Yam Le--- ?

Before I get to the good stuff, here are a couple pictures from Purim... Both are from the Tel HaShomer hospital, where we went on Purim morning to give Mishloach Manot the sick children...  Notice that I did, in fact, bring the penguin suit to Israel!!

Last Sunday through Thursday I attended the Masa Jewish Leadership Summit in Yerushaliam.  A number of my friends from Bar Ilan were also there, along with the other 400 gap year and post-college international students in Israel this year.  The week was incredible!  We spent each day in different workshops, learning about different aspects of Jewish leadership and how to be effective in it.  Masa set it up in such a way that each student was in a group with people who were going to the same area for college.  So, my group was all students who will be in New York/New Jersey next year.  They did that so that if we wanted we could actually work together over the coming years, which is awesome.  In addition to learning as much as I did, I made a number of friends from very different backgrounds and had a chance to learn about all sorts of programs in Israel that I had never heard of or learned about.  And, the food was awesomeee!! Who could complain?

Here's a picture of myself and a couple friends at the Gala Dinner event on the first night...

I got back on Thursday night just in time for my favorite night class, and went to a Chametz party at my program director's house after.  When I got home, I packed for Shabbat and went right to sleep.  For Shabbat, I traveled with three of my girl friends- Emma, Miriam, and Yael- to the holy city of Tzfat.  The bus we had to take took four hours due to traffic, which wasn't as bad as it could have been.  When we finally got there, we were picked up by our lovely hosts and we went to their house to get ready for Shabbat.  Our hosts were our program director's mother, which was so nice!  Their house is absolutely beautiful, and it is literally next door to the Ari Z"l's synagogue and overlooks his mikvah and the old cemetery.  Very cool.  We had little time to get ready for Shabbat, but as soon as we did we headed out to find somewhere to pray Kabbalat Shabbat.  The synagogue we initially found wasn't such a good fit, so after a couple minutes we headed out and just walked until we could hear "Yedid Nefesh" being sung.  We followed the song and ended in this little shteibel of a synagogue.  We packed in with the other maybe twenty women, and enjoyed the happy, sing-y kabbalat Shabbat.  Mid-way through the lights went off, which was unexpected but exciting.  After tefilah, we asked how to get to the place where we'd be eating dinner and we found it after about ten minutes.  On the way there, I really enjoyed how I recognized many things from when I had been there with my class in eighth grade.  

Dinner was absolutely wonderful.  Our host family hosts people each week, and they're very good at what they do.  The Rabbi was from New Zealand, and thankfully everyone spoke English.  They had a number of other guests, so it was fun to talk to everyone about where they were in their lives and how we all ended up in that one house for Shabbat.  The house itself was stunning.  It was a couple hundred years old, and the ceiling was arched and probably twenty feet high.  The meal itself was great, too... The challah was one of the best I've ever had, there were salads galore, and it was all topped off with a wonderful chicken.  We might have done the most singing in one meal possible, but we sang some good songs so it was great.  At one point the Rabbi stepped out and the wife started singing a Sephardic song which I like very much, so it was basically the two of us singing and I really enjoyed it.  After dinner, the four of us walked back to where we'd be sleeping and fell asleep quickly.

In eighth grade we visited the Ari Z"l's synagogue, and I remember so clearly how much I loved it.  So, on Shabbat morning I woke up at 7:20ish and made it to synagogue by the 7:45 start-time.  It was Sephardic, which I loved, but even better was how similar it was to our nusach in Seattle.  The men were all sitting down on these comfy-looking couch/bench things which lined the walls, and though one of the men was clearly the chazzan he was sitting with everyone for the beginning, too.  Tefilah was over by 9:45, and everyone went outside for a quick kiddush.  The chazzan man offered me a potato borekah, and it was actually really good. I went back to the house afterwards, and since everyone else went to a different synagogue I was the only one home.  I decided to take a nap, so I slept for about two hours until lunch which was awesome.  Lunch was great!  The food was great, the company was great, there was also some singing going on which was fun... All good.  We spent the afternoon walking around, which was nice.  After Shabbat, they actually offered to drive me home because they were heading to Beit Shemesh anyways, which was SO nice.  The other three girls stayed the night in Tzfat, which is why they only offered me a ride home.  

I got home at some time between 11 and 12, and cleaned my room a bit before putting my laundry in the washing machine.  I hung out with one of my madrichot for a bit, as I was waiting for the laundry to finish. About nine of the guys were heading out to Cyprus for the week at 4:00 am, so I ended up hanging out with some of them before the taxi came and got back to my room at about 4.  I folded my laundry and did some other miscellaneous things, so I ended up staying up until about 6:30.  

I slept in on Sunday until about 1, which I was happy about, and spent the afternoon preparing for a trip that Adina and I decided we'd take starting on Monday.  But we'll talk about that a little more later.  On Sunday night, Ilana, Adina, and I went to this place called the Blackout Restaurant for dinner.  What is special about it is that you eat in complete and total darkness, and your waiters are blind or visually impaired.  It is part of the blind museum, and it was an incredible experience.  I don't think I had ever experienced such total darkness before... Our waiter led us to our table in a train and she helped us find our seats and everything else.  It was cool that she was able to help us find our way.  It took a long time to get used to not seeing, but we finally got the hang of it after fifteen minutes or so.  Something I thought was incredible was that my other senses went into like over-drive as soon as I couldn't see.  I tasted the bread in a way that I had never before... It's hard to describe, but it was very "real" on my tongue.  I know that sounds weird, but I don't know how else to describe it.  The meal itself was pretty good, but it was clear that the experience is what we paid for.  Which was great.  Ilana pointed out that we got to walk out of the room and see again, as opposed to our waitress, which kinda put it into a different perspective.  Overall, it was an amazing experience and highly recommend it to anyone!

There is this famous hike in Israel, called Yam L'yam (Sea to Sea) which stretches from a city called Achziv (on the Mediterranean coast) to a place called Ginosaur (on the beach of the Kinneret).  When I had first heard of this hike from a friend of mine three years ago, I knew it was something that I wanted to do.  A bunch of my friends were doing it this week at different times, and Adina and I decided that we wanted to get in on that action.  On Sunday, a friend of mine was at the mall so she went to this map store and I very clearly told a woman who worked there which map I wanted and she gave it to my friend for me.  We bought all the food we'd need for the three days, and when we got back from the Blind Museum we packed it all up.  I had spent a couple days heavily researching the hike, reading every website in existence about it and talking to as many people as possible who had done it before.  We were planning to get to the starting point by about 10, and we figured we could definitely get to the first camp site by nightfall.  Everyone who I had talked to said that this time of year was the absolute busiest and best time to do the hike because we'd surely run into another group and travel with them.  In addition to that, a couple of friends of ours were planning to do it also on Monday morning but they were traveling by car and we by bus.  We were pretty sure we'd meet up with them at some point, and if not we'd just befriend a different group doing it.  

We left home at 5:30 in order to catch a 5:45 bus, which was the first of four.  Each bus was faster and easier than expected and we actually got to a city called Naharriya earlier than we thought.  All was looking great for us.  Everyone I had talked to said to just ask around and we'd surely find the trail head like that.  We started asking and after probably twenty different people we found no one who had even heard of the supposed trail head.  So I checked my phone and found out that the actual starting point was in Achziv.  This was, by the way, after about forty-five minutes of walking the streets of Naharriya.  We started walking towards Achziv, but found out that the walk was much further than we'd thought.  A Rabbi offered us a lift, and he kindly drove us to the exact place where we needed to be.  We found three Israel young teenage guys who were also doing the hike and said that they had actually done it before, so we followed them for a bit but since they were walking too slowly we went ahead of them and kinda kept an eye on whether or not they were turning the same way as us.  The first hour or so of our walk was through banana plantains, and I knew that was right because of all of the websites I had read.  When we got through that part, we were at a highway and since there was only a road to follow we did that.

Oh.  I forgot to mention.... On the third bus, I took a look at the map to study it a little bit and realized that the woman had done exactly what I told her not to do.  She gave me the "Shvil Yisrael" (trail which stretches from the North to the South of Israel) map as opposed to the "Yam L'Yam" map.  Rude!!!  I said specifically that I did not want that map, because I knew that the two were similar.  Dumb.  So, Adina and I did not have a functional map but figured that we could just follow trail markers until we found our group.  

So we followed this highway for way too long, until we were just fed up because we wanted to be on a trail- not concrete!  We stopped this classic mid-50s Israeli driver, and asked him where to go.  And, by the way about ten feet behind us there was a trail blocked off by a sign which discouraged entrance.  So we were talking to him for a while, and he vaguely remembered doing the hike at one point and said that we should go down the blocked off trail because it would meet up with the real trail.  So, instinctively, thinking that it was a smart question due to the sign and barbed wire, I said, "it's not dangerous?" Leaving his motor running, he got out of his car, walked to the fence, and pulled the poll of the fence out dirt and threw it on the ground.  "Ein sakanah" ("it's not dangerous"), he said.  Typical Israeli.  Whether it was smart or not, I don't know, but we followed the trail until it met up with a big trail about five minutes later.  Hurray! A real trail!  Good news, right?

We stopped for a quick lunch, and headed out in the wilderness.  Beautiful.  After a while we actually found a trail marker, which was the most comforting thing I had seen all day... I'm pretty sure I screamed.  Haha.  The rivers we had to cross, and sign we saw were all things that I had read about in my research, so we were finally confident.  Minus the lack of map.  We came across a biker, who had the exact map that I asked for, and we knew for sure that we were going in the right direction and that we were moving at a good pace.  Good news.  We continued for a couple hours, still seeing trail markers, and when we looked up we saw nothing other than:

three cows!! We gently made our way through them, and continued forth.  Soon after that we saw:

a castle which we later found out is called Montforte's castle.  We had a number of little rivers to cross over, and I have to go ahead and publicly pay tribute to how incredible my hiking boots are.  I think I might actually write an email to REI in thanks for the recommendation.. I was able to walk through the water, and as long as the water line remained below the top of my boot I didn't get wet.  That's right, people! Waterproof boots!  Then, one time I accidentally stepped too deeply but because of my awesome hiking socks (also from REI) my foot was wet for like five total seconds, if even that.  Amazing.  And while I'm praising REI, I might as well mention how much I adore my backpack... That thing is a force to be reckoned with!  Love it!  Here's a picture of Adina crossing the river carefully:

So anyways, we continued along for a while until we got to a point where the trail went very up.  We hiked up this very steep mountain for a while, and as much as it sucked it was that much better when we saw:

It's kinda hard to see, but the ocean (the very light blue on the left in the middle of the picture) is the ocean and where we started not that long before... AWESOME to see how far we had hiked in such little time.  So cool.

We kept hiking up for about fifteen more minutes, and we got to: 

Beautiful!!!!  But, there were four different trail options.. Confusing.  We put our stuff down, and when we were done moaning and groaning I found this random guy who I asked about where to go.  He spoke some Hebrew, but wasn't the best communicator.  What I understood was that in order to get to the place for our first campsite we needed to go back down the mountain and a very far way to a place called "Abirim."  He told me not to go down one of the paths, which was 25% helpful. Haha.  We also found this very kind German father and son who are touring Israel for five days.  They offered to help us, and showed us this map which they had which was only semi-helpful.  It wasn't specific enough, so we couldn't tell which trail to take... We only knew which direction to go in.  An additional problem we were having was the fact that the sun would be setting in about an hour and a half.  And although we were prepared to hike at night, which flashlights, it is obviously not the safest idea especially when we didn't have a map and there would likely not be people to ask on the trail.  So we walked down one of the trails for about ten minutes before realizing that that was definitely not the right one.  We stopped to discuss our options, and headed back up the trail.  Now we had two possibilities: walk back down the huge mountain which we had climbed up and hope that it led to a trail we missed for some reason, or take this trail which seemed like it was going in the wrong direction.  

When we got to the top we saw that the German tourists who we had run into were about to leave.  We really did not know what to do.  It was clear that we weren't really prepared for our future as hikers because of our lack of map, but we were definitely mentally and financially invested in our plan to finish.  What to do?  After much deliberation, we decided together that the best and most responsible thing we could do was ask our German tourist friends for a ride out.  So we did.  

Definitely a bitter-sweet ending. We had an absolutely awesome day, full of hiking- through cities and the forest- and we had a great experience together.  Lame because we really really wanted to finish yam l'yam, but happy because we made the good and safe decision.  Luckily for us our tourist friends were actually heading back to Tel Aviv, and they offered to drive us there with them... So nice!  

What's worse than sitting in a car for three hours because of traffic?

Sitting in a car for three hours because of traffic and having to pee the entire time... Sorry if that's a little to open for you, but I thought it was an important part of the day.  I'm serious I don't think I had ever had to pee that badly in my entire life.  Thankfully when they dropped us off on this random street, we found a little market with a bathroom after about ten minutes of walking.  Heaven! After that we walked for about twenty-five minutes to the Azrieli towers, where we were able to take a bus home.  We got home about fourteen hours after we had left, and it was a truly adventurous day.  Aside from a sunburn and some definite soreness, I'm totally happy about our day yesterday.  When I got home, I unpacked and showered quickly so that I could get right into bed... And so I did.  I slept for a solid thirteen or fourteen hours, which I haven't done in a looong time, and I plan to return the map and some of the food today.  

Bright and early on Thursday morning I will be heading to the airport to catch a flight to Rhodes.  For those of you who don't know, Rhodes is an island off of Greece and it is the homeland of my Ezra Bessaroth ancestors.  I will be meeting my parents and my younger brother there, and I could not be more excited for that!  We will hopefully have a lovely Shabbat together, for the first time in about seven months, in the coolest place ever.  And on Sunday night we'll fly back to Israel, where we'll all spend Pesach together in an apartment in Yerushaliam!

Remember when we said "L'shana ha'bah b'Yerushaliam" "Next year in Jerusalem" at the end of the Pesach seder last year??  We really meant it!!!