Tel Aviv day at the beach

       My first weekend was a 3-day weekend, celebrating the Jewish holiday Shavuot.  I heard that this holiday is to commemorate Moses receiving the 10 commandments? Anyways, we had Sunday off of school and work, and Joseph, Hannah, and I decided to take a trip to Tel Aviv, about an hour away, and go to the beach. 

            We borrowed a car from someone and Joseph drove. For any observing Jew, there are a lot of restrictions on the Sabbath and on holy holidays.  For example, they can’t drive cars, they can’t use the TV or computers or phones.  Instead, they walk everywhere and Shavuot was no exception.  As we drove the streets of Jerusalem early in the morning, there were no other cars, but rather swarms of the ultra-Orthodox Jews, the ones with black suits, hats, and curly ringlets as sideburns.  We were pretty nervous about getting rocks thrown at our car, because it is fairly common if you are driving in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood on the Sabbath.  No one threw rocks at the car, but someone did throw a water bottle! We made it out okay, barely!

Pictures of the streets swarmed with walking Jews. No cars.

            At Tel Aviv we borrowed a family’s body boards and took them to the beach, hung out for a few hours, went body boarding, drove into the city and walked around a little bit.

            Tel Aviv is completely different from Jerusalem, only an hour away but it is a different world!  Where Jerusalem is full of religion, tradition, tension, and history, Tel Aviv is liberal, secular, and modern.  It felt like California, with the palm trees, relaxed beach environment, and even the houses and streets seemed like American West Coast! The water was warm and the sun would peak through the clouds every so often, just enough to keep it warm but not too much to get badly sunburned.  It was a very ordinary feeling day at the beach.

Walking along the promenade at Tel Aviv

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After Tel Aviv, we had a BBQ at an American family's house in Jerusalem to commemorate Memorial Day.  We had pulled pork sandwiches, a rare treat in Israel as it is against the Jewish and Muslim religions to eat pork!  

This is Greg telling the story of locking himself in the bathroom and how they called the Marines to get him out (true story):