Israel has not eaten me yet

I’ve just been really busy/really lazy and haven’t gotten around to posting any more. I think I came here with these grand intentions of doing blog posts every coupe of days or something, and then reality hit me and I’m just constantly running around and when I’m not running around I’m exhausted. But my schedule is evening out a bit, becoming more regular (plus we’re having fewer problems with the internet, which was part of the problem as well), so from now on I’m going to try posting once a week.

So anyway, here’s a quick rundown of what I’ve been up to the past few weeks:

-Saturdays at the beach

-Purim

-Overnight in Jerusalem

-Beginning of volunteering jobs

Will try to cover them as quickly-yet-thoroughly as possible.

Saturday is one of my favorite and also one of my least favorite days here. I love it for how relaxed it is, everyone chilled out, sitting on the beach, enjoying the sun (when there’s no fantastically huge rainstorm going on). Least favorite because pretty much everything shuts down and you have to make sure you get whatever food or anything else you need for the weekend by Friday afternoon, otherwise you’ll be taking a nice long walk to find anything left open. So it’s nice and relaxing, but sometimes it feels a bit like forced relaxation, because there’s nothing much else to do.

So Saturday has become beach day – again, aside from in the midst of massive rainstorms, which we had last weekend. Truly, I have never seen rain like this before.

It rained on and off for about five days straight – and by on and off, I mean it would be the most intense downpour for twenty minutes, then clear up and be kind of sunny for half an hour, then an even more horrific downpour for an hour, then dry for ten minutes, then a steady rain for half an hour, then okay again, on and on for days.

But we got the most incredible rainbow out of it afterwards

This doesn’t even fully do it justice. It was actually a full rainbow, so big I couldn’t fit it all into one picture. Pretty amazing.

So when it’s not threatening to send us looking for an ark, we head for the beach on Saturdays, as does pretty much the entire city. Our first weekend here, one of my roommates and I went walking around one of the typically busier neighborhoods and it was pretty much a ghost town, not a soul to be seen anywhere save some hungry stray cats picking at spilled garbage.

And then we got to the beach.

These are all at the beach near Jaffa, which is close to my neighborhood, but there are nicer beaches for lounging and swimming farther uptown.

So really there’s not much else to say about that. This was really just an excuse to show you pretty pictures of the beach.

Purim was last weekend. In very, very short, Purim is a festival commemorating the deliverance of the Jews living in the Persian Empire from a plot by Haman the Agagite to annihilate them, as recorded in the Book of Esther (thank you, Wikipedia).

In modern day Tel Aviv, it’s a day (or several, as the case may be) on which people get dressed up in costumes and party in the streets. It was on Sunday, so parties lasted from Thursday through Monday it was pretty much like having Halloween for four or five days straight, except with hamentaschen instead of candy.

So dressed up we got (several of my roommates and I went as Beatles songs – I was Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, though I admit, it was a rather half-assed attempt) and out we went, to Florentine, one of the main partying neighborhoods, where bars and clubs had spilled hundreds of costumed Israelis onto the streets into a throng of nuttiness.

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Strawberry Fields Forever, Rocky Racoon, Here Comes the Sun, Bungalow Bill, and Lady Madonna

You can drink openly in the streets, hence all the street partying

My travels that night took me to a punk bar, a pizza place (slice of pizza and a beer for twenty shekels (about $5)!), several trips up and down the street, dancing on one block to classic rock (score!), dancing on another block to rave music, and back again for more pizza.

Rave in the streets

Some of my roommates dancing. Luckily for all of you, there are no pictures of me dancing

Unfortunately, this was the weekend of the massive rainstorm, so most of us didn’t go out much beyond this night and Thursday night, but we did go to Jerusalem on Monday, where Purim is celebrated the day after everyone else. More on that in my next post, because this one is getting pretty long and if any of you have my attention span, you’re long since checked out of this, and I want you primed and ready for pictures of partying in Jerusalem! (no really, there was partying in the streets of Jerusalem. Just you wait.)

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