All Night Hike, All Day Artsy, All Weekend Kedumim

I realize now why it's a blessing to sleep one night each day: When you're about to go to sleep, sometimes you drift first into your activities and experiences of the day, before the brain enters hibernation. If you don't sleep for an entire night, you have the mental homework of recounting everything you did as your level of consciousness decreased, over two days. Follow?

Thursday night, 22:30, A tour bus drove south to the lower tip of the Dead Sea, at the edge of the Judean Desert, and a group of college students hiked all night around a river called Nachal Pratzim,as well as Mount Sdom. Yeah, like Sodom and Gemorrah. It was salty at the end, but at the beginning the river was all very smooth with this powdery type of rock that got on everything, and was nothing like sand. We even played hide and seek, one of my personal favorites, for at least an hour, following an in depth lecture into the art of camouflage. There's a Hebrew acrostic that covers all the details, from shadows and smells to the glimmer of a weapon. The pictures were near impossible to take, because I had to keep the exposure open for as long as was possible, 15 seconds. Because of that, I had to put the camera on a surface, and usually chose the ground. Still pictures came out, and we humans really adjusted well to the night vision. The moon was almost too bright, and it prevented us from seeing the stars for most of the night. Fortunately, the darkest hour really is right before the dawn, so we lay on the salty sands of Sodom and learned how to navigate using astrology. We arrived at the end on a lookout of the Dead Sea and watched the sky brighten up before returning to campus.



Pictures of the Night


We arrived back in Jerusalem at 8. I barely slept considering I was a bobble head on the bus ride. But instead of following the track of any normal tired human being, I spent half an hour looking up bus schedules, and packing for the weekend, and then went right back on another bus to Tel Aviv to see the creative works of the artists of Tel Aviv at Nachalat Binyamin. This street hops with performances and a crafts market on Tuesdays and Fridays. Knowing the limited time I had left, I chose to go now rather than at a later time when I would probably be awake. Moreover we had a relaxing breakfast/lunch nearby, but it left with a little more than an hour to run through the market and explore. Some of the stuff was really nifty. See for yourself.



That one hour time limit was due to the fact that I had to get back to Jerusalem to go back to Kedumim, the the West Bank settlement near Nablus and home of my wonderful madricha Na'ama who hosted me on Passover. This time I wasn't going with Will and Chandler, but rather three girls, from Rothberg, and when we arrived at Na'ama's house, her mom immediately recognized me as התרנגול היחיד בלול, meaning the only rooster in the coop. Altogether there were six girls, and me. It probably would have made a bigger difference if I were awake, but I gathered all the energy I had for the wonderful Shabbat meal, and then slept the night and day away. Saturday, we took a nice stroll around the neighborhood, and enjoyed much intellectual conversation about the Conflict. There were also a lot of visitors and eating, all the time. It was simply a great way to wrap up a busy few days.