Blogs from Israel, Middle East - page 151

When travelling, plans can change suddenly and drastically. After leaving Dahab, we headed up to the popular resort of Sharm El Sheikh to meet up with my parents for a week of snorkelling and lazing around the beach and pool. The day before we were due to meet them at the airport, I checked e mail to find that my dad had been taken into hospital with a kidney infection and subsequent blood poisoning, so they had to cancel their trip (hope you are feeling better, dad!). As we had already done the major highlight of the area, snorkelling and diving on the magnificent reefs of Ras Mohammad National Park, we decided to move on. This decision was helped by the fact that our accomodation was very basic, mosquito-ridden, and overpriced, and the only transport out ... read more

(As dictated to Betsy.) In school, I’m learning Hebrew and my friends are mostly talking to me in Hebrew but if I don’t understand they talk to me in English. One of my friends talked to my dad and said I’m learning Hebrew really well. I have a tutor named Yuval. He’s really nice and my teacher doesn’t think he’s doing enough. My school teacher wants me to do other stuff with her and not so much with him. My teacher’s making me read a book in Hebrew called “Alexander the Great, the Small" ("אלכסנדר הגדול הקטן"). With Yuval, I’m also learning to conjugate verbs and know colors and numbers, and we have signs on lots of things around the house that I’m learning. I went to a party on a boat for a bat mitzvah ... read more

I must say, each day is big. Real big. Classes have started, and I have to say they are now full on. Lets see... where to start. How about here: Last Friday, we all took a "field trip" down to Eilat for a ecological boat ride around the gulf of Eilat. Eilat, as a city, is not much to speak of. In fact, it is overpopulated and touristy, and dont even start me on how detrimental its overdevelopment is to the environment (I am, afterall, studying the environment here!). But the coral reefs in Eilat are some of the best in the world. And its amazing, as this one body of water connects four countries. From the boat, we were floating in the middle of Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Man, that is loaded. After ... read more

Hey all, Internet connections here seems to be few and far between... plus, it seems there is always something else luring me from the computer... I now can use my laptop (hurray!) in some places... so I am not confinded to the bunker :-). But I still dont have access in my room, (nor do I yet have a desk on which to put it!), but all in time, I know. I realize that many of you are in the dark about what I am doing, and where I am doing it. So this entry I will try to explain what's going on in my corner of the earth. I am currently living, until mid January, on a small kibbutz in the Arava desert, right near the Jordanian border. It is a tiny oasis with some ... read more

Trip to Israel Tel Aviv - Jaffa - Jerusalem - Nazareth Under Construction!!!... read more