Finding Jesus in the Holy Land... Literally

Last Tuesday, I was walking to class by myself, kind of whistling and bobbing my head along, minding my own business. I cross the street, and I see this guy turn the corner and begin walking behind me.

That guy?

Jesus.

Or His twin.

Or a guy that looks JUST LIKE HIM.

Seriously.

He had long brown hair, a full beard, and was wearing head to toe white, loose linen clothing. It had been raining earlier in the day so the ground was a patchwork of puddles and slick pavement, but Jesus (I refer to him in my head as 'Hay-Sus' so it's less potentially blasphemous) was in bear feet just walking up the sidewalk.

I kept throwing confused glances over my shoulder, and Jesus kept on walking behind me for a good 200-300 yards. I'm starting to get anxious; am I hallucinating? Is it really Him? Am I even crazier than hallucinating because I'm starting to think it might be?

Finally Jesus turns and walks into an Aroma (Israel's answer to Starbucks), and I'm immensely relieved.

My Hebrew is waaay to bad to be trying to talk to Him.

eXtreme Israel

A few weekends ago (I forget how many, senior moment) I finally garnered the social courage to go on one of the trips offered by the university for us semester kids.

Rappelling. In the Qumran.

It was so frat.

There were like 20 kids, 2 university guides, 1 security guard (of course), and 4 rappelling company guides. We leave the university at 6:30 am, and I start getting the feeling that it is going to be a long day.

First of all, the university guide gets in the front of the bus as we're pulling out and tells us that we may not actually be able to rappel today. And that we won't know until we get there.

.... All right.

Second, everyone on the bus except for yours truly is super-awake and super-chatty. Even when I am super-awake, chattiness is not known to be one of my qualities. I plug in my headphones and drown out the inane babble and sleep until we get there.

We pull up and now I'm that much more groggy than everyone else, and we get the all-clear to go. Phew.

What do you mean, we can't text on our Blackberries on the way down?

We go on a short hike, maybe 10 minutes, and the girls are starting to complain. It's hot. They're thirsty. Feet/head/back/whatever hurts.

I am not optimistic for the outcome of this venture at this point.

I ditch the girls in back and go up front with the guys and things get much better.

Qumran is right next to Ein Gedi, the place where I hiked a few weeks ago, so it's really similar. There are canyons from the desert plateau above where the water runs down in the case of rain. We were rappelling down where the waterfalls would have been should there have been water, so it was pretty sick.

The first fall was 35 meters. The guides set up all the ropes and everything while everyone else sits around on the rocks and plays -my favorite- get to know you games.

It's finally time to go down, so Zac and I (newfound friend who shares my distrust of bonding activities) rush down and manage to go down 5th and 6th, respectively.

It was so cool. We feed the rope through the crazy metal thing, bounce off the rocks, and get close to the bottom and make a startling discovery:

There is still water at the bottom of the pools.

And we have to rappell right into it.

It sounds exciting, but the water is actually frigid. And deep. Like up-to-my-chin deep. And the bottom? Squelchy, squishy, shoe-sucking mud.

We climb around the rocks, waiting for people to finish. The security guard occassionally yells at us to get away from the edge, don't climb too high... etc etc etc.

The second fall was 15 meters, and this one dropped into another pool that was even colder, and even deeper. Immediately after this one is the next fall, and because there are pools of water everywhere there is no way to escape the annoying people because we're all perched on the same small patch of rock.

There was another group ahead of us, so we have to wait for them to finish and remove their ropes before we can even begin, so it takes a good hour between the rappells. The sun begins to set, and it lowers behind the rocks, and the temperature begins to drop.

It's still light out, but we are soaking wet and freezing cold. Like shivering.

I was told my lips were blue so I got to go down fairly early. This last one was 50 meters, and sheer cliff.

Also, SHEER AWESOME.

We had to rappell into another pool of water, but this time there was sunshine on the other end, so it was great.

The people at the bottom had scattered and were all basking on the rocks like lizards, trying to dry out and warm up. I meet back up with Zac (who by now had a terrible bandana burn) and this other guy Micah, and we went exploring. We climbed down the next fall (like 8 feet, chillax parents) and scrambled up some hills.

While clambering about, we found this tunnel. Being adventurous, we crawled in. It was a really small tunnel, so we had to crawl on our hands and knees, but it was awesome. Every once and a while there would be a hole to the outside and we had magnificent views of the wadi (canyon).

So there we are, just crawling, and all of a sudden there is this light up ahead. We keep going, and all of a sudden the tunnel floor in front of us is GONE. There's just a shaft that goes up and down for yards in either direction.

I affectionately refer to this as The Shaft of Doom.


Wanting to avoid the aforementioned Doom but still wanting to see where the tunnel goes, we caaaarefully scamper on the ledge that goes around it and continue on our merry way.

Finally and tragically, the tunnel comes to an end, putting the three of us on the edge of an amazing outlook overlooking the entire wadi and all the way out to the Dead Sea.

The sun was setting behind us, and I could hear the vaguely indie music getting louder and picture the credits starting to roll, that's how perfect and Hollywood this moment was.

W.D.E.: Wanted-Death Experience

So this weekend, I decided to take it easy, unwind, go to the beach...

Good plan, right?

Yeah.

I head off to Kibbutz Shefayim, to once again revel in the beauty of the sand cliffs and the Mediterranean. It's a little windy, but we decide to still head down since it's sunny and there's nothing else to do on Shabbat.

Lovely walk through the park, scramble down the cliff... Beach. Bliss.

We walk a little ways down to find somewhere where swimming wouldn't be totally dangerous (big rocks! I ended up not swimming, so don't worry), and suddenly the people-scape changes.

And by changes, I mean gets naked.

Apparently it was a nude beach.



We've been there before, and there were no nude people, but today they were out in full clothes-less force.

And by they I mean fat old men.

One guy in particular stands out as the most traumatizing one of the bunch.

He was standing facing the ocean, hands on his hips, fully naked except for the hat and shawl he wore around his shoulders to ward off the cold.

THAT'S WHAT CLOTHES ARE FOR.

Remember how I said it was windy?

Well, uh, he had a big of a flag-in-the-wind problem going on.

There was also a naked guy tanning all his lovely lady lumps, and at some point another guy came up to him and they were just laying on the sand talking and taking in the day.

The second guy? Fully clothed. I don't even know.

Needless to say, I walked as far from the naked people as possible, set down my towel, and promptly laid face-down and fully clothed.

My psychiatrist will be hearing about this twenty years down the road when I turn into a never-nude.

N.D.E. (Near-Death Experience)

Mom, Dad, don't panic, but I've been attacked.

By a bird.

It's a sunny Monday morning, and Jess and I are enjoying a groggy walk to 8:30 Hebrew. The birds are chirping, the sun is shining, and the spring flowers are blooming in full force. I was even humming the Beatles, that's how jolly of a morning it was.

Until....

Something starts pulling on my hair, from the top of my head. I scream and flail my arms in the general direction of the offender, only to see the world's biggest crow fly off, a few stray hairs dangling from its CLAWS.

I'm still pretty shaken up, not to mention the fact that my head has just been assaulted. Jess checks for bird poop, and just as soon as we're in the clear, the dang bird circles back around and begins dive bombing me.

It swoops in for a strike, flaps off (to gain height, the better with which to destroy me with) and drops again.

This literally happens four times before I make it into the security checkpoint area.

Let the Alfred Hitchcock jokes begin.

Ein Gedi, Day 1: 1, 2, 3, Shalom!

I am tired. And sore. And sunburned in random places, including but not limited to: the back of my neck, the back of my upper arms, the tops of my forearms, and the backs of my knees.

Hiking in the desert will do that to you.

Especially when it's 100 degrees. Good thing we went in early March, or I would have definitely melted.

This weekend, three friends and I went to Ein Gedi, the nature reserve next to the Dead Sea for two days of sunnin' and funnin'. And by that I mean hiking.

Anyways, even the ride there was exciting. We descended from Jerusalem (on top of a hill) to the lowest point on earth (the Dead Sea), which meant for half of the 1 1/2 hour ride, I was deaf, and for the other half, everything was excruciatingly loud. Darn ear pressure.

We're rolling along, and all of a sudden we roll by this toll-booth looking place, and Armin, one of the people I went with, goes, "Hey, we're in the West Bank right now."

What!?

Parents, before you die, it was a C zone area, which means it is under Israeli control, and totally safe. (If you don't believe me, which I know you don't, see the Administration section of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_bank. Resume breathing).

So now I have the street cred of having gone into the West Bank without any of the danger! Sweet!

We drove by a woman in full hijab herding a goat, a man herding a flock of camels (gaggle? herd? pride? whatever the word is for camel groups is), and Jericho. Jericho was kind of lame, just a low-lying city, but I guess I shouldn't have been expecting any tall walls, for obvious reasons.

Anyways, we get to the field school where we stayed, and it was rad. There were ibexes just cruising around, horns and all, like it was no big deal. Check in wasn't until 3, so we stashed our stuff, filled up our water bottles and headed out.

10:15 am.

Friday we hiked up Mt Yishav, a rocky, barren outcrop with a marvelous view of the Dead Sea and Wadi David.

Wadi is some bizarre word that is neither English nor Hebrew... It means canyon, but there is a different word for canyon in Hebrew, and the Hebrew signs all had that word (don't ask me what it is, like I remember). And unless I'm mistaken, 'wadi' doesn't mean anything in English, so...

Yeah. Made up words. Great.

Anyways, we hike-hike-hiked to the top of Mt Yishav, scrambling up the mountain side, sliding on the loose rocks, and sweating like woah. It was hot.

At one point, we reached a place where there was a really rad echo. Doing the only logical thing on a mountain of loose rocks, we all stand close together and shout, "1, 2, 3, SHALOM!"

Really sweet echo, and also really sweet lack of fatal rock slide.

We finally get to the top and it is. So. Hot. We take some victory pictures on top, and stop to drink in the view, and some water.

To the one side, we can see the wadi we're headed to later, another side, the Dead Sea, and the other side, the desert plateau which we are now on.

The plateau is completely deserted except for a bright green truck in the distance. No idea how it got up there, as the trails we used were hardly fit for mountain goats, let alone a truck.

We climb back down and head into the wadi, and lose the trail, as we had been threatening to do all day. We know the falls we're headed to are further up, so we just hike in the dry riverbed, figuring we'll find it eventually, or turn back and find the trail again.

We go on like this for a while, when we see a man running towards us and shouting in Hebrew. No one has any idea what he's saying, so we stutter out in Hebrew that we don't speak Hebrew, does he speak English?

And of course he does.

And of course he's a park ranger, and of course we're in a closed part of the reserve, and of course the park is closing.

Did I mention the ranger is heavily armed? Oh, Israel...

He walks us back to the trail and part of the way out, and was asking about our day. We told him we climbed Mt Yishav, and he goes, "Oh, I know. We watched you on our telescope."

Of course.

It turns out that the desert plateau we reached was about a 4-hour walk from Hebron, a controversial town in the West Bank. Apparently sometimes Hamas likes to send people up there to do things. Drug and arms smuggling from Jordan across the Dead Sea mostly.

We got lucky today, no militants. Huh.

He leaves us at these crystal-clear pools that are allegedly okay to drink out of, and I tried a handful just to try, and it was delicious and cold. I'm still skeptical of filling an entire bottle of the stuff, but it's nice to say I tried it.

We hike down some more into the wadi (Wadi David), and finally reach some of the most amazing and surprising falls. Surprising because we spent the rest of the day in a DESERT.

We leave the main falls because there were loads of tourists who had taken the canyon walk in, and we found another, smaller one further down, thankfully took off our shoes, and jumped in.

We splashed around, floated, reveled in the not-hotness-and-suniness of it all, swam up the waterfall and got pounded in the face with water. A ranger came and told us it was time to go (recurring theme of the trip), so we reluctantly put our shoes back on (sorry, feet), and walked back to the field school.

4:15 pm. Long day, right

I was asleep by 8:30. And woke up at 6:45 to do it all over again.

Sorry, body.