Vacation from Vacation

My internet seems to be down right now, so I will write in the meantime and hope that it’s back up for me to post. And check my email. And read the news. And sign onto IM and skype. And, well, to have internet. Sadly, the guest blogger had to head back to the states to go back to school. So while he may provide a nice long comment, you just get my side of the story for now.

New Year’s in Jerusalem was fairly uneventful. I had heard that it was really not celebrated here, so I didn’t even make dinner reservations. That might have been a mistake. It turns out that it’s not really celebrated here by Israelis, but it’s still during the time when Israel is filled up with Americans on vacation, so restaurants are booked. We did find one eventually, and had a good dinner. The rest of the night was quiet and very low-key. Among other things, we packed for our trip to the Dead Sea…

Monday morning we woke up far earlier than planned to the sound of my landlord banging on the (bolted shut) door. He wanted to fix something in the apartment, and when he said he would come by on Monday, I assumed it would be in the evening as usual, or at least after 9 am. Apparently I was wrong. I went to the door and explained that I was still sleeping, and asked him to come back later. He agreed, although I don’t think he apologized for waking me. I guess I can take that as proof that New Years really isn’t an Israeli holiday. Around lunchtime we made it to the rental car office to pick up our car that we had reserved online a few days earlier. They informed us that they didn’t have the car we reserved, but they could upgrade us to a minivan (thanks, guys) or downgrade us (and we would pay less) to a Getz. We really didn’t want the minivan, but the Getz was one of the smallest cars I had ever seen. Michael went outside to look at the two cars and decide, and when he came back in, announced that he had seen a sedan close to what we had reserved, sitting in the lot. They told us they couldn’t give us that car, because someone else had reserved it. That seemed a little illogical to us, since we had also reserved a car, and it wasn’t there. Ultimately, they gave us the car we wanted. As we were filling out the paperwork, another group came in. From their conversation, it was unclear whether they were the ones who had reserved the car we had now claimed, or whether they simply had more claim to it than we did, being part of their frequent rental program or something. In any case, we apparently did a good job of arguing. They told the other group that the car was not available. They could have a minivan or a Getz. We finished as quickly as we could and drove away! Among other things we found in the car was a booklet of Israeli driving laws, at least the ones that are different from the US and Europe. The most random may have been that it is illegal to turn left into a parking lot. I guess I was comforted knowing that in contrast to what I see on the roads, there are, in fact, driving laws in Israel.

The drive to the Dead Sea is on a (perfectly safe) road through the West Bank. (Seriously, there are tourist stops on the way there.) The views of the Judean Desert are amazing. It’s not desert like I would normally picture a desert, but instead hilly and mountainy and rocky and gorgeous. I tried to take some pictures as we drove, but they are mainly blurry and/or have my finger over the lens. But a couple of them came out. We also had to stop once to let a herd of camels cross the road. There were 8-10 of them. We have a picture of the last few going by. It definitely made for good entertainment on the way there, and a definite realization that we were in the middle of a desert.

Our hotel was very…Israeli. And it was filled with lots of…Israelis. They tried to make people stand in lines, but that concept still hasn’t caught on so well in this country. It was a hotel where there were only rooms on one side of the hallway, and the middle was open from the top floor to the bottom, so when there were kids racing up and down hallways and shrieking a few floors away, we heard it. Frequently. There were signs not to drink the tap water, because it’s salty. It’s ok to shower in and brush teeth with, but not so good for large quantities of drinking. The signs said there was drinking water available at a designated location on each floor. We expected a water cooler of some kind. That was a silly assumption. No, there was a tap sticking out of the wall, but instead of being labeled “salty water, not for drinking,” like the rest of the taps in the hotel, this one was labeled “drinking water.” Was it really any different? We’ll never know.

We went to Masada, of course, and debated hiking to the top (supposedly about a 45 minute climb) or taking the cable car (a 3 minute ride). We decided to hike it. It was beautiful outside, and how bad could a 45 minute hike really be? After you’ve committed to the hike and gone well past the ticket counter and cable car entrance, you see the sign at the beginning of the hike, saying it’s a steep climb that also includes about 700 stairs. And they’re not even stairs; they’re uneven stone ones, and some of them should definitely count as two, especially for someone my size! A little over an hour later, we did make it to the top. At the top, I found the ticket counter and upgraded our ticket down to the cable car. It suddenly felt like 700 stairs down was a bad idea. We wandered around the top of Masada for an hour or two, looking at all the ruins of Herod’s palace and the Jewish fortress that used the mountain many years later. It’s a beautiful site, and a fascinating story of the Jewish rebellion and mass suicide that occurred a few years after Jerusalem was conquered, in 73 or 74. Everyone believes the story, the Israeli army brings many of their soldiers to Masada to basically swear that Masada will never fall again, and most tourists stop by to pay homage to a group of rebels who decided to kill themselves rather than become Roman slaves. The story is all written down by Josephus, who apparently got it from a couple of women and children who survived. Archeologists have found a lot of evidence, including the storerooms that contained enough food to survive months or years on the mountain and the stone shards with names carved into them, apparently used for lots to decide who would kill the others. But…they never found the one little piece of evidence that you would think people would need to believe a story about a mass suicide of almost one thousand people: there were never any human remains found at Masada. Weird. I guess everyone likes the story anyway.

The next day we went to Ein Gedi, a nature reserve in the same area. It’s gorgeous. In the middle of desert, there is this area with naturally occurring waterfalls and plants and really pretty things you wouldn’t expect in a desert. And also cute animals that don’t seem so afraid of people. We have some pretty close up pictures of some of them. We did a short hike through the reserve that went to a few waterfalls, each bigger and more impressive than the one before. The last one before hiking back, of course, was beautiful. There was a couple around our age who was hiking right in front of us, then they would stop and be behind us, then in front of us again, and we kept sort of acknowledging each other quietly. We all ended up stopping at the same end waterfall though to take pictures and enjoy its prettiness, so we talked some. One of them was American, went to Penn, lives on the west coast now. She was Israeli. We left the waterfall at the same time and basically hiked back together, pointing out good pictures to one another on the way back. Then we wanted to go see the ruins of a synagogue a short walk away, so we all walked over together. It was entirely random, and I’m sure I’ll never see either one of them again, but it was an amusing way to spend an afternoon.

The trip back from vacation was…well looking back, it was pretty funny. We were in a rental car. We walked back to the car on the last day, about to drive back to Jerusalem. I noticed that something was hanging down in the front. Basically, the front part of the undercarriage is made of cheap, thin plastic. So if you pull all the way into a parking space, it doesn’t always hold up. It didn’t on this car. Michael pushed it back up into place, and we went on our way. A couple of kilometers down the road, it definitely sounded like it had come down again. So we pulled over into a spa parking lot (on the right, of course). Clearly as we were about to drive into the West Bank (a safe part, but still…), we didn’t want to have to stop again. So Michael took a shoelace from one of his shoes and tied the piece back up, wrapping the shoelace around the grill of the car. There were several knots and it seemed very secure, although he mentioned after we were back that he wished he had used both shoelaces; he was worried about it the whole way back. (The drive was about an hour and a half.) We arrived back at my apartment, and still had several hours before the car had to be returned. We debated what to do. Michael wanted his shoelace back, so the piece was going to be hanging down. On further inspection, there was more of the plastic piece missing right behind where it had broken, probably damage that was done before we ever had the car. So we really didn’t want to be charged for something that wouldn’t have happened if the car hadn’t been broken in the first place, although we of course didn’t know that the piece was missing until the little piece that was left broke. So we did what any good Israeli would do. We walked up to a hardware store, debating ethics the whole way there. We decided this was, in fact, taking responsibility: we were fixing the car so that the same thing wouldn’t happen again any time soon. We bought a roll of black duct tape, came back to my apartment, and fixed the damage. Michael got his shoelace back. The car rental place got their car back. Everybody was happy. Hopefully including whoever has that car next…!

Friday morning Michael was a trooper and got up to go on my way early morning shuk run. We bought yummy things and spent the day walking around Jerusalem and not doing a whole lot more. We had a quiet Shabbat dinner at home and enjoyed the treats we had bought ourselves at the bakery in the morning. Eventually his airport shuttle came…at 2 in the morning. An amazing vacation. But always too short.

Now I’m gearing up to go back to school and have lots more visitors. I have a D’var Torah (sermon) to give to my class the end of the month that needs to write itself, travel agent work to do for my parents' trip, some reading to do, and various other errands I would like done before classes start again. I also am (as expected) pretty homesick again. I know that once classes start and I’m busy I’ll do better with that, but right now, I really just feel far away again. So as not to end on a sad note, here’s a link to Michael’s pictures from his trip. I haven’t posted mine, mainly because they’re the same pictures, and also because I haven’t had internet all day. I’m at a friend’s apartment mooching internet for an hour! Talk to you soon…