Hi guys! Last post, I finished writing about the Jewish holiday Sukot, and this post will start with the next day and our lunch with our great aunt Shula. We started off the day by doing homework, then Ofer (Aba), Troy, Asher, Savta, and I got in the car and drove to the port of Jaffa. The restaurant we went to was called “The Old Man and the Sea”, after the book by Ernest Hemmingway which Asher and I coincidentally just finished for English class. We met Shula, Savta’s older sister, and a couple other members of her family. Then, we ate a lot of different types of food. The next day, we went with Troy, our uncle Oved, and our cousins Maytal and Matan to visit the temple of a non-violent religious group called the Bahais. I love this religion because believers do many things to halt violence. For example, even though Jerusalem is a holy place for them, members of the Bandai faith are not allowed to live in the state of Israel because their first prophet realized that because Israel is a holy place for three other religions, it is a center for violence and that adding another religion to the mix would only make matters worse. As well as this, the Bahais try not to be intrusive and to be at one with nature, as evidenced by their temple; a beautiful terraced garden with no sacred ornaments of any kind. After touring these gardens, we drove to my Saba’s (Savta’s husband) sister’s house and met with Aba and Savta. We stayed there for a time and then drove home and worked on homework after saying goodbye to Matan. He was going to Poland to see the death camps with his school, so we didn’t get a chance to see him again before we left. That night, we went to visit other members of our family at my other great aunt’s house. There must’ve been at least fifty of our relatives at the minimum, none of which we had previously met on our trip. I am in love with this side of the family because OH MY GOSH THEY EAT SO MUCH GOOD MEAT. They made steak and ribs and beef and it was all so delicious! It was very fun and I got to watch the expressions on my relatives’ faces when they heard me speak fluent Hebrew! They didn’t even think I knew a word of it!! The next morning, I got up and drove to my voice teacher’s son’s house to record a song in Hebrew called “Jerusalem of Gold”. However, I also ended up recording two other songs. The first one is called “Second Bird” and is in Hebrew, but the second one is “The Circle Game” by Joni Mitchell. It wasn’t what I expected, but it was very fun to record in a studio and see the process that goes into making music. The first draft of the songs wasn’t amazing, but when Idan, Tamar’s (my voice teacher) son, fixed it, it was quite good. I went to the studio with Aba and my aunt Ronit, and they enjoyed it too. After that, Aba and I drove home and Oved and Maytal picked all of us except for Savta up. We drove for two and a half hours until we finally got to a restaurant called “The Barrel” at our destination, the Negev, or the desert. After dinner, we drove out to a clearing nearby for a star tour and saw the moon, Mars, and Saturn through giant telescopes, as well as star formations and a presentation about stars, the planets, and their sizes. We went to sleep at a hotel, and the next morning Aba and Oved drove to pick up my cousin Ariel from her army base, so she was there when I woke up. We ate breakfast and then made our way down to the cliffs, where we each rappelled down twice (Asher, Ariel, and Troy after a bit of “persuasion”).
Then, we hiked for three hours across the desert to a place with many different types of naturally colored sand, from red to green.
After that, we went on a guided tour about the desert and how it was created. Then, we went to dinner and then to another tour, this one private: scorpion hunting. We didn’t actually hunt the scorpions, but we searched for them with UV flashlights because, for unknown reasons, they glow in the dark. I found at least four scorpions (one scorpion and a nest of at least three additional scorpions), Ariel found three (though one of them was a different species), and Troy found three as well. This was really cool because we learned a lot about scorpions, and the two species that we found were two of the most deadly species in the world. Also, we met a woman who was stung by scorpions on two separate occasions, and she described the sensation as “burning from the inside”… Very reassuring. I will continue this story in my next post!
Ella
24-1?