Le’kol hatchala yesh sof, u’le’kol sof yesh hatchala chadasha.
To every beginning, there’s an end, and to every end, there’ a beginning.

A year on the other side of the planet? Cool! I wouldn’t have done it any other way. After all, there’s existing, and then there’s living. For me, that sense of being alive is my inspiration to write. That, and knowing that you were reading.

Thanks.

THURSDAY
As we arrived for tfillot, it turns out that the maintenance staff was in the middle of washing the floor of the Ariel room. We felt awful walking all over it once they finished. I got asked to lead Psukei, and started walking away when it was time for Shacharit, but Mike told me to keep going. That was really too long of a service for one person to lead so early in the morning. After breakfast, we gathered again in Ariel for a whole slew of lectures and presentations on sticking with the Conservative movement and Israel after Nativ ended. First off was Rabbi Paul Freedman and his wife, Nina, talking about Project Reconnect. He was director of USY for quite a while, and spoke to us as if he was still in that position, focusing more on his d’var Torah and commending us than saying anything about his cause. However, he was cute as always, so at least he was entertaining. Next up, we had two speakers from the Conservative Yeshiva. One was a guy who came and went within thirty seconds, and one was a woman who asked each Nativer who’d chosen the Yeshiva track for first semester to say something they liked about the place.

After a break, we had a presentation by Nefesh B’Nefesh, an organization that helps facilitate aliyah for Diaspora Jews. They showed us a video about a landmark day for the group in which three airplanes of new olim, one American, one Canadian, and one British, had all landed simultaneously at Ben Gurion airport. The movie had no dialogue, and rather set the montage of people’s old homes, hugs goodbye, fun on the airplane, and arrival in Israel, to a moving Mizrachi song. As the lights came up in the end, a surprising number of Nativers were in tears. So, when the question was asked at the end of who was considering aliyah, the number of people who raised their hands was probably inflated. Our final presentation of the morning was done by a woman with atrociously long hair who told us about future program options in Israel. From firefighter service to army commander training, a whole range of ideas was laid out for us to think about. And with that, we had lunch and some free time before the huge afternoon program. I went to purchase the various gifts that I needed before breezing back into Beit Nativ.

Our big afternoon program was created by the six madrichim and was titled The Nativ Museum. We started off by getting pretty Jerusalem-themed notebooks in which they’d glued pictures of us as well as questions about our year for us to fill out. As we left the auditorium with our books, we saw that all of -3 had been transformed into a maze, recreating our typical surroundings on Nativ from September through May. We weaved through our airplane on the way to Israel, Beit Nativ, Aroma and Egon, Machtesh HaGadol, Hebrew U and the Yeshiva, a sukkah with other holiday elements, an airplane for vacation, Haifa/Gadna/The Dig, Dialogue in the Dark, the Negev, and the crossroads to three different rooms for Ein Tzurim, Be’er Sheva, and Yerucham – all with the perfect props, decorations, and places to write as we paused at each station. It was a great way to “get back in the zone” if we’d forgotten what it felt like to actually be in each location and situation. (Mind you, the Be’er Sheva room definitely beat the Yerucham and Kibbutz ones, what with a mural waiting to be painted and Grey’s Anatomy playing on a laptop.) Personally, I didn’t make any crazy new discoveries, as I’d been doing my writing and reflecting as I’d gone along all year. However, I thought that this program was fantastic both in its goal and execution, and I’m going to remember it for the end of other programs, too.

That night was a little bit crazy. Mike had told me that Judith and Penina were in town, so when I finished the staff program early, I went over to hang out with them at their apartment. It was great catching up with them, but I had to leave as they began to cook dinner to meet up with Jacob. (We were supposed to have dinner at our the home of Na’ama, our Pilgrimage rosh, that night, but she had to postpone it until Sunday. We wanted to call Jacob to tell him, but he was observing two days of Shavu’ot, as per the Diaspora custom. So, he showed up base anyway, which was great because Judith and Penina wanted to see him. Phew.) At first, Jacob, Alana, Gabe and I all went out together to grab falafel and ice cream. After a while, we met up with Judith, Penina, her friend Eyal(?) and Mike. Judith and Alana paired up, though they’d never met before, on some shared connections, Gabe left to go to bed, and the rest of us hung around together, weaving in and out of groups and losing one another. Eventually, Alana and Mike went off drinking, Jacob headed back to his yeshiva, and the remaining four of us headed back to the apartment to watch (or better, fall asleep to, as it was already 2 AM) 10 Things I Hate About You. So weird things happened. But weird things happen.

FRIDAY
Yonit and Shosh day! We woke up early to head off to the Israel Museum together one last time. Since we’d left Jerusalem, the special exhibition on bread had been replaced by a new Surrealist and Dada pavilion that was extremely well done. The best part, though (especially for Yonit, a lover of kids’ fantasy books), was a life-sized closet into which one could walk, following a path down to a window. Through the small hole was another world entirely. Juxtaposed next to all the classic Dalí, Duchamp, Miró, and the like, we spent most of our time there. We also checked out an exhibit on Western interpretations of Middle Eastern culture and life. I was reminded of the Biblical Art class in which Efrat told us about the Crusaders’ map of Jerusalem, citing the Dome of the Rock as the Beit HaMikdash. I was also amused by photos of bourgeois 19th century Europeans who journeyed down to Israel for tours of the Holy Land. Their group shots in front of desert dunes and Masada are just like ours, only they’re dressed in their best and nobody’s smiling.

Not having eaten breakfast, we were starving as the museum closed, so we hiked back up to Ben Yehuda for one final Burger’s Bar for me (and a first try for her, which she liked). Back at base, I took a nap until it was time to get ready for Shabbat. Once again, we had Mincha, Kabbalat Shabbat, and Ma’ariv at base, followed by the usual dinner. Things were shaken up only by Nahum’s absence, as Elishe had gone into labour, Nathan and Josh’s presentation of Hanna’s underwear and wifebeaters frozen in a brick of ice, and a fight between a cat and a rat outside. We had our final Nativ-a-Tisch, singing all the usual favourites and eating our last Marzipan rugelach for quite a while. And as it ended off, we all went to bed.

SATURDAY
For our last chance to go to where we wanted Shabbat services, I opted for Yemin Moshe. Alana, Shoshi and I took the scenic route by the French consulate to get there, but we still managed to show up in time for the Shacharit Amidah. Excellent. The building slowly filled up with Nativers, perhaps waiting to hear the announcement of Nahum’s baby, perhaps just for one last dose of pecan pie, up until the last kids who plopped themselves outside the door just for the Kiddush. (Ethical? One of our morning debates…) The kiddush was a bit of a letdown compared to usual, though, so we still had room for lunch at Beit Nativ. Rachel and I were feeling impatient, though, so we ended up ducking out early to explore the newly unlocked, completely destroyed British hotel at the base of Agron. (Basically, we’ve been itching for the chance all year long.) The inside looks exactly like the music “school” from Mishehu LaRutz Ito – the building being like one tall column with winding staircases, crazy cornices, and winding corridors lined with one teensy room after another. Of course, the entire place was covered in the garbage and graffiti of politically minded squatters. “Blank walls = blank minds”, the walls asserted to me, which made me at once question my status as a thinking person. Mind you, I think that I can have a brain and a bed all at once, thanks. After traipsing around finding treasures in our Shabbat clothes, we headed back to base.

I napped until Mincha, and all the usual end-of-Shabbat-and-chag rituals raced by quickly. I hand-squeezed my own lemonade out of a lack of decent food at Seudah Shlishit. Finally, after Havdallah, Yossi announced the birth of Nahum and Elishe’s baby that afternoon – it’s a boy! I headed down to Cup-O-Joe with Nathan, Tani, Alana, and Julia, where Elana later joined us. This was a truly wacky crowd, between our inability to order and our inability to eat properly. And that’s all I can remember from that night…

SUNDAY
Last full day in Israel. Wow. After davening and breakfast (where I squeezed my own orange juice, for a change, and saw off Kizell), we had programming by track. First off was a session by Yossi as a way to move on to “the day after Nativ”. Like his first program with us, he gave us prompts such as “how I’ve changed this year” and “what I’m looking forward to at home”, which we went around the circle answering with just one phrase. Some people veered towards funny answers (Yossi “What is the biggest threat to Judaism?” Andy: “Iran.”), some people stayed serious, while some passed on every single question. Either way, by the middle of the program, the tearfest had begun. We had a block of free time and lunch, which I used to pack, before a program about Jewish life in college with our staff.

We each got a pile of confetti and three cups (Yes, Maybe, and No), and were asked a series of questions related to how we saw our Jewish observance evolving in college. This wrapped up with resources we can use to help us along as Jewish students. We also had the chance to create and artistic representation of our year on Nativ. However, Aviva and I had been commissioned to make Mike some sort of IOU gift – we would be giving him a set of Mishna, but back in New York to save on shipping costs. So, we took a white sheet, wrote “IOU” on it in huge letters with an explanatory note, and then wrote down random “inspirational” quotes to cover the rest of it. Finally, we had a long end-of-year speech by Yossi (aka his Words of Wisdom). The cutest moment of this was the way that he and Nahum reminisced about their time together as co-staff, as they’re parting ways next year. It’s quite nice to see their best friend dynamic play out in their silly stories, compliments, and gift-giving – of course, giving each other the receipts to get reimbursed for them later. ;) Finally, we all got our yearbooks and various shirts, and (luckily for me), everyone was thrilled with them.

After the formal programming, Jacob came over so that we, along with Tani, could finally have our dinner at Naama’s house. We had been told to pick up drinks at SuperSal, but that evolved into a half-hour challenge due to the incompetence of Svetlana, the incompetent cashier. Sigh. But even after walking down to the very last apartment on Rechov Palmach, Naama was just finishing up with her cooking, so we were really right on time. She made us a terrific Italian feast with great bread, ravioli, and lasagna – and ice cream! All three of us fell in love with Naama all over again, as she just becomes cuter, wiser, and more fun every time we spend time with her. Next year’s Nativ is very lucky to have her on staff next year. Back at base, I went to my room with Alana and Jacob for some art time, but as we were sitting down, who should show up but Amir? I banged down Emily’s door to steal Abi’s guitar for an impromptu performance. Amir’s band’s first CD is coming out in September, so I made sure he would send me a copy. He’s just as lovely and soulful as ever – and it’s always funny that when he shows up, it’s always a surprise.

MONDAY
And, on to the official last day. The Kibbutz track woke up early, as our final banquet was being held at the Jerusalem Theatre Café at 10:30 AM sharp. All the girls dressed up in bright sundresses and the guys donned polos and button-downs, a couple of steps up from our usual attire during the semester. We were treated to a huge meal complete with warm bread, salads, pasta or quiche, and a huge dessert selection. The theme was supposed to be Bonfire, so along with the tea lights on our tables, skewers and marshmallows were provided for roasting. Not such a great idea – our pyromania as usual got the better of us as we soon had ash-covered tablecloths and wax dripping everywhere. Yael, Mike, and Yossi each spoke, and we provided them with their gifts – an mp3 player for fading technophobe Yael, Mike’s big IOU flag (to which someone asked, “Shouldn’t it say ‘IU’?), and massage gift certificates for both Yossi and Nahum.

Back at base, we all finished up packing before having a last meeting as a track in the Beit Knesset. There, Mike and Yael gave us gifts – kippot crocheted for the boys with “Nativ 26” and their Hebrew nicknames, and bulletin boards customized with photos for the girls. We also had our last birthday party, this one for Sarah, with nice cold popsicles. After that, it was down to -3 for our final “banquet”. This time, Nahum had the chance to speak, and he was adorable as ever, running a sing-a-long of our favourite songs he taught us from the year and teaching us one more. The K1 acapella choir performed a fantastic medley of Cecilia, Piha Patchah, Ridin’, and Good Riddance (Time of Your Life). Finally, there was a slideshow, but since it was done by Andrew and Jenny, it was entirely of their friends and K2. Oh well. We left the auditorium for even more mini-cakes, and with that, it was time to load the buses.
Awkward eons passed between the time we brought down our suitcases and got on the bus. We said our goodbyes to the people we were leaving in Jerusalem and eventually hit the road. I finally had my one-on-one talk with Yossi about the year, though we were constantly interrupted by phone calls and a little scare involving a few forgotten passports. But just as we were finishing, we pulled up to Ben-Gurion. As always, the Kibbutz track was the first to get organized and get checked in. We had to wait for the entire group to get through before passing through security, and we only started to get in line for that five minutes before boarding. Oops. We spent the hour beforehand stuck waiting in limbo buying our last Hebrew novels (well, just Yonit) and eating our last kosher McDonalds. We started boarding immediately upon arrival at the gate, and once we got seated, many of us fell immediately asleep. Journals and yearbooks were signed, and some people tried to watch the in-flight movies, but overall, the tired ride showed that we saw things as already being over.

TUESDAY
Landing in JFK, tears were everywhere as we unloaded the baggage carousel. Annoyed airplane staff shooed us along through our goodbyes, and we all headed our separate ways. It’s so weird knowing that I won’t see the majority of these people for months, perhaps IC at the earliest, if we all decide to staff it. Nathan and I boarded the shuttle for LGA, and after waiting for hours for our flights while watching Paris Hilton and various animal-related stories on CNN, I was alone. It was really over.

Le’kol hatchala yesh sof, u’le’kol sof yesh hatchala chadasha.
To every beginning, there’s an end, and to every end, there’ a beginning.

A year on the other side of the planet? Cool! I wouldn’t have done it any other way. After all, there’s existing, and then there’s living. For me, that sense of being alive is my inspiration to write. That, and knowing that you were reading.

Thanks.

MONDAY
Right after davening, we did our final round of cleaning and boarded the bus for Jerusalem. As always, we arrived forty-five minutes before Be’er Sheva did, and at least two hours before Yerucham, so we were left with a whole lot of free time with an optional lunch in between. Later in the afternoon, we filled out our written evaluations by group. I’m very thorough when it comes to these things, so it took me a good hour and a half when some people left after two minutes. (Really, there’s that little that you have to say about the year?) After that, we saw a production by four members of K2 of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged. This is a pretty funny play to start with, but this show was especially well done. We were all rolling in the aisles at the great acting and Nativ jokes spliced in. After dinner, we had one more show to sit through – the Nativ-wide talent show. The highlights included Yosef’s psychic math trick, Alana and Julia’s rendition of I’ll Make A Man Out of You as a song of female empowerment, Jeff’s Day In The Life of Yerucham doing impressions of everyone all at once, and Mendy’s act, simply titled “Being Awkward”. As well, in between acts, Tani, Emily, and Andy (the hosts) gave out paper plate awards while citing other people who had been nominated for each “category” but who clearly wouldn’t win.

After the show, it was time for our second semester Ilanot reunion dinner. Rachel S., Yoav, and Dan Kieval met up with us at Beit Nativ, and with Rachel L., Nathan, and Phil, we all went out to Italian Kitchen. We were stuck in a back corner of the restaurant and largely ignored, but that was alright with us. Afterwards, Nathan and I went to meet Erin Kizell at Egon. (I guess I couldn’t last the whole year without going there…) Nathan continued on to hang out with some other people, while Erin and I headed back to base to chill with Rachel L. on the porch. And then, exhausted, we went to bed.

TUESDAY
Erin wanted to go to Me’ah She’arim that morning to buy some mezuzot for her apartment for next year and a Hebrew dictionary, so I went along with her. First off, it was odd seeing that every store in the neighbourhood carries Etz HaBakbukim products – I didn’t realize that they were known at all off of kibbutz. It was also fun telling the store clerks that we were buying the mezuzot for an apartment Erin would be sharing with a few girlfriends – in reality, she’s living with a non-Jewish gay guy. Finally, with the Hebrew dictionary, Erin went to ask for help just as I found them tucked on a bottom corner shelf in the bookstore. The employee there was so impressed that he promoted me to store manager. As we left Me’a She’arim, I remembered that Jacob had a day off that day, so I called him up to see if he was around. He met up with us within minutes, but apologized that he had to meet his Uncle Yankel at the Prima Kings hotel soon, although he wasn’t sure where it was. Jacob was pleasantly surprised when I told him that it’s right next door to Beit Nativ.

So, we all walked back together, though Erin stopped off along the way to get lunch at New Deli. After Jacob’s date, he came over to Beit Nativ, where we hung out with Phil, Nathan, and even Jeff for a bit. During that time, though, I got a call from Nikki Greenspan inviting me for coffee at…Prima Kings! So, Jacob, Phil, and I all went there to chill. After that, Erin had to leave to catch her bus before Shavu’ot and Jacob had to get ready for the chag. Rachel S. and I had our phone one-on-one for the summer, and afterwards, I went to shower. To our surprise, just before the chag, Aqram and friends made us fresh pita with pizza-esque toppings. After everyone getting their nice clothes covered in zatar and chili pepper, we had Ma’ariv services together at Moreshet Yisrael. Dinner was closed, and while we did get the usual Shavu’ot fare of blintzes and cheesecake, Beit Nativ always finds a way to mess it up – the cheesecake was watery and there was no jam or anything for the blintzes.

At dinner, we also got a schedule of various limudim for Shavu’ot going on around the city. We had time for about two outside sessions before our Nativ-run sichot at 2 AM, so I opted to go to the Hartman Institute for the first one, at least. The topic was modern interpretations of Shabbat and the sabbatical year, and while it was somewhat interesting, it was so slow-moving that I fell asleep. (Don’t worry – lots of other people did, too.) Because of that, I decided to head back to Beit Nativ instead of staying for another session. I did a little bit of studying on my own, then took a short nap before the 2 AM sessions.

WEDNESDAY
The first Nativ session I went to was led by Sarah L, and it concerned Heschel’s theories on human ways of connecting to God. We had a break in between for more cheesecake and ice cream, then I went to Jeff and Elan’s session about why we eat cheese on Shavu’ot and what makes cheese kosher or unkosher – essentially the same thing as the limud that I ran last year for the ECRUSY Tikkun Leil Shavu’ot. As we ended, it was nearing 4 AM, so we set out on the walk to the Old City for sunrise Shacharit. We’d been told that the whole city walks down together and that it’s a very moving experience. For me, though, there was such a mundane feeling about it – maybe if it was all in silence as opposed to people carrying on with their usual chitter-chatter to stay awake, it would have felt cooler.

We arrived at the Southern Wall for a Conservative minyan just as the sun was starting to come up. Every Conservative community in Jerusalem – Nativ, TRY, Solomon Schecter schools on trips, the Conservative rabbinical and cantorial schools, the yeshiva, and the Masorti synagogues – was present, and the service started out okay. Soon, however, it devolved into that well-treasured Conservative tradition of one-upmanship and trying to prove others’ practices wrong, so Alana and I went walking around the Kotel to scope out the scene. There, the focus wasn’t even on praying – it was more of a social gathering. Around 7, the two of us, along with Jenni, decided that we had had enough and went back to Beit Nativ to go to sleep. I read a little and ate a little, as I was starving, and I proceeded to sleep in until lunch.

Lunch was decent, and afterwards, I hung around with a bunch of people in the courtyard, mostly playing with Matan’s basketball. Alana and I also chilled for a bit (and investigated the mystery of a cell phone we found on the porch in the old building), and I spent the rest of the time reading. We had Mincha at Moreshet, followed by a very Seudah Shlishit dinner, and then did Ma’ariv and Havdallah. After the holiday, Alana, Reva, and I went out (and were later joined by Nathan) for Schnitzi’s and to get Alana’s nose pierced. Unfortunately, every piercing place around Ben Yehuda seemed to be closed. I did, however, marvel in wonder as we wandered down Rivlin, the usually noisy bar district. Some big soccer game was playing on TVs, wide-screens, and sheets all down the narrow street, and every mouth was gaping open as eyes glued themselves silently to the screens. (Rivlin, however, always gets to me – it’s so incredible to see the semi-trashy bar district being built of hundred-year old Jerusalem stone with gorgeous moldings, windows, and doors.) Finally, Alana and I watched Roswell (old-school!) and we went to bed.

SUNDAY
It's always nice to start off the workweek by being told that we're painting instead of doing manual labour. Sarah and I were assigned by Ziv the mysterious task of dipping ten-thousand wooden skewers into paint, letting them dry, placing them in a box, and repeating. (This inspired me to create my own all-girl punk band called Ten Thousand Toothpicks - what do you think?) Anyway, it took the paint ages to dry, so we took a trip to the moshav's superior Kol-Bo when we realized that Sarah had never been there before. Even after that, we spent most of the day whiling away our time, listening to Galgalatz, chatting, and playing endless rounds of Snake. The afternoon was relaxing, as it had to be, because we had few relaxing afternoons left on kibbutz.

MONDAY
Instead of Yom Nativ, which was moved to Tuesday, we were back at work. It was a pretty ridiculous day, however. Our task was to attach thin plastic hoses to these six-pronged nozzles (called "shoshanot" because they look like rosettes) in a cornfield. Before we could do that, however, the water had to be turned on to rinse out the insides of the pipes. Bad news: the faucets didn't work. While Chanan took care of the problem we sat around aimlessly. Then, he told us that it would be a while until anything was fixed, so he brought us to the chickpea field and began eating pods again. We joined in, finding a much better way to bide our time. The water began to work after about 45 minutes, so we began our attaching work, which was far harder than it worked. After straightening out all the rows, Chanan offered us an aruchat eser - a welcome surprise considering that we'd already had such a long break that morning. After our coffee, we sealed off pipes and finished the general maintenance that the corn field would need for its irrigation. And after that, we were done! It was a muddy day, but far from difficult. Isn't it nice when the whole week starts to go that way? Once again, I probably spent the afternoon reading or hanging out or having a good time, but all these days start to blend into one after a while.

TUESDAY
The last Yom Nativ: Yom Sport in Yerucham. It was fun driving on our everyday route to work past Massuot and the Ashkelon fields to meet up with the other groups and being able to shriek about our surroundings. We spent the day in the Canada Park in the centre of town supposedly “playing sports”, although the only event that was even remotely Olympian was 3-on-3 basketball. For the first round, we could choose between Capture the Flag, Gaga, and Jeopardy, while the second rotation involved Human Text Twist and Quidditch along with the basketball. (Was the whole day some sort of elaborate Jewish joke?) I figured I could be the most useful at Jeopardy and Text Twist, so I went for those. There was an odd tension buzzing through the air as K2 was judging all of the events, predictably in their favour. I didn’t think about it much, though, as we plowed through another barbeque lunch (always improved with ice) and as I filled up hundreds of water balloons with Rachel and Yonit.

Next, we had a few water-based competitions: a water balloon toss, a game of Make Your Staff Laugh which resulted in them spitting water at you, and Drip Drip Drop (really, letting Mike go crazy with a waterbottle). After watching Teppy flash the staff and Yosef sing Rotzeh Banot for laughs, we were on to the last event of the day, the relay race. Once again, options for stations included washing dishes, painting fences, and writing “NATIV” on one’s stomach using chocolate pudding. Aviva and I signed up to sing the Barney theme song in front of Crunch Burger. The people who were supposed to come and tag us were taking a while, so we, along with our station-mates, went to get 50¢ ice cream. And when the relayers did reach us, we realized that we had no idea where we were supposed to go. So, all three teams split off in different directions. We walked back to the finish line, where the last runners crossed within seconds of one another. It was revealed a few minutes later that because K2 had made it first, they had won the marathon and the entire Yom Sport. Ho-hum. We had an irritating Kibbutz meeting regarding the colour of our sweatshirts, proving people’s immaturity a little further. And with that, we headed back to kibbutz, where we watched This Is Spinal Tap (nicely advertised in Russian by Nathan) before going to sleep.

WEDNESDAY
Finally, our endless painting efforts paid off as we got to install the hundreds of signs in the orchards. As we left them, though, the fields were still barren, not dripping with fruit the way we’d imagined it. As usual, Yuval didn’t really know what he was doing and criticized our every action, but we laughed through it. For each field we had to set up, one person had to stay behind to guard the extra signs that wouldn’t fit on the tractor bed. Guard them from what? From theft! Apparently the Bedouins in the array steal any scrap metal lying around. I sat the second round out because I felt like being lazy, but my Snake games kept being interrupted by the unbelievable swarms of flies that attacked me no matter where I sat. I feel even worse for all the World Vision African children now. Also, some guy did drive up to my pile of scrap metal, but he was just trying to bum a cigarette off me. (In the middle of an empty field? This country never fails to weird me out…)

Right after we got back, it was time to head into Jerusalem for Yom Yerushalayim. Our buses dropped us off at Beit Nativ, and after waiting the requisite extra hour for Yerucham and binging on green apples from SuperSal, we headed to Kikar Tzion to meet up with the march to the Kotel. While the formal parade had begun at Gan Saker, I was grateful that we joined in the middle because the day was drizzly and miserable. For some reason, the masses were being held back at Yoel Salomon, and our chakla’ut vocabulary helped us to translate “Al tidchof, al tidchof!” as “Don’t push!” Alana and I soon realized, though, that we could just walk past the barrier of flag-waving yeshiva boys to get to the real parade ourselves. We twirled our way down Yafo, dancing past American hora circles that somehow moved forward and actual Israelis watching the scene in a bewildered way. (Yom Yerushalayim is clearly a holiday for the religious and the Diaspora, not most residents of Jerusalem.)

We got down to the Kotel quickly, but got bored of people watching and trying to find friends, so we headed back. At this point, already an hour after we’d left, Nativ and a large number of paraders were just getting to the Old City. It proved difficult moving in the opposite direction from the crowd, and we ended up stumbling up through the Arab shuk, which felt awful. On the way back up Yafo, we ran into Alana’s cousin Eli and then we decided to have “dinner” at Coffee Bean. (Really, we just wanted an excuse to try their fancy iced drinks while we had empty stomachs. And that was that – after the teensiest squidge of time in Jerusalem, it was time to head back to kibbutz. But at least the movie on the bus was a chick flick for once…

THURSDAY
My birthday, and the last day of work, which is quite a bit of excitement for one day. We started off by organizing and stacking the sprinklers from the paprika field, me being OCD as always and straightening out the boys’ work. Soon, Ziv drove over and asked us girls whether we wanted to finish painting the signs. We went along with him, glossing over the mistakes and restenciling them with precision and speed. We finished the job right in time for one last coffee break, complete with the boys, who had finished with the sprinklers. Finally, Tani and David were sent off to do a round of pesticide-spraying with the cool backpacks with hoses attached, while Sarah, Aviva, and I continued with the project of painting one hundred thousand skewers. Gabe was stuck just wandering around. After our last lunch together, Chanan gave us a farewell speech (in English!) telling us that he’d appreciated our time together. (In true Israeli style, however, he apologized for our jobs often seeming to be “avodah sh’chora” – “black work” – with no explanation needed.) Finally, he gave each of us a G’dash D’ganim t-shirt and sweatshirt, which we’d been pining for all semester. The girls were saddled with XL tees, while the guys in turn got XXLs, but we were so thrilled at the generosity and took a picture with Chanan wearing them immediately.

Back on Ein Tzurim, I showered and got changed quickly because Nathan was taking me out to dinner for my birthday. (First, however, Phil stopped by my caravan with a container of confetti, which we exploded outside. Hurray! Also, Nathan gave me a whole assortment of gifts, from a new sketchbook and pastel pencils to a French novel called Le Petit Nicolas.) We headed into the Baka neighbourhood in Jerusalem to an Italian restaurant called (), which is Nahum’s favourite. The last bus back to kibbutz left Jerusalem at 9:30, so we decided to have an early (by Israeli standards) dinner around 6. But, when we arrived, the place was deserted. Luckily, this meant that we got our food quickly and had plenty of time to linger and talk as the restaurant slowly filled up. Nathan and I split grilled salmon and chicken breast stuffed with mushrooms and leaves, as well as wine and the requisite hot chocolate cake. Everything was remarkably good, and I came back to kibbutz that night feeling satisfied and happy with my 19th birthday.

FRIDAY
And so the packing begins. I spent the whole morning assembling my stuff all over the caravan, taking down my wall of fun, and squeezing my year into two bulging suitcases. There isn’t much to be said about that. We spent the rest of the day enjoying our lack of need for productiveness that comes with the kibbutz lifestyle. As Shabbat rolled around, we did Kabbalat Shabbat and Ma’ariv outside of our caravans, squinting to read our siddurim by moonlight. Most of us ate dinner in the chadar ochel – I guess we never quite made those family connections – and sat ogling the new American group seated nearby. It turns out that they were the graduating class of the Jewish day school in Detroit, and they conducted themselves as true Detroiters, insisting on singing their zmirot louder than us when we were reciting Birkat HaMazon. Weird. David and I visited with Yehuda and Zahava after dinner for our usual semi-awkward chat, but this time with Yehuda pulling out his Independence War photo alnum for David, who had never seen it. Alas, we had to leave earlier on, as my group birthday party was being held that night. But after a round of Yom Huledet Same’ach and a couple of hazelnut cigar cookies, I was done with people for the night and went to bed.

SATURDAY
Sure, we could go to one last round of services at the kibbutz Beit Knesset that morning, but to me, they’ve never been anything special. Instead, for the last time, I had my first taste of the morning after my toothpaste be that weird, brownish Israeli grape juice. Lunch was as usual, and once again David and I visited our kibbutz parents. I had my end-of-year one-on-one with Yael afterwards, and she remarked to me that I didn’t change much this year but it was alright because I started on a high note. She also said I was one of the few people whose expectations didn’t seem to change. For the afternoon, like everyone else, I lay out in the sun reading – this time, some David Sedaris novel I’d found in Nathan’s caravan. The interesting part was that every single last one of us was wearing a white shirt as we lounged, making us look like a Tide advertisement, kids in the 60s in their underwear, Jews on Yom Kippur, or all three.

Mincha came and went, as did Seudah Shlishit, with one last serving on sweet kugel, and Havdallah. After all of that, we went over the procedures for the next two days and learned the song that we were to sing at our thank-you ceremony the next day. Abi wrote the song based on funny anecdotes we’d sent her about our workplaces and kibbutz families, and it was quite well done. That night, we lounged around, but not even for very long because Shabbat ended so ridiculously late.

SUNDAY
Last full day on kibbutz. Again, it was all packing and cleaning, because we get so distracted that we can’t accomplish much in one fell swoop. At 3 PM, the moving truck arrived to cart away our baggage to Jerusalem, and from there we were left to restore our caravans to pristine condition. (Not as if we’d found them in such great shape – and the slugs, mushrooms, and rats can’t possibly have been all our fault.) That evening, we had the aforementioned thank-you ceremony for all of our bosses and kibbutz families. Chanan was one of the first to show up, and the six of us gathered around him in a circle to ogle his clean clothes and chat him up. (While some people said that it was cute watching us, others remarked that we’d become to K2 of the Kibbutz track.) Yehuda also stopped by, but only briefly – the kibbutz was running a lecture series on Shavu’ot that evening, and he had to go there instead. (I’m not sure if it’s weirder that the ceremony was planned for the same time as the lectures or that Yehuda was more eager to go to lectures, which always happen, than our one-time event. Whatever.)

Abi and Phil gave a small speech, in English and Hebrew, on behalf of us, then one by one, all the families were called up along with their Nativers for us to present roses to them. Next, we came to the front with our bosses, and we recounted funny stories from work before giving them their roses. Finally, we sang our song, which people seemed to like (but not as much as us). To end things off, we gave Chanan one final goodbye and presented him with a gift – a framed photo of him with the six of us with messages from us on the back. It was so weird to think that I’d probably never see him again, at least for a long time. After that, we immediately started working on our last kibbutz bonfire and barbeque. After the usual yummy wings and hot dogs, we had to go around the bonfire telling funny stories from the semester. I talked about the day my cell phone got crushed as it got dumped with a pile of rocks into a ditch but survived. It was fun that most of the Chakla’ut stories involved me somehow.

David and I left early to say goodbye to the Neumans and to give them their gift, a chamsa with Birkat HaBayit and scenes of Jerusalem (because they welcomed us into their house and because they both have a special connection to Jerusalem). They had told us to come by around 10:30, when the lectures would be done. However, we had to track them down at the chadar ochel because everything was running late and they hadn’t gotten home yet. We expected to find one man sitting and talking monotonously to the whole crowd, but instead, the lights were dimmed an some guy was giving a one-man concert with instruments strapped all over him. Neither David nor I recognized any of the songs he was performing, but every kibbutznik, from the little kids to the seminary girls to the old fogies, were all singing along knowingly. The concert finally ended after about half an hour, and we exchanged gifts with the Neumans (they gave David a Hebrew novel and me a Havdallah set), took some photos with them, and said our final goodbyes. Then, we got into our beds on kibbutz one last time.

THURSDAY
Very long day. First off, Tani, Gabe, and I were sent off to finish disassembling and cleaning up the paprika fields. Tani and I alternated picking sprinklers off the ground and arranging them neatly on the tractor bed, a dizzying task that left us covered in scrapes and bruises. However, there were little things that made the job more enjoyable that day. Every once in a while, a faint drizzle emerged to cool us off, and at aruchat eser, the Thailandim gave us some delicious tea biscuits. We picked up our very last sprinkler right as the clock struck one, Chanan pulled up to pick us up, and the drizzle evovlved into a storm. Great timing all around. It also felt pretty good knowing that we'd finally followed through on a project from beginning to end. Finally, the feeling of being finished with something let me begin the weekend with a sense of relief.

Soon after showering and changing into new Nativ shirts, we boarded the buses to head to Jerusalem for the Gala Masa Event. (Yes, that's "event" with a capital E - that's just how the scholarship fund does it.) On the way out of kibbutz, we picked up the Americans from Ein Tzurim's yeshiva, and near Beit Shemesh, we let Habonim Dror kids from Australia and South Africa board. Between the Orthodox and the Socialist kids, we were feeling our middle-ground Conservativeness more than ever. We arrived in Jerusalem to the Sultan's Pools, right outside the Old City walls, where we had seen Barry Sacharov perform three weeks into Nativ. (And all of the sudden, we were three weeks from the end...) After getting some delicious boxed lunches and muddling through security (what other country in the world has metal detectors on wheels?), we were free to roam around the event before the performance. I met up with Dan Kieval, and we wandered through the vendors' stands, mini-food court, drumming circles, and political debates together. As well, the other kibbutz track people and I competed to see how many people we knew we could each run into that night - I made it to 18! Mind you, there were a couple of thousand people from at least a dozen countries around the world there, so it was no surprise that we'd all run into someone.

As it got dark outside (and as it began to drizzle again), we headed to the ampitheatre for the big show. The beginning was mostly a series of song-and-dance routines by Gaia, complete with kiddie back-up dancers, elaborate costume changes, Jerusalem-themed medleys, guest-star drummers, fireworks, and fire itself. Their performances were peppered with speeches by Israel and Jerusalem's most famous. The first speaker was Uri Lupolianski, mayor of Jerusalem, who reflected on the 40th anniversary of the city's reunification. Afterwards, we heard Ze'ev Bielski, who gave us the same speech that he did during our leadership seminar about making aliyah. This time around, however, he was able to deliver the message in three minutes instead of forty-five. Finally, we saw the grand pooh-bah, Ehud Olmert himself. Based on his current 2%(!) approval rating by the Israeli public, I was expecting booing à la Mike Harris circa 1998. Instead, people just talked through his speech indifferently. It was too bad because they missed potentially the worst joke of all time: "So, I was coming into this event, when Ze'ev Bielski told me to stop the rain. And I said, 'Only God can stop the rain!'" He paused, expecting laughs, but it never actually happened.

After the speeches, we saw a series of movies which would lead to to believe that the Conservative movement dominates Israel programs. First, in a suite of five video messages from American Jewish community leaders, one is the USCJ Executive VP and another is the President of Merkaz. As well, there was a MASA promotional video primarily of Nativers looking longingly at the Kotel and talking about their connection to Jerusalem. And as the last clip ended, the ceremony suddenly devolved into a blastingly loud concert performed by HaGroovatron. (Could this possibly be a real band name? We guessed that, like Gaia, they're just another fabrication of the Jewish Agency.) We danced and moshed for a bit, but soon enough, Hatikvah was playing, everyone was standing, and the event was over.

Along with Rachel, Yonit, and Nathalie, I went back to Beit Nativ to meet up with everyone else for the rest of the night. As we were walking along Agron, an anti-Olmert parade came up marching beside us and encourging us to join. (Ah, the perils of living between the Old City and the Prime Minister's house. Best location ever!) From Beit Nativ, I set out with Tani and Nathan to Cynthia's birthday dinner at Coffee Shop. From there, we crashed Simeon's party at Focaccia Bar and met up with Ilana for drinks and a concert at Mike's Place. So, understandably, by 2 AM, I was exhausted. So, I headed back to Beit Nativ alone and talked to Jeff for a bit before going to bed. He wasn't so happy because he, along with Sarah R. and Elana, had had to stay in and work on the yearbook all night long. Plus, Jacob had taken his bed in our room and needed a place to sleep. I suggested that he share with Jacob - and I woke up in the morning, the two were cuddled together quite sweetly.

FRIDAY
Tani and I woke up super-early to meet up with Na'ama for breakfast before she had to leave for her weekly volunteer work distributing Shabbat meals to needy families. (Isn't she wonderful?) She drove(!) us over to a little café called Velka in Nahalot that was fabulous. Its speciality was grilled cheese with upscale ingredients like Brie, apples, and spices, but it was still cheaper than most places around Jerusalem. After catching up and laughing a whole lot, Na'ama dropped us off at the bus station, where we began our adventure to Yafo and Tel Aviv for the weekend. After sleeping all the way there, we made our way to the old city and quickly tracked down the Old Jaffa Youth Hostel. We explored the shuk for a bit and got groceries for a bit before returning for a quick nap. We weren't hungry enough for dinner when we woke up, however, so we made our way to Neve Tzedek in Tel Aviv to walk around the super-cute neighbourhood. Back at the youth hostel, we used the public microwave to make grilled cheese bagels and ate dinner on the roof. The views from all sides, and the patio itself, were all gorgeous. (Will I bother to add the photos? Check Facebook!) I ended off the night by introducing Tani to Animaniacs, which he loved, while drinking the hostel's weirdly delicious complimentary Russian tea. And, that was that!

SATURDAY
We woke up bright and early for a long day of walking and exploring. Our mission, though we didn't know it when we started out the day: to do Tel Aviv and Yafo in their entirety in one day. We began at the port in Old Yafo (incidentally, where I spent the Saturday mornings of both my first and last open Shabbats), then moved on to a southern beach in Tel Aviv with nice music playing. When it began to rain (it's not supposed to rain this much in Israel after Pesach!), we moved up to Allenby and were surprised to find much of the commercial district closed for Shabbat. We started naming streets that we'd like to see, from Dizengoff to Sheinkin to Rothschild. The great part was that every time we thought of a place we'd want to go, within steps, we had already arrived exactly where we needed to be. This is how we got to each of those streets, the Kabbalah Centre that Madonna frequents (which had an air conditioner made at Ein Tzurim!) and Max Brenner. Tani had never eaten at the latter, and after trying some free samples they were giving out outside, we knew we'd have to stop for a mid-afternoon chocolate indulgence. (I feel that I can leave Israel satisfied now having had my last Thick Italian Hot Chocolate from there.) We also ran into a rosh from Ramah Palmer and some TRY kids while eating there - ah, this Conservative movement of ours.

After Max Brenner, we traipsed down to Nahalat Binyamin and through the very closed shuk, stopping for a pause at a nice park before passing a mosque, a series of hotels, and winding up back in Neve Tzedek. (This time, at least, we had a camera!) As the sun set, we played word games and set out to find our hardest target of the day - the bus station. But after some detours through the Filipino market and a little intuition, we found ourselves on a Metropoline bus back to Castina. We caught a ride back to Ein Tzurim in a Bene Darom olive-and-pickle delivery vehicle (cool!), and got home at a reasonable time. So, this summary doesn't really do the weekend justice, as it's hard to recapture a sense of adventure and discovery once it's all passed. But, it was a great day of bonding, and we probably worked off at least some of the calories from our hot chocolates by walking for seven hours.

FRIDAY
After attempting to sleep in, but waking up at 8 because of the rest of the week's schedule, I unpacked and cleaned and repacked and then left to spend the weekend in Jerusalem. First though, at the bus station, I bought the dress from Ayin HaShlishit that I had been drooling over since Pesach. (Twenty-five dollars, and good for all of our assorted end-of-year parties and camp. Yay!) Because I was so used to hiking from the rest of the week, I felt the urge to walk all the way down to the Constantinis house in Ein Kerem. It was a beautiful day, and I'd really missed walking in Jerusalem, so I had a good time. I arrived at their house in time for Shabbat dinner, which was Jewish in a casual sort of way. The conversation aimed to be intellectual, including English etymology, but the kids also all got to talk about their days. After dinner, we all read for a bit, and then some of the kids and I watched the last episode of Friends. And because I was still in tiyul mode, I went to bed.

SATURDAY
Like last time, we all pretty much woke up in time for lunch. The afternoon was also pretty relaxed. I saw my first episode of Heroes (although I'm still not sure what the big deal is, and it seems just like X-Men). We also spent quite a bit of time playing a 1998 Hebrew edition of the Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Vered would help me with the Hebrew and I got a lot of the trivia right, although we had to yell at Uli for all the sports questions. Also, I figured out some of the simpler questions on my own! Overall, though, not much was happening until about 5, when we started setting up for the Constantini's famous neighbourhood Lag Ba'omer bonfire. We cooked, cleaned, built at 2.5 metre-high wood teepee, shucked corn, and strung onions and potatoes on wire for roasting. The guests trickled in slowly, and soon there were over a hundred people milling about the yard. Vered took care of the music, while Yotam entertained younger kids and Lahav and Dor manned the bar. Shani made bread dough for kids to roll out into pitas and then cook over a tabun and coat with labenah or chocolate spread. Other younger kids passed out appetizers and everyone else entertained guests. So, I didn't really have anyone to talk to, but I was still fine. After sunset, the bonfire was lit and everyone went crazy over the huge, flaming tower. It lasted a good twenty minutes before the structure collapsed.

Alas, I had to leave pretty early, as the last bus to Ein Tzurim left at 10:30. The rest of the country needed to go home at the same time, and the bus was so crowded and heavy that it couldn't actually move. So, another bus was called to take care of the masses, who all smelled like smoke. All of Jerusalem smelled like smoke. I spent the ride home talking to some yeshiva boys from Ein Tzurim who had helped me push ahead through the crowd at the door to get on. And, when I got back, I went to sleep.

SUNDAY
Second-last week of work. After all of our time right before Pesach assembling pipes in the paprika fields, they got enough water and were ready to take down. Disassembling proved to be as physically trying as assembling, and we all gave up pretty quickly. This wasn't helped by the fact that the temperature had inched over 30ºC for the first time all year and that we were working in direct sunlight with no shade anywhere within walking distance. We were grateful when we were given a coffee break at 11:15, and when we did some easier work in the same field until lunch. (Cutting wires off of sealed pipes and screwing off sprinkler heads - nothing that bad.) After work, I designed the kibbutz sweatshirt and helped out the yearbook va'ad in their mad dash to finish all the work required, especially given the other va'ad members' lack of helping. But, hey! At least I got some cheesecake out of the deal.

MONDAY
And, second-last Yom Nativ. I think this one was just forgotten about, and it was definitely planned at the last minute. First, we had a session with the Masorti movement shaliach in charge of promoting aliyah. It started off fun, as we were supposed to go around the room telling people where we saw them living at age 35 and their future career. Some people gave realistic answers, while most of us were being serious. (I was told that I would be either a journalist or a graphic designer somewhere in Canada, though three separate people decided that I would be the benevolent dictator of a small country.) From there, though, the whole discussion was about why more Orthodox Jews make aliyah than Conservative ones. I'm not sure that the debate benefitted either him or us. Afterwards, I went to a Talmud session with Nahum about Shimon Bar Yochai, the central figure of the Lag Ba'omer story. I actually really enjoyed studying right from the text, and it was easily the most academic thing I've done all month. Either way, as a group, we came to conclusions about living in one's mind, living real life, and finding a balance. Decent stuff. After lunch, we went back to yearbooking, and proceeded to work and work and work until we went to bed.

TUESDAY
Back to work. We were doing the same job as on Sunday, but this time in the cornfield. However, it was even hotter than last time and we had even less water, so we all got genuinely dehydrated. We called our bosses for some more water, but nobody came by with anything for a good forty-five minutes. At the end, Chanan picked a chickpea plant for us and encouraged us to try the raw, semi-unripe beans. They tasted just like edamame, and we were pretty satisfied. After work, we went to Be'er Sheva for one final dinner party. After delivering to Debbie the caricatures for the Kehilla 1 shirt, we made pita pizzas and watched Friends. Afterwards, Alana and I did face masks and rejoiced at our soft skin.

WEDNESDAY
Caught up! We started work half an hour earlier this morning so that we could accomplish more before it got too hot. We were loading all the undone pipes onto the chanukiyot when I got a call from Yossi. Things for the yearbook had to be accomplished today (even though I'm not on the va'ad!) so he told me to go back to EIn Tzurim and finish things up. I gladly took the excuse for a day off work and walked back to kibbutz. Finally, today, we made a mad dash to the finish line, and (we thought that) the final product (was) uploading for the printer. But, either way, that was the end of my involvement with the yearbook for this year, and thank goodness.

That night, inspired largely by Jacob's visiting friend Will, our pyromania got the better of us and we decided to try making Molotov cocktails. (Don't worry - we're in the middle of the desert with wide, open spaces with nothing flammable in sight.) Our first attempt failed, but with the small blaze emerging from our second try, we were able to light a whole bonfire. Not yet satisfied, we also set aflame a mouldy chair left from the caravans' Gush Katif days and an abandoned set of shelves we found in the firewood pile. We performed the requisite dancing and chanting around our fire and attracted a crowd. Fun night!

SUNDAY
In honour of the last tiyul of the year, the bus to pick us up actually made it to kibbutz on time. Nathan and I read Freakonomics up to Tel Aviv, where we picked up the rest of Nativ and ventured up to the Carmel. We started off the trip with lunch at a god-awful restaurant in Zichron Ya’akov, although we at least had time to stroll through the city’s quaint shopping area. Afterwards, we rode up for our first hike, Nahal Bezet, right near Nahariya. I’d already done this hike on Pilgrimage – it’s the one where, right in the middle of the trail, there’s a huge bat cave in which we all spelunked. I could have sworn, however, as we were waiting around for everyone to finish this part, that I saw all of my Pilgrimage friends sitting around on the surrounding rocks and slopes. I spent about half the hike talking with Rachel about plans for Toronto and the other half talking to Yosef about summer plans. After ascending one steep hill at the end and davening Mincha, we headed to our youth hostel for the night, Akzhiv. The place was a little crazy – the rooms were these tiny wood cottages with jets in the bathtub and red velvet blankets on every bed, including in the teensy-tiny loft.Though the supper menu was identical to that from our lunch (schnitzel, rice, etc.), it was a few hundred times tastier. After dinner, we found that Ray was playing on TV, so we watched that and then went to bed.

( Sunday in pictures )

MONDAY
For the Learner’s Minyan that morning, Annie took us across the highway to the Mediterranean for a discussion about the nature of the relationship between God and the environment. She planned things from an interesting angle, as usual, and it was nice to start off the day sitting on the seaside and reflecting. After breakfast, we left to go the the Kibbutz Settlement Museum on some kibbutz nearby. We took it as a sign when we noticed the group exiting as we were coming in couldn’t have been older than grade five. Inside, the museum was set up to look like a condensed version of an early kibbutz, complete with children’s house, clothing storage room, clinic, and dining hall. We were guided around by a woman impersonating an early Ukranian kibbutznik, and she was a little bit too ridiculous for us in her explanations. We did, however, learn some bizarre facts about the early movement – for instance, that knives had to be chained to the tables in the dining halls because people kept stealing them for work in the fields (which I can identify with, as we also improvise our tools.) Also, kibbutzniks slept in tents of three, which made things a little problematic when couples got together and someone had to be the third wheel. We finished off the morning with a "kibbutz-style lunch", which was pretty much breakfast at Ein Tzurim (tomatoes, cucumbers, rolls, cheese) plus baked potatoes and fried onions. Not bad at all!

( Let's leave the Old Country with nothing but our blankets. )

After lunch, we headed out to hike Nachal Amud, which I'd also done on Pilgrimage. However, we did a shortened version of it last time around. This time we started at the real point of origin, the grave of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai at Har Meron. It took us a few years to park the bus because preparations were well underway to accomodate the quarter of a million people who'd be spending Lag Ba'omer in the surrounding forest. After being cornered by a crane listlessly swining blocks of concrete through the sky, we got off and had to walk to the entrance ourselves. The hike was pretty nice, although we didn't go swimming at the end like we had last time. As it was getting dark, we drove around Kinneret to its southeast corner to our hotel for the rest of the week, Kibbutz Ha'on. Once again, we were all in little cabins, though these were much more Radission than rustic. Dinner went by quickly, and afterwards, I had to participate in a focus group with Yossi about staff guidance. (Yeah.) And with that, because it was getting late, I went to sleep.

( It's the new Mother Nature taking over. )

TUESDAY
For the morning, we had a choice between two hikes: a harder one back near Akzhiv, or an easy little stroll in the park up on the Lebanese border. Considering that I'd done Akzhiv on Pilgrimage and wasn't going to go for a hat trick, and that Nahum told us the easier hike was cooler, I opted for the border hike. It wasn't physically challenging in the least bit, but we saw four waterfalls! As well, we got to drive through Metulla and Kiryat Shemonah a few times as the Negev bus driver got more and more disoriented, so I can cross them off the list as the last Israeli cities I had to see this year. Finally, we spent some time at the Dado Lookout, from which you can see all of Metulla and off into Lebanon. We were done by lunch and met up with the other group in Korazim to get food from a Chinese restaurant in their mall's food court. (Oh, the weird things that MASA sponsors...)

( Walking through Nachal Iyun... )

After lunch, we walked to the Golan Winery. Our tour started off with the cheesiest promo movie I've ever seen, featuring a genie, a lamp, and a CEO who couldn't act for the life of him. We were all rolling in the aisles, though, so it was alright. From there, we saw the room where the wine barrels are kept for aging and the area where machines assemble and arrange the wine bottles and cartons for shipping. The hallway from which we watched this also had diagrams explaining which flavours to seek out when tasting wines; two suggested qualities for semi-dry white wine included butter and lanolin. Ick. Finally, as the highlight of our tour, we got to taste three different wines: a semi-dry white, a dry red, and an über-sweet dessert wine. We learned the proper techniques of swishing our glasses and savouring the drinks.

And with three glasses of wine in our systems, we made our way to the next activity of the day - kayaking on the Jordan River! (Genius timing, yes.) We all piled into rafts of two, four, or six (though our six only got four paddles...) and manoevered through this narrow little area that you could call a stream if it weren't for the rapids. Since we're all silly teenagers, we spent half of our time stealing other people's paddles and trying to knock people out of their boats for some good old mutiny. (At one point, we found two people just stranded on the side of the river...someone had stolen their raft and they hadn't been able to climb on with anyone else.) At the end, some people baptized themselves in the Jordan river, while some people got naked to use the river as a mikvah. We sat around the park for a while for some reason, then headed back to Ha'on to quickly shower and get ready for a night out in Tiberias.

Even though we'd had Chinese for lunch, we heard that Tiberias' Asian place is one of the best in Israel, so I ended up eating there with Nathan, Sarah, Koby, Yonit, Avram, Lila, and Joe. Their pad thai was absolutely delicious. Afterwards, Yonit, Nathan and I went walking along the boardwalk and downtown. Finally, as we were about to leave (from the exact corner where we were supposed to leave Tiberias on Pilgrimage), the Nachman-Mobile pulled up and incited all of the guys to start dancing to a dubbed version of Numa-Numa. (For the Romanian-music-video-challenged, the lyrics to the remix are simply "Rebbe Nachman/Nachman Me'uman/Rebbe Nachman Me'uman..."). Just like on Pilgrimage. Some things just never change, do they?

( Tveria )

WEDNESDAY
Unbelievably crazy day. Why? This day, we had the option of a full-day, 13-hour hike involving jumping off cliffs, rappeling down waterfalls, swimming with our backpacks and being wet the entire day long. How could I say no? Even though the hike started super-early and ruled out anyone who couldn't swim, was afraid of heights, or was afraid of their lunch getting soggy, lots of people came out for the adventure at Nachal Zavitan. Unfortunately, I couldn't bring my camera along because everything we had got drenched. However, Joe bought a disposable camera and wrapped it in a plastic bag, so maybe when he develops his photos and puts them online, I'll post them. Either way, the day was challenging, but on a mental level more than a physical one. I could feel my heart zooming up my throat and out my mouth with every thrilling jump. But, best of all, we all made it through without any complaining or tears and we all had a great time.

That night, after a quick dinner at Ha'on, we journeyed to Hamat Gader. When I came there with my family when I was younger, we rode the hot-water water slides with the newts at the bottom and visited the alligators. But this time, because we were all more mature, we spent our time soaking in the hot springs. This was pretty nice and soothing, especially after all the hiking, though all of our cuts and scraped really burned. When it got too hot in the massage chairs of the pool, Tani, David, and I hung out with Na'ama, who had been my Rosh on Pilgrimage. Why was she with us that night? Nahum was in Jerusalem getting ready for the birth of his baby, and since Na'ama's taking over as Nativ Assistant Director next year, she's trying to get in character! Two buses left back to Ha'on, one at 9:30 and one forty-five minutes later. However, we were all so exhausted that the first bus filled up ten minutes early and drove away. So, when I got back, I was definitely tired.

THURSDAY
For our last day, we had a pretty easy hike on Har Gilboa, south of the Kinneret. Really, we were just driven to the top of the mountain, and it was up to us to make the very, very steep descent. However, it began to rain quickly enough, so it was a refreshing hike. Afterwards, we drove down to the Sachna Pools, a nice park with a naturally-occuring water amusement area with swimming areas and a waterfall. (We also got Chinese for lunch again. Groan.) Finally, Yossi gave us a long talk about the real last stretch of Nativ and things to consider for finishing up our volunteer positions and packing. And with that, we all drove back home for a little bit of rest before the weekend.

( Last day of the tiyul. )

Well, that's it for now! Stay tuned for the update for this week.

WEDNESDAY
Even as work was beginning, I felt like I needed a nap. Good thing that it took Massu'ot Yitzchak a whole hour to realize that we were sitting aimlessly in the sun next to the Misrad G'dash before giving us work for the day. Once again, Aviva and I painted, while David and Tani this time took on wire-detangling and bolt-attaching duties. And once again, we finished before them, so once again, we helped them out - this time, by acting as human supports for the huge spools they were using for the winding. David and I competed to see who could make the best coffee, and while mine was agreed upon as tasting better, he managed to drink a whole three (3!) cups during aruchat eser. The rest of the morning passed by super-quickly and I wasn't even all that hungry for lunch. I was tired, so I just sat around for most of the afternoon, but later, we finally finished Pulp Fiction, and the ending was pretty much worthwhile. And, that was it!

THURSDAY
Same painting as always, but I'm getting more efficient by the day. In the meantime, Tani and Gabe put together new signs, bringing them over occasionally for Aviva to spray paint. Yuval even brought me cookies and juice to tide me over. Unusually, though, I was having real trouble standing up to do the stenciling and my legs were getting exhausted. So, I wasn't happy when it was announced that we'd have to do an additional half-hour of work straightening pipes in the tomato fields - a job David, Tani, and Gabe had done just last week. Tani and Gabe were both half-asleep on the job, with me having to remind them to pick up the pipes to pull on them. Myself, though, I was beyond tired, and began to sit down with every new row we crossed. Finally, we decided to call it quits early, and we got back for lunch at exactly 1:00 - a legitimate time to get off work!

As for this afternoon, I was supposed to go to Be'er Sheva for dinner and the Bedouin shuk, but I was still feeling tired after work, so I opted for a nap. When I woke up after an hour, still in the mood to go, I was feverish. Great. So, I've been lying around this afternoon, watching Arrested Development, doing the crossword, and finally getting around to updating this. At one point, we had a t-shirt va'ad meeting in the room, but Jenni got excited about a particular idea and invited everyone who was on kibbutz at the time to see it. Needless to say, 15 people in this tiny room is always a bad idea, but everyone kept shifting out of proportion like when I got strep and I felt claustrophobic, so I shut off the light and curled up under the covers. Then people got the message that they couldn't stay inside. So, overall, I'm disappointed that I couldn't leave my bed this afternoon, but I guess I need to take it easy if I want to get better.

FRIDAY
Mid-morning, Nathan and I set out for Be’er Sheva as a stop en route to our weekend plans. There, we met up with Dan and Angela, and the four of us went out for lunch at Hodu Katan – the premier hole-in-the-wall Indian restaurant of the city. We sat outside on mattresses at a table that was about a foot high and rejoiced at a menu where everything was under 25 shekel (about 6 bucks). This money was able to buy us plates of steaming curry, beans, and rice, along with naan and yogurt dips. Afterwards we went down to the bus station to part ways. There, I met up with Tani, and the two of us traveled down to Kibbutz Sa’ad while listening to Simon and Garfunkel. Unfortunately, since neither of us was really paying attention, we missed the Sa’ad stopped and ended up at the next kibbutz down, Mefallesim. We tried quite hard to catch a ride back down to Sa’ad, but the highway was so empty that I found myself running across it, flailing my arms and screaming, without being in any danger. Finally, a van of bikers (read: a father and two boys with their mountain bikes) pulled up and we were off for the weekend. With directions from Yael, we walked through the kibbutz and down to the Nativ area, where we proceeded to do nothing but hang out until Shabbat started. We all went to Kabbalat Shabbat and Ma’ariv at the kibbutz’ Beit Knesset. The service was led by Yael’s nephew, but when he forgot how one song started, the adults pretty much took over for him. That was upsetting; he had been doing a good job.

( Intermission: Where exactly are we? )

For dinner, we were split into pairs to be hosted by kibbutz families that are usually involved with Nativ. Jenni and I ended up with the Shlomis, a legendary Nativ family. (They’d been the kibbutz parents for four brothers who had all gone on Nativ; when one of the boys got married, the family felt that the Sa’ad parents had to be there. The two families are still close and visit each other a lot.) The father, Ofer, is Yemenite, and the mother, Tzira(?) is Ashkenazi, so all of their offspring were gorgeous. Of the seven kids, only three were present, but they were all stellar. The eldest son was there with his wife, two toddler daughters, and newborn son. (Tzira spent a good deal of time after the meal showing off photos from the brit milah, which had been two days earlier.) Also in attendance were two of the younger sons. One was 14 and pretty quiet, while the baby of the family, about 8, spent the whole time entertaining his nieces. Finally, seated at our end of the table Tzira’s parents and a Nepalese nanny. (Her mother was injured in a car accident and needed help eating and such.) The family was very friendly and was eager to hear about our lives, both on Nativ and outside of it. They also kept reassuring us of how much Nativ was missed on Kibbutz Sa’ad and how much they wished we were with them. The food was also pretty good – we heard plenty about their special Yemenite soup, although it honestly tasted like my mom’s. We were pretty full after just one steaming bowl, but we also feasted on the challah, potatoes, and plentiful dessert selection. So, by the time we had benched, we were extraordinarily sleepy. So, after going back to our room, we had a two-second oneg and then went to bed.

SATURDAY
Shacharit? Uh, no. We slept in late and then had Kiddush at Yael’s house before lunch, which we ate in the chadar ochel with our family. However, the food was much better than Ein Tzurim’s Saturday morning fare and the meal moved much more quickly, too. Afterwards, Jenni and I unlocked the Nativ mo’adon, just to picture what our semester might have been like if we’d been on Sa’ad instead. We also took the opportunity to steal some novels that had been left there from past Nativs to read ourselves. And read is just what we did all afternoon – I made a dent into one of the pilfered books, The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan, and a fantastic book that Jenni had borrowed from Joey called The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived. (It’s about fictional characters and stereotypes that have somehow changed the course of history – pretty cool.) We read and talked and slept until Seudah Shlishit, which we again ate with our families. After doing Havdallah with the Shlomis, we headed back to kibbutz. Pretty relaxing, delicious Shabbat.

( Sitting on the side of the highway... )

Next up: Tiyul Tzafon!

THURSDAY
At the moshav, we were back to the sign painting. This time, though, while Sarah and I did stenciling, Aviva got to paint the metal with the power sprayer. Pretty cool, though she was dyed blue by the end of the morning. We soon got to see the benefits of working in the garage as opposed to in the fields. First off, we have a radio on which we can blast Galgalatz, the mainstream pop station, to find out what the rest of the world is listening to. But the music also proved to be a huge motivator, as we were working more quickly than ever and the time was passing faster. As well, we had access to aruchat eser again for the first time in weeks. Our usual tea and coffee was made better by the fact that our boss-of-the-week, Yuval, brought us two packs of wafers on which to snack. Our best guess is that he has a crush on one of us - we're guessing that it's Sarah.

After work, I did my yearbook page, and Nathan and I made macaroni and watched Mishehu LaRutz Ito (Someone to Run With). It had been offered as a MASA movie first semester, but I didn't go because I'd been all movied-out at Hebrew U that day. I'd definitely buy the movie just for the sake of being able to show people where I lived first semester - the first half of the movie entirely takes place where we lived and chilled around Gan Ha'atzma'ut, Rechov Azza, Ben Yehuda, and Yaffo. But although the first two-thirds of the movie were pretty good, the ending was a little too simplistic and didn't really make sense. But, overall, good night.

FRIDAY
In the morning, Nathan and I set off for Be'er Sheva for the day (for him) and for the weekend (for me). We met up with Alana at the bus station, then went off to the Merkaz Big for lunch. Spaghettim was our venue of choice, and we ate our pasta and drank swoon-worthy lemonade over Barry White covers of 80s hits. Afterwards, because we still had to get some groceries for Shabbat, we went to the nearby supermarker, Tiv Ta'am. The place was exciting not only because it was huge and chock-full of hard-to-find goodies, but becaue it was decorated in a homestyle, fancy way like North American grocery stores. Here in Israel, most of the supermarkets are bland and white. After gushing over all sorts of European sweets and fun American products, we headed back to the bus station.

Nathan left off to go to the beach in Ashkelon with Julia, while Alana and I went back to her place to get ready for Shabbat. On the menu for us to cook were macaroni casserole (as we were dining that night with Hillel, a vegetarian) and broccoli, as well as pasta salad for lunch the next day. We watched Friends intermittently as we stirred cheese sauce, and soon, Alana's friend Ellie showed up bearing a hot pan of cake. (Ellie and Alana know each other from their high school in Baltimore, and she's spending the year on Shalem, the religious track of Young Judaea's Year Course.) Finally, after lighting candles, Hillel and Debbie came over. Hillel brought us some soup and challah while Debbie carried in cheesecake, spaghetti, and the Disney edition of Trivial Pursuit. We went through the Shabbat rituals, which I haven't done in a long time in such a small setting, and chatted and acted silly over the food. We demolished the casserole entirely and made a lot of headway into both cakes. Then, after dinner, it was board game time, with Alana and I teaming up against Debbie/Ellie and Hillel, all by his lonesome. Alana and I won quickly enough, but we were all delirious by the end. I went over to Debbie's apartment to get ready for bed, and fell asleep to the Great Gatsby.

SATURDAY
We all slept in until about 11, which was wonderful. Debbie and I had cheesecake and bananas for breakfast, and soon afterwards, we went over to Alana's apartment to make a plan for the day. We opted to have a picnic lunch in the park near the Merkaz Klita and brought boatloads of stuff with us: both cakes, pasta salad, challah, yogurt, chips, apple juice, and a couple more board games procured from Debbie's apartment. As we munched away, we ignored Israeli boys demanding to know whether we were from Miami and watching a Russian family set up their grill almost within a set of bushes, which made volunteer firefighter Ellie cringe. After the food, we went on to Cranium and Battle of the Sexes before getting tired again. We went back to the apartments for reading and naptime, but when I finished the Great Gatsy and had to let Alana and Ellie know what I thought of the ending, we ended up talking until Shabbat was over. Debbie came over for Havdallah, and soon enough, Ellie and I had to head home again to begin our weeks. I ended up able to grab a sherut back to kibbutz, but of course, I still went to bed late.

SUNDAY
Back to work, and luckily, we were still on orchard prep duty. While Aviva and I worked on the signs, Tani and Gabe were assigned the job of untangling a wire and screwing bolts onto it to mark off where trees needed to be planted. However, Aviva and I were able to finish quickly (largely due to the fact that our boss kept asking us to do things and then realizing he didn't have the materials for us to do so), so we visited them often - but not as often as the moshav's horses! We're all a little bit in love with the two ponies, one grey and one brown, both unbelievably soft, that live near the refet. Finally, we got to helping the boys out, but lunch arrived before we could finish with the messy detangling effort. ( However, there are pictures! )

After work, Tani, Nathan and I started Pulp Fiction, but we had to stop early because it was Erev Yom HaZikaron (day of rememberance for fallen Israeli soldiers and victims of terrorist attacks). The kibbutz ceremony was held just after sunset outside of the chadar ochel. The evening consisted of the usual recitations of El Malei Rachamim and Kaddish Yatom, as well as prayers for the state of Israel and for the army, and a siren signaling two minutes of silence in memory of the dead. There were also a few touches specific to the Lebanon War last summer, from a prayer recited for the kidnapped soldiers to a slideshow of all 150-something Israelis who died during the fighting and another one showing general scenes from the war - an Israeli compilations consisting mostly of photos of people praying or smoking. Finally, there were some uniquely kibbutz features, including poems, readings, and songs from the members.

After this, we had programming specific to Nativ. We went to the faraway mo'adon, where one wall was covered in black tissue paper. On top were photos and stories of fallen soldiers from throughout Israel's history, war-related poetry and songs, and dried flowers. There were also candles and newspaper articles on the tables below. We spent some time just looking over this area, then sat down to hear stories from Nahum about two people he had known who had died recently - one member of his platoon while doing reserve duty in Lebanon back in the nineties, and one close friend who had been in the Hebrew U terrorist attack a few years ago. Next, we watched a movie about a fallen Israeli soldier from America who had recently had a book published about him with his letters home and drawings include. We ended off with a discussion of this, and soon went to bed.

MONDAY
Keeping up with Yom HaZikaron, we woke up early for tfillot so that we could bus into Jerusalem for the country-wide memorial service at Har Herzl. (On an insensitive note: I led Psukei D'Zimra, and though tired myself, I announced that we were doing a certain song because everyone sounded "dead". Oops.) Nathan and I began reading Freakonomics on the bus ride there, which was quick and unexpectedly free of any major traffic. We were set loose to wander about the graves in the official military and political cemetary of the country, which was overflowing with thousands upon thousands of mourners, tourists, and VIPs. I saw soldiers crowded around the graves from the last war, elderly women sitting in folding chairs and simply looking at tombstones, and even a bindhi'ed Indian family looking sadly upon the name of one of their loved ones. But, as always, pictures do the talking better, ( so these are stolen from Cynthia. )

At 11 AM, there was another siren which began a ceremony that was out of sight on top of Har Herzl, but broadcasted on loudspeakers throughout the area. Twelve prominent members of Israeli society lit memorial candles at the top of the hill (in a ceremony I wouldn't have understood if it hadn't been for Mendelsson's class), and the standard prayers were recited again, this time by surviving family members of last summer's heroes. Speeches were given by Ehud Olmert, the PM, among other noteworthy individuals, and we all impressed ourselves with the amount of Hebrew that we were able to understand from them. At the end, we went back to the buses and headed back to Beit Nativ for a lunch that was better than last semester's average. I had to duck out early with Molly, Jenni, and Sarah L. to check into our youth hostel for that night, as they were closing early for Yom Ha'atzma'ut the next day. (We had wanted to stay at Beit Nativ, but it's all booked up right now by March of the Living.) Finally, after lunch, we saw a downright cheesy movie about a family's struggles as they try to determine whether their soldier son died in a terrorist attack that day. (He didn't.) After that, we were free to go for the day.

Nathan and I set about going around the city to relive first semester in one day, including going to the fabulous candy shop on Agrippas and the Old City. As well, we went back to the Jerusalem Hostel just to check out our room for the night. However, since we'd ordered dorm beds to save money, this also meant checking out our roommates. They turned out to be a whole group of friends from Mexico happily smoking hookah, and the smoke and crowd kind of obliterated any view we might have had. Luckily, we were able to keep our stuff in Molly and Jenni's room, so it didn't become scented with that weird apple-flowery mix. We met up for dinner with Angela, Dan, and Joe at Burgers Bar, where I was so hungry that I had almost downed my hamburger by the time anyone else was served. Joe was interested in going to Erev Yom Ha'atzma'ut services, so we popped into Yeshurun, the closest synagogue to Ben Yehuda, to try it out. Although we were severely underdressed in our white t-shirts and jeans, and even though the service went on for a full hour, it was still alright. (And we said Hallel at night! Whoa!) But, after sitting still for so long, we had to get moving.

We made it back to the Jerusalem Hostel, which is beautifully right on Kikar Tzion, just in time to put on sweatshirts to get ready for a night of partying. When we came outside, Gaia (a band invented by the Jewish Agency) was just finishing up, and the dance music to fill time between sets was starting. A bunch of older adults were hora-ing and twirling to the modern music, and we found it to be so amusing that we had to join in. Goldschmidt even started up a conga line, which really tickled their fancy. (Goldschmidt is just one of those kids who knows how to make older people smile. It's wonderful.) Finally, the main event, HaDag Nachash, hit the stage. Right before, we'd gone inside to go to the bathroom, and I noticed that the Mexicans had left the room. And when I got a good look at it, I realized that it had huge, openable windows that faced right onto the concert stage - and there was room enough on the ledges for four people to sit and watch the concert cooly and comfortably. (Plus, we could people-watch throughout the crowds down below!) Nathan, Rachel, and I sat extremely happily as the band went through Ma Na'aseh?, Shirat HaSticker, and Hineh Ani Ba. (Yeah, they knew that they had an American crowd.) But, one of the definite highlights happened when we saw a familiar hand waving from down below - Dan Kieval! We quickly invited him upstairs to watch the concert with us, and his brother, Dave, joined us too. After the last song of the set, fireworks went off over the Sheraton Hotel, and we stayed seated just to watch. It just incredible having the best view in the whole hostel for our cheapo, $10 beds.

After a while, we wanted to go back outside, so Nathan, Alana and I made our way down to Kikar Safra, home of city hall, for Israeli dancing and songs. However, the moves were complicated, so we ended up just sitting around. On our way back, we managed to run into Hillel and Peaceman at Coffee Bean, half of my ulpan class from Hebrew U, Ellie and her roommates, and Jeff Seidel. So, this all reaffirmed that the Ben-Yehuda party was entirely American, but this didn't really bother me. It's at least good that Americans are this enthusiastic about Israel's right to exist...we finished off at the youth hostel, watching the last string of concerts before a final set of fireworks marked the transition from live music to techno. Around 1, we went to bed, but awoke again at 5 AM when the music shut off (as at Boombamela) and when the Mexicans came back to go to sleep.

( But, what about this Jerusalem Hostel and it's European, horror-movie feel? )

TUESDAY
Nathan, Jenni, Alana, and I woke up with a craving for waffles, but after walking to both Babette and Waffle Bar, we were dismayed to find them both closed. (Maybe they only cater to post-drinking waffles, not breakfast waffles.) Either way, we ended up at Ne'eman for some great pastries, as well as some unusual dining mates. The two tables immediately next to us were each occupied by one clearly religious man and one very secular one. ( Alana tried to get the photo evidence. )

After breakfast, we went to Beit Nativ to help set up for the program's barbeque lunch that afternoon. But, once again, we cannot be serious for five minutes while waiting for Nahum to bring in the vegetables to go with the knives. ( Nahum's office take-over! )

Our party consisted of sitting around in the park munching on shishkabobs, dancing to Galgalatz, and just chilling. It was also pretty much one big photo-op. ( One big photo op! )

Finally, afterwards, we boarded our buses home for some well-needed rest. Nathan, Tani and I continued with Pulp Fiction, but we didn't quite make it to the end. The highlight of the night, though, was that the kitchen hadn't made us any dinner because of the holiday, but the Kol-Bo wasn't open, either, to buy more food. So, we just ordered in stacks and stacks of fluffy pizza from Kiryat Malakhi for dinner. We each had about 7 slices, it was so delicious. And so, a delicious series of days off ended.

Because this is longlonglong (especially because not everyone's put up their photos yet), I'm continuing in a new post.

MONDAY
Yom HaSho'ah, and with programming well done according to me, the Holocaust education cynic. We started off the day with a session to learn the stories of five righteous gentiles, including Raoul Wallenberg and Père Marie-Benoît. We had time to share a few stories of our families' or friends' connections of the Holocaust before the country-wide siren went off at 10 AM. At that point, all across Israel, the country stopped and rose for two minutes of silence.

We continued with a few more stories afterwards, then began to watch a movie called On the Edge of God. (Originally, we were supposed to see Life Is Beautiful, but the movie store in Jerusalem was all out - I guess it's a popular movie for the occasion. The va'ad chose this one a bit blindly, but it was okay.) The story was about a Jewish boy from Warsaw who was hidden in a religious Catholic village during the Holocaust. Although one aspect of the movie involved his own struggle to stay true to himself, it focussed more on the suffering of the Poles during WWII and how these monstrosities were perceived by children, especially in light of their Catholic education. Overall, it was pretty well-received by the group, partially because it differed so much from our typical diet of Schindler's List and The Believer.

Before lunch, we heard a speaker who was the closest thing that Ein Tzurim had to a Holocaust survivor. The lady who spoke with us had been born in Lithuania right at the outbreak of WWII, and at age 3, was snuck out of the ghetto by her mother to put her in hiding. After the war, but still as a young child, she came to Israel. It was impressive the sort of memories she was able to conjure up from her life aged one to six. Afterwards, we finished the movie and had a quick discussion about it. Finally, to end off the day, we had a sort of "pledge circle" where we each had to say one thing we would do in the next year to act upon the memory of the Holocaust. The ideas ranged from learning more about international genocides to petitioning government members to zooming on on local problems as well as global ones to spreading Holocaust education. Altogether, I was impressed by the programming for its ability to do something beyond make us sorry for ourselves as Jews. Things went exactly the way that they should have.

After rinsing all the mud off from work, it was time to set off as a group for the beach! We thought we were going to Chof Ashkelon, but we found ourselves pulling into Nitzanim Junction and realized that plans had changed. It was so odd to see the beach recuperated after the messiness of Boombamela - it certainly cleaned up well! It had gotten cooler outside, but it was still humid, so we were all eager to go swimming. The water was freezing, but the waves were nice and the sand bar went out really far. When we started to really get cold, we retired to the beach. There, we began to build some sandcastles, and it quickly escalated into a boys vs. girls sand city-building contest. The teams were a little uneven - it was just Emily and I working against Josh, Tani, Andy, David, Phil, and Gabe. However, the girls' city of Swegopolis with its tunnels and seasshells clearly beat the boys' Batman, complete with apartheid wall and financial district. ( Which one do you like more? )

Soon, it was time for dinner. A great barbeque was prepared with steaks, honey mustard chicken, hamburgers, and hot dogs, as well as pita, drinks, and pickles. (Oh, and whole carrots - those got devoured quickly, though.) After eating, we all hung around reading, playing baseball with items found on the beach, and chilling. When we headed back, we all piled into the shower as quickly as we could and started to get ready for bed. A couple of us were supposed to watch a movie, but we couldn't agree on one, so I got in bed to go to sleep. But, this was interrupted by some meetings involving caravan drama which took us late into the night. Oh well!

WEDNESDAY
When we arrived at Massu'ot Yitzchak, I was barely into Chanan's truck when he asked Sarah and I if we wanted to paint that day. How could we say no? We met Yuval, who told us that we were making signs to label an orchard of almond trees. He would spray-paint the signs purple, Sarah painted on the letter designation (either aleph-kaf or just aleph) and I stenciled on the numbers for the rows. Sarah and I got efficient very quickly, especially when someone brought in a radio and turned up the music. It was quite enjoyable work, except for a few small issues. At one point, the pointy-edged signs were stacked in a way in which I couldn't manoever without being scraped by them. I made one turn too fast, and the corner of a sign gashed open my leg. Slightly shocked and in pain, I turned back the other way - just to cut my other leg even worse! It took Yuval a while to get the Band-Aids, but overall, he was a fun guy to work with. He kept offering us breaks, food, drinks, and compliments, and admitted when he made mistakes. One such was when he miscounted the number he needed for certain rows, and we had to redo a bunch. It wasn't a big deal, though, and we had a great time. Oh - and we get to finish the job tomorrow!

As for this afternoon, it's taken me a while to update, especially with a few good interruptions. First was picking up my laundry (boring), but soon afterwards, Abbie told me there was a colouring party happening in Molly's caravan. So, toting my crayons and my Unparalleled Colouring Book of Tibertan Art (found in my grandparents' basement, belonging to unknown uncle), I was met with a beautiful scene: crayons and markers strewn everywhere, pages ripped out of a Sesame Streeet colouring book littering the common room, and even Mike, our staff, working on an outline of Elmo. We held another bonfire around 8, and we had an ice cream party for Hanna's birthday at 9:30. And now, if all goes well, we'll be watching Evil Dead soon. Yay!

That's all for now. Thanks for staying tuned!
- Shosh

Alright, where were we?

TUESDAY
Back to work - supposedly. We waited for our morning ride until 8:30, at which point we enacted our "one-hour" rule, which stipulates that at this point we can just go free for the day. Us Chakla'ut Farm Workers were all set to settle in with How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days in my caravan when we got a call from Yael telling us that we'd have other jobs for the day. After much debate and arguing, Tani, Gabe, and I ended up in the laundry, while David and Sarah worked in the chadar ochel and Aviva returned to the guest house. Our time in the laundry was pretty fantastic. The work was much less physical than usual (a good thing after our long break), the laundry building smelled great, and I got to fold things very neatly and precisely allll morning long. The ladies in there (including my kibbutz mother!) loved us and kept giving us "me'ah achuz" (one-hundred percent) for our work. The only downside was that they kept trying to offer us pieces of some cake they'd made that tasted like soap. That was upsetting. The other fun thing about work that day was that Tani decided he wanted to learn all the words to We Didn't Start The Fire, so I began to teach him.

That afternoon, Avram organized a softball game for anyone who felt like playing. Bad American (or good Canadian) that I am, I didn't have a clue what the rules were or how to bat or anything. So, I came to the diamond a bit early so that Avram and Marty could show me the ropes. I ended up playing in the game, albeit badly, but it was still alright. Things got a little annoying after a while when some people simultaneously got competitive and decided that they were all experts. All was remedied, however, by a little dog that wouldn't stay away from our game. We petted her and played with her and gave her water. She was so appreciative that she took a liking to us and started following us around - and back to our caravans. Realizing that she had no collar and likely no owner because kibbutzim are prone to strays, we let her stay with us. Tani named her Imo (Eye-Moe), and so she became the group dog.

WEDNESDAY
Back to work - for real, for one day. For the first time in forever, the six original Chakla'ut members were back together, and for the first time in even longer, we were back in the parsley fields. Thank goodness, this time there was some rhyme and reason to the organization of the rows, and we were able to (intuitively!) figure out where to move the pipes as the combine combine-d down the field. The whole job took us almost until lunch, but Chanan wouldn't let us go early. He took Sarah, David and I to unload exactly ten pipes from a rack across the moshav before taking us back to the office for lunch. Odd.

( Another cramped day in the truck. )

Because Pesach vacation had left us underprogrammed and desperate (just kidding), we started a seminar that went on until Thursday afternoon concerning Israel Advocacy. As Hadas noted when I told her about this earlier in the week, "Why don't they ever give Israelis lessons in Israel advocacy?" Either way, our program started with a lecture by Neil Lazarus (whom I've heard before on Pilgrimage and during the Leadership Seminar) about the Five Rules of Advocacy. What were they? I don't quite remember, but we're getting the notes emailed to us later, so it's not a huge deal. Afterwards, we had a session with a man named David Olesker jumping off from Jimmy Carters' recent comparison of Israel to apartheid South Africa. He spent a long time refuting the claim by citing both people's misconceptions about what characterized the apartheid and what makes Israel's reality different. This was pretty well-done, although we kept joking long after the session was over that the only thing we learned during the Advocacy Seminar was that apartheid is bad. Well, that and the fact that sessions are better when put together by two guys named Neil and David, one of whom is secular and wears tacky shirts, while the other is religious and right-wing, who aren't afraid in the least bit to make fun of one another.

THURSDAY
Day two of the seminar. After tfillot, we started off with another session with David about campaigning. Once again, I don't remember too much about it, except that we spent the whole time snacking on cookies provided courtesy of the Ein Tzurim guest houses. The final session was actually pretty fun. We were given the scenario that an undercover Islamist group was trying to gain more recognition for the (supposedly wronged) mayor of Jerusalem while it was under Jordanian rule as a Palestinian hero. Their plan to do this was to have him named the student government's honourary President for the year. Our track was split into two groups, each one having the task to "advocate for Israel". We were given phone numbers for "campus security", a "speakers' hotline", "entertainment", and "catering", and were left to plan for ourselves. (These numbers were all routed to our staff, Neil's, and Neil's wife's phones, and they gave us a good, realistic hard time as we tried to get things organized. They also called us, posing as reporters and opposing students groups to heckle us.)

In the end, we presented our plans to each group and to Neil. The other group chose to do a pro-Israel carnival, with Israeli bands playing, Israeli food, and camel rides. Neil was a bit more partial towards our plan: instead of turning the incident into an Israel-related issue, as it wasn't, in essence, we instead strove to make a point about the purpose of student government. We planned to involve all willing campus groups in a week-long campaign called Students for Student Government, with the purpose of "keeping international politics out of student government". Each club would set up tables and posters to oppose the honourary president plan. As well, each one would give away t-shirts reading "(name of club) supports Students for Student Government" on the front, with the slogan on the back. To make things really authentic, for our presentation, we created our own samples using Nativ as our organization. Finally, to make our campaign a little more fun, we got Dave Matthews band to play an opening concert that was free but with horribly expensive food to illustrate what happens when student governments loses focus of its students. We also planned for a rally at the end of the week as a culmination to ensure that the motion wouldn't pass.

With that, the Advocacy Seminar ended off, and we were free until our closed Shabbat began the next day. For dinner, we had a bonfire and barbeque, which is always delicious. Later that night, I watched Empire Records with Nathan, Joey, Jenni, and Abi, and that's about all that I remember.

FRIDAY
After sleeping in nice and late, I did some graphic design work for my dad and learned how to use the program Fireworks, which has turned out to be fantastic find. I took a break for lunch, then got back to work - the program actually had some decently useful tutorials to use. Finally, Shabbat came around, so I showered and got dressed to spend the day with the group for the first time in well over a month. Yosef led Mincha, Aviva led Kabbalat Shabbat, and Matan led Ma'ariv. In between, Nahum gave a short d'var Torah, and Mike did Parshat Ha'Shavu'a for us about the mysterious death of Nadav and Avihu. For dinner, I was going to eat with my host family, but their table was full, so I ended up joining the Nativ table instead. Again, it was great to eat with my friends for the first time in a long time. As an added bonus, there was watermelon for dessert! After dinner, I hung out with Tani and Hanna for a bit, and afterwards, we went to the tisch. However, the songs were running a little long and slow, and the food was a little lacklustre, so we got pretty crazy pretty fast. Ah, it was just one of those nights, but as least we had fun!

SATURDAY
We started off by leading services entirely by ourselves for the first (and perhaps only) time this year. Almost every member of the group participated in some form, but notably, Nehama led Psukei D'Zimra, Tani did Shacharit, Sarah R. did the Torah service, and Teppy led Musaf. Things passed by quickly because everyone was in a sing-y mood, and the service ended off on a high note (literally) with Josh and I leading Anim Zmirot and segueing into the instrumental Adon Olam tune. I was going to eat in the chadar for lunch, but Phil was going over to his family's place and didn't want to eat alone, so I went along with him. This proved to be a good chance for me to practice my Hebrew, as this couple has much better hearing than my aged "parents". As well, Phil wasn't feeling so well, so I was able to distract them so that he didn't have to speak so much. We had some terrific salads, empanadas, soup, chicken, and fruit with whipped cream for dessert. Also, Phil's "parents" were charming and we got into some good discussions. After lunch, I went over to visit my own kibbutz parents, where we looked at some old photo albums from the original Ein Tzurim in the West Bank. When I went back to our caravans afterwards, I was read to speak a little English for a change.

Right when I got back, Avram told me we were having another softball game, so I went back for some more practice. This time, I was able to hit five pitches in a row! It was quite exciting. Soon, lots of teens from the kibbutz showed up, so we were able to play a real game. I got a hit on my very first try, but I twisted my leg in a funny way while running and it began to hurt. So, I didn't do much running while in the field. Luckily, I didn't get another hit until later in the game, but as I began to run, the pain intensified far beyond what it was before. It didn't help that the kibbutznik who tagged me out tripped me when I was already is agony. Despite the leg situation, though, this game was far more fun than the one earlier in the week because everyone was more relaxed.

After the game, I lay outside and read for a bit, but soon it was time to get changed for Mincha. I led it, and I popped in as many fun tunes as I could, which people told me they appreciated. The only annoying thing was starting into Va'Ani Tefillati and realizing that nobody else knew it and could sing along...and then realizing that my tune involved high notes. ;) We had Seudah Shlishit in the chadar, and it was pretty good. And for the first time in literally months, we all really got into the Saturday night z'mirot. (Well, Nathan and Hanna were playing "Float or Sink?" with egg yolks in a cup of orange juice, but they were into it too.) Ma'ariv and Havdallah went by quickly, though we all thieved cloves from the spice bottle to play with them through the announcements. (I mean, splitting up va'adot for the end of the year - we needed some distraction!) And that was that - a really great closed Shabbat. That night, Matan, Marty, and I set out to build a campfire together while Aviva and Molly went into town to buy some refreshments. I had some good talks, and for the first time in a long time, Josh and I did a blues improvisation.It was a really refreshing, relaxing evening, proving once again that all one needs to be happy are fire, a guitar, and friends.

( Bonfire! )

SUNDAY
The morning was eh. However, Nathan and I had a really good talk in the afternoon. That evening, as Yom HaSho'ah was beginning, we went to Yafo as a track to see a play adapted from a David Grossman story called Momik. First, we arrived about half an hour early. Then, we had to sit through an odd MASA session first with some Russians with bad haircuts, during which we fiddled with some odd headsets which they gave us but that we never used. After this, we had another whole half hour until the play started. We wandered around to try and find a coffee shop to counter the theatre's inflated prices, but we had forgotten that everything was closed for Yom HaSho'ah. Oh, this country.

The plot revolves around Momik, the nine-year old child of Holocaust survivors, growing up in Israel in the late 50s. His parents want to protect him from the horrors of WWII by trying to hide it from him, referring only to The Nazi Beast and people arriving in Israel from Over There. However, Momik's imagination morphs these concepts into concrete items that are at once adorable and insensitive in a childlike way, especially when his new grandfather, Anshel Wasserman, arrives from Over There. I found it to be interesting because the production was so distinctly Israeli. As if the director had stolen my Jewish History notes from earlier in the year, I saw the overall demeaning tone that coloured references to the Jews of Europe's passivity and submissiveness during the war. My favourite part, however, were the sets. All of the scenery was two-dimensional and on wheels, zipping across the stage for scene changes or just for effect. It really made me feel like I was experiencing a child's dream sequence from inside of their mind. The absolute best effect was used to illustrate Momik and his parents being asleep, for their "beds" were vertical and upright, but just 2-D, so the actors stood against them with blankets over their bodies. It was as if they were floating and inside of a picture book - and straight out of Momik's scary, creative mind.

After the play, it was already late, and I was tired. So, I stretched out on the back seat of the bus and slept the whole way home.

Early in the day, we set off southbound again to continue our trip. The father of the Kfar Vradim family drove us just far enough out of town to grab a bus to Nahariya. After thanking him up and down for the fun time we'd had the previous night, we found ourselves in the peaceful Arab village of Tarshita. The sherut came quickly, and from Nahariya, we boarded the train to go to Tel Aviv to visit the Okons for the day. I'd never taken the train before, but it made me feel like I was on a fancier, tidier version of the Toronto subway. The trip took about an hour-and-a-half (as opposed to the 3ish-hour bus ride that would have had the same price), and soon enough we were at the Tel Aviv University station. Shai picked us up from there, and we had a late lunch with him and Malka at their apartment to make sure that I saw them before they left for Eilat for a few days on Sunday. After looking up bus schedules, repacking our bags, and hanging out for a bit, we left for our next destination: the Boombamela music festival on Nitzanim beach.

( But first, welcome to Tarshita! )

From the Tel Aviv bus station, we headed on the Ashkelon bus to the beach's junction. At that point, we still had to take a sherut, get wristbands, and ride on a shuttle bus to get to the beach and festival itself. Right away, we met up with Alicia, Shosh C., Sam, and Jenny, who had a tent set up near the entrance. We would never have been able to find it ourselves, because the entire, enormous beach was covered in hundreds, maybe thousands of tiny tents. I had never seen anything like it before. Since the other girls had already been at the festival for a while, Yonit and I went to check the main areas on our own. We passed by some thrill activities, like bungee-jumping and rock-climbing, on the way to the more commercial area. Dozens of shops were set up hawking Indian and South American clothing and jewelery, reggae-themed items and dreadlocking, and assorted other cute knick-knacks. Hidden among these were tables belonging to Jews for Jesus and Chabad. There were also food stands selling everything from fresh chips to French crepes to huge chunks of watermelon. Finally, interspersed throughout all of this were various music and comedy tents, each appropriately decorated for their genre: dance and trance, reggae, rock, queer humour, and the like. Finally, though nobody was playing as we took our first tour, in the centre of everything and right on the water was the main stage. Yonit and I ran around on the beach for a bit, and as it began to get dark, we met up with the other girls from Nativ to plan for the night.

( Boombamela! )

Yonit and I weren't hungry from our huge lunch, but the others wanted chips for dinner. From there, we went to the main stage concert of the festival's headliner, Mosh Ben Arie, which I thought was really well-done and had great music. Next, we went to the trance tent to dance, and from there moved on to the reggae venue. The latter was particularly cool because the band playing, Los Caparos, was one of the ones from the posters on my kibbutz wall that I'd taken from Betzalel back in December. They were also pretty good. It was getting cold out, so Yonit and I went campfire-hunting to warm up a bit. As we sat at the one near the reggae tent, we sang old camp songs together. Finally, when we started to get tired, we met up with Yonit's future Michigan Art classmate, Shif, who is on Young Judaea, to sleep in her tent. (She'd offered us spots when we ran into her at the bungee jumping earlier in the day.) The three of us, as well as Shif's younger sister, Leah, ended up talking for a bit before curling up semi-uncomfortably to go to sleep. The music was still blasting as we dozed off around 3:30, and both Yonit and I awoke suddenly at 6 when the blaring at last stopped.

The next morning, we met up with the Nativ girls to lie out on the beach for a while to read. This was great - it wasn't too hot outside, and the nearby music pavillion was giving us great background tunes. And when my eyes got too tired for reading, there was also fantastic people-watching to be had. However, though I was drinking a lot, I still got dehydrated and kind of sick. So, I ended up hanging out in the shade of the girls' tent during the afternoon eating rice cakes (yeah kitniyot!). Around sundown, we got set to leave, taking down the tent and cleaning up around us. Heading back to kibbutz proved to be the hard part. Because we had taken an Ashkelon-bound bus to the festival, we assumed that the same one would get us back to kibbutz. Not so: there are actually two highways, with two different buses, that run from Tel Aviv to Ashkelon. We finally broke down and took a cab back to kibbutz, and we got a decent price for a 15-minute ride. Back in my caravan, Yonit and I broke out the Nutella and matza and watched Rumour Has It on TV before going to bed.

On Sunday, Yonit left early for Jerusalem and I enjoyed having some downtime alone for the morning. In the afternoon, I set out for Tel Aviv to hang out with the Okons. I hung out at Ohad's for a bit, and then we left for dinner at Noam's father's house in Shoham. The planned city was quiet and cute, and Noam's family was simply out of The Brady Bunch. His father lived with his new wife, their two daughters (one of whom was my age and whom I hung out with, the other one who wore a pirate patch as a fashion statement), the older daughter's boyfriend, another son from another marriage of Noam's fathers, and a cat and a dog. Hadas and Noam couldn't stop telling me about how great Noam's stepmother's cooking was, and it didn't disappoint. After dinner, the younger daughter, Bar, showed me her collection of artwork she and her boyfriend have done. All in all, it was a pretty good night.

The next morning, I slept in late, but it didn't matter - Hadas and Noam's baby, Yaron, was sick, so they wanted to stay home with him. He was getting better in the afternoon, though, so we decided to go to Azrieli mall in Herzeliya. It was a lot of fun - Hadas and Noam hadn't been to a mall in a long time, and I hadn't been to a non-dumpy mall in a long time. (After all, Jerusalem and my current area are both pretty poor.) Even Ohad, typical teenage boy, enjoyed being there for the chance to play with Yaron. Either way, we spent the most time in toy stores, bookstores, and candy stores, which can satisfy a broad range of people. When we got back, it was time to come back to kibbutz and to end vacation. I brought Yonit's stuff that she'd left at the Okons to the station for her. I had a long time to wait before my bus, though, so I decided to roam the bus station to find the ultimate chametz to end Pesach. In the end, I settled for some great baklava from a bakery stand. However, as I walked around, I noticed this ( typical Israeli sight... )

Well, that was my vacation! For its ever-changing plans and craziness, I had a really great time, and I feel like my time and money were well-spent. A shout-out goes out to Yonit for being a fabulous travel and exploration buddy as always. Now, as for updating my time back on kibbutz...that can wait a little longer. ;)

( I'll end off with some more of Photos You've Never Seen! )

( Welcome to Shorashim! )

WEDNESDAY
Yonit and I woke up early to get a ride into Karmiel to catch a bus for Tiberias. As each of us showered, the other admired the door of the room where we were staying. (The owner of the room is actually Hannah, age 19, who in her teen years was an aficionado of American teen magazines. Both sides of her door were collaged with ads and pull-out posters and other assorted knick-knacks from the early 2000s.) We ate Passover brownies for breakfast while reading some Newsweeks that were lying around. (It's not just the youngest daughter who's into American culture - everything inside of the house screams USA. You could easily forget that you were in Israel with editions of the Moosewood cookbook and the latest Oprah-approved novels.) However, the mother, Karen, was running a little late, and when we arrived at the Karmiel bus station, the shuttle to Tiberias was just pulling away. Undefeated, Yonit and I resolved to board the next bus that came our way. Luckily, the bus happened to be to an equally fun city, Tzfat.

As Pesach vacation was just starting, the bus was entirely overflowing with soldiers. We stood for the first 15 minutes or so of the ride as the landscape changed from a series of big-box stores to a pleasant-looking Arab village. By the time we got seats, we were coasting by picnickers on Mt. Meron (site of Israel's most famous Lag Ba'omer festivities. Finally, when we arrived, Yonit and I realized we had no idea what to do in Tzfat. So, we resolved to walk around and follow signs until anything came up. First off, we saw a giant shuk taking place at the bottom of the hill, so we went to look through it. There wasn't much interesting there except 5-shekel picture hats and one lone bubble skirt, so we went back up the slope towards the Old City. The area was pretty, as were the views off the edge of the mountain on which Tzfat is built. However, to our disappointment, every art gallery was closed. We figured that it was because of the holiday, despite is being tourist season, so we settled for admiring the street art.

( Welcome to Tzfat! )

Around 2, we decided that it was probably time for lunch, so we sat down at the first open restaurant that we saw. It was an utter hole in the wall with a patio of four tables on a slant, but it was kosher for Pesach and open, so we sat down and ordered some sweet matza brie and coffee. It was the most incredible thing that either of us had ever tasted, and we savoured every last bite of it. Not really knowing where to go next, we noticed that the castle-like building next door had a visitors' centre, so we walked in. Through a short tunnel, there was a historical plaque explaining that the place was called the Saraya, and it had served as the seat of the Turkish government in Tzfat way back when, then became an absorption centre for Jewish immigrants, and was the location of the first swearing-in ceremony of Israeli soldiers though. Going beyond the plaque, though, the place was an under-construction wreck. Regardless, Yonit and I went from room to room, trying to imagine what the palace could be when the renovations were done. And on our way out, we noticed a huge banner next to the coffee shop where we'd lunched that it was its opening day. So, we were some of its first customers - cool!

We decided to walk to walk towards the Artists' Village, which I suppose is different from the Old City, for it was absolutely hopping. Every gallery was open and people were milling about all around us. We went from studio to studio, looking at paintings, jewelery, glasswork, sculptures, and altogether incredible work. This kept us occupied for a long time. We then delved into the shuk, where we noticed Mark Lazar, the guy who always does drama games for Nativ and always pops up on our excursions. He followed us through the cheaper art places, no matter how many mysterious turns we took. While wandering down the hill, we stumbled upon the Great Synagogue of Tzfat, where the ringing cell phone that got evil glares belonged to the religious guy at the entrance giving out kippot. As we were about to head back uphill, Yonit and I noticed a sign reading "Safed Cheeze" with an arrow pointing left. The sign was so irresistable that we had to follow it. More and more signs popped up as we kept walking, with "Safed" and "Cheese" all spelled a myriad of different ways, with some indications just spray-painted onto the walls. Finally, we made it down to a cool, white room stocked with unused machinery and with a couple sipping black coffee while shelling green peas. At the other end, a man was offering up free samples of cheese and halvah. Needless to say, we tried a little bit of everything. It gave us a whole story about following an endless line of signs to get free cheese, which is always a sign of a good vacation.

It was getting chilly out, so we started heading back uptown to the bus station. On the way there, though, we stopped by a few more galleries. In one of them, a little girl came up to me, looked straight into my face, and asked, "Eich korim lach?" (What's your name?) I was startled at first, but managed to reply, "Shoshana. Ve'eich korim lach?" She looked at me again and said, "Sivan! Na'im me'od." (Sivan, nice to meet you!) before running away. It was adorable. As we began to approach the station, I noticed a building with a really cool, glimmering roof that I wanted to check out. We went towards it, and it turns out it was just a banquet hall, but next door was this awesome abandoned mansion right out of a movie set. We noticed that there was a trashed graveyard out back, and soon, some Haredim emerged from it. It was so weird that we had to get going. On the way, a group of girls stopped us and asked, "Ehh...eyfo anachnu?" (Uhh...where are we?) Slightly weirded out, I tried, "Tzfat?" The leader of the group shrieked, "Anachnu lo be'Kiryat Shemonah?!?" (We're not in Kiryat Shemonah - northernmost town in Israel, quite far away - ?) Then, they ran off laughing. We had no idea whether they were being serious or not, but we were amused. So, Yonit and I resolved that later at Boombamela (a provocative hippie fest) later in the week, we'd go around in the same style asking where we were, then exclaiming, "What?!? We're not in Jerusalem?!?" Finally, we made it to the bus station, and we looked through each others' drawings and things until the Karmiel bus came.

We got back just in time for dinner, and Karen prepared leftovers salmon cakes, salad, and soup for us. She also had a nice, big watermelon for dessert as well as chocolate-covered clumps of raisins and nuts. Exhausted and ready to rest for a bit, we decided to watch the movie that was right on top of the family's VCR - good ol' Mulan. (And yeah, it was a VCR - this is a moshav we're talking about, after all.) Within minutes, the family cat had crawled onto my lap and fallen asleep. After the movie, Yonit and I hung out with Hannah for a bit, and when we settled into bed, it felt really nice.

THURSDAY
Hannah had to go back to her army base, but to get there from Shorashim (aka, the middle of nowhere in Israeli terms), her mom had to give her a ride into Acco to the train station. When they asked if we'd like to spend the day in Acco and its twin city, Nahariya, we agreed readily. In Acco, Yonit and I were dropped off in the Old City, where there were plenty of gates and alleyways to explore. It was pretty cold out, and after a while, it began to rain. So, we hid out in the shuk until it let up. After we'd decided we'd seen enough of Acco's port, we decided to head uptown to catch a sherut into Nahariya. Yonit flagged one down and asked the driver if he was going to Nahariya. He replied that he wasn't, but offered us a free ride to the bus station, where we could catch another one. Something that we never expected to occur in Israel...

( Welcome )

SUNDAY
One last Yom Nativ before vacation. First up was Hanna’s program (which I made up) in which the group was divided into five teams and instructed to gather up all their remaining chametz. Each team then had to design an assigned scene from the story of Pesach using the food. Because I’m not even going to try to describe the mess we made in words, here are the pictures:

( Diorama-rama! )

Afterwards, David did a program comparing our commandment to “remember” on Pesach to times throughout the Tanach in which God remembered the Jewish people. For our last program before lunch, Nathan split us up into groups to compare our family’s Pesach traditions. (While I was able to list lots of unique things about our seder, from our Ukranian tunes to out-of-towners calling around Echad Mi Yode’ah time, the rest of my group didn’t say much. While one guy’s family tries to ask questions about the artwork in their abstract siddur, everyone else said things like, “We go around the table to read Maggid” or “We have more than one type of charoset”. It made me proud of my wacky family.) Afterwards, we had to compose a song about what we’d learned. We chose to do it to the tune of Dayenu, but being the last group to perform, another team managed to use it first. So, we tried making up something to the melody of Chad Gadya, but it didn’t really work. In the meantime, the other two groups did a rap in the style of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme and a song parodying the English Echad Mi Yode’ah. (Their traditions included 5 dollars for finding the afikomen, 3 types of charoset, 2 Pesach songs sung set to Beatles tunes, and 1 non-Jewish family at someone’s seder.)

Before lunch, we were given some sheets concerning the halachot of what consitutes chametz and how to clean for Pesach. After studying up while eating on the chadar ochel’s patio, the information was taken away from us and we were quizzed in teams. The game was a little long and tedious, especially with most of the other groups arguing with the hosts, so my group mostly read and crocheted to pass the time. In the end, we came in a close third, which is surprising because our team was the only one without a Hebrew speaker and because we’d been detached the whole time. With Yom Nativ said an done, we left to clean our caravans for the holiday. (One of the members of my caravan ran off before she could help out, though, which was odd.) We dumped out our chametz and garbage, scrubbed the countertops and fridge, and wiped down the floor within half an hour and then called it a day. And then, just a few minutes later, all my caravanmates were gone. Faced with the prospect of a trailer all to myself, I sprawled out on the couch, turned on some reality TV, and began to doodle.

I did nothing until dinner, which turned out to have some great pita, avocados, and baby corn. Afterwards, Jenni and I decided that we really wanted to watch a movie, but nobody was left on kibbutz with a good DVD library. Then I remembered that I had a copy of The Little Mermaid that my parents had given me for Channukah, so we decided to watch that and invited Reva along. The movie was still as good now as it was thirteen years ago. Sam and Alicia were already coming over for the night, so when they arrived mid-movie, they also became glued to the screen. Even David, who had dissed the film when he saw us watching it on his way to talking to Yael, joined us for the last third and insisted that we watch the extras, including the 45-minute Making of the Movie and all the deleted scenes. After going through all of the DVD’s contents, I went to sleep.

MONDAY
I slept in and spent the morning packing and just finishing arrangements for vacation. After a non-existant lunch, I boarded the bus to Jerusalem for the seder. The ride was quick, and I had a lot of time to kill before heading over to the Constantinis’ for their seder. So, I windowshopped through the mall at the bus station and marvelled at the kosher-for-Pesach (albeit unkosher) McDonald’s and bakeries displaying trays of macaroons. Around 5, I showed up at the crazy complex of houses at 4 Ha’arazim to help them get ready for the big dinner. Keren, the oldest daughter, was acting as head chef, while the other kids made frustrated attempts to actually fit all 43 chairs around the arrangement of chairs and to set the placecards in a way that satisfied everyone. In the meantime, newly-arrived from Australia and jet-lagged, Na’ama and Shlomi held everything together as they cleaned. I pitched in everywhere that I could, and when Na’ama’s mother arrived with a special strawberry shortcake, I got a slice of it, too. (It turns out that she makes it every year so that her kids and grandkids don’t starve through her husband’s famously long Maggid. It seems like all the women in the family have their own special “only on Pesach” dish.) We finished early, so I checked my email for the first time in days and got dressed for the seder.

After a meet-and-greet with all the extended family on both Na’ama and Shlomo’s sides (who all did semesters at Harvard and are either doctors or computer programmers), we sat down according to our placecards. I was seated at a table of English-speakers between the head table and the table of teenagers. The other Americans were the co-workers of Nava (Na’ama’s sister) at Camp Ramah in the Poconos. Of course, these ladies were thrilled to hear about all the Poconos people on Nativ and asked me to send on regards. Soon, the ceremony itself was underway. Na’ama’s father, the head of the family, came in in a luxurious suit and announced that tonight, we were going to do things Yemenite-style. However, while the tunes reflected this proclamation, the grandfather’s dvars after each section of Maggid were more about Greek and Roman culture. He spoke about the seder’s similarity in all of its parts to Greek feasts and even made parallels in the symbolism and imagery. For some paragraphs, different kids were suddenly demanded to read. The adults all poked fun of them gently when they mispronounced words until the older adults made the younger ones read, pointing out their own mistakes. The karpas never seemed to appear at our table, but we did get both romaine lettuce and chraine home-made by Nava’s husband for maror. The charoset was also great, but so delicious that it was gone, bowl and all, within a minute.

Then came the meal. I know that most seders cook for more guests than are really expected, and the same rule seemed to apply with the Constanini's food. There was enough on table to feed at least 60: chopped liver wrapped in turkey slices, eight billion kinds of salads (of which the biggest hit was chicken/mayo/apples), chicken soup (with kitniyot-laden pea for the vegetarians), chicken, brisket, turkey, a blend of white and sweet mashed potatoes, and asparagus. In between courses, I bonded with the cousins on Shlomi's side, but there was soon dessert to be had. We were each brought a plate with scoops of banana, lemon, and strawberry sorbet, passion fruit cake, and fruit salad. To call us back to order to finish the seder, the grandfather asked everyone, "Mah zeh 'tzafun'?" and quickly answered himself, "Ha'hefech shel 'darom'!" ("What's the opposite of 'tzafun'? South!" Ahh, Hebrew puns.) Most of the concluding songs were chanted Yemenite-style in a way that was hard to follow along, but this was made up for by the family rendition of "Echad Mi Yode'a". All of the scattered kids ran back to the table and sang it clearly and loudly in the cutest way.

Once we actually ended at around 1, schnapps and whiskey were brought out, despite everyone's four requisite cups of wine and good wine drinken during Shulchan Orech. Soon, one uncle was on the piano banging out every song about spring that he knew and had all the adults singing along loudly. Cuban cigars were passed around, and everyone was getting jolly and festive. Soon, we heard a knock on the door. Shlomi opened it, and in walked two police officers. Apparently we were disturbing the peace in the religious neighbourhood, so the men asked Shlomi for his phone number and told him to wrap up the party. So, we had to listen. With that, all the guests started going home, and we finally went to bed.

TUESDAY
All the kids and I started waking up around 11. I spent a while reading The Great Gatsby in bed, but around 1, we decided that it was probably about time for lunch. Yotam fried up some awesome matza brie, while lots of matza-friendly spreads and cheeses were laid out while we listened to Galgalatz. We also got to try Na'ama and Navah's respective Pesach specialties: Na'ama makes her own chocolate spread, while Nava had left us a bowl of heavenly lemon curd to eat. Afterwards, the kids and I went upstairs to play a very addictive, multi-player video game and watched a bit of friends. Na'ama then called us downstairs because she needed some help. Preface: before the seder, I'd asked Shlomi what help he needed. He replied that there was a 5000-piece puzzle on the floor of the dining room and that it had to be finished so that they could set up for the seder. However, when we got down to the office that day, the puzzle was still incomplete. The parents just wanted the puzzle done and out of there, so we brought it back to the dining room to keep working on it. The picture itself was cool: a cartoon map of Western Europe rife with stereotypes and naked breasts. Needless to say, before long, we were singing along to Yotam on the guitar instead of fitting together blue pieces. It was so Partridge Family-like that it was almost scary.

After a dinner of seder leftovers, I had to get going to catch the lone post-chag bus to Karmiel, which left at 9:45. It took a long time to say goodbye to the Constatinis because they were so often, and even with that done, I was delayed further by my missing shoes and the seeming lack of any eastbound bus stops. Finally, at 9:37, I realized that I wouldn't make my bus unless I called a cab, so I hailed one as quickly as I could. I was clenching my fists, wishing the driver would go faster, and counting out shekels as they appeared on the moneh. I zoomed through security and up the escalators at the bus station to collapse onto the bus right at 9:45. However, if Yonit hadn't stalled the driver, he probably wouldn't have let me on. But, with that, we were off for a 3-hour drive up north. We had tons on which to catch up, but after two hours of crazy curves and changes in air pressure, we were both headachy and tired. When we finally got to Karmiel around 12:30, we climbed into the car of Yonit's family friends as quickly as we could for our drive to Shorashim, a nearby moshav. And after putting our bags down in our room for the next two days, we were ready to hit the sack. However, we had an unexpected bedmate - the family cat. After trying exhaustively to push, pull, grab, and tickle him out from under the sheets, we decided that we could just sleep with him in there with us. He kept us nice and warm all night long.

To be continued in the next post!

SUNDAY
We'd had more than enough of the chicken coop, so David, Sarah, Gabe and I were thrilled when we were told we'd be back in the fields. We started off by loading a whole tractor bed with various irrigation pipes, tools, and connectors. Struggling to find a place to sit on top of the whole mess, we found ourselves riding for a good forty-five minutes and winding through all sorts of farms and valleys. We even passed by two Arab boys herding a flock of filthy sheep and other unidentifiable animals. When the tractor finally pulled over, we were within a few kilometres of Ashkelon and could almost see the sea in the distance. It turns out that the Massu'ot Yitzchak/Negba partnership with G'dash D'ganim owns fields all the way out by Ashkelon and that it was time to start working them. Sarah and I stood on the tractor bed and unloaded all the various parts to David and Gabe to be assembled later to irrigate a paprika field. This was relatively fun, especially since we were able to talk to one another. However, David, the lone short-sleeve wearer, got a nasty rash from the fibreglass in some of the equipment. After a coffee break with no coffee of which to speak (as most of them are these days), we went back to straightening pipes in the tomato field, which has vegetables destined for ketchup. I'm entirely convinced that this moshav only grows condiments - so far we've worked with ketchup tomatoes, paprika, parsley, and chickpeas for hummus.

After work, I sat in the sun and drew while Aviva and Molly painted, Marty crocheted, and Matan played guitar. It was quite the creative corner. Afterwards, since Sarah's parents were coming to kibbutz, theother four dwellers of Caravan 4 cleaned our disgusting common room and made it sparkle in just fifteen minutes. It's even still clean now! I made a valiant effort to learn to use Adobe GoLive, but not being in school for so long has made me unbelievably ADD. I did discover Adobe Illustrator in the process, though, and I think I've found a new love. Finally, Tani and I had a good chat, and I went to bed, never early enough.

( Sun breeds creativity. )

MONDAY
The theme of Yom Nativ was "Cultures". We were asked to show up for the day in our pajamas, so Hanna and I wore our matching bottoms to throw people off. I ended up leading Shacharit, which was a little more eventful than usual because it was discovered that our Torah isn't kosher. We ended up reading from this baby Torah which became a giggly matter when I had to parade it around at the end of the service. For the actual Yom Nativ, we watched a documentary called Promises. It took seven(ish) kids from around the Jerusalem area, Jewish and Arab, and of all levels of religious and political extremism to ask them about the Arab-Israeli conflict and their thoughts on the people of the other side. We also got a look into the kids' daily lives and problems, even those unrelated to the situation. At the end, the more moderate kids from both sides met up for a day of sports and bonding. The movie was followed by lunch, and we then quickly discussed the movie. Most of us agreed that the film was a little too left-leaning and a little too biased against the Israeli side, but efforts for Israelis and Arabs to talk in order to cooperate always come from the left. We were pretty torn as to whether the project made a difference or not - two years later, although the kids had tried to keep in touch, the Second Intifada broke out and it made it difficult for them to meet out. However, there was one fact on which we all agreed - the cutest kid was a little girl from a right-wing settlement who described the Shabbats she'll have when she's a mom while struggling to separate two plastic chairs for dinner. She was even listed in the credits as "Racheli (The Chair Girl)".

( Earlier that day... )

After doing some design work, I set off with Nehama, Nathan, and Abi for Be'er Sheva for Sari's birthday dinner. Getting out of kibbutz was the hardest it's ever been, and Nehama had to content herself with playing "He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not" with an artichoke. We made it to town at about 5:30, at which point Alana and I met up at SuperSal Deal to scout out the shoes we wanted there and to catch up. She ended up coming to the as well to the dinner, which was being held at Be'er Sheva's only nice restaurant, More. When we got there, Sari, Nehama, Mari, Ilana, Lila, Jeff, Nathan, and Abi were already seated and ordering from the menu of Asian goodness. Between us, we ordered a whole assortment of noodle dishes, tempura, and sushi. I personally got salmon sushi, which always makes me happy, but I probably equalled the caloric value of the rolls with the tasty rice crackers that the waiter kept bringing to our table. A couple of us also split desserts, including deep-fried ice cream, fried bananas, and molten lava cake with a sparkler for Sari. We had to end things off a little early because a Kehilla 2 party was being held for Sari back in Yerucham, and I experienced what it was like to ride the 9:15 bus to Kiryat Malakhi as opposed to the 10:15. (It's a little less sketchy.) We got lucky when we arrived at Castina because we noticed an Ein Tzurim air conditioning truck stationed in the parking lot there. It turned out that the driver was a yeshiva teacher who had done a shi'ur for us for Purim and who was picking up his wife from the same bus that we were on. We gratefully accepted the ride. I veritably collapsed into bed within minutes of our arrival.

( Happy birthday, Sari! )

TUESDAY
Odd day at work because nobody showed up except for Gabe and I. We were back at the same fields near Ashkelon as on Sunday to start laying down irrigation pipes for the paprika. All morning long, a tractor pulling one of our canoe racks full of pipes would drive slowly down the rows and we'd unload them into straight lines, alternating pipes with wheels and those without. Yeah, it's about as exciting as it sounds. However, I walked along balancing pipes on my shoulders as if I were portaging and practiced my balance. The other thing that kept me from boredom was the addition of some new coworkers. During the Passover vacation, due to the volume of work needed to be done, the moshav kids all help their parents out with their jobs. So, our tractor that day was driven by Tomer, grade 11, and working on the other side of the canoe rack were Tamar and Dvir (or Ziv? they kept calling him different things), both grade 12. It turns out that Tamar is actually Chanan's daughter and managed to keep up with us in a skirt that went past her shoes and long sleeves. Although she was a good worker, she told me that when she's older, she'll teach at a girls school and won't do manual labour if she could help it. We kept talking as we started connecting the first rows of pipes, where the pipes attach to one another without needing another sprinkler piece in a minute. We timed ourselves to see how efficiently we could work, veritably running to the next connector as soon as we'd finished one. Our best time was a whole row in four minutes, which I'd deem pretty impressive with the way the pins get stuck.

After work, I visited David, who was sick, to see how he was feeling, and sat outside for a while doing a crossword and checking my email. We had dinner in the chadar ochel, along with the kids from the Australian/South African yeshiva. However, as people said about Sa'ad last year, the food just gets progressively worse and worse as Passover approaches. After that point in the week, I stopped bothering to go to dinner entirely.

WEDNESDAY
Thankfully, Tani was back at work, and our numbers were further increased by Joey and Teppy. As the school where they work is on vacation, they're helping out with different jobs on the kibbutz and moshav. We spent the first half of the morning unloading pipes again, although this time the lighter, aluminum kind without attached sprinklers. Once we finished with that, we got a call from Chanan through one of the moshav kids telling us to start attaching the sprinklers and connecting the pipes. However, after just one stubborn, exhausting row, Joey, Tani, and I were ready to call it quits. Gabe and Teppy, whose row had been shorter and easier to secure, joined us in our extended break. They all talked American politics and examined the few, tiny pieces of pottery they found in the soil, while I dumbfoundedly made mud balls with the soil. It was close enough to lunch that we figured we'd just wait for Chanan to come back for us and try connecting the pipes again when we had more strength. But 1:45 had already rolled around by the time we saw Chanan's truck approaching. He informed us that we hadn't gotten lunch from Ein Tzurim and that we'd be eating the moshav's food instead. Afterwards, he asked whether we'd finished connecting the sprinklers. We weren't about to lie to him. We kept at the work, although frustratedly at the long hours and inferior food, until 3:15, when we finally went home. On our way out through the moshav, Chanan picked up our lunches from the moshav office. They were pretty dismal-looking too, but we chugged the whole bottle of Pepsi Max right when we got back.

( On the fields again )

In the afternoon, I was feeling so dead that I was ready for a nap, but I kept pushing ahead and doing things for some reason. Even though we don't live in houses, Passover is starting to creep up on us, and we realized it was time to start getting rid of our chametz. Luckily, this was also the night of the Israel-Estonia soccer game a lot of Nativers attended, and since it was on TV, we had a reason for a party. So, we all brought piles upon piles of food to Molly and Jenni's caravan to watch some football and eat a ton. And to make things even better - Israel won!

( Party on. )

THURSDAY
Each day I've been getting progressively more exhausted, and I was thinking of taking this day off sick, but I figured I'd make an effort to go to my last day of work before vacation. First off, though, I had to mail in some stuff for camp. I'd been disappointed the previous day to find that the post office on kibbutz is only open from 7 AM to 1 PM, which gives me about a half-hour window of opportunity when I can mail anything. I woke up earlier than usual to drag myself there, but as the clock hit 7:10, I was informed that nobody usually showed up there until 7:30. Great. I went off to breakfast and asked Marty to send it in for me later, as he'd offered. At 7:30, though, we got a call from Chanan telling us he wouldn't be arriving until 7:45. Gabe, Aviva, Teppy, and I were all there for that time, but Chanan was not. We decided to wait half an hour, and when he still hadn't turned up at 8:15, we headed back to our caravans. It was at 8:18 that I got a call to my phone shouting, "Laura Bush? Laura Bush! It's Chanan, I'm coming at 8:30!" This was pretty frustrating. Aviva and I went back to the chametz pile to get food for our aruchat eser and we dragged Tani out of bed. Sure enough, Chanan did come to pick us up, although he dropped off Tani and Teppy near the moshav as the rest of us took a naseous ride into Ashkelon.

Our entire job for the day was attaching the stubborn pipes, so Aviva, Gabe, and I worked our biceps and our punches for hours upon hours. (I have arm muscles now!) The only problem was that the sun was blazing and that all of our water was in the car of Chanan, who had long driven away. We expected him to come back for our 10:30 break, but he never turned up. So, the three of us worked ourselves into a state of dehydration until we finished the field around 1. We walked up to meet Tani and Teppy (who had also finished screwing sprinkler heads onto the first kind of pipe) at the southern end of the field, where all we could do was sit and wait. I was the only one who had Chanan's number, but my phone was also in his truck. In the meantime, the moshav kids were trying to start up a tractor to drive to their own lunch break, but they were stuck, too. To keep ourselves busy, we tried to sing every song we could think of relating to water, rivers, oceans, ice - we were that thirsty. Finally, Chanan turned up around 1:45 and attempted to fit all five of us, the three moshav kids, and four Thailandim into his pickup. He was thinking of keeping us until 3 again, but I think that seeing us so worn out made him change his mind and let us go back to the kibbutz. We were unbelievably grateful. And to celebrate the triumphant arrival of our vacation, Aviva, Tani, and I sprung for some delicious Avatiach popsicles at the Kol-Bo.

( Vacation, finally! )

The rest of the night, I was too tired to do much. I tried making some soup for dinner out of stuff from the chametz box, but it wasn't great. A lot of people came to visit - Alana, Cynthia, Shosh C., Nathalie, and Shayna Y. - but everyone was in that state of early vacation exhaustion, so everyone collapsed early on.

( But it was such a bright, sunny day! )

( And, finally, some photos you never saw... )

FRIDAY
Sleeping in late is beautiful. Molly, Elana, Yonit and I pretty much goofed off all morning, then went to lunch, watched Saved!, and fooled around with the Princeton Review and College Board. Also, Elana found out that she'd gotten into University of California Santa Barbara and I learned that I'd made it into Ryerson even without my supplementary application. Yay! We davened Kabbalat Shabbat at the Beit Knesset, where a kibbutz boy was becoming a bar mitzvah. His d'var Torah was handed out on paper, and I was thrilled that I was able to read and understand the whole thing. So, I kept it as a memento of the fact that I can read at a 13-year old's writing level. I had dinner with my kibbutz parents and Yonit, who they were thrilled to have, and afterwards went back to their apartment for tea and conversation. After that, I hung out with Phil, and finally, I joined up with the huge party in Yael's caravan. To finish, I ended up just talking to Yonit before going to sleep.

SATURDAY
We all slept through tfillot and stumbled into lunch, which I ate again with the family. Yehuda invited me and any friends for a tour of his bomb shelter museum that afternoon, so Marty and Yonit came along. The place is actually very cool. The walls are entirely lined with old books, some of which have been in Yehuda's family for hundreds of years. There are mementos from his time in the Independence War and from the POW camp in Jordan, as well as general artifacts from Israel in the 1940s and earlier. The more recent additions include rememberance pieces for his father and son, who have both passed away. Finally, there are newspapers clippings from various articles about the bomb shelter that Yehuda had remodelled. I could easily have looked around for hours, but we all needed Shabbat naps. Yonit, though, who hadn't heard his stories from our Yom Nativ, said that she found Yehuda himself much more interesting than the museum. I spent the rest of the afternoon reading, and we were lucky enough to have Seudah Shlishit in the dining hall, which is far more delicious. Josh slept through dinner, so I brought him back a tray full of icky fish and wilting vegetables. (Phil actually made him a real dinner.) I also surprised Mike by proving that I knew his favourite Seudah Shlishit song. Elana, Josh, Phil and I improvised Havdallah with tealights, cinnamon, and orange juice, and we marked the end of Shabbat by watching an episode of Grey's Anatomy. As it got late, all the guests left, and we tried to go to bed early-ish for work the next day.

SUNDAY
Since it had poured all weekend long, the fields were way too wet to work. So, we spent the day in the main chicken coop of the moshav, far from the one where we'd worked a few weeks earlier. After changing clothes like we had to the first time around, Tani, Gabe, David, and Sarah were taken to clean the chicken potties with power hoses. I got to stay inside and screw together sprinklers with three Russian ladies, Rosa, Sophia (Sopha), and Kira. Rosa is clearly the ringleader - the other two act as if they're frightened of her. Sopha acts as the consultant, but only gives advice when Rosa asks her to. Rosa then acts upon whatever Sopha said by yelling at their boss or breaking out in Russian song. Kira is the follower, as she works the fastest and the hardest, but always defers to Rosa. I tried to impress the ladies with my meagre Russian knowledge, and they listed all the Russians they knew in Toronto. They also laughed when I told them that our group was volunteering - they all live out in Ashkelon and Kiryat Malakhi and don't think that work is worthwhile unless you're making money. Soon enough, they reverted back to speaking in Russian instead of Hebrew, so I worked out a theorum for finding squares of high numbers in my head. I guess that I kind of miss school.

For aruchat eser, they actually made great rice and carrots, which was an improvement over our usual sugary tea. Around this time, the rest of the group came in miserable and soaking wet. I couldn't help but smile at the fact that my morning had passed quickly and that I'd been sitting down the whole time. After some wafers and David's leftover coffee, the ladies and I had the task of cleaning some barely-dirty funnels. As I scrubbed the plastic and stacked the clean ones, I memorized squares in my head up to 25. I guess I was just in a math mood that day. The Russian ladies continued going crazy every few minutes, but they liked me and kept giving me breaks, so I was grateful. Lunch arrived quite quickly, and the chicken coop's real workers tried to convince us to stay for a few hours. But, David convinced them that we had a program that afternoon on kibbutz, so we set off in this ( windowless, airless, cramped car back to Ein Tzurim. )A bizarre song with the lyric "Push the Button" blared over the radio, so I decided to check it out when I got back. It turns out that it's the same "Push the Button" song that Israel's entering in the Eurovision 2007 contest. I have this odd feeling that it won't win.

The afternoon was pretty chill, but Tani, Emily, and I finally got around to watching Jesus is Magic with Sarah Silverman, which was alternately funny and painful to watch. Yael was offering a massage program that night, so I arrived with blankets to the mo'adon, which she'd transformed with tea lights and incense. Her work was great at usual, this time concentrating on the shoulders, and we had a great discussion during the process despite my raucous coughing. Afterwards, I went over to her trailer, where Jenni, Alana, and Reva were watching Chocolat. I love a good girly movie. We celebrated afterwards by eating lots of chocolate, and that was the evening.

MONDAY
Arr, Yom Nativ. Once again, all three of our mo'adons were in use, so we had to find a fourth one for Shacharit. I had to do Glila at the end of the service, which did not go well. I was rolling one side of the Torah while one of the gabbais did the other side. I then started to put on the belt, which is a two hand job. However, the gabbai holding his half of the scroll walked away, and since the hagba wasn't paying attention, the side began to fall over. The gabbai caught it in time, but everyone was murmuring about how scary it had been and how they all thought they'd have to fast for 40 days. I was so flustered by this, even though it wasn't my fault, that I couldn't even do up the belt and someone else had to take over for me. Embarassing, but one of those things that you just need to get over. Shacharit was followed by another session with Jules, this time airing general complaints about Nativ. Since we've already had so many sessions with the same comments, it really felt like a waste of time. We could have at least just gotten some written surveys to fill out. However, it felt like we were just biding time until lunch talking about how amazing people's volunteer placements were and how there are no good concussion doctors in Jerusalem. Jules also gave us some examples of how Nativers are involved in the Conservative movement after the year is done, but it was all kind of elitist sounding. I beat my high score on Snake.

Lunch in the chadar is always great, especially with the croutons that have suddenly replaced the soup nuts. I snuck in a crossword puzzle before the next program, which was a Mock Knesset being run with one guy. (I don't know what happened to the rest of his va'ad...) Anyway, I was part of the Likud party with Aviva and Phil, but nobody really wanted to take the program seriously as we'd all done it so many times before. We broke up and reformed coalitions every couple of minutes, and the Kadima party threatened to deal with a suicide bomber by blasting the Gaza Strip with members of the Shas (Sephardic Orthodox) party with cannons. Our staff got frustrated, which frustrated us in return. It was a relief for all of us when it ended. In the afternoon, Aviva unsuccessfully tried to teach me how to crochet, and I did an oil pastel replication of Van Gogh's Sunflowers. I ended off the night by watching Arrested Development, which always makes things better.

TUESDAY
Another day of work in the coop. Sarah had bee traumatized by her cleaning experience from Sunday and the fact that her shoes still hadn't dried off, so we switched places. However, when I came over to visit her during my coffee break, the Russian ladies were so thrilled so see me that they gave me chocolate. I actually didn't mind cleaning off the poop-covered basins. Tani and I alternated pushing the potties under a high-powered hose that made a lot of steam and a lot of noise and scrubbing the basins to remove excess poop. We got very soggy, despite our oversized gloves, raincoats, and boots, and had to blink a few times before we could see again after stepping out of the vapour. After our break, we worked at hosing down some contraptions that looked like plastic beaver tails. Work moved relatively quickly, and I almost felt at the end like I wouldn't need a shower later. (Actually, I was quite sweaty - it was broiling in the tent where we worked.)

The afternoon was work as usual, but for Teppy's birthday, a campfire and barbeque were arranged. This was pretty low-key aside from a fun game of Singled Out organized by Tani and Reva. I also got the fun chance to roast my own hot dog over the campfire - I don't think I'd ever done that in real life before. I ended off the night by walking off with Josh and Jacob's salami and giving it to Teppy as a gift.

( Campfire! )

WEDNESDAY
Quite the day. Since the kibbutz is scrambling to get ready for Pesach, a couple of us are being pulled out of our regular jobs each day to help out with the spring cleaning. (There's also a South African and Australian yeshiva here to help out.) That day, I was enlisted to work with the guest housing people, which meant that I got to wake up a full half hour later than usual. My task was tidy up the Beit Knesset in preparation for some group that was using it. That meant wiping down all the book shelves, organizing the books by type, and separating the unusable books to be put in the geniza. The lady in charge of me checked up on the progress about every half hour until I finished at 11. After that, though, I could no longer find her, as hard as I looked. For a while, I read out of a book I'd found during the clean-up called "La verdad de la Bibla" (The Truth of the Bible) about the historical basis for the Torah...in Spanish. Finally, though, it was lunch time, so I decided that the lady didn't need anything else from me and let myself off work. After eating, I sat outside and stretched and sketched (which Matan found amusing). After picking up my laundry only to find that one of my bags had ripped open because there had been a metal pin in our load, scattering my label-less stuff everywhere, I set off for Be'er Sheva.

The bus ride in was uneventful, but when I got on the bus to the Mercaz Klitah, Daniel Sher and Ezra ended up being on it. Jeremy also got on after one stop, but he was pretty immersed in his phone conversation. The two boys asked what I was doing in town, and I told them I was cooking dinner with her as usual on Wednesdays, and incidentally enough, for the boys from their house in Yerucham. Then, Daniel told me that Alana was going into Yerucham to do the cooking. I had simply thought that the boys were coming to Be'er Sheva, but after clarifying with Alana, decided to go on to Yerucham with her. I hung out with Yonit for a bit, then set off for the SuperSal deal to buy groceries (which are obscenely overpriced in Yerucham). The other great thing about the place are all the free samples. Alana and I oohed and ahhed over the polka-dot ballet slippers for sale and struggled to find ingredients like mozzarella (which we guessed at) and fresh basil (which we found with the help of an English-speaker). It was also fun going up and down the Pesach aisles - in Israel, almost every popular snack food and processed food item has a Passover equivalent. It's all very tempting already.

The bus to Yerucham was a little bit scary because there were no street lights around. This got even worse when the bus started to wheeze and had to pull over onto the shoulder. Already a little nervous, I commented, "I don't like it that it's so dark..." Suddenly, all the lights on the bus shut off too, leaving us in drowning in the pitch black. After a minute, the bus started up again, but we were freaked out. We were greeted in Yerucham by Aaron shouting out the window at us to come upstairs. By this point, we had about an hour and a half to cook and eat, but we were determined to make our meal. Our menu consisted of spinach and cheese ravioli, bruschetta, capri salad (tomato slices with soft cheese, basil, balsamic, and olive oil), and chocolate cheesecake for dessert. Aaron took charge of the bruschetta and showing us where everything was in their beautiful, well-stocked kitchen (granite countertops! a blender! a food processor! a grill!) while Alana and I did the rest of the cooking. Phil helped out when we needed extra hands while David, Yoni, and Simeon played video games. (Don't worry - they did the dishes afterwards.) Here and there little accidents happened, but we didn't care because Aaron had put on the Beach Boys as cooking music and because everything turned out delicious. I probably ate (and enjoyed) more raw tomatoes at that meal than I ever have before in my life. The cheesecake probably had the most issues with it, but after tasting it hot, we declared it to be a success. Alana and I each took some home with us to refrigerate and eat later, while I doubt the boys resisted the temptation of eating it hot.

The last bus out of Yerucham left at 9:15, and we barely caught it. We soon knew that it was the same vehicle we'd used on the way there because it chugged along like a caterpillar, driving a few metres forward before churning backwards. As well, the back door wouldn't stay closed. I was a little bit worried about the snail-like pace because the last bus out of Be'er Sheva that passes by Ein Tzurim leaves at 10:15. Though it was cutting it close, we made it to the station with a few minutes to spare. I ran into Jeff there because he was, in turn, taking the last bus back to Yerucham. My bus came on time and I was happy that I got a seat to myself. However, across the aisle from me was sitting a very drunk man still holding his tall can. At first, he just muttered to himself in a way that I could ignore. Soon, though, he started getting out of his seat and leering at me, calling me "motek" and "chamudi" (sweetie and cutie). Again, I tried ignoring him and exchanging glances at the soldier across the aisle but one seat up. (Perhaps I felt safer because I knew that half the bus was armed with standard-issue army guns.) Finally, the guy was getting way too close, so told the guy to go away, got up, and moved to the front seat of the bus. The drunk guy followed me there. I was starting to freak out because he was angry that I'd switched seats and got very loud. Luckily, after just a minute or two, the bus driver kicked him off entirely. Greatly relieved, I spent the rest of the ride home sitting more comfortably. At Castina, there didn't seem to be any buses coming, so I cabbed back to Ein Tzurim, exhausted and weirded out yet giggly over the night's events. Definitely an adventure king od a day.

THURSDAY
Much less crazy day. I was back in the fields minus Sarah, whose parents are visiting, and Tani, who was on kibbutz helping out. In the morning, we worked on nearby Kibbutz Negba, which has a partnership with Massu'ot Yitzchak of some sort. First, we straightened out pipes that will be used to irrigate tomatoes once the seeds are planted. Afterwards, we unloaded some more pipes from a canoe rack. Chanan showed up after our break and had the boys load some more pipes while Aviva and I sorted sprinkler attachments inside of a box. We were done pretty quickly, though, but couldn't really help out the boys. ( So, we just spent the next hour and a bit until lunch sitting in the box and talking. )All morning, we'd been working under Daniel, who's only a few years older than us, but pretty much knew what he was doing. Trying to drive back to kibbutz with our tractor and cart proved to be hard for him because we had to try five or so different routes home to find one that wasn't blocked. Finally, we made it back and ate lunch with him.

Aviva and I went for popsicles and ice cream when we got back to celebrate nice weather finally returning, and then I napped until about 6, at which point I showered and went to dinner. The bonfire was fun because lots of people were in from Be'er Sheva and because Andy decided to try lighting balloons. Otherwise, it's been chores as usual.

FRIDAY
I had two chores to accomplish before leaving kibbutz for the weekend, but completed neither of them. After fighting with the kibbutz computer for about half an hour, I asked Yossi to just print my contract for me, and I got yelled at in the laundry for checking to see if my lost shirts came back. (They did, but I can't pick them up until Wednesday. Systems...) I met up with Jeff at Castina and gave him the remainder of Alana and Shosh's Super-Awesome Double Chocolate Cheesecake™ as we got on the bus. Since we had a good fifteen minutes in Be'er Sheva before the Yerucham bus arrived, we picked up lunch at the mall. Alicia ended up getting on the same bus with us and was thrilled to share in our jalapeño-coated fries. When we arrived, I had my first good look at Yerucham in the daytime, and it honestly seems like any other cutesy, small town that one would encounter in North America, although it must be frightening to live in one of the apartments that literally borders on the desert. The Jeff/Andrew/Ross/Joe/Mike/Elan/Uzi house, however, is in a nice spot near the centre of town and almost looks like it should be a cottage.

We watched Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion when we found it as the lone movie in Andrew's shared library, and though it was ridiculous, it helped us to understand a lot about Andrew. Afterwards, we got to work on dinner, for cooking in Yerucham with its spacious kitchens is always a joy compared to in Be'er Sheva or on kibbutz. On the menu for the evening was tomato-lentil soup, fried chicken, and red velvet cake, to which we added fried onions (leftovers sitting around from the soup that we threw into the chicken's oil), mashed potatoes, Israeli salad, and some interesting bread. We cooked while listening to word puzzles on NPR, the combination of which felt great. Since there's no light in the part of their common room with the table, Jeff and I set up a little nook by the couch to eat. However, we made so much food that we never even got to the soup and decided to save it for the next day.

After dinner, we went for a walk pretty much from the extreme west of town to the east. Among the sites we passed by were an unused sports centre, the homes of several crazy volunteering co-ordinators, the high school where a lot of Nativers work, an abandoned park, and a couple of synagogues. The clichéd best part, however, was a park in the east with path leading up to two tall, slim towers. One could not see what was beyond the towers, so Jeff asked me what I thought might be there. Jokingly, I replied, "A slide!" But at the end of the path, it turned out I'd guessed right and I slid right down. As we were settling down for dessert, we heard a knock on the door. It was Lila, who was all alone in her blacked-out house and a little frightened. I don't blame here - the house was being literally shaken by the crazy windstorm that had erupted after sunset. So, we read from a silly Dr. Laura Schessinger book to calm her down and hung out for a while. Eventually, the storm died down enough that she decided to go home, and eventually, we went to bed.

SATURDAY
After sleeping in pretty late, we decided that it was time for lunch - leftover soup! We ate it while watching The Colbert Report. Afterwards, Jeff and I hung out and talked before deciding to go for a walk to see the girls' houses. First, we went to Lila's, which is right near the one where we cooked the previous Wednesday night. Shosh and Alicia were home this time around (they'd been to Shosh's host family's for dinner the previous night), as well as Simeon and Talia. Shosh served us up tea and chocolate cake, though Jeff and I had already had enough of it with the red velvet cake. Lila and Shosh's house is pretty big and also serves as the Kehilla 2 meeting space. It feels quite home-y between Sarah Stein's cut-out decorations and their huge kitchen and bathroom (which only they can use!). We went on to the other girls' house, way up at the north end in a Haredi neighbourhood, but they were all out of town. Unfortunately, the windstorm had blown some of their windows open, so we closed some up to try to make it look a little safer. We also saw an authentic tumbleweed nearby! We headed back to Jeff's house through a row of apartments that looked like they came out of the movie Sof Ha'Olam Smolah. Back there, we watched The Terminal and talked until it was time to go home. Neither bus back to kibbutz was quite so eventful this time, although I did run into Corinne, Shayna, and Jesse at the Be'er Sheva station. I managed to catch a sherut back to kibbutz. When the driver asked how much is usually charged for the route at night, I told him that it was 5 shekels ($1.25) - a cheap price as a bargaining tool. However, he took it straight up and I got an inexpensive ride home. Certainly a nice touch to add to a really nice weekend!

SUNDAY
Ah, the leadership seminar: time for all the people who complain about the lack of leadership opportunities on our university-prep program to have their needs fufilled. It started, however, on an amusing note. A bus was supposed to come through Yerucham and Be'er Sheva to pick us up at a quarter to nine, letting us pull up to Beit Nativ in Jerusalem by 11. However, the bus simply didn't show up. Nobody looked into the issue but Sarah, who found out from a phone call from Koby that the bus was running an hour late. (Aren't the staff supposed to tell us this?) To kill time, Sarah, Hanna and I headed back to our caravan and watched Martha Stewart trying to dominate her adorable 8-year old guest chef. Finally. Around 10:15, a queasy-sounding bus pulled up and we began to reunite with people. However, we hadn't been driving for even five minutes when our bus driver pulled over at Castina for a rest stop. While some Nativers were off the bus for twenty minutes while eating at McDonald's or going to the bathroom, it took the driver a full half hour to get back on. (Again, we had one staff member for all three groups, and he didn't really know what was happening either.) The bus wheezed along towards the main highway to Jerusalem, but it was closed off, so the driver had to find an alternate route. But within minutes, we were on the shoulder of the road. The bus had completely broken down and we had to call up the company for a new one. At this point, our first session was supposed to have started already. About fifteen minutes later, a new bus came by, and we took a very bizarre but ultimately successful route to Jerusalem.

By the time we arrived, it was already time for lunch. Our initial groups had been redivided so that the Nativers who had come to Beit Nativ on their own (and on time) could have some programming in the morning. In the meantime, we got our rooms (I was with Yonit, Lila, and Rachel in Lila's old place). After a sadly typical Agron lunch, Alana and I went walking through our old neighbourhood to catch up. Then, we proceeded to our first session, which was titled Thinking Outside The Box. The goal was to teach us to act on impulses and think differently, though the games we played didn't relate much to the session leader's rambling. It was, however, fun to hear people describing their thinking processes as different appliances. Nathan claimed to be a subwoofer as "he is really loud, but nobody really knows what's going on inside", while Mike explained that he is a cell phone because long-term exposure to him causes cancer. We also did a ridiculous brainteaser with dots and lines that distracted us the whole time.

Next up was a meeting for all of Nativ with Ze'ev Bielski, the executive chairman of the Jewish Agency and World Zionist Organization. He spoke about methods to bring more Jews to Israel, but when his arguments became circular, I started doodling on an issue of People magazine with Jeff and Andrew. Our last session before dinner was Public Speaking with Neil Lazarus. We'd had a program with him before on Pilgrimage where he spoke about media bias. Spoke, however, does not quite describe Lazarus' style, as he jokes, pounces, goes on tangents, and literally throws himself into the audience. We watched some videos of good public speakers (Barack Obama, Arnold Schwartzenegger, and Binyamin Netanyahu, among others) to analyze their styles. At the end, a few people in our group had the chance to present speeches in front of us for Neil to grade. Tani made a compelling argument for the abolishment of abstinence-only sex education, and Mike began to speak about being a representative of his shul due to the scholarships he received from them. Mendy, however, stole the show by proving to us that his LL Bean "Miracle Pants" were superior to all of our through anecdotes and facts.

After all of this, we proceeded to dinner, which wasn't bad but wasn't satisfying either. Jeff and I walked down to Soya for old times' sake, where we rejoiced at once again tasting their spicy-sczewan coated delights. We hung out in Gan HaPa'amon for a while, but when it got cold (and oh, does Jerusalem ever get cold) we went back to Beit Nativ and called it a night.

MONDAY
After davening as a group and having a quick breakfast, we went back to our groups from the previous day to begin a new round of sessions. First up for us was a return visit from Mark Lazar, the guy who led drama games for an Erev Nativ of ours back in November. The theme of the session was Israel-related games. We started off by having to arrange all the chairs in the room into a map of Israel, which we then had to explain. Next, we all had to stand in our favourite places on the map to see what we had in common with different people. From there, we played huggy bears to get into groups for a game to improve our Hebrew counting. Each of our limbs was labelled with Hebrew numbers in order (ie. my right arm was echad, left arm shtayim, right leg shalosh, left leg arba, the person on my left's right arm was chamesh...). Then, Mark called out to numbers, which we had to connect with our limbs, creating a fun Twister scenario. We played a round of Song-A-Rama with the word "Israel", which mostly turned up prayers. Afterwards, we did a game where, after one person left the room, we broke up a Hebrew word into three syllables. The room was split into three parts, with each one chanting one syllable outloud until the person who exited could figure out the word. We finished up with a game where we were divided in two teams and had to line up on opposite sides of the room while a member of each team left. When they returned, they stood opposite their teams, and each group had to scream a Hebrew song lyric until their teammate could figure out the line. So, how did I remember all of these? I think I'm going to use them in the future!

Next up was a session called Communication in Hadracha, which was geared towards learning to recognize and cater to one's audience, led by the adorable head of NOAM England's year program. We opened with another great game, Jukebox, where people formed pairs and chose a song together while Aaron and I left the room. When we returned, they were all mixed up and sitting in a circle. We had to take turns tapping on one person's hand at a time to hear them sing their song and match them with their partner, Memory-style. I ended up winning, but we all had some fun. The rest of the session gave some good ideas for appealing to people with different learning styles and interests. We had a break for lunch, during which my roommates and I plowed through the current season of Degrassi on Lila's iPod. Afterwards, we had a session with David Keren about teaching Judaic subjects effectively. His main piece of advice, though, was to let our audience come up with their own questions rather than give the audience questions to answer, which was kind of self-evident. Our last program of the day was a session with Nahum about the Four Sons from the Passover seder. We tried to find the real differentiation between the sons through discussion and by looking at different illustrations of them throughout history. It was cool, but it really dragged on forever. Good thing he gave us chocolate!

At dinner, Nahum invited Nathan, Goldschmidt, and I to see an English-language production of the Gilbert and Sullivan musical, Patience, which his father was directing that night. The tickets were cheap enough that we opted to go. The production was put on by JEST, the Jerusalem English-Speaking Theatre, and everyone involved was amateur, though often with a music degree from a good school. The orchestra was conducted by the same guy who did the music for Hillel's West Side Story back in December and they performed wonderfully. The female roles were also all well-cast, though it was obvious that not enough males had try out - their part of the cast had a few too many awkward preteens playing British officers. All in all, though, I thought that the show was great, and I was glad that I went. Afterwards, I hung out with Jeff and Leora in their room, and then I went to bed.

TUESDAY
Right after breakfast, we set out for Ma'ale HaChamisha, a kibbutz hotel outside of Jerusalem. Why we had to go there for more programming that required nothing more than a couple of rooms I don't know, but I'm not complaining too much. First off was a session with Annie teaching new icebreakers. There were a couple that I really liked. One involved the leader saying their name outloud and doing an action. Going around in the circle, every other participant had to repeat the name and pass along the gesture, going as fast as possible until the name lost all meaning...but you remembered it! Another one was called The Truth About Me, in which one person gets up and says a fact relating to themselves. Everyone else to whom that fact applies flocks towards them, until another person gets up and states another fact, with new and old people running towards them instead. Our last program in small groups for the week was a session led by Julie on discipline as a camp counselor, which I thought was great, though I was pretty useful, even though I was restless. Finally, it was time for lunch, and when we headed to the Ma'ale HaChamisha dining hall, we were greeted by the best Nativ meal we'd seen all year. Two kinds of soup! Five kinds of meat! Lots of side dishes! A huge salad bar! And best of all, a huge dessert selection! We all loaded up our plates to overflowing and were happily full all afternoon.

We had some time before our next program, so Jeff and I wandered into a section of the hotel where booths were set up advertising different asthma treatments. The booths' staff had abandoned their stations for lunch, so we were tempted into stealing some of the free samples. Out of guilt, though, we only made off with a pad of paper and a few pens...and a medical article titled, "Does cyclically iloprost infusion prevent severe isolated pulmonary hypertension in systemic sclerosis? Preliminary results". Now, in the fields, we typically have a "Political Hot Topic of the Day" to keep us from getting bored. After all discussions about military service and abortion can keep us going for hours. However, I knew that this article had the day's hot topic and simply had to show Tani. He found it as hilarious as I did, and we went around all afternoon asking people for their opinions on the topic. (Tani's stand was that the answer was "yes", while I held firm for the "no" side of things.) This managed to keep us entertained all the way through Jules' session, which was aimed to guilt trip us into being shomer Shabbat and Kashrut as long as we were going to be Ramah counsellors and Wheels staff.

After this, we had free time in the hotel as the other half of Nativ had the same session with Jules. A couple of us were watching The Office when we noticed trays of great-looking cakes being brought to the asthma conference (which by now was filled with laptop-toting attendees). It soon became a mission of ours to run underneath their booths, undercover style, to snatch some slices for ourselves. As I was lounging around and talking to Nathalie, though, I suddenly noticed that the novelty laptop bags being given out were labelled with the words "Jerusalem Sports Medicine Practitioners Conference - March 13th-17th, 2007". It hit me that our family friend in Jerusalem, Na'ama, is a leader in that field, so I called her up out of curiousity. When she picked up here phone, I heard her shouting over a noisy background, "Shoshana! I can't talk right now, I'm at a conference!" "At Ma'ale HaChamisha?" I replied. "How did you know?" she asked. I answered, "I'm here too!" She ran out to the lobby to greet me, hugging me up and down and expressing excitement at our upcoming seder together. She had jet quickly because it turns out that she was one of the conference's organizers, but on the way out told me to offer myself to a slice of cake. I had to laugh.

We left the hotel around 4:30, just as a heavy rain began to set in that would follow us through the weekend and beyond. As we were approaching our destination of Kibbutz Chanaton, though, we were treated to some fantastic lightning shows over the plains. The rain didn't let up in time for us to make a mad dash to the Beit Knesset for Ma'ariv (which, in my opinion, we should have done on the bus to save us from being soaked). Our BBQ dinner was clearly moved indoors, as was our free time for the night. I don't usually advocate excessive programming, but I think it would have been nice to do something together as we were all confined to one building on a lonely kibbutz long before bed time. We did go for a walk, though, when the downpour turned to drizzling, so it was okay.

WEDNESDAY
Time for the portion of leadership training that they always show in Nativ promotional videos - team building games! We went off to Dani-Hi, a part-time soldier training facility near Cesaria, to try our hand at cooperation with ropes and wood. The program was split up into four groups for the day, but mine was comprised of a few people who cared quite a bit about our team’s success and a majority who couldn’t have cared less (myself included). First up, we had to play the human knot game, but since we’d already done it so many times, we were able to solve it in under a minute. Our leader was already a little frustrated with us. The next task involved a rope with a noose on the end hanging off of a wooden beam, with wood panels about two metres away from it on each side. Since all the sand between the wood was hot lava, we had to get the rope over to our side and manoever each team member to the other wood panel without falling in. A few people were very intent on lacing all of our shoes together to pull over the lasso; the rest of us were content with building sandcastles for the half hour it took those people to realize their technique wasn’t working. In the end, it took us 45 minutes to complete the challenge, while the average group can do it in 16 or 17. The tour guide sounded quite irked as she told us this fact.

Next up, our team was told to find a way to balance on a suspended, swinging log attached to two poles. Once again, certain people tried the same technique to death, with the rest of us chilling while following instructions. The group leader then got really fed up and started swearing at us and calling us babies. I’m sure that she was relieved when we arrived at the next station, where we had to hoist our teammates up a wall, for it began to pour before it could even start. We all huddled under a shelter being used for a game by another one of the groups and kept ourselves entertained by singing and listening to Yosef sing. Finally, we were informed that the rest of the team-building activities for the morning were cancelled and that we could hang out in their gym until lunch. There, about half the group sat around reading and talking, while the other half played a rousing game of pairs tag. Lunch was held in a very Muskoka-esque cabin and consisted of barbequed food identical to the previous evening’s fare at Chanaton. We spiced things up when we got a craving for dessert by stealing oranges from the next room over. It took the staff a while to figure out whether there was anything we could still do in the rain, but they managed to form a decent, pieced-together schedule from what was available. Since there were only three things we could do, though, we split back into our Kibbutz and Kehilla groups.

( Singing in the rain )

First, our group did rock climbing in the gym where we had been before lunch. I was able to boulder about halfway across their wall, which was better than most people, and I was able to ascend two of the three walls. (Nobody succeeded at the one wall I couldn’t do.) Through that, I remembered how much I’d liked rock climbing. Afterwards, we had a combination drumming and martial arts session with a Brazilian oleh. After he kicked some of the more innocent people in our group out for being rude and one person got hit in the head and cried, we were encouraged to punch him in the chest. I was able to use the reflexes I’d honed as an oldest sibling to deflect many a punch and a slap. Finally, we went on to the paintball field to play a few rounds of Capture the Flag. I couldn’t play the first round because my gun was broken, but once I received a new one, I managed to hit two people while getting hit myself only once. I slept for the whole bus ride home. That night, Goldschmidt arranged a little acapella meeting, which Cynthia dragged me into. Even though I haven't been in choir since, uh, grade 5, it was fun harmonizing to the hits and some things that we made up ourselves. We also played a good game of song association afterwards, which is just like it sounds. While standing in a circle, one person goes into the middle and starts singing. When another song pops into someone's mind, they tap the person in the centre, take their place, and start singing. This can go on for hours. Jeff and I watched an episode of The Office, and then Yonit and I watched Gilmore Girls before going to bed.

THURSDAY
Last day of the leadership seminar. First thing in the morning, we went off to the Interdisplinary Centre (IDC) Herzeliya, which is the only fully-accredited, English-language university in Israel. We started off with a session trying to sell us on the school, using former Nativers as spokespersons and gloating about how they'd stolen all the best professors from the US by paying them more than Harvard and Princeton. However, tuition is still only $6000 a year. Mafia ties, maybe? This was followed by a session about Israel advocacy, which was the same as every other one that we'd heard. To alleviate boredom, Rachel and I honoured March Madness and the NCAA by creating our own Nativ bracket pitting ridiculous contenders against one another: David Keren or David Mendelsson? Strawberry or banana? Egon or Sbarros? As we got to the final rounds, the battles became ridiculous. The session was followed by lunch, which became our third meal in three days with fries as the main side dish. Then, we went on a tour of the campus, though nothing was explained to us aside from the new communications facilities that are identical to Ryerson's.

Finally, we had a session with Jules Gutin about the article we'd had to read that week by Neil Gillman about "the shift from halachic Judaism to aggadic Judaism". This was problematic for a few reasons. First off, the article was written as a response to an essay that was written by Ira Stone. However, all the issues, definitions, and ideas are in this original article, which we were never given to read. Therefore, Gillman's article had no context. The terms "halachic" and "aggadic" were never defined, even though they were central to the argument, and I have no ideas how the average Nativer was supposed to know what they meant. I happened to know the difference by chance, but it could never be inferred by the content of the essay. As my mom said later, the whole article reeked of the Conservative tendency to use buzz words and terms just to get our attention. In fact, I think we were only given this particular paper because it was written by a guy with a famous name. When we got to the discussion, it proved to be just as useless. I saw no reason to pay attention during the session and instead played Condors and Elves with Yonit (who is fantastic at the game). The one shining moment, however, came when Jules started comparing the Conservative point of view on the issue to the Reform idea. It was already raining when the session had started, but when Jules mentioned, "I don't know if any of you are Reform, but..." a huge boom of thunder interrupted his thought. We all had to laugh of the prospect of God intervening on the matter. We were just as distracted when the rain turned to pounding hail - and it turns out it was snowy and icy all over the north of Israel.

As the session ended, so did the Nativ week. We said goodbye to everyone as we boarded the busses home and psyched up for the weekend. I spent the ride home talking to Jacob and listening to Andy's stand-up comedy routines. Back on kibbutz (and with special guests for the weekend Yonit and Elana) we unpacked, showered, and hung out until it was late. And...that's it for this post! Tune into the next one for the weekend as the resuming of everyday life.

WEDNESDAY
Once I arrived in Tel Aviv, I had a little trouble figuring out how to get from the bus station to my uncle(ish) Nati’s house in Ramat Aviv. Luckily, he was stuck in traffic on the way home from work near the bus station, so he offered to pick me up. This probably produced more stress than it was worth, as his description of “being in a white car on Levinski Street” was as helpful to me as my assertion that I was “wearing a blue sweatshirt and an orange backpack”. With time, though, we found each other, and spent another good forty-five minutes idling on the Ayalon highway. We literally ran into his (enormous and gorgeous) house when we arrived, getting dressed for the wedding in five minutes flat. My outfit was severely improvised, and since I own dress pants nor pantyhose, my sock-burn was in full view. Nati and Shai’s mother, my great-aunt Eva, noticed the state of my legs and clucked disapprovingly. However, she forgot about me when she saw the rest of Nati’s family decked out Montreal-style for the occasion. Nati, his wife, Eva and I piled into one SUV as my three cousins drove the other, and we headed out to the wedding in Kfar Daniel, near Modi’in.

Nati had told me that the ceremony was being held in a combination monkey farm and reserve. I guess I was expecting something in the vein of African Lion Safari, for when we were greeted at a gate of wrought iron and fancy candles, I was genuinely taken aback. We passed by the elegant, gauzy white chupah to go to the reception, which was being held in a wall-less yet heated tent. There, I finally met the bride, Lilach. (I had become well-acquainted with her siblings and slept in her bed last time I’d visited the Okons - she had been travelling in India with her then-fiancé.) She looked absolutely stunning in a subtly jewelled strapless gown and with her hair flowing like a mermaid’s. During the reception, I stuck by Hadas and Noam, whom I’m closest to in the family - and who also have a cute baby to distract. The appetizers and cocktails were all quite fancy, but I didn’t sample too much of it. Soon, we were all being called to the chuppah for the actual wedding ceremony. I sat with Eva up in the front row because she wanted some company. On my other side was a drunken religious guy who kept yelling at the rabbi administering the ceremony for what he was doing wrong. Within a few minutes, though, the groom, Assaf, was stepping on the glass and the marriage was made official. Within a moment of the ritual, we heard the speakers begin to blare his wedding song with Lilach - I’m So Excited, as in the Motown song. Ah, Israeli wedding standards. As well, the kids at the wedding had all been seated in front of the first row of chairs during the ceremony. As soon as the song came on, they all charged up onto the bimah and attacked the legs of the bride, groom, and parents - with hugs of course! I thought that this was a really cute touch.

The ceremony was followed by dinner, which was in a semi-enclosed room adjoining the reception tent. I sat with the Okons, which made me feel important but intimidated. Luckily, the woman from the couple next to me was also a distant relative, though on the bride’s mother’s side, so I felt more comfortable. She would speak to me in English and I replied in Hebrew, which made her happy. Also, her Clevelander husband gave me his business card so that I could spend Shabbat with them in the Galil. (Unfortunately, the card was cleared off with the table at the end.) The food was pretty good, especially the salads. I didn’t have much time to eat, though, because Noam kept dragging me onto the dance floor. (It turned out later that he’d heard Lilach was afraid that nobody would dance - I’m happy I was able to help assuage that fear!) My cousin Ohad, who is as reserved as a 16-year old can get, was actually getting quite into the music. It turns out that Noam was setting him up for his first taste of alcohol education. Ohad was quite fine, though, if livelier and looser than usual. As for myself, the non-alcoholic cocktails were great. I guess the weekend had just left me with a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.

Between dinner and dessert, Lilach’s grandfather (Malka’s father) gave a really sweet speech about her, and then a slideshow of the bride and groom’s lives was shown. It was very cute because it contrasted matching pairs of photos from each of the spouses’ childhoods - the newborn picture, the naked-in-the-bathtub picture, the best-Purim-costume-picture, the army picture, and so forth. The music was just starting to get alterately good and Bar-Mitzvah-good as dessert was coming out, but the ingenious waiters brought it to us on the dance floor. It was well worth it for the deliciousness. (The Okons are a definite chocolate family.) I still went inside, though, for the things that couldn’t be eaten with your fingers - personal molten lava chocolate cakes and lichee sorbet. The crowds began to leave en masse at this point, which was long past midnight, and I was getting exhausted seeing as I’d woken up at 6:45 as usual. I began to conk out in the dinner hall as the dance floor began to clear out. As I was staying with the bride’s parents, we were the absolute last ones to leave. It was only then that it occured to Lilach that she’d never thrown out the bouquet of flowers. Not wanting to keep it, she handed it to me and said, “Now you’ll meet someone nice.” Whee! Though the ride home was squished between Ohad and another relative sleeping over, I was asleep all the way back to Ramat Gan. Beautiful couple, beautiful surroundings, beautiful wedding!

THURSDAY
Naturally, we all slept in very late. Malka, Ohad and I sat down to eat breakfast for lunch with cereal, yogurt, and Shai’s fabulous homemade bread. Afterwards, the three of us went on a walk to Mercaz Shuster, which is an outdoor shopping-café complex just minutes from their apartment. (They also live next door to a big community centre and a great park - it’s a really nice location.) We went into a store resembling Lush and had a mid-afternoon snack at a place called Café Bert. (If I ever own a coffee shop, I’m going to give it that name.) Hadas, Noam, and baby Yaron came over with the intention of going down to the port (see last Tel Aviv entry) for dinner. However, Yaron’s sleep schedule hadn’t quite synced with theirs after the wedding and they were exhausted, so we ended up getting food again at Mercaz Shuster, this time at Café Hillel. We managed to occupy our table for a good two-and-a-half hours - that’s how long it took for Hadas to give up on entertaining Yaron and hand him off to Ohad, who was magically able to get him to focus on a fountain then go to sleep. We also stayed longer because Noam arrived late and because two of Hadas’ friends who were strolling by stopped by to chat. After dinner, we got ice cream from a place called Glidah Be’er Sheva nearby, then we headed back to the Okons’. While Yaron was stumbling around with a closet door, Shai tracked down an old photo album, which we looked through together. It was a fun mish-mash of pictures from a Polish ski resort in the late 40s and the beach in Tel Aviv in the 50s - snowsuits and bikinis are always fun when juxtaposed. Afterwards, I read quite a bit, then went to sleep.

FRIDAY
Another sleep-in! Life is brilliant! I woke up quite a bit earlier than the previous day, though, and I when I went to the kitchen to get some breakfast, Shai was busy cooking that night’s dinner. I offered him some help, and we was thrilled just to have someone to keep him company. Together, we made cabbage soup, sweet-and-sour pineapple chicken, kinois with raisins, and shredded carrots. It was my job to read the ingredients and instructions from the cookbook, which proved to be good practice. And since I recognized the names of most of the foods listed in the recipes, I actually proved to be helpful.

When we finished up, Malka drove Ohad and I down to the port for another try. Hadas and Noam were running late, so the three of us checked out a women-centred art fair being held on the beach. We also tried to get a spot at the hot diner that Hadas had recommended, but it was far too busy. So, we settled on a place called Café Speedo with a menu paying tribute to the bathing suit company of the same name. By the time we were all sitting around the table together, lunch had been pushed off until 3, and it mysteriously took another forty-five minutes before my fruit-and-nut salad showed up. (Really, the service was terrible. They also messed up Noam and Ohad’s orders, and it was hard to catch any waiter’s eye to try and fix the problem.) Afterwards, Noam was dying to go to Max Brenner for dessert, so off we went. We all ordered different hot chocolates, which were all thick enough to eat with a spoon and decadent enough to keep you happy for a week. Finally, we headed uptown, and I read some of the Okons’ travel magazines before going to sleep.

SATURDAY
Once again, when I went to the kitchen for breakfast, Shai was busy making food, but this time baking his signature bread. After helping a little with that, Ohad and I headed over to Hadas and Noam’s for the day. We watched the movie Ice Age II (very cute) and enjoyed the lunch that Shai and I had made the day before. When evening hit, we did one last ice cream run and I got to explore their cute, Avenue Road-esque neighbourhood in Givatayim. (The Snickers ice cream that I got has to rank among the best that I’ve eaten this year.) After that, it was time to say goodbye so that I could head back to kibbutz to pack for our leadership seminar. Noam offered me a ride home, as he missed his days travelling along that road from Tel Aviv to Be’er Sheva. Along the way, we stopped at his kibbutz near Rosh Ha’Ayin to say hi to his mom and to pick up some stuff. She gave us cookies for the ride and we were quite grateful. Noam and I talked for most of the ride, and soon enough, I saw the Ein Tzurim sign. I thanked him up and down as he pulled away, then got to the aggravating task of figuring out what clean clothes I had left to pack. And as for the week for which I was packing, well, that’s the next post.

FRIDAY
Pretty chill day. We watched TV, I updated my journal, and in general just relaxed until Shabbat started. We prayed as a group in a new, red-hued mo'adon which we hadn't used before - we have no idea who was using our two regular lounges.

Anyway, we were supposed to eat either Friday night dinner or Saturday lunch with our host families, but David and I lucked out - our kibbutz parents asked us to eat both meals with them. However, since Yehuda and Zehava are two of the kibbutz' founders, they still abide by the principle of eating all meals in the communal dining hall. So, while everyone else was enjoying some home-cooked goodness, we dined on the traditional kibbutz fare. Oh well! At least Yehuda was gentleman-like in keeping our glasses of orange juice full at all times as Zehava played the role of the typical Jewish grandmother, complaining that neither of us was eating enough. Other than this, though, conversation was a bit of a struggle. The issue wasn't the Hebrew, as David is fluent and I can make myself understood and even come up with conversation starters. It was just that our parents weren't extraordinary talkative. For instance, when we noticed that they'd brought their own kiddush cup to the meal, we asked Yehuda about its origin. He simply said, "Someone gave it to me for my bar mitzvah." And when we followed up by asking who it was who had given it to him, he replied, "Someone. I don't know." Zehava opened up more when I brought up her granchildren, but kept repeating the same stories over and over again. The first was short, reminding me that she is a Jerusalemite and will always be one - she was even a nurse there! The second one was about her daughter who lives in nearby Be'er Tuvia and has children in the gan at Ein Tzurim. Every morning, her granddaughter calls up her husband and asks, "Saba panu'i?" (Is grandpa there?) to which she replies, "Of course!" Then, she asked repeatedly whether I knew what panu'i meant, and every time I reassured her that I'd learned the term in ulpan. Yehuda also revealed at one point that neither he nor Zehava had ever left Israel, even though he'd been taken prisoner in Jordan - a bit of a political comment.

As dinner ended, we were a bit relieved. Although we really do like our kibbutz parents, it was simply hard for David and I to keep from fidgeting and feeling awkward. After the meal, we had a study session for Purim. We studied a bit of Mishna relating to the mitzvah of Mishlo'ach Manot (giving gifts to others on Purim) by reading it out loud. However, the session's leaders explained the passages simply by paraphrasing them, which drives me nuts - we usually do understand the meaning of the words the first time around, but we need some elaboration or context to give it deeper meaning! Evidently, we grew restless quickly as the session didn't seem to have a point. Tani and I played some games with one another, and when it was my turn to read, I changed the name of the passage's rabbi, Rav Mari, to Rav Mari-Ann Zhenya Sartin-Tarm, the name of a girl on our program. Teppy replied to that, "I knew she was going to say that!" and after that we just couldn't sit still any longer. After the session, Phil and I hung out, and then I went to bed.

SATURDAY
Considering that it was a closed Shabbat, I actually woke up to go to Shacharit at the Beit Knesset. I toted along my Tanakh because there's no extra reading material in the womens' section and I knew I'd get bored. I started reading earlier than expected, though, because nobody else showed up for services until about halfway through, and even then only half the group came. David and I had lunch with our host family again, and Zehava brought up pretty much the same anecdotes again. After lunch, we all sat outside reading for hours, and I made a big dent into One Hundred Years of Solitude. (I also got up to date on reading the weekly parshas - I've been trying to get through the whole Tanakh week by week by forgot about it for a while.) We were back in the red mo'adon for Mincha and ate Seudah Shlishit outside, even though it was a little chilly. Finally, we finished off Shabbat with Havdallah and ran off to put on our costumes and get ready for megillah reading.

Speaking of costumes, it's always fun to do a run-down of who was what - Molly and Jenni: twins; Reva: Snow White; Emily: cowgirl; Sarah L: bunny; Abi: emo kid?; Nehama: fairy; Sarah R.: fairy; Hanna: Wilma Flintstone; Abbie: baby; Aviva: Matan; me: butterfly; Josh, Jacob, David, and Gabe: Teletubbies; Marty: Akram; Phil: a devil wearing Prada; Tani and Joey: Starsky and Hutch; Nathan: Flava Flav; Teppy: Quailman from Doug. And that's all that I remember...

( Chag same'ach! )

We went to the yeshiva for megillah reading, and we were in for a serious surprise when we arrived. The yeshiva boys had decorated the whole Beit Midrash to look like an Iranian terrorist group's hide-out. (I did take photos...I should upload them.) There was barbed wire and an assortment of Iranian flags strewn across the walls, and the centre of the room was turned into a makeshift tent. In the women's section, the floor was covered with dirty mattresses and Goldstar beer bottles relabled with Arabic text. Ahmanijhad was also sitting behind the mechitza for good measure. We used the beer bottles at graggors when Haman's name was called by hitting them with our keys or blowing into them. However, since this was an Israeli reading, it went by really quickly. When it ended, we returned to the mo'adon to put on a few final touches to its decorations. After all, the other two tracks would be arriving soon for a big, Nativ-wide Purim dance.

The buses were running late as usual, so a few of us decided to check out the kibbutz' party, which was being held in the chadar ochel. As we walked through the food service area at the front, we passed by tables and tables of every alcoholic beverage imaginable, most of it untouched. (Never fret - a few people grabbed beers, but nothing more intense than that.) In the party room itself, everyone's favourite KC and the Sunshine Band and Jackson 5 songs were blaring, so we showed off our carefully-honed bar mitzvah dance moves in front of the crowd. I was surprised to see men and women dancing together, as Ein Tzurim is a religious kibbutz, but this was pretty much the case. Just as we were getting bored of the kibbutz party, the Kehilla tracks arrived, and we all greeted one another with big hugs. I wasn't in the mood for a big party, so Jeff and I mostly hung out in my caravan, where we were later joined by Rachel. Things were a little awkward when some drunken Nativers pounded down our door demanding all the alcohol we had in the name of our program's director. It turned out later that they'd been caught drinking in our rooms, which isn't allowed on the program, so all the bottles that the Kibbutz track possessed were being confiscated. They amassed lots of alcohol, as nobody ever really took the no-drinking-in-caravans rule seriously. Either way, the incident had us talking for days. After helping Yonit towards the bus and kicking the last tipsy Kehilla-niks out of our rooms, we settled in to go to sleep feeling slightly confused.

SUNDAY
Most of my caravan was planning to wake up to go to a women's minyan megillah reading, which had the added bonus of starting an hour later than the traditional, non-egalitarian reading. However, we all slept through our alarms and only barely made it to the group's Purim se'udah on time. The programming was minimal: Andy hosted the game where we each had a secret identity taped to our backs and had to figure out who we were before tracking down our "partners". Gabe also recited the brilliant Purim kiddush that Jules had done for us at Heschel Kinnus a (long) two years ago. Really, though, the main event was the food. Our meal consisted of Honey Nut Cheerios and Oogie cereal, Milky puddings, cow cheese, and laffas with hummus. What else could one ever need? At the end of the meal, we exchanged our Mishlo'ach Manot Secret Santa-style. Andy started by giving his gift to the person whose name he'd drawn, who in turn passed on their present to the person they'd picked. This kept going until everyone had received Mishlo'ach Manot but me. It turns out that my partner hadn't made or bought me anything. This was sort of upsetting for me based on other recent events. But, I put on a smile after lamenting with David for a bit and packed my bags to go to Jerusalem for Shushan Purim. After all, Rachel and I were going to spend time with Dan at his Kivunim base and have some fun. Just as I was on my way out, the person who was supposed to give me Mishlo'ach manot stopped by with a package for me. Part of it was food that had been recycled from the se'udah, and enclosed was a note which made me feel even worse. I can't say that I was much in the mood to celebrate when I boarded the bus to Jerusalem.

When we arrived at our destination, the four people I was with wanted to cab to Beit Nativ, so I told them that I'd simply walk. They gave me some weird excuses to try and make me feel better but it just made me feel queasier. To cheer myself up, I went to the fabulously cheap candy store off of King George to buy some gummies. There, I managed to run into three(!) kids from my ulpan class: Bracha, Jonathan (aka Tony), and Daniel. I walked up to Agron to go read in Independence Park, but it grew cold quickly. I called up Phil to ask whether I could hang out in his room in Beit Nativ, but he and Andy were still eating a very late lunch. So, I walked up and down the aisles of SuperSal over and over until the time that they said they'd be back. I must have looked unbelievably suspicious. Finally, though, they made it back and we all went inside. I read some more and took a nap, but all the while also tried getting in touch with Rachel, whom I hadn't heard from all day. Finally, around dinnertime she left Be'er Sheva for Jerusalem, and we arrived at the Kivunim base as they were finishing up their own costume party. (By the way, their program is two-thirds informal study in the hotel in Ramat Rachel where they live and one-third travelling around the world, meeting with Jewish communities in Russia, Morocco, India, Hungary, and Italy.) Around 10:30, Dan suggested some things to do to celebrate the holiday, but all three of us were being so indecisive about what to do that we were all just frustrated with one another. And by the time we actually made up our mind to go to one particular party, I was wrapped up in Dan's Indian shawl and my eyelids were drooping. He and Rachel ended up going out and I just slept. It had been a long day for me, anyway. So perhaps I didn't party during either Purim this year, but it wasn't meant to be.

MONDAY
We all slept in until Dan had to go to some mask-making program his group was doing. Rachel and I said goodbye to him and we headed back uptown. We ate brunch-ish (note: I hadn't even eaten a proper meal since dinner on Saturday night) at a cute café uptown. The grey skies and October air were well-matched by my brioche and cappucino, and some passersby thought Rachel's and my meals looked so good that they emulated our order exactly. Afterwards, I just wanted to go home, so I boarded the bus back to Ein Tzurim and was home by mid-afternoon. After unpacking and cleaning up, I designed a website for my dad's company (check it out at http://allecoinc.com ), did some other chores, and took it easy by myself.

TUESDAY
Pretty good day at work. For the first half of the morning, we were still weeding the chickpea fields, but due to the weekend's rain and newly-ploughed soil, all the roots were nicely loose and satisfying. Afterwards, as the sun got stronger, we were back to the pipe loading. The afternoon was a little bit crazier.

It was my turn to take our lunch carton from the fields back to the dining hall that day. I didn't mind because it was my turn to bring back dinner and set it up that night, so I'd have to stop by the chadar sometime during the afternoon. I dragged the cart all the way to Mike's room myself and headed back to our caravan. By that point, I was resigned to showering third, after Sarah and Aviva. However, a phone call took a while, and by the time I got off, I didn't have enough time to wash before our session with Yossi. So, I went to the meeting a little disgustingly. He came to talk to us about the alcohol issue, which went a little weirdly. A couple of people made arguments for being able to keep stuff in our caravans because of the lack of alternatives for drinking: the bars in Kiryat Malakhi are seedy and unsafe for girls, and not being able to store alcohol means having to polish off an entire bottle of vodka in one sitting. It was even mentioned how However, the rule still stands. Some other complaints were brought up afterwards about the lack of any food group aside from carbohydrates at our dinners and some supposed lack of group bonding. However, Yossi wanted to talk to somepeople individually, so the session was cut off.

Afterwards, it was announced that we were starting a Kibbutz track chevruta program that day. Although it sounded good, I had been dying for my shower for a good three hours already, so I figured that I could just start the next week. Turns out, though, that it was actually a session for the whole group with a guy from the yeshiva about parallels between the Purim and Joseph narratives. Well, I couldn't turn it down. I stuck around, and the material was pretty cool - not to mention the fact that the guy leading the session kept referring back to my comments. Towards the end, though, I couldn't stop picking the clumped-up mud off my clothing. I was ready to dash out towards the shower when I heard someone remark, "Hey, can we move dinner up fifteen minutes?" I remembered the cart next to Mike's room, remembered that my partner would never remember to pick it up themselves, and tried to find them so that they could do the chore. They were nowhere to be found. I shlepped the heavy cart into the mo'adon and patiently waited for that first person to turn up who wouldn't leave dinner out of disgust after a minute. After all, the animals love to get into our food even if we don't. Finally, someone stuck around, so I headed back, leaving my MIA partner to clean up the mess. (This wasn't before I realized why it was that our suppers had no protein: we had received sliced cheese for sandwiches, but the first two people to come in each took half of the pile to make themselves grilled cheese sandwiches. Thanks, guys, for being considerate and sharing.)

That night, Tani and I were supposed to watch Jesus Is Magic, but he ended up having dinner with Joey's family and stayed there late. So, instead, I went over to visit Yael, who was worried because she hadn't done enough practice for her physiotherapy test the next day. She asked very nicely if she could give me a short massage. How could I say no? This one only lasted fifteen minutes, but she's promised me an hour-long one, assuring that it really helps her out...and, what can I say? It's always nice to be helpful!

WEDNESDAY
Very odd day at work. Micha was in charge, and while he's generally a little spacy, he kept abandoning us for half-hours on end. For the chunk of the day that we did do work, we did a little bit of pipe-loading, a little bit of rubber stopper insertion, and a little bit of screwing sprinklers onto pipes. (The ones we were loading these days had actual sprinkler extensions, which made them heavy and awkward, onto which we added the tops.) (Also, they were hard to put on, as in the words of Gabe, "I'm screwing and screwing and nothing's happening!") However, Micha also had us throwing some super-heavy pipes onto the top rack of some nearly-full racks - the rack that we never use. This is not a good idea for short people, especially klutzy short people like us. Between that and an episode unloading a faulty rack, we sustained many an impact to our heads and shins. Nobody came out unscathed - we gathered together whenever Micha disappeared to compare wounds. I wasn't feeling terrible until the end, when Sarah and I had either end of a pipe balancing on our fingers and she dropped her end unexpectedly. My left index finger let out a nice crunch as my side fell to the ground along with it. (I don't think I did anything to it...it stopped hurting after a few days.) Since we didn't even get a coffee break that day, we were all unbelievably relieved to be going home, but me especially. I had a few things to do before setting off for Tel Aviv. After showering and packing in a frenzy, I attempted one desperate time to locate the Etz HaBakbukim store, which I'm firmly convinced exists nowhere on kibbutz. The bus arrived just on time, and I slept all the way to Tel Aviv, despite having the angriest bus driver ever, who was also female. Female bus drivers are always the angriest.

As for Tel Aviv...that'll be in the next post! This is getting redonkulously long again.

SATURDAY
Nobody wanted to do much except for relax. After waking up just in time for lunch, I headed back to Nathan's caravan with Jenni, Shayna, and Julia. While I alternately read and talked to the girls, Julia splendidly decorated Tani's wall for him. I napped and worked a bit and Shabbat was over quickly.

SUNDAY
In the sherut on the way to work, our driver told us that we were working in the lool (chicken coop). We weren't sure whether he was joking or not, but when we pulled up to a new building on the moshav and were met with a distinctively sour smell, we realized he was right. (We're still not sure, though, whether we were working there because of the threatening rainclouds or just because the moshav had nothing else for us to do.) Things weren't looking great when the man who greeted us noted, "I didn't ask for girls." Regardless, we were all taken into a room full of changes of clothes which we were directed to put on. The reason? The moshav workers couldn't be too sure that we wouldn't bring the avian flu over from Ein Tzurim. The boys all got work boots, but us girls just had our shoes sprayed with some sort of sterilizer. Our job for the entire morning was simple: we had to coat the floors of two very, very long chicken coops with a layer of sawdust to get them ready for the arrival of new flocks. Gabe and David fetched bags of sawdust from storage and brought them to us on a cart. Aviva and opened and dumped out the bags of sawdust using X-Acto knives while Sarah and Tani spread it out evenly. To keep from getting bored, we talked about our excitement for the Oscars that night. As well, we took an hour-long coffee break accidentally - our boss for the day forget to come back for us. Oops. In the afternoon, Lisa came to visit from her ulpan at Kibbutz Hod Ha'Sharon, so we spent some time catching up and exploring the depths of the Kol-Bo. That evening, we had a va'ad meeting to finish things up for the next day's Yom Nativ. Afterwards, Abbie, Aviva, Molly, and (inexplicably) Matan and I had a pseudo-girls' night eating pizza and watching Gilmore Girls. Then, we all went to bed early. Unfortunately, I slept through my alarm and didn't wake up for the Oscars.

( Lul photo ops )

MONDAY
Our group's Yom Nativ. When I arrived at our mo'adon for tfillot, it turned out that nobody had ever gotten a world map for our first activity - having people put a dot on each country from which their family originates. Someone was trying to draw one on the board, but it wasn't labelled with countries and was a little hard to understand, especially in crucial Eastern Europe. So, instead, I listed all of the countries from the Animaniacs All The Countries in the World song on the white board and added any that I could think of that had originated after the song was written in 1993. I was late to tfillot, but I still got the first aliyah. We meant for there to be a fifteen-minute break in between davening and the map activity for people to grab food to eat and put away their siddurs. However, it began to pour just as we were letting out, so most people chose to stay behind in the mo'adon instead. And I guess, because people have nothing better to do, everyone started yelling about how the drawn map was incomplete and how some countries were missing, no longer existed, or had changed names. It was painful sitting there and having people critique my last minute effort - who else could list so many countries in the world from memory in ten minutes? It was simply an extremely frustrating start to the day.

The map activity itself went fine, with most of the dots centering around Eastern European countries as predicted. However, Joey realized again that I also have some Italian heritage (though we've already been over it) and decided that we had to "stick together". Afterwards, we did a program I came up with where people sent in stories about their family, and we read them outloud anonymously and had people guess whose story belonged to whom. I submitted the one about Aggie in WWII, which people all thought was pretty cool. However, I think that the favourite was Tani's, which mentioned the fact that his great-grandmother sold bagels on the railway tracks and mentioned lots of other random Yiddish names without much context. For our last program before lunch, we had a speaker who talked to us about his experience founding the original Ein Tzurim in Gush Etzion, becoming a POW in Jordan, and starting again at this location. The story mostly overlapped with everything we'd already heard at Kfar Etzion during Israel Experience week, on our tour on the first day, and with our speaker on the first Shabbat, but it was nice to hear about what the Jordanian detention was really like. Also, it turns out that the guy who spoke is my kibbutz abba. Hurray for finally getting a family! I'm sharing them with David, who speaks Hebrew fluently, but he's assured me that he'll try not to overpower me when getting to know them because of that.

After lunch and watching CNN's Red Carpet report with Hanna, we proceeded to a game of Two Truths and a Lie about random Jewish facts. At the end, people were supposed to list off their own interesting Jewish facts. While some were genuinely cool, other people did obvious facts, which were funny. Finally, we did the program that I planned, in which I distributed notes from my Jewish History class about the waves of aliyah to different groups. Each group then performed a skit about their particular wave. The fifth aliyah was done in the style of Shoes, while the Third was an opera. Yael yelled a ton in Hebrew for the Arab aliyah, but Teppy stole the show with Mike performing about the Post-Holocaust aliyah. It was a great way to end the day on a positive note because we were all laughing. We were told that we did a good job, and the whole va'ad was pretty happy just to be done with all of this. In the afternoon, Aviva made s'mores, and I watched West Bank Story with Nathan, Abi, and Joey. The rest of the day, I've been getting in touch with people to start planning weekends away because this year is ending pretty quickly.

TUESDAY
Once again, when we woke up, it was pouring. The immediate reaction of the farmhand girls of Caravan 4 was the possibility of us getting back in bed and going to sleep. However, Yael told us to get ready for the day and to have breakfast - we would only find out whether we had work or not at 7:30. Sarah, Aviva, and I were all complaints and drenched clothes as we proceeded to the chadar ochel to breakfast. But, lo and behold, at 7:29 we got a phone call informing us that we could indeed take the morning off until 10:30. If the weather got better, however, we were back on the job. Gratefully, I crawled under the covers and read a little bit before falling asleep. We were woken up with a phone call at 10:20 telling us that the sun was shining and that we had to grab the sherut to the moshav. Disappointedly, we dragged ourselves out the door. The work wasn't actually too bad - it was just pipe-stacking as usual, as we're between seasons - so the morning went by quickly. And luckily, they didn't make us stay late to cover the time that we'd missed in the morning. However, I was partnered with Chanan loading pipes on one side while the rest of the Nativers did the other side. It made work go fast, but our boss is rough and hit me in the head with these heavy metal pipes a few times. I now have a nice scab on my ear from a particularly hard smack. From far away, it looks like a piercing.

WEDNESDAY
When we arrived at the moshav, we were taken to a small trailer filled with sprinklers with metal supports on the bottoms. I guess these are the ones that we removed last week as being faulty because the supports helped these sprinklers to stand up straight. We had to stack them on top of two wooden cases in a lattice pattern, so while Aviva and Gabe handed down sprinklers, Tani and Sarah arranged one pile and I did the other. At the end, they couldn't stop commenting on how pretty mine was. Maybe I'm bound for a more aesthetically-minded career than agriculture? We then stacked a rack of pipes, had our coffee break, and did another three racks afterwards. It felt like a pretty long day, especially with the long breaks while Chanan was taking the racks off of the tractors (and the fact that I wasn't working on his side today). Tani and I kept ourselves amused talking about one-hit wonders à la Weird Al's parody of Runaway Train and old TV shows, which spawned the creation of a Facebook group later that day. The pipe stacking is actually becoming fun as we get into the rhythm of things - now we mostly talk without having to pay much attention to what we're doing.

After work, Nathan and I set out for our second week of dinner in Be'er Sheva. On the bus on the way there, a whole bunch of kids and some cute Israeli guys boarded at Kiryat Gat. Turns out that they were from an outdoor adventure group run by JNF called Chugei Sayerim (Pathfinder Activities). Anyway, I had a great time just eavesdropping on these 10-year olds' conversations, from a boy trying to prove to his friend that the Earth is round because Newton said so, to a girl desperately trying to buy a lollipop off of another girl. I also finished Pride and Prejudice on that trip! Upon arrival in Be'er Sheva, we detoured to SuperPharm to (unsuccessfully) find Nathan braces elastics for his Purim, then boarded the 9 bus for the Merkaz Klitah. The bus driver was in a terrible mood, so when I paid him with a 50-shek ($12.50ish) bill, he got angry and refused to give me change at first. He also drove terribly recklessly and made us think that this bus trip would be our last. However, we did make it to Kehilla 1's haunt all in one piece.

Upon arrival, the girls didn't know what they were making yet, so we had an "apartment meeting" with Nathan and I playing the roles of Elana and Arielle to decide. In the end, we opted for baked potatoes with cheese and other toppings. Julia, Nathan, and I went to Shufersal to buy ingredients while Alana, Sam, and Cynthia took the bus to the mall to buy their Purim costumes. The latter group took a very long time to get back, and we didn't want to start without them. So, in the meantime, Julia and I hung out while washing dishes and baking kosher-for-Pesach peanut butter cookies. (There are now three types of home-baked cookies in their kitchen, which I think makes for a happy home.) Nathan sat in the common room and had his hair cornrowed by Angela while playing Snood. By 8:30, though, we just really wanted to eat, so we decided to make cheesy mashed potatoes instead. I set the potatoes to boil while Julia roasted some garlic as per Angela's instructions. She forgot about them, though, and they caught fire. Oops! The potatoes also wouldn't boil well over the gas burner, so I microwaved them instead. And when it came time to mash them with the girls' electric mixer, Julia admitted that it only had one prong. (Turns out that it was the same one that had been willed to Kibbutz Girls that we had broken ourselves in Jerusalem.) However, they turned out delicious, even when a ton of garlic powder was thrown in to replace the burned cloves. Alana modelled her cute Tinkerbell costume (with wig newly-trimmed by Julia) as we dug in. Finally, as we were about to leave for the bus home, David came by with his mom and step-dad to drop Arielle off. He offered us a ride back to kibbutz with them, and so we went. It was evident on the ride home that the three of them had spent too much time together recently, but we were still grateful for the lift.

THURSDAY
Last day of work before the long weekend. It was chilly and windy in the morning when we left, and as Micha drove us out to the chummus field for rock-clearing, we asked what would happen if it started raining as we worked. He replied that we would duck under the truck bed to stay dry and that Chanan would drive out to come and get us. Sure enough, after about half an hour, the skies erupted, but Micha told us to keep grabbing rocks. We didn't know why he wanted to keep going, but we kept working as we slowly got soaked. The soil of the field soon turned to mud, which made it hard to walk...but even harder to drive. After a few minutes, Micha's tires got completely stuck in the mud and he couldn't move at all. Now we were really wondering what Micha's motivation had been to keep us out in the rain. Micha gave the tractor more and more gas, and the wheels kept turning without doing much but spray mud at us. Finally, after one good rev, the truck propelled forward, and we thought it was time to go home. Suddenly, we saw a figure run towards us and jump into the tractor. He pushed Micha aside, grabbed the wheel, and began driving away from our sopping group. Convinced we were going to be left to die, we shouted at Micha to ask what was happening. He yelled back at us that on the last workday before Purim, it's a Massu'ot Yitzchak tradition for sons to steal their fathers' vehicles and start driving them. The only reason why Micha had made us stay out was because he didn't want to disappoint his son, which we thought was cute. The skies let up as we drove back to the moshav office for our coffee break.

After forty-five minutes over hot drinks, which must have been awkward for Esther-fasters Gabe and David, Micha came to get us again. Since the rain had only gotten heavier, we were going to help set up the moshav's auditorium for their Purim play and then get off work early. We were all pretty thrilled. We took off our muddy shoes to enter the pristine hall, which is a sure sign of Massu'ot Yitchak's wealth, and we had their chairs in rows and tables up in record time. Lunch was still on when we returned to Ein Tzurim, so we were able to experience the joy of eating in the chadar. After showering, Abbie and I decided to get to work on some mishlo'ach manot (Purim gifts) - we each had to give one to a "secret buddy" in the group and we wanted to make some for our kibbutz host families as well. First off, we bought some food from the Kol Bo (me making sure to get three different blessings in their for my partner, Gabe) and then we made some cute origami baskets to hold the stuff while watching The OC. Goldschmidt and Angela stopped by to say "hi" just as I was supposed to go meet my host family for the first time since the Yom Nativ. Goldschmidt and I struggled to locate their out-of-the-way apartment, but found it eventually. Yehuda and his wife Zahava sat me down and gave me some cake and water as we talked about Zehava's time as a nurse in the Independence War. (Based on this, I don't need to tell you how old they are.) I tried my best speaking Hebrew to them, but Yehuda already has hearing problems, and Zehava often cringed as she tried to figure out what I was saying. However, they kept saying over and over again how much they liked me and gave me plenty of hugs when I left.

Next week in the next post!