a problem, because we were trying to go up, but a couple of buses were trying to go down. We lost. We pulled over. It took the first bus a good 10 minutes to get by, because the street was so narrow, and there were so many people who were not exactly cooperating about getting out of the way. Before the second bus could go by, someone else from my shuttle got out and stood in front of the bus. With the bus driver yelling and honking at him, he waved at our little shuttle-van. The driver jumped back in and took advantage of the opportunity to back out of our space and turn around and head back down the street ahead of the bus. The whole shuttle told the guy who stood in front of the bus “kol ha-kavod,” all the honor, basically, when he got back on. And we were back on our way. We circled around to try to get close to this man’s house from a different street. When we finally stopped for him (again), it became clear that he did not have enough cash to pay for the shuttle. So we waited for another 10 minutes while he went home, and a wife/sister/some associated woman came back and paid for him. It was a little ridiculous, and just frustrating because of how late at night it was already! While we were waiting, another shuttle passenger got out and demanded to switch to a cab. That was another few minutes. I was the second to last to be dropped off, of course. It was almost 1am by the time I got home.

Now I’m enjoying my vacation, but a bit homesick today. Feel free to cheer me up:) Pictures will be posted once Michael emails them to me and I get my act together and post them. Soon!