Negev my Negev

Yo, what's up? For this leg of our trip we be taken it south, to the Negev desert, where we be sporting sunglasses and funny hats. The word Negev could use verbification in my opinion. Where is Negevize, Negevate, for example? The Negev is where it's at, the hotness, the coldness, the dryness. There be dead seas, mountains, craters that aren't craters, and food that make you the happiest eaters alive. We hope you enjoy. The actors this time around are Nadav, Aaron, Chaim, and our ever-energetic tour guide Devora. Notably absent is Anya, who is spending time in Russian with her relatives.



All travelers need food, and in our case we need Jachnun. We stop at a family restaurant in a small village off the highway for this traditional Yemenite dish. Shunning the more modern Israeli cafe food, we follow a series of hand written signs for many kilometers, and eat the most delicious meal ever prepared for any king, ceo, or traveler. It is, as I make sure everyone understands, the happiest day of my life.



This is the cutest restaurant in the world. Click through for more pictures of what it looks like, and the happy eaters contained.



We go next to Mitzpe Ramon, where we crash at Nadav's aunt's house. Here are our intrepid explorers daring the mild desert climate for a photograph at an important geological site. A site of geopolitical geological importance. That's right, here we are at the Ramon Crater. As should be obvious to any skilled observer of tourist photographs, it's not a crater at all, it's a maktesh, or an erosion cirque. The thing is so big you wouldn't even know you were in it, since it just kind of goes off the horizon in multiple directions.



There's all this cool desert art sculpture near Mitzpe. It's like burning man, but without the burning, the man, or the people. Just the desert and the art. Aaron and Nadav are pictured here doing their part in the fight against gravity.



Not far away is Ben-Gurion's grave, the first prime minister of Israel. The architecture is interesting, and it overlooks a magnificent desert vista. It feels like you are being swept by a stream down into this location, and everything is the height of a man, making you feel neither small or large. Ben-Gurion has some interesting history with the Negev you can read about if you follow the link.



We drive from Mitzpe to the Dead Sea. I share the driving. Incredible how quickly my inner Israeli driver shows himself. We drop off Devora for a job interview, and say goodbye to her for now.



Our room in the field school in En Gedi.



An important part of any Israel trip is hiking up Masada, where a bunch of Israelites killed themselves around 66 BC. They called themselves Zealots, and defended a desert fortress built on a mountain top from the Romans for a siege which lasted many months. It is from them that we get the words zealot and zeal. Zeal is truly a terrific word!



I run into a few of these animals on the way up. One of them, with big horns, waits in my path. Thinking back to a monkey troop Yotam and I once encountered in Malaysia, I decide it's best to not get in its way. I wait a while, then make some noise, he runs off, and nobody is gored. Pictured above is one of the fairer sex.



The American team, represented by Nadav, Aaron, and Chaim (above) reaches the top of Masada first, before sunrise. A formative experience in Chaim's earlier years creates a deep need to get up at 4am and be the first to the top on this day. A team of Russian climbers poses a slight challenge, but is easily overcome when they take a wrong turn.



Here is the world's earliest known photograph. It was uncovered in the Dead Sea Negatives, and is reproduced here for all the world to see. In it, you can clearly see a Roman siege tower which was rolled up an earthen ramp (up the side of a tall mountain), attacking the fortress. The next day, the Romans knock, but nobody answers. Everyone here is dead via a complicated form of suicide, except a few people who tell the story. Two women of above average intelligence, according to Josephus Flavius, and some children.



Yours truly in the hot bath room. I can never say no to a sauna. A set of baths up here? Yes, the fortress is huge, and my small camera can barely suggest how massive this mountain is. There are multiple palaces up here, baths, a large set of water cisterns. Next door is the frigidarium, but this picture was taken in the hotatorium.



We go next to En Gedi, an oasis in the middle of this desert. It's hard to believe that all you can see in every direction is totally and completely dry, and yet you have these waterfalls and lush growth. Complete with animatronic looking mammals. We figure they just move slow, since they are more like lizards in habitat.



We don some sun screen in the parking lot, much to the delight of some college age tourists, and show some skin. The water is cold, and it's not a particularly hot day. But, this is a fashion magazine, after all, and we can't bare to disappoint our readers.



I climb over for a photo op with the waterfall, but the climbing photos are totally cooler than the product.



Here are the desert gentlemen, in a hot & salty picture, by request, at the world famous Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is very salty, and actually has bacteria living in it, so it isn't totally dead. It's so salty you float with no effort. You can stand in the water and just bob there. On your back. On your front. In a box. With a fish, on a dish, with a mouse. It's fun you see, you should try it sometime, and be like us & me!

Ah Jerusalem!

International travel does strange things to time, and jet lag is just one type of time distortion possible. There is also the experience-photograph-upload-blog time delay phenomena. For example, yesterday Nadav, Aaron, and I woke at 4am to hike up Masada, an ancient desert fortress, to watch the sunrise. But today I will write about the events of Jan 3. An upcoming edition will chronicle everything between then and that.



Careful readers will remember I landed in Tel Aviv on Jan 3 at 3am. Anya and Nadav, pictured above in all their awesome cuteness, picked me up at the airport. Earlier that day they picked up Aaron, and they had only arrived a day earlier. We returned home to sleep for a few hours, to comfort our circadian rhythms, since they were all rattling from stress and confusion, and we had a long day ahead of us.

First order of business was an awesome Israeli breakfast, not pictured above or below. Cucumbers here are a force to be reckoned with. Their crispness knows no bounds, and I now understand what it is that Nadav is always trying to approximate back in the bay area. Brokers and farmers take note: Nadav is willing to trade various parts of his body for such cucumbers in the united states.



Today was Devora's tour of Jerusalem. First, we had to find Devora's place, which turned out to be quite hard. Anya, Nadav's co-pilot and navigator, despite numerous hardships, managed to get us there. It took a while, and that night she literally had nightmares about navigating Jerusalem, and rebuilding the city on a grid.

Jerusalem, you see, just like San Francisco, is built on this absurdly hilly terrain. SF is a grid, making it pretty navigable, but the roads often take these crazy slopes, like Lombard. In Jerusalem the roads follow the contours of the topography, making them vertically less comical, but navigationally absurd. It's like a city planner sat down with a spirograph, a french curve, and a six pack. Throw in some construction and traffic, and you have all the makings of a blockbuster traffic thriller. Voila!



Devora, true to form, had a scholarly and entertaining tour for us on the theme of wall building in Jerusalem. Pictured above and below is the simple barrier that blocks some gunfire angles from an Arab part of town into Gilo, which is a Jewish development across the 1948 cease fire lines. During the last Intifada, there was gunfire directed at the houses here, and the government dropped these blocks into place to protect the residents.



It's interesting that to make it less ugly, the people who live in Gilo painted a mural of what is on the other side. The picture, of course, is not as pretty as what was originally there, but it was a lot friendlier too, I suppose.



Devora then pointed out that the ancient walls of Jerusalem were also built as a security measure, just like the separation barrier pictured above that intends (and seems to) block suicide bombers from entering Israel from the West Bank. So, walls and security is an old obsession. I think that membranes, walls, and dividers of all kinds is fundamental to the shape of the universe and all living things. This wall is not nearly as gentle to the landscape as the ancient walls of Jerusalem, or even the simple blocks that protected Gilo. It's pretty ugly, but seems to get the job done.



Here is an open air market in Jerusalem. Well, I thought the Berkeley Bowl was the best grocery store in the world, with the Lonely Planet backing me up, but there's simply no contest.



Here are some delicious borekas, food of champions. Devora took us, along with David (pictured below), to an awesome Iraqi Jewish restaurant in the market. There wasn't much veggie fare, but it was awesome. Who would have thought that matza ball soup, for example, could be improved upon? Put meat inside, and you have Jewish dumplings.



This is the first Jewish settlement outside of the old city. Nobody lived outside the old city until the last hundred some years, it turns out, and the Jews were particularly reluctant to leave the familiar, comfortable, and secure enclave inside. Old habits die hard.



Next, we said goodbye to Devora and David, and headed towards the old city. Behind Anya you can see the walls that enclose old Jerusalem.



We walked through an Arab market towards the Western Wall, but got lost. A nice Arab kid pointed out where we had gone wrong.



I can't help it, here's another picture of Nadav and Anya:



Here is the Western Wall, and, new for us, some new Israeli Army pledges doing some kind of institutional ritual. The Wall is the last remaining wall of a large support structure, on top of which was the ancient Jewish Temple that figures centrally in all kinds of Jewish belief and ritual. That Temple was last destroyed by the Romans. Now, on top of the Temple Mount, is a very old Mosque that is is very important to Muslims and the Palestinians. Nothing is simple here.



Some Jews come here to pray, and some put little notes on pieces of paper that they slide into the cracks between the stones. The Army pledge thing was new to us. Boys, about 18 years old, seemed to be getting inaugurated into the Army. There wasn't much wind, so the Israeli flag had some kind of rod in it to keep it up. Like Prozac, but for flags.

That's all for now. More pictures and adventures coming soon.

Quick Blur

Dusk at the Amsterdam canals
Originally uploaded by markopoulos

I've just endured a crazy three day blur of travel. I finally got some sleep mediated by pillows and the like and a real horizontal surface. I feel rested, clean, and hungry. Not even sure if it was 72 hours, but I did leave San Carlos on the 1st, and arrive in Tel Aviv on the 3rd. Nadav and Anya picked me up from the airport at 3am in some kind of pretty well planned commando-like operation.

In the middle of this trip I remember spending a long time in Amsterdam, going out during the day, and eating a destructive quantity of incredible Indonesian food, plus some awesome fries special (mayo + onions + curry sauce). I am now in a secure Tel Aviv location, that happens to be Nadav's family apartment, and will attempt to stay awake all day while Devora takes us on her awesome Jersusalem tour.