Roman Around

You can see a lot in Israel if you put yourselves in the hands of natives. Today, our tour guides were Udi and Schlomete. When we arrived at our apartment in Tel Aviv after flying in, Yoni the Great (who now reads this blog :) was not the only one to greet us. Udi and Schlomete (who's name I'm almost surely butchering) were there with open arms. And groceries. It was really amazing to me that the first people I would see in Israel were people I already knew from Ames! I met them several times in Ames, as well as their son - who incidentally is now close friends with one of my favorite graphic design professors. The 7 degrees of Iowa continues with fury! Today the two of them whisked us away with a down-to-the-minute itinerary. (In case you haven't figured it out there is no spell check on this web browser and you are at the mercy of my wild guesses from Level 2 Spelling and my irreverent comma usage.)

On kibbutzes (kibbutzim is the proper plural)

A kibbutz is a small commune built of many families living a socialist lifestyle. Every person works and all profits go to the community. You work and you get what you need to live. I can only assume this lazy and inexact explanation will draw a comment out of Giora...

Kibbutz 1

So prior to going to see my first kibbutz we went to a bar called the Kibbutz with Omri, Tali's brother (Tali being our awesome Iowa City friend who single-handedly kept Naomi calm and collected before our wedding which is why I have a wife and not an empty beer glass at a local tavern..) Anyway (my god, I'm off on tangents like crazy tonig-). ANYWAY, this bar was modeled after my previous sloppy explanation. Brilliant, really. You pay a cover and then food and drink is at cost. It was a hotspot. Omri brought us to a birthday party where he knew one person so we pretty much just hung out among ourselves and collected interesting others.

Kibbutz 2

We visited Ramat Hashofet first for a rendezvous with Naomi's childhood in Israel, Rina and Giora's homes in Israel and Naomi's grandma. Udi and Schlomete waited while we took a quick walking tour which was a little disappointing. Naomi led me to Rina and Giora's homes, which touched and had a path from one house to the other...up to a couple of years ago. As it stands, those two homes were the only two recently renovated homes in the entire kibbutz. Naomi was slightly deflated but we kept our momentum and arrived for Naomi to see her savta for the first time in 3 years and for me, her mohawked goy husband, to meet her for the first time. It was a heart-felt reunion that was very touching to see. Her savta was so very happy to see Naomi. I barely managed to stammer out a couple of Hebrew sentences over the entire encounter, but I smiled a lot. Naomi translated and explained things to me so it was nice.

Next up, national gardens. Absolutely amazing. I have great pictures of all of this on the Canon, which I didn't bring the correct cord for, so imagine someplace nice. I learned a lot about the Rothschilds, who were a family of very rich businessmen. The story goes that a prince once came to the original Rothschild and needed to hide a chest of gold with him because he was going into exile. Years later, the prince returned to find the gold still hidden unmolested and this created a name for Rothschild and his integrity. He then had five sons and instructed them to move to different cities around the world and do business with eachother and trust one another absolutely. This created an empire. How badass are they? Their crest consists of five arrows, one for each brother, a lion, and a unicorn. Yeah, that's right, a frickin' unicorn. A family so powerful they didn't even need to pick a real animal for their crest. Anyway, the son of one of the son's invested very very heavily into early Israel and bought a bunch of the land and financially backed multiple settlements and when he died in his 80s the country mourned his loss and buried him in a crypt and built the mother of all gardens around him. His family still donates heavily to Israel which is why half of Israel has Rothschild somewhere in its name.

We ate a picnic there as well and dear god this is taking a long time to explain. I can do better. We went to a fun town and got ice cream. We then proceeded to see Old Stuff. Roman stuff. The coolest was an enormous intact aquaduct with a public beach. People would sit on the aquaduct and picnic and it was very 2000-years-ago-meets-today. More old stuff was seen. We went to a concert at the nicest public park I've ever been to. There must have been a thousand people there using the playground, the track, the pond, the walking paths, the grassy areas. Fantastic. We were then deposited, exhausted, back to Tel Aviv. Oh yeah, and I made my first cultural faux paux! hooray! Best if delivered in documentary style:

When in the wild you can encounter many different behaviours. As I was walking in a local park with an Old Thing Worth Seeing, I stumbled across a family of Muslims. Their offspring ran up beside me and gestured what can only be inferred as "take a picture!". As I did this the adults became agitated. The males began yelling and the women began covering their faces. Finally the alpha male said "okay, just the kids, just the kids" after understanding his offspring had initiated the interaction. I took a picture of the children and as we were walking away it was explained to me by natives that Muslim women cannot have their pictures taken. Well shit.

Okay, that's it. :)