Days 5 and 6: Red Sea, Dead Sea

Day 5:
It’s official: I’m a tourist in khakis and no clue. Turns out I got the location of my family’s kibutz wrong again. It’s not up North but in the middle of Israel, close to the Mediterranean Sea, about 6 miles inland from Gaza. Yeah. Also I have a tan, a farmer’s tan, but beggars can’t be choosers.

The work week here starts on Sunday (which is their Monday) and ends on Thursday. Friday and Saturday are days off.

I have yet to experience silence.

Anyway back to the trek. We are in Eilat. In daylight, the city looks more and more like a resort town. Breakfast is a giant exotic continental buffet of eggs, cottage cheese pastries, smoked fish, fruit, and more than 10 kinds of yogurt. The Red Sea is warm enough for a dip. Crystal clear with hues of green and turquoise. We spent the half the day at a sea park watching coral reef fish and turtles. Later that evening we had an amazing dinner of fresh-caught something. It was to die for.

Day 6:
Israelis are of many races. And gorgeous. I keep running into women who look like Angie Harmon and guys who look like Christiano Ronaldo. Smart too, don’t get into arguments with them… they’ll win. I’m not used to losing an argument! I must learn their superpowers.

From Eilat we drove 3 hours to the Dead Sea stopping at an ancient copper mine a mere 2,300-2,400 BC. How these people found copper in the middle of the desert and mined for it in this heat. Oy veigh.

2 hours later, the reddish desert opens into a canyon to one giant gray body of water. It’s muggy, smells slightly of sulfur. Not a tree or a spec of life in sight. Just a resort skyscraper hotel center and a huge asphalt and salt refinery a few miles later. We are officially on Mars.

The Dead Sea is a little scifi. The water feels oily, the sea floor is spiky with white and beige salt crystals. Don’t let it get in your eyes or mouth – it can ruin your day/outlook on life. But after bathing in it, your skin will feel like fine royal velvet for days. It helps with joint and muscle ailments too. A feeling of overall renewal... and a body buzz. And – the best part – you can’t sink. It’s like floating on an air mattress. Reeeeeelllllaaaaaxxxxaaation. And for the first time - silence :)

Day 4: 3 Kings... err, I mean Jewish Mothers

After a few days of loud and fast Russian, my English leaves much to be desired. Struggling I am… Yoda say. It’s a long drive from the North of Israel where we are staying to the very Southern strip, border with Jordan, resort town of Eilat. The trip included:

Desert, desert, desert, sand, sand, rocks, rocks, rocks, oasis, tour of Nabetean ruins (the Bediun spice traders from Arabic descent who married into the Jewish tribes spoke Aramaic, etc.), coffee and cake, sand, sand, desert, desert, canyon, smog, military exercise, modern-day nomads with goats tin shacks and cell phones… insert Abba on the car stereo “mamma Mia, here I go again”, down a hill and oasis!

Eilat looks like Vegas. It’s noisy and bright, teeming with fashionable 20-somethings. We are staying at a hotel that looks like a cruise ship. Where is the bar?

Family starting to bite at each others’ ankles. Along with my mother there are two aunts. I have 3 Jewish mothers on this trip. All is still great... Where the hell is the bar!?

Epiphany #2: Israel is a lot like Mexico, or any country in Eastern Europe. Smoking is still cool, American music on the radio is a few years old (Whitney Houston… really), brand names are cooler than they should be (advertising:1, common sense:0), a lot of dusty car repair shops, shitty parking, lots of stray animals, exotic trees, strong drinks. If it wasn’t for Hebrew road signs it could easily pass for Bulgaria or Puerto Rico. I do love it so.

Exhausted. Tomorrow we have a full day of activities, much like summer camp! My non-existing calves hurt like hell. I’m off to find the hotel bar. Pictures of delicious cake and Beduin trade rote en route later.

Days 2 and 3: Pigeons!

It's nice to get to a point with your family where all you start talking about is the mundane. That's the real daily life you never get to hear about since your usual occasional rushed conversations focus on the milestones: how is school, what do you want to be when you grow up, when is the wedding, how old is her son now, etc. Today was more about what we should have for breakfast and weather patterns. Aaaahhhh :) So anyway, days 2 and 3 were eventful.

Day 2
We got a tour of the kibutz. Oh and by the way, I got the name of it wrong: it's Reim, not Ha Negev. There are approx 500 people, mostly families. Lots of loud energetic kids. Big agricultural and livestock economy, so it's a giant farm and a small factory. Orange and lemon groves. Olive trees. Bicycles. A small grocery store. Pool. All levels of top-notch K-12. A double barbed-wire fence around the living sector, an armored gate, and cement-reinforced buildings. Bomb shelters mixed with daily life like bus-stops. Sandbags around kindergarten walls as bulletproofing. And it's all so... normal. Utilitarian military industrial complex chic. The biggest bomb shelter turns into a pub on Fridays. Why waste all that underground space?

Full disclosure: I'm a political centrist. I'm trying to see this from a neutral educational point of view, and also from my family's side. They came here as refugees. We all went somewhere as refugees, they happened to come To Israel. They don't have much of a militant one-sided view. Most people on both sides of the debate are sane and normal, willing to compromise, and get along in daily life. It's the few psycho extremists on both sides who are in the news, and with their fingers on the trigger. They screw it up for everyone. They are the reasons for bomb shelter manufacturers to have a business. And so the normal people continue on, and most days their life is pretty darn good. Have I mentioned 4-6 week vacations? :) And so we continue eating great Russian food, laughing until we can't breathe, and drinking red wine. At each meal there are still 3 languages being heard at the table. I need to learn this Hebrew nonsense...

Day 3
Soon more family will need to be picked up from the airport. Until then, we get a tour of the very cool 'prelude' ruins (as in these are not the highlight of our trip, but cool hikes no less). Beit Guvrin is a remnant of an underground cave city from sometimes before Jesus, before Jews really. Pictures on Facebook. These people had a great water-retainer system, made olive oil by hundreds of kilos, and kept pigeons for food... like chickens. PIGEONS!

We visited two Christian monasteries hoping to buy wine/cognac because God knows solitude makes people experts in wine. But alas they were closed. It's Sunday, therefore time for prayer and not time to cater to annoying tourists. Crap! The sites and properties were amazing though. The women's monastery was next to the church of St Stephen. The St Stephen. Please to refer to Facebook for amateur photos. On the way home the sky was milky, smoggy, color of a manilla envelope. The smell was a mix of car fire and dust with fresh pine and baked bread. The sunset was spectacular.

For the next 3 days we are taking off for overnight trips to Eilat (resort town on Red Sea) and Dead Sea to float in salty water. Holy moly, I might get a tan! Hey Oregonians – jealous? ;P

Going to Jerusalem, etc. after that.

Day 1: Mission Beseder

The word beseder is Hebrew for "good" or "ok" or in many instances "shut up, go away, I got this." That's how my family uses it anyway. Day 1 after landing, it's 6 or 7 am local time (not sure), and I'm sipping my instant coffee with lots of cream and sugar on my aunt and uncle's patio, realizing that I have to write this sh...stuff down. So here is a synopsis:

The flight was fairly tolerable. A total of 26 hours. We got grilled by the Israeli security team on the last leg of our trip before hopping a flight from Zurich directly to Tel Aviv. And by 'grilled' I mean asked confusing questions at the gate about why my last name is different than my mother's last name, and why we don't live in the same town, and who we know in Israel, etc. The questions made me doubt my own damn self. And by 'security' I mean a sweet girl in her early twenties and her supervisor who was a hot version of Waldo from Where Is Waldo. So far so good :)

As soon as I nestle into my 3rd airplane seat to take my cripple nap, I get jabbed by my mom's elbow. "Hey, they are going to feed us, wake up." What? Food? Why? No thanks, just trying to make it a few more hours without snags or nausea. Go away, I'm sleeping. But no boys and girls, they food was served, and it was the best airplane food I've had. Ever. Tender beef with jasmine rice and fig sauce, warm pita bread, a fresh cabbage and raisin salad. To use a more eloquent term – nom. A short time later the plane landed so smoothly that we didn't even realize we were on taxing. Turns out the pilots of this particular airline are mostly ex-military fighter pilots. They've got the special touch. :) Olga getting happier by the minute.

Have I mentioned that everyone smiles and speaks perfect English (along with 2 or 3 other languages)? Mom and I usually like to talk smack in Russian about other people out loud. It's our thing. No one can understand us, but here we learned to filter our Russian too. The hard way. Well, I learned to filter. Mom still says the first thing that comes to mind as per usual.

After a few other security checks, we are greeted VERY enthusiastically by my uncle, aunt, and cousin. And by that I mean bulldozed by hugs, awkward photos, and taking over our luggage because "you are not to lift a finger when you're here, you're guests!" And the loud-ness begins. It's not that they are yelling, or arguing (which they are, all the time, about everything). It's the pitch. How I much I have missed them. I haven't seen my cousin since we were both 8 and after maybe 5-10 minutes we were right where we left off. Except for the fact that we both speak English with a sprinkle of Russian and Hebrew unlike when we were kids when it was just Russian. Epiphany #1: it's a mad world.

My new favorite word is teraga or teragi. It means "calm down" or "chill the fk out."

There are giant palm trees, it's humid and breezy. Jackets? Don't be stupid! The evening unravels with a 1 hr commute to HaNegev, the kibutz (or a community/village really) where they live to meet up with the rest of the family. Their house, like all houses here, is very modest. Small 2 bedrooms 2 bathrooms, a yard, and a what seems to be a revolving door with all their friends and neighbors coming and going at all hours. It's real. We feast upon chicken. We drink coffee with lots of foamy cream. We drink tequila per my mom's insistence. We reconnect, which doesn't take any effort.

The internet is funny here! My Google landing page is mostly in Hebrew, with the scroll bar on the left. I have no idea what the plan is for today. I'll keep you posted.