For those who are interested, a brief, not-terribly-exhaustive catalogue of the things I did and did not do over my week-long excursion into the wilds of northeastern Israel.
Did: Sleep on the back of a tank. Solo hike through the Yehudiyeh Nature Preserve living on peanut butter and pita. Almost fall off a mountain/die of exposure.
Did not: Actually fall of mountain/die of exposure.
Did: Get hit on by fourteen-year-old Israeli girls bathing suggestively together--you couldn't make this up--in a waterfall.
Did not: End up in Israeli jail on charges of statutory rape.
Did: See a variety of strange animals, including wild pigs, foxes, and cliff-climbing waterfowl.
Did not: Despite how sick I was of peanut butter and pita, catch and eat them.
Did: Try.
Did: Try to pick cactus fruit using a T-shirt to avoid the spines.
Did not: Succeed, or manage to salvage shirt.
Did, in Tzfat: Illegally explore an archaeological dig. Get followed around for two separate days by a stray dog. Learn Torah with Hassidic Rabbis. Dance around in caves with same rabbis, but after Shabbat, when they were kind of tipsy.
Did not, in Tzfat: Feel any need to do anything constructive, at all, ever again.
Did: Sleep in parks to avoid paying for rooms. Mooch food off of Chabadniks in Tzfat. Talk them into giving me a free bed for a couple of nights just, you know, because.
Did not: In any way deserve it.
Did: Go national Israeli dance festival in Carmiel, where tens of thousands of people get together to, um, folk dance. Spend literally ten hours there, because the people I was meeting there are into that sort of thing.
Did not: Dance. Ever want to see Israeli folk dance again.
Did: Hitchhike (tramp, in colloquial Hebrew, as in Lady and the) from city to city as method of transportation.
Did not: Get kidnapped, raped, or murdered (although I think one girl's boyfriend was thinking about offing me). Find it to be a good idea.
Did not: Find Jesus, who is said to hang around the Galilee.
Did: Try.
Did not: Get sick of falafel. Or understand why I haven't gotten sick of falafel yet.
Did not: Do any planning at all, whatsoever.
Did: Enjoy myself thoroughly. Blow my own mind. Get back to Jerusalem with more questios than answers.
Did not: See any hope for the future.
Did not: Care.
1 comment:
"Did not, in Tzfat: Feel any need to do anything constructive, at all, ever again."
so one thing i've definitely learned here is that i don't really give a damn about where i go in my life.
all i really want to do is own a foreign books shop in florence. or milan. and learn italian.
when do you get back to atx? i get the feeling im going to need a friend with perspective...
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