Last Day

This is my last day in Tel Aviv. My flight leaves at 11 tonight, and 3 (!) flights later, I'll be back home. Yay, home!!! For so many reasons!


It's hard to leave, but I think it's time. I've had an amazing time here, and I'm afraid that I'll never be able to come back. But, at the same time, I think that this trip has really come full circle. 


Almost the first thing I did in Tel Aviv was go swimming in the Mediterranean, and on Tuesday we were able to go swimming again. Somehow, spending just a few minutes in some salty water or lying on soft beach sand makes everything seem right.


Yesterday, two friends and I went and had pizza and lemonade at a nearby place, and chatted. There was a bomb threat a couple feet away, but life just kept on keeping on, probably in part because there wasn't a bomb. Plus, yummy pizza. That evening, we went and had cake, followed by a trip to the store to get plane snacks. I tried an Israeli winter chocolate marshmallow puff thing that everyone has been telling me that I need to try. Then three of us went to the lounge, ate popcorn and drank hot chocolate and tea. We watched the end of Inception, and printed our boarding passes.


Leaving is tough. Saying goodbye to people who I might never see again isn't easy. But there's also so much that I have to look forward to at home. Family, friends, food... The forever adorable Donut and Ginger.


On a less sentimental note, I thought I'd throw out a couple of final observations.


Hanukkah is not an ostentatious holiday. Businesses light menorahs, but they are small, and the decorations are minimal. Turns out that my idea of Hanukkah is influenced by the wonderful, over-the-top love of Christmas in America. Speaking of, is Christmas really in a few days? It still feels like mid-Fall here, except that most everything is still green. Snow? What? What's that? What?


Free-cycling is the best. In my part of Tel Aviv, people put out clothes and shoes they don't want anymore on benches for anyone to claim. The weather is mild enough here that things don't get wrecked before people take them home.


Last observation/suggestion/note-to-self: If you ever want to get to know the layout of a city, and it has reasonably-sized streets and isn't too hilly, ride a bike. I feel like I know Tel Aviv so much better from the times that I rode my bike places than the times that I took the bus, and walking is too slow to really cover ground in a reasonable amount of time. Bikes!!

Just Life

Hi all!


Exciting news! I'm going to start reintroducing meat into my diet on Monday, in preparation for going to Yunnan, where Will assures me that I would not be able to manage a vegetarian diet. I am so excited to have a valid reason to eat meat over Christmas this year. What's that you say? There's lard in these biscochitos?? Ha, I'll have two!


That's it for today!


There's always more to say about food, vegetarianism, the lack of delicious cream cheese in Israel (but really though, why is there no cream cheese?), and the trade-off between morality and efficiency in the meat industry, but I really ought to finish my paper, which is due tonight.

Last Week of Classes

We're coming up on the end of the NYU-Tel Aviv program. Classes end on Dec 15th, and then we have our finals period, and then on the 22nd it is back to New Mexico for me. I'm going to miss Israel, but I'm also excited to be home again.


Since this is the last week of school, it's pretty much crunch time. All the assignments that we didn't have over the semester are happening all of a sudden. Papers? Tests? Work?? Arabic homework has been pretty consistent, but my other classes tended towards reading homework, with the occasional response. Now they want actual papers--absolute madness.


Actually, these are probably some of the last essays that I will need to do for a while. I finally decided on a major, and it is biology! Yay! So I won't be taking as many humanity-type classes after this semester.


But on to the happenings of the weekend!


Last Friday, my journalism class went to Jerusalem. We did an Ir Amim bus tour of East Jerusalem, which was interesting, but also cold. For a collection of their maps of Jerusalem, click here. The locations of the green line, municipal boundary, and wall are worth looking at (although the best map for this at their website is 2 years out of date, and doesn't show a difference between planned wall and existing wall).


In the afternoon, we spoke to a formerly American woman who used to live in Itamar, and now lives in a predominantly Jewish enclave in the middle of a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. Click here if you feel like crying.


It was an interesting conversation. I know that I tend to stereotype settlers, and this woman was a surprise. She said that she wanted people to get along; she was much more interested in that than she was in whose land was whose, or who had done what to whom. She lives in Israel because it is the land that she loves, not because she feels politically motivated. She was remarkably open, sharing details of her life that I never would have inquired about without the least bit of prompting. Also, she was pretty clearly a former hippie. All in all, a conversation well worth having.

Doctors and Health

Hi!


Sorry this has been something of an uninteresting read recently. I've been a bit distracted. The most exciting thing that I've done recently is get a typhoid vaccination. And so, a blog post about a mundane trip to the travel clinic.


I needed so much help getting an appointment set up. First off, I needed help finding someplace reputable and affordable. Then I called the number, and it immediately went to a message in Hebrew listing hours of operation. I tried the number a couple of times, morning and afternoon, and it kept not being open. After going for help again, I learned that actually, the message was just a menu, and I needed to press 3. Oops. It was a relief to have someone else make my appointment for me, since I was proving unable to navigate health care in a foreign land. Thanks, Hadar!


Finding the travel clinic: off to Dizengoff Center, which is basically an absurdly confusing mall built with ramps, stairs, escalators, and second-floor passages over the street below. I found the clinic easily enough--it helped that there was a picture of a happy cartoon child on the outside.


First strange-ness: the person who tells patients what paperwork to fill out sits at a desk of regular height, and on the patient side, there are chairs to sit in. I get to sit down while you put my information in the computer?? Very odd. But then, I've never been to a travel doctor before.


I think that's probably plenty of detail on my exciting trip to the doctor's office. I should write a book on the experience, clearly. And then the sequel: A Fantastic Journey to the Reception Desk of the Chinese Embassy, Or Getting Visas in Tel Aviv.

Pre-Jerusalem Musings

I'm off to Jerusalem this Friday on a field-trip with my journalism class. I don't know exactly what we're going to be doing, but it should be interesting. It's very different from Tel Aviv.


From here, it seems to be a pretty problematic civil rights place, and not just in terms of East Jerusalem, citizenship issues, and security. Here's a recent conflict over dance, windows, advertisements, and Orthodoxy.


I don't think I mentioned this before, but on our group trip to Jerusalem, some kids threw stones at someone in our group because of her attire. I started to write that I thought that she was dressed perfectly appropriately, but what I think is or is not adequate dress doesn't really matter. Stone-throwing matters. Children are growing up thinking that it is alright to inflict a cultural standard on someone by throwing stones. Not cool.

Thanksgiving

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving here in Israel!


Some of the more talented NYU-Tel Aviv students arranged to cook a Thanksgiving meal for us, and it turned out wonderfully. Turkey, gravy, vegetarian stuffing, potatoes, yummy soup, apple crumble, apple-spice cake with cream cheese frosting and coconut sprinkled on top... So much delish. And there were lovely decorations hung up, and it was altogether an excellent holiday.


Things that are hard to find in Israel: cranberries and canned pumpkin. It was also tricky kosher-wise. Since our dining hall is kosher, we ate the cake and crumble downstairs, and there was no milk or butter involved in the actual Thanksgiving meal.


Hope your Thanksgivings were all fun!

Jordan

Hi!


So I got my camera back! Yay! Thank you, lovely people in Jordan, for returning it.


Day 1: I took a bus from Tel Aviv to Eilat, and then a taxi to the border. The border was alarmingly empty. There was practically no one there apart from the skeleton staff. I knew that it was a fairly quiet border, but I was very surprised at how alone I was there, on both sides of the border. I actually went the wrong way a bit as I walked across, because there was absolutely no one to follow.


It surprised me how different it felt to be on one side rather than the other, when it was a physical difference of maybe 100 yards. The female Israeli border person gave me a piece of Bazooka bubblegum (the comic was in Hebrew! I have no idea what it said, but I'm sure it was hilarious) and the male Jordanian border person asked for my email address and phone number. Being the ingenue that I am, I thought that he wanted them for something security related--after biometrics, email addresses seem so impersonal somehow. When I saw that he was writing it down on a scrap of paper, I realized my mistake. Fortunately, gmail seems to be fairly unpopular in Jordan, and no one has ever successfully called my phone from outside of Israel. Absurdly confusing area codes and country calling codes for the win!


On the other side, I was bundled into a cab, and taken to my hotel. It was fairly alarmingly budget, but it had a gorgeous view. Specifically, this one:

I walked around Aqaba a bit. Went back to my hotel and put on more clothes. Then walked around some more. I made friends with a man selling what I strongly suspect were bootleg DVDs, and I failed to speak Arabic well. Altogether, I had a nice evening, but I felt like half of what I said to anyone and everyone I met was that I did not, in fact, want to go on a private evening trip to South Beach, no matter how beautiful, free, or otherwise nice it might be. And actually, South Beach is supposed to be great, but now I'm afraid my brain has associated it with the-place-men-take-foreign-girls-whom-they-think-will-be-easy-to-take-advantage-of, or something like that. Anyways, I did not go to South Beach.


Next day was Wadi Rum. I had no trouble getting there--I split a cab with two European tourists I met at the Aqaba bus station. Wadi Rum... such a weird experience. It was gorgeous, but... Hmm. The taxi dropped us off at the Visitor's Centre. My arrangements were to spend the night at a tourist-y camp out in the actual basin, and I was told to call when I arrived, which I did, but when no one picked up, I decided that I had all day to figure out how to get to camp, and in the meantime, I wanted to ride a camel, because I was a tourist and that's just what tourists do. I certainly wasn't about to go sit in a 4X4, at any rate.


One of the men hanging around and being a semi-official guide mentioned camels in his spiel, so after making absolutely positively sure that we could end the camel tour at the camp that I had booked an paid for in advance, I agreed to go with him. He was very nice, and after giving me tea and breakfast (yum) and a camel and a kid to lead the camel, sent me on my way.

It was all very nice. Me, on a camel, traversing a rather trammeled tourist attraction. It was very beautiful, of course, and I enjoyed waving at the occasional 4X4 of jostled tourists. Clearly I had made the right choice.


Unexpectedly, a jeep pulled up on one side, and the person in it revealed himself to be the owner of the camp where I was going to stay that night. He made it clear that there was a problem with my going with another guide, although I was not exactly sure why. The kid leading my camel called the person I had hired as my guide earlier in the day. About half a second later, I found myself sitting on a camel with a jeep keeping pace on either side. It was a fantastically awkward moment, and I had no idea what to do. Everything worked out more or less all right, but I wound up hanging around in the town for a couple of hours, which was supremely boring.


But after that: camel, take two!

(I have a small bag around my front, which is why I look a little odd. My water was being annoyingly sloshy when I left it in back. Also, camels walk really really quietly.)


I had an overwhelmingly nice evening, although once again, there was far too much of the harassment occurring. It was nice to see the stars, and dinner was delicious. I wish I had taken a picture of how it was prepared, but think slow cooked under the sand with fire. Mental image? Maybe? Maybe not? Anyways.


Next day, Petra! The other tourists and I returned to the village in a 4X4 (ha! I knew I didn't want to pay for a 4X4 tour) and then I hopped on the minibus to Petra.


A note about public transportation in Jordan: there is none. Well, okay, exaggeration, but barely. I spent an absurd amount of money on taxis and private cars because the minibus system is very casual and it's hard to get information on them pinned down. People hitchhike, but that didn't sound like the best idea ever for me personally. Safety first!


Petra! The minibus dropped us off, and there happened to be a shuttle to the hotel I had reservations for waiting for one of the other passengers, so I hopped on. Lucky break for me! I quite liked the place, and it is the only place where I stayed that I fully recommend, so here goes: Valentine Inn, stay there.


A woman was working behind the counter, and I was surprised by how glad I was. Yay! All you want from me is my money! Such a relief. I found it almost hard to address the man who was also working there just because he was a man. Plus, she was practically the first non-foreign woman I had seen in days.


That afternoon, I walked to Petra. After bravely paying the exorbitant admission fee (77 USD) I went in. On a horse because some guy wouldn't let me alone until I rode his horse, and also because I like horses.  I walked through the Siq:

And around other areas too. I made friends with a very nice guy with a donkey. Can I just say that it is impossible to look cool while on a donkey? I did my best. If you want to see the awesomeness that is a donkey, email me, and I'll send you a picture. I don't really want to put pictures with my face in them up. Needlessly paranoid? Yup.


Anyways. We wound up with the following view, which is fairly iconic, but I never would have found my way up here by myself.

Soon after this, we went and had "Bedouin whiskey" (delicious tea with enough sugar in it to rot the teeth of a dental hygienist in two swallows) in a cave. In a cave. So cool.


That evening, I went to my new friend's family home for dinner, which was very good. It was chicken and rice and vegetables, all served on a big round platter. We ate sitting on the floor with our fingers. (I am still vegetarian, but I hate to be rude. My stomach was not pleased with me.)


I met some more people and then rode on another horse before being driven back to Wadi Musa (the tourist town adjacent to Petra. It's where my hotel was).


Then back again to Petra the next morning!


In the afternoon, I went on to Amman, where I spent an uneventful night, and then the next day I crossed the border back to Israel. That part of the trip was fun, too, but I can't say that I have any particularly fantastic stories from it. Mostly just good memories.


I keep remembering things to say, but I suppose I should save something for over Christmas, right?


All in all, it was one of the best trips I've ever been on, and an excellent first foray into a foreign country alone. But I don't think that I'll be going back there while Israel is my home for two reasons: one, travel is expensive and I'm fantastically good at getting ripped off, and two, because I hate being addressed as foreign female before being addressed as a person.