My Vino, Nature and Stolen Swim Suit

All my family members and Israeli friends ask me “Are you learning anything or did you just come here to livalot (a Hebrew word best translated into English in this context as to live life up)?” I answer them with the hesitance of an adolescences boy who is asked how many times he masturbates, always lowering the level out of embarrassment. The classes here are not of the level that most are used to at their home university but I am learning interesting and relevant things, however, I am also learning a plethora about traveling, outdoorsy things, wine and the Israeli bureaucracy. I am enrolled in five classes all of which deal with a wide variety of issues in Judaism, Middle Eastern politics, ethics, business and my favorite the environment. This said, only one of the classes has a attendance policy, which makes it hard to go when it is nice outside, and their idea of a midterm in the class is a 500 word essay on topics that can be written using wikipedia.
Alright, enough of my school life and now to get to the reason why you come back every week craving for details about my travels, social life and whatever else is going on in my life. This past week has been pretty relaxing and normal. I have started to run a few days a week because my diet of pita and hummus for the past three months has transformed my usually sculpt physique into something that looks like a combination of subway Jared (before he lost the equivalent of 3 young teens) and me before I left. I have also given up the consumption of alcohol* until the end of Passover that coincides with the Boombamela Festival (boombamela.co.il). This has been in an effort to become healthier and to get in shape for beach weather.
This past Thursday a few friends and myself took a train to Benyamina, a small town 30 minutes northeast of Tel-Aviv, to visit one of Israel’s many wineries. Before this trip my liking for wine equaled my liking to long lines, I would rather move strait to the front but if the ride was cool it was worth the wait (this analogy worked better in my head). We got a private tour of the facilities and shown all the different stages of the wine making process from the weighing of the grapes as they arrived from various vineyards to the barrel room and most peoples favorite the finished product via the wine tasting. I was schooled in the proper etiquette of what to look, smell and taste in certain wines. We tasted one white, two reds, desert wine and a chocolate liquor. After getting our fill of samples from this winery we took a ten minute bus ride northwest to the small artist village of Zickron Yakov located in the beginning of the Galil Mountains. Again we visited a winery this time skipping the tour and going strait to the wine and cheese. After tasting one of the wines we decided to by a bottle, enjoy the scenic view and good food and wine. We stayed until around five when the restaurant closed and took another bus to a different part of town. Our waitress from the restaurant rode the bus with us and showed us the small shops and stores that the town is known for. After taking many pictures with the mountains in the background and eating and drinking some more we boarded a bus back to Tel-Aviv.
Right now is the most perfect time to come to Israel for the weather is perfect and all the trees, plants and flowers are blooming and everything around is green. The following day after my wine trip, Friday, the Overseas Program, the part of the university in which the abroad students are a part of, organized a trip to the northern part of the country. The trip was to begin at 7:30 in the morning, but like most things Israeli an hour was wasted, and we ended up leaving the dorms around 8:30. We drove north along the costal highway, a scenic road with the beach on one side and the sun on the other. We first arrived to Mount Moron, previously a 1208 meter high mountain before the Israeli air force shaved off four meters for an observation post and the peak of the mountain. What I enjoyed most about our hike was the fresh, clean crisp air of the north. Its scent made me reminisce about previous Passovers, also called Chag Aviv (holiday of Spring), for this is usually the time back home where the weather changes and you can smell the flowers when sitting outside. Also since it was still early in the morning and a little cold when we were hiking everyone was pretty quite. This allowed me to reflect so many different things from Joe Greenberg, an elderly blind man who I used to read to and watch baseball games with, and opening day, to my summer plans and the state of the Chinese economy. I don’t want to use the cliché that silence is golden because I think I would have gone crazy if it were completely silent, but with the sounds of nature it made everything in the world seem ok for a few hours.
That night and the entire weekend we stayed at a kibbutz a few kilometers from the Kineret (Sea of Galile, I think Jesus walked on water there at some point) in Hukuk. On Saturday we did another hike this time a little longer, though less intense, however I don’t remember the name of the place. Since it was Saturday the trail was packed with families and school groups so it was not as peaceful as the other, nonetheless also very fun. The coolest part of the day was when we went into a cave that was pitch black. A few things of note, we only had four flashlights for a group of 15 people, therefore climbing in the cave was a bit interesting and really fun. Entering the cave reminded me of the Jules Verne novel, Journey Into the Center of the Earth, I crawled through tiny spaces, climbed a wall and squeezed between two walls in order to explore the caves magnificent stalagmites and stalactites (all those geosci classes came into handy and I impressed some girls with my knowledge of calcium carbonate rock and how dripping water ate away at the rock). Saturday night, after Shabbat, the counselors organized a trip to the sulfur baths in Chamat Hagader, literally right at Israel’s border with Jordan. We relaxed in the pools for a while and also went into a pool where the water was around 45-50 degrees centigrade.
The low point on the trip came the next morning when I went outside and realized that the bathing suit (one of my favorites) I left outside the night before to dry was not there and was most likely stolen (it was stolen, Gabe who also goes to Michigan also got his bathing suit stolen so we concluded it was a thieving OSU asshole). Anyway I wasn’t going to let a missing bathing suit ruin my kayaking down the Jordan river. I shared the kayak with my Hungarian friend Adam and we were the first in the water. We took our time going down the river that in some places is at most six inches deep.