A Crazy Day In and Around Tel Aviv!!

I woke up this morning at around 7:30, which gave me enough time to really take my time waking up and get my stuff together by 8:40.  We all made it to the bus basically on time, and rolled out towards the Yitzchak Rabin Museum.  We each received these cool earpiece-less headphones, which attached to a headset that hung around our necks.  The way they work is that in front of each of the many many screens throughout the museum a sensor reads that the headset is there and feeds the headphones the English translation or explanation of what is happening on or around the screen.  They were definitely really cool and technological, but more importantly helpful in my learning process.  I really appreciated the way that the museum was set up... There is basically one main hall which winds around in a spiral, and there are U-shaped hallways which shoot off of the main one.  And all of the walls of every hallway are lined with video screens, glass plaques with information in Hebrew, Arabic, and English on them, or other informational tools.  And the whole thing was in chronological order, which was definitely helpful.  They also had in U-shaped hallways, sections of the floor which were made of glass and displayed a timeline of things going on outside of Israel.  I definitely appreciated that, because in general when I learn about a time period I like to see what possible societal, national, or world-wide influences there could be, so the floor timeline was helpful.  My favorite part of the museum was a four minute video about the six-day war.  It showed videos of combat, but the narrator was able to give a good explanation and clarification of what was going on.  It definitely gave me a better understanding for how amazing of an accomplishment the six-day war really was.  The last stretch of hallway in the museum was a series of many many pictures of Yitzchak Rabin doing different things and with different people.  Many of them either had to do with political deals or his army life, but it was cool to see his life through pictures.  After we all finished walking through the museum, we sat outside in the parking lot and ate our sandwich lunches.  I had lox with tomato and lettuce, which was surprisingly delicious. Picture of Nick and I outside of the Museum:

We headed out towards Namal Port, which is a shopping district much like the Pier in Seattle, near Tel Aviv.  We all spent an hour just walking around and hanging out, and we had a pretty good time.  People split off into groups, and bought coffee or ice cream- but, as far as I know, nothing significant.  I had a good time just hanging with a couple of my friends. 

The bridge to the shopping district

 

 Standing on top of the cement barrier to the bridge!

From there we left to the highlight of the day: Paragliding!!  We drove for about fifteen or twenty minutes before we got to a very fielded, dirt-road kind of an area, and that is when the adventure began.  Our little bus was having a difficult time navigating the hilly terrain, but despite the issues we pushed through.  We most definitely retraced our pathway a couple of times, due to the fact that everything surrounded us looked like dirt or grass, but we eventually made our way to the top of a little sand hill where the bus was no longer able to venture further. Though the ocean was not at all visible, my senses were a-tingling and I knew that it was near.  We plowed through the sand roads and made it to the beauty itself... The Mediterranean.  This is what I saw:

Can you argue with that? I don't think so....

It took a couple minutes from that beautiful spot to get to where we would be paragliding, but if you thought that was incredible just wait until you see these ones:

Beautiful, I know.  I wish the color of the water couple properly be displayed in the pictures, because it is actually indescribable. The complete vastness of the area, and the seemingly never-ending ocean... AMAZING.  I really am having a difficult time formulating well what I am trying to say, so I hope you get the point.  

Anyways, since there were thirteen of us to go paragliding we had to take turns.  I happily sat on the edge of the at least one-hundred foot tall cliff as others began the paragliding process first.  It was super cool to watch the first two people go, because they went simultaneously since we had two paragliding helper people for us.  As I was just sitting, taking pictures, and wholly admiring the sheer beauty that was before me, I noticed my friend starting to climb down the side part of the cliff and went to check it out.... Another one of my friends was about 3/4 of the way down between the top of the cliff and the Medit, so I basically said to myself, "I need to be there."  Here's a picture of the climbable part of the cliff:

It's hard to tell, but this is basically a hole in the cliff with lots of rocks and tons of sand.  Wish I could explain better what it is, but that's what I got for you...

I knew that I had no choice to find a way down, so I started the journey.  At first, taking it slowly and easily I held onto the rocks as my feet slid in the sand; my body sliding/falling at the solid 70-75 degree angle of the cliff. Scary, but awesome.  I kind of started to re-think my adventure after a couple of minutes, but I had a great internal motivation speech and continued forth.  I'm going to take this moment to recognize that I was totally thinking about the Owen Family Song as I was making my way down the potentially life-threatening situation of a cliff that I has put myself into, and the song goes like this: 

We are the Owen Family;

The get-up-and-go family;

We hike from hilltop to hilltop!

We hike and camp in Lake Chelan,

and Carnation,

We're all-for-one;

We're one-for-all;

We are the Owen Family.

(See any Owen family member for the tune of this lovely song)

 Anyways, as I proceeded down the cliff-side I came to a screeching halt.  There was a rather large drop, which my friend advised me to jump off of like he did.  I wasn't totally feeling that.  Despite the total adrenaline rush and pure desire to complete my goal, my don't-break-yourself alarm was making a lot of internal noise.  Don't worry, guys: I didn't jump... I found an alternative route.  Yay me!  I paved a new pathway, as I slid down the opposite side of the cliff.  Moral of the story is that after a number of minutes spent climbing down the cliff-side, the goal had been accomplished. WHAT. UP. My friends Adiel, Zach, and I had successfully climbed down a full-on cliff and we were on the breathtaking beach itself.  Guess what happened next... My shoes, then socks, most definitely came off, and there was probably some running happening on my behalf.  We all ran into the ocean and enjoyed the incredible water which was up to our ankles.  Then we decided that this was absolutely a once-in-a-lifetime kind of an opportunity, and we went deeper. Incredible, incredible, incredible.  I have never experienced such a thing before.  When people have told me about how amazing Israel or traveling is, and everyone has had stories of such impromptu and incredible experiences, I was never totally able to get such a good idea of or feeling for what that is like.  Today, I gained an understanding.  Not only for the beauty of spontaneity, but also for the wonder and uniqueness of Israel. Speechless.  Here's a picture, that someone took from on top of the cliff, of my two friends and I who first made it down to the Medit. itself.

Yum.

We climbed back up after a good twenty minutes of sheer beauty in fear of missing our turns for paragliding.  We all managed to scramble up, and of course as we began our ascent a couple of our friends were jealous and began their descent.  Because we're cool.. No joke.  Anyways, we made it up and went to the Israeli woman who was in charge to tell her that we were ready for our turns.  Even though there were two or three boys ahead of us, as soon as the people who were flying came down she told me to go over to her, ahead of the boys, because I'm a girl.  Girl power! It always works... Love it.  I thought I was nervous for this whole flying-hundreds-of-feet-above-ground thing, but the exhilaration of the climbing worked out any and all knots in my stomach and I was totally ready to go.  My flyer guy buckled me in like fifty thousand times, which would have been comforting if I hadn't been literally feeling like I was on top of the world and needed no such thing to calm me down.  The flyer guy told me to run as best as I could across the sandy cliff top, until we would be off the cliff, but it was seriously difficult because the wind was pulling our parachute up as we were trying to maneuver ourselves forward.  But, alas, we made it happen and off we were... Flying very high in the sky! It was totally insane! I was literally sitting in buckles and on one of those pad mats people sit on at baseball games, but I was hundreds of feet above the sea.  To the north we saw Netanya, and to the south we saw Tel Aviv.  No words can describe the rush that flooded my veins as the flyer man was pulling us sharply left and right; back and forth; up and down.  I mean I guess I could attribute my supreme nausea to all of those exciting things, which might help you understand my feeling a little bit more, but whatever... The nausea was totally worth it.  Amazing. Here's a pic of me and the flyer man on our way from the North to the South across the coast:

 After we landed, the nausea really hit me which was super lame because despite my usual state of total preparation for anything and everything I actually ran out of water today for the first time since I got to Israel.  Lame day to be lacking water! So as the two final members of our group went paragliding, I hiked back to our bus with my friend Nick in order to try to calm down the nausea.  Since I didn't have water it wasn't working so well, but I got a great suggestion to eat a granola bar, which kinda helped, and closed my eyes and listened to my i-pod until everyone got back.  I totally thought that puking was imminent, but I was able to avoid it-- yay me for not puking!  When everyone else finally got back to the bus we headed out, and our way back to our living campus stopped for water bottles- thank G-d.  

We got home and I literally jumped in the shower, after taking my sand-filled shoes off outside of my apartment, and enjoyed the clean-fest very much.  I had a line on my ankle that looked like a tan line, but later found out that it was actually just sand caked onto my legs from when I was climbing up the side of the cliff. I was sad because I thought I got super tan today, but I was happy that I could get the sand off of me.  The new, clean, not-as-nauseated me enjoyed a nice salad with some friends in our kitchen.  Afterwards I sat on our new picnic table, which sits outside of our building, where I spent some time working on this blog post and just hung out with the girls.  At 7 we were scheduled to have a couple classes, so we all made our way over there.  I really enjoyed all three classes, and they made me remember how much I enjoy actually learning things.  Haha.  So I do have something to look forward to about school, but for now I'm pretty set with enjoying the beauty of this country all day every day.

After the classes, I hung out with a couple of the girls in the kitchen as I was awaiting the arrival of Dena and Ilana! They finally came, and I met them halfway between the bus stop and my apartment, and it was so great to see and be with them!!! I showed them around a little bit, then we hung out around the apartment for a while, and then headed out.  It was late so we didn't really have anywhere to go, but we just walked around Ramat Ef'al and happened upon a zoo! Guess how we knew it was a zoo? The smell... Yucky.  But here's a picture of one of the animals we saw street-side at a little after 1:00 AM:

After a little exploring, we came back to my apartment and just hung out.  Now it's almost 5:00 AM, which is the latest I've stayed up in who knows how long, and it is time to go to sleep.  Lila tov l'kulam!