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.