July 13th-14th, 2007 This was the best weekend of my trip. It was a ton of fun. My internship group went on another tour, this one for a whole weekend. We went to the Ein Gedi, which is the desert in the South by the Dead Sea. It was hot as all hell and full of amazing nature and history. That place is real old-school Israel. It’s even where David hid from Saul way back when. I could write about my experiences all day, but it would just get boring after a while. Check out the pics ‘cause they’ll describe things [View Full Entry]

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July 6th-7th, 2007, This was a great weekend. Stav, my friend from Birthright (a free trip/tour of Israel for all those not in-the-know), took me to the Northern part of Israel for a weekend of camping and hiking. I was the American guest of her, her boyfriend, and her friends Dan and Dana. Some other people met us later at night, after our hike. Everyone was really nice, and we all had a good time. We started with a hike in Nachalat Zaki/Zaki River. I wish I could have taken pictures, but for the better part of the hike the water [View Full Entry]

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Hey all, sorry for the extreme delay in any posts. I've just been busy a lot in general. Obviously really busy since I'm writing this in Aug 7th. Anyway, this site crashed recently so most of my old stuff was lost. Sorry bout that. Enjoy what I give you though! There'll be lots more to come in future days, and some really great pics. July 4th, 2007, There's a place called Mike's Place in Tel Aviv that is basically a straight up American bar. It's filled with American tourists and everyone speaks English. I don't really like it there too much, [View Full Entry]

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July 1st, 2007 Today Adlai and I took a short trip down to Jaffa (Yafo). It’s an ancient Arab city at the very south of Tel Aviv. Read all about it here. Jaffa’s known for its cool sense of local Middle Eastern culture. It’s full of small shops, most of which sell antiques. I managed to get some cheap house wares while out there, and I had fun in the process. I also got a really amazing nargila (hookah) for an excellent price. It was a true Middle Eastern experience, with bargaining and everything. After that [View Full Entry]

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June 30th, 2007 So I’ve been chilling out a lot and hitting up the beach. I’m starting to get one hell of a tan. My old roommate Jason is visiting from Jerusalem for the weekend. We’ve been going to the beach and last night we went out to a cool bar with a few friends. We all got kind of tipsy—my first time in Tel Aviv—but once again I didn’t really party to hard because we all just hung out as a group. I did go to a really cool party the other night though. It was “white night” here [View Full Entry]

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June 28th, 2007 Today I went on a tour to Zichron Ya’akov with my program from the Jewish Agency. It’s not much of a program really. We never see each other ever except for the rare event or tour, and this was my first one. I met some cool people, but I’ll probably only hang out with very few of them outside of the program. Zichron Ya’akov is a nice little town in the Carmel Mountain area of Israel. It’s up in the north by Haifa. It was the center of the NILI organization, which was the Israeli group that [View Full Entry]

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June 26, 2007 So a lot has happened over the past few days, but to be honest I'm way too tired to write about it all. To start, Tel Aviv is in the midst of a heat wave, as is most of Israel. It's 100 degrees Fahrenheit and higher everyday. For those fans of the metric system, that's 38 degrees Celsius and up. It wouldn't be so bad if I could go to the beach everyday, but I started my job a couple of days ago. The hours really suck during my first week because I have to go through training. [View Full Entry]

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June 22, 2007 So I’m in Tel Aviv with full Internet access, but only in the lobby. Still, it’s better than the situation was before, but it’s weird having a different IP address. Every time I use AOL to get to Google, it takes me to the German site. On Internet Explorer, it takes me to the Israeli one, which makes a lot more sense but is nevertheless annoying. I miss Jerusalem. I don’t really miss the scenery so much—it’ll always be ther for me—but I miss the people. I made good friends there and I made them quickly. Here, not [View Full Entry]

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June 18, 2007 My new roommate Steve is completely off-the-wall bonkers, but I mean that in the best way possible. From the moment he arrived, he started jumping all over the place, convincing us all to go out. By the end of his antics he had us all riled up and ready to go. It was a pretty fun night out, even though I had originally planned on taking it slow. Last night’s fun caused me to wake up late today, so I didn’t go to any of my morning classes. I didn’t go to any afternoon ones either because I [View Full Entry]

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June 17, 2007 So it’s been a few days and things are progressing quite well. I’ve gotten close to a couple of really cool guys here. A few of my better friends are British and they’re starting to rub off on me. I’m trying my best not to borrow their terms of speech. The same goes for a Californian guy named Jonathan, who I’ve also been spending a lot of time with. G-d help me if I start saying “rad.” There are people from all over the world in Aish HaTorah (my school). Aside from the English, of which there are [View Full Entry]

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