Day 0-June 1

Worst birthday ever. I awake at about 9 to the hustle and bustle of getting out the door for the airport. I am under the impression that we needed to leave at 11; in actuality, we needed to leave at 11:30 and, like always, we end up leaving at 11:45. It doesn’t even reach 10 before my mom is repeating over and over how late we are and how we are never going to catch our flight unless we leave immediately. After setting up barricades for Luke, we pile into the car and leave. Instead of getting sandwiches at Publix, my mom thinks we should ditch it and just go straight to the airport. By this point, she has seriously stressed all of us out. We reach the airport at 12:30, our flight to JFK International being at 2. We find ourselves being shuffled from one line to the next as we search for the right line, my mom growing ever more incensed, my dad ever more pissed, and we, the children, ever more aware that mom was right to have been freaked out. We eventually get to go to the special cutoff line, which takes three seconds, and run to the security checkpoint. Unfortunately, we had SSSS printed on our tickets, meaning that we would get an extra security search. After patting us all down quite thouroughly, which took an extra five minutes, we caught our flight. We made it to JFK with plenty of time left but no nerves. We wait around the International terminal (which vaguely reminds me of the Denver airport, except on a smaller scale), looking at duty free stores and other super-expensive stuff. We board the El-Al flight at 7. The flight is surreal; there are passengers old enough that they cannot move, passengers davening through even the toughest turbulence, and the wail of babies from mothers not much older than me. The food is terrible, I feel like crap. I try to fall asleep, and fail.

Day 1-June 2

Finally, after hours and hours and hours and hours on this godforsaken plane, we arrive in Tel Aviv. I had 1-2 hours of sleep. The airport is beautifully done, with lots of limestone and glass and is generally a very pretty design. We get our bags (ending an added portion of worry on the plane) and head to the “cafeteria” where our tour guide was supposed to meet us. After a brief search of the area, we find lots of people looking for other people, but no sign of our tour guide. Suzanne and I share a worry that our tour guide will turn out to be a very fat individual. As we wait around, a well-built, tanned, and bald man introduces himself and compliments my mother very smoothly. He is Moshe, the organizer of our trip. He introduces us to Tal, our tour guide, and buys us drinks. He’s a very outgoing and friendly guy who I take a liking to almost immediately, as is Tal. We leave Ben-Gurion airport and head to Jerusalem. Tal takes a microphone and does the whole tour guide spiel while I snap pictures from the back of the van. I get a picture of Lod, a town that I remember Moshe Dayan conquered single-handedly in the Israeli War of Independence. Also, I get pictures of the first forest ever planted by Theodore Herzl, because the road from Tel Aviv to Jersualem was completely bare of trees when he first traveled it a century ago. Sunflower fields, grapevine fields, and much more was encountered on that road. In the Israeli War of Independence, Jersusalem was besieged and convoys of supplies were brought up by civilian vehicles reinforced with steel. Those vehicles that did not make it were turned into monuments, as was this metal monument, which points towards Jerusalem. I also spotted an enormous tank, which I tried to take a picture of. Jerusalem is a really cool city. The buildings are all built with limestone; the stone is found nearby but it is also mandated by the city’s building authority that all buildings are constructed with that material.  All public works of art are abstract, because Muslims find repdocutions of the human image blasphemous. As we passed through Jerusalem, I noticed a soldier with an M-16 step out of a bus. I was so surprised by the almost casualness of the weapon and of his purpose that I took a picture. Soldiers are everywhere, strolling around and fully armed, eating and talking with people. In different circumstances, I would be one of those soldiers right now. The Hebrew University is also situated on top of Mount Scopus, or at least the liberal arts campus is. The science and math campus is located elsewhere. We first went to Mount Scopus, where we had kaddish over coming to Jerusalem and where one can see the Temple Mount. It was incredible to actually see, with your own eyes, what you have only seen in pictures and by description. The old wall of Jersualem, hundreds of years old, has eight gates, one of which does not open. We saw three gates, the New Gate, the Damascus Gate, and the Herod Gate. We passed by the King David Hotel, which is used for dignitaries and was bombed by Zionist terrorists before the War of Independence. We went to our hotel, and after depositing our stuff, we went to Ben Yehuda street for dinner. Ben Yehuda street is a pedestrian plaza full of shops and falafel stands. Falafel, for you who do not know, is fried chick pea paste balls, which is put into a pita with pickles, cucumbers, sauce, and French fries. It’s actually pretty good, but messy. Street performers knew we were Americans from a mile away; one began playing Yankee Doodle as we walked by, and dad put a shekel in his can. I was incensed that we are so obviously American. We returned to the hotel and went to bed.

Day 2-June 3

I slept early, but woke up at 2 and could not get back to sleep. At 7 we got up and went down to breakfast, a very strange affair with both normal breakfast foods and smoked fish, different creams, cheese, and yogurts, as well as lots of olives. We met Tal in the lobby and left. Our stop was within the Old City of Jerusalem, where we first discussed the gate, which had defensive measures that Tal elucidated on. We then went through the streets of Old Jerusalem as Tal identified a getseminie (a millstone designed for crushing olives for olive oil) and the ancient Roman corridor that used to be the main street of Jerusalem. There was an old model of the original Menorah in the Temple, but no one knows the original version. We went through several museums of archeological digs of the area, which were uncovered when the Jordanians destroyed the Jewish quarter when they lost Jerusalem in the Six Day War. Most of the digs were of ancient and rich homes. We went straight to an English-language tour of a tunnel that had been dug underneath the Muslim quarter against the West wall. Because the Temple was destroyed, the only thing the Jews have left in terms of religious buildings is the plaza on which the Temple was built, and Ha-Kotel, the wall closest to the Holy of Holies, where the Ten Commandments were kept. It was pretty emotional. Then we went to Ha-Kotel itself, which is the one small section of the wall the Muslims have not built over. It is separated into two parts, one of which is for men, the other for women. The men’s side is maybe twice to three times as big as the women’s side, with scores of Hasidic men aged from 9 to 90 praying. To finally go to Ha-Kotel was pretty intense, and I have no words to describe the holiest place to a Jew. We then went to King David’s tomb, which may or may not be the tomb of King David, a king, a man, or any tomb to at all. We then proceeded to an open-air fresh food market, which was both refreshing and disgusting at the same time. For example, a bird flew down onto an open sack of nuts and proceeded to eat them, and I’m pretty sure I saw animal testicles for sale. The fruit looked wonderful. We returned to the hotel, everyone tired and my skin needing a rest from the sun. We went up to the pool, located on the roof, and then mom and dad left to see Ha-Kotel packed with observant Jews. We watched American TV with Hebrew subtitles until they came back, and then the parentals and I walked to the King David Hotel to have drinks. We talked about music for a while.

Day 3-June 4

We awoke late, maybe 9-10 and went downstairs to a poor kosher breakfast. Since it was Shabbat, everything was closed and Tal had the day off. We found a cab to take us to the Israel museum. Taking cabs is difficult for us because we are a group of five, and there is a 100 shekel fine for not having everyone in the car seatbelted that Israeli authorities are very strict about. We went to the Israel museum, by the Knesset, and saw a bunch of cool art. Ancient art is funny: it’s inspired by Egypt all the way up to one point, and then a bust of Alexander the Great marks an abrupt and complete change of cultural and artistic styles. We got out in the early afternoon, who told us a good restaurant in a town called Ein Karem, which is a Christian town where all the secular Jerusalem Jews go to on Shabbat for shopping and eating. The cab driver dropped my dad off so that he could pass the police and drop us off in front of the restaurant, but then started driving in the opposite direction. He was trying to make a U-turn because turning around would have been hard but it freaked us out. We got to the restaurant, which was packed, and proceeded to have a delicious Middle Eastern meal, complete with flies all around us. It was probably extremely unhygienic, and the chicken hearts I had were probably terrible for me, but it was good. We sat next to an Israeli family who used to live in Austin and the father knew our first cousin (Andras the mathematician) intimately. It was surprising. The son, who was my age, was having lunch on his break from his military post. Again, I felt that this entirely different and confusing life of an Israeli soldier could have been mine. After a LONG and fly-infested lunch, we hopped into a cab and went back to the hotel. We tried to walk to the Old City to see King David’s Tower, but it was closed so we went to the YMCA across from the King David Hotel instead. We returned to the hotel.

Day 4- June 5

I awoke early, went down and had a fairly large breakfast. After all was said and done, we left for Hadassah Hospital to see their synagogue, which was decorated with stained glass windows made by Marc Chagall. They were pretty good, but the color coordination was a bit haphazard. Several of the windows were broken in the Yom Kippur War and were remade by Chagall, with one having part of the old window with the shrapnel still in it. In recent times of conflict, high school students will come and double sandbag the windows to make sure they are not broken again, because Chagall can’t remake them, because he’s dead. Afterwards, we went to Yad Veshem, the new Holocaust memorial and museum. Yad Veshem is a line from Ezekiel, and it roughly means that there will be a name and a place to record deeds. It was a beautiful and modern memorial, with some very moving images and buildings. The museum, however, was too memorial and not enough museum; there was a lot of plexiglass pictures and poems and art, but did not have the physical equivalents of the one in D.C. After Yad Veshem, we went to a mall and ate lunch while dad planned the Bat Mitzvah on Thursday. After lunch, we went to the Knesset and saw some cool stuff, although we weren’t able to go inside because we had to schedule a tour in advance. After the Knesset, we went back to the mountain that Yad Veshem is situated on to arrive at the official Israeli version of Arlington cemetery, where we saw the likes of Yitzhak Rabin, Golda Meir, Levi Eshkol, and Theodore Herzl buried. Tal tried to get me to the Birthright meeting where, among 10,000 Jewish youth from around the group Sharon was supposed to speak, but the security was too tight. We went back to the hotel for a while, and I fell asleep on the bed for an hour and a half. Mom woke me up and we went to the YMCA for dinner. I was really tired and I didn’t end up eating much. I went back to the hotel, and went to sleep.

Day 5- June 6

Woke up to a nasty surprise. Dad had suffered diarrhea throughout the night, so the previous plans were scrapped. We went to the ramparts of Jerusalem’s walls, walking a whole corner of the Old City. It was really cool and amazing, but Abigail was really whiny until Mom made her drink a Coke, and then she was fine. After we walked the walls of the Old City, we went to the Citadel to a really great old museum that went through the entire history of Jerusalem and also a special exhibit on trains (Jerusalem is building a metro train transit system). It was Jerusalem Day, the anniversary of the unification of the city in the Six-Day War, so there was a great mass of people running through the streets, shouting and waving Israeli flags. I was talking to the security guard outside some offices of the Tourism Ministry who mentioned that these celebrations were also a protest of the evacuation plan in Gaza and the West Bank and we also talked about soccer/football and basketball. We went back to the hotel where we collected Dad and then proceeded to all pile into the car and head to the Dead Sea through the Judean desert. The scenery turns dry and we see Bedouin tents and several Palestinian villages including Ramallah and Jericho. We stopped at Qum’ran, the site where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, and realized that at the lowest point of the earth the weather is constantly at 110 degrees, dry, and the sun frying every skin cell. After that, we got back into the car to travel to the Crown Plaza Dead Sea, a “5-star” hotel that was full of cripplingly old people and had terrible food. We agreed to wake up early the next morning for Masada.

Day 6-June 7

We woke up at 4 for Masada. We got into the car and proceeded to hike up the snake path but did not make it on time to see the sun rise over the Jordanian mountains from the top of Masada. It was a cool trip to the top of Masada. When I came back to the hotel, I slept for five hours. We then left for a jeep trip through the desert that lasted three hours that was pretty cool. At the end, we went through this cavern (wadi) that ended in this pitch-dark cave called the Flour Cave because of the very loose white dust that clung to you when you got out. We went back to the hotel and called it another night.

Day 7-June 8

We woke up early and left the hotel to head to Bet She’an, an old Byzantine-era town that was very awesome but equivalent in heat and sunlight to Qum’ran. Our time there was limited simply due to the threat of sunburning. We proceeded to a sixth century synagogue with a beautiful mosaic floor called Bet Aleph, and then went to a kibbutz called Ohalo Manor for Abigail’s Bat Mitzvah. It was a beautiful ceremony, and we all enjoyed it immensely. We had the grandparents on the cell phone so that they could listen in on the ceremony and be a part of it. We decided that the Bat Mitzvah was a success and then adjourned.

Day 8-June 9

We woke up early and was gently urged out the door by Tal in order to make it in time for the tree planting.