Blogs from Israel, Middle East - page 160

that's it - tomorrow i'm finally flying. my first destination is kutz summercamp in warwick, ny, where i'll be spending the next 2 months. and as for later on - we'll see. during the last 2 months i have had (on and off) extremely annoying stomach aches, which may pose a big problem if i plan to travel for a long time and to distant places... so the plan is right now to enjoy my 2 months in the summer camp and to see how i feel in order to decide what's next. i have an open flight ticket for a year, so my trip can last anything from 2 months to a year... mmm apart from that, almost everything's cheked: i said goodbye to everybody (almost), bought and packed everything (almost), and for what i ... read more

A few local CouchSurfers have organized a barbeque on the outskirts of the city, on a gentle, pine-studded hill that feels a world removed from Jerusalem’s solemn ramparts, from the clamor of the shouk and the crowded lanes of the Old City. There are a few dozen of us gathered - Israelis and globe-trotters and globe-trotting Israelis - and we go through the motions familiar to these sorts of gatherings: routes taken and planned, couches surfed, border officials duped and dodgy trains ridden. There’s comfort in these odd get-togethers, in the assurance that while the faces and cast of characters change, the stories stay more or less the same. We’re grilling kosher hot dogs and dipping into what’s been dubbed “the best hummus in Israel” when we cautiously turn the talk to politics. It’s the ... read more

Yagur stream Middle East » Israel » The Carmel and Golan By ygallerJune 9th 2007Hiking down Yagur stream starting in Usfiyya and ending at Kibutz Yagur... read more

So here is my second entry and i hope i can type pretty quickly as internet is fairly expensive here. It has been 10 days since the beginning of birthright and it has ended after 10 amazing days in israel. We literally did almost everything, albeit very shortly, in isreal. I will briefly go over all the highlights of the places i visited and you will have to ask me for the details. Day 1: Arrival and Caesaria We arrived after a long 12 hour flight in ben guiron and all of us really just wanted to sleep and hit the showers. However, we were whisked right away up to Caesaria towards northern isreal close to the golan hights. This town is equivalent to Montreal's westmount. Very rich, bigh houses, and they even had a ... read more

These days in Tel Aviv - a hedonistic Sodom-by-the-sea, if ever there was one - aren’t entirely going according to plan. Somehow I’d imagined myself thrust full-on into the pageantry of pleasure and vice from day one: an orgy of sex, drugs and potato kugel that seemed to ignore my aversion to drugs and my ambivalence toward kugel. While I’d planned long days on the beaches and longer nights in the clubs, it’s only now that I’ve come to terms with the reality of my time in Tel Aviv: I look fat in my swimsuit, I don’t like clubs, and my wallet’s taken such a beating that I’m going to be slouching my way into Africa by month’s end. Never mind the four-dollar iced coffees that have become a five-a-day habit, or the fact that ... read more