The Travels of Praziquantel

Off to Asia Again...

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:34:00 +0000

Hi everyone,

In another day and a half I will leave on another trip to Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand ... 34 days will seem way too short in that part of the world! In the usual tradition for what happens when I plan trips, Thailand has had now-famous flooding, the worst in 50 years (which I am hoping will dry out by my arrival there in mid-December) but I hear that the other areas I am going to on the way are now trying to compete with huge squalls of rain. There have also been several earthquakes ... not so much where I'm going, but surprisingly, right under the fault line on which I live.

Anyway, I will try to capture all the travel news and gossip that's fit for print :) Photos may join up with the blog later. Also, I've added a link to my blog where I believe you can now subscribe to receive updates!

--Carol

The Loveliness of London!

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Mon, 24 May 2010 20:21:00 +0000

So, I have to admit, even though I have friends from England, I had never been there before and frankly was in no rush to get there. Prior to going there, I thought of it as an extremely expensive European place with crappy weather and a cold-ish demeanor. Well, I'm glad to report that I was wrong about the demeanor! ;-) I was really struck by London as a place with tons of history (even the *trees* are way old and manicured, the buildings are beautiful) and yet vibrant and modern and fun too! 3 days was definitely not enough time there, but enough to get a tiny taste of what it has to offer. Part of the reason is was so much fun, of course, was my getting to meet up with three different friends each of whom I hadn't seen in a while!

I had booked ahead of time with a B and B enterprise called At Home In London (http://www.athomeinlondon.co.uk/detailsR.php?refno=236) where you stay in a host's home and they only have one or two rooms to let ... kinda like Couchsurfing but with a price tag and possibly nicer digs ... I'm happy to report that our room at Julia's lovely house in the Holland Park (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland_park) neighborhood was really nice, spacious, and not gruesomely priced!

And she was an absolute dear, and made great breakfasts. Plus her cute son loaned me an adaptor to charge my iPod Touch with when I realized I had forgotten to bring along an electrical adaptor suitable for England (my brain had only been planning out Israel really). The one drawback, which my mom would be quick to mention if she were given a guest-editor role on this blog, is that most quaint multimillion-dollar homes in cute little neighborhoods of London are built more vertically than horizontally, and so our room was two flights up (or "4 damn flights" as my mom calculated using her Magnification-of-Difficulty Formula). Anyway, the first night we were going to walk down the road to Notting Hill, which is just next door, to see if we could find Hugh Grant in a bookstore, and ended up going the wrong way and mistakenly ending up in Shepherd's Bush which we though was lovely too, but no Hugh Grant. Oh well. Great architecture and parks everywhere.

The next morning, we met up with my adorable friend Sabrina bright and early for a tour of the historic Tower of London (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_london). This is another place with gobs of history -- a place that served as a fortress, a royal palace and a prison as well as a torture chamber and a place that is said to be quite haunted by all those ghosts of the past.

Oh, all that plus a display of the royal jewels which was very interesting. Sabrina and I had dodged a bunch of queues by lifting up the velvet ropes and re-fastening them, but when I tried to take a few photos of the royal jewels while on a people-mover going past it (so people didn't just throng them and not move on, I suppose), the royal policemen/?guard told me loudly that there were 6 signs prohibiting photography (which I had not noticed due to being distracted chatting with Sabrina) and would I please delete all photos of the jewels AT ONCE. And then he stood there and watched me to make certain I had deleted them. Talk about taking one's job seriously! They weren't that terrific anyway, the photos I mean, so you're really not missing anything... My mom got very tired out by this little tour, as Sabrina had forgotten that it included approximately 73 million steps, like the Old City of Jerusalem tour... Oh! to be 23 again! She is a lovely person I travelled with in Malaysia last fall who it was great to catch up with! BTW -- Anyone in the London area who needs an interior designer -- she's your gal!

Next we walked over the Tower Bridge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_bridge),

which was very funky to a beautifully decked out dim sum restaurant (http://www.dimt.co.uk/) and had lunch. Sabrina, this place definitely wins for atmosphere and views, but I owe you a traditional Oakland Chinatown dim sum lunch! :) I have to add, I was also stupefied by this incredible public art exhibition which was 250 different elephants scattered through London and each one decorated and painted in a different way! It was like London's personalized welcome to me!!

Next, my mom and I decided to walk to Borough Market (http://www.boroughmarket.org.uk/), a very very cool food market, part open-air and part not, which my friend Koren had mentioned. It, of course, in addition to being hip, has tons of history (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borough_Market).

We walked around, tasted a few things, bought a thing or two, and then got on the Tube and headed to the Covent Garden area, where we were meeting my friend Vanessa.

Covent Garden is another really lovely and interesting if touristy area (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covent_Garden), where street perfomances about in the Piazza, and some nice shopping goes on. My mother and I, in fact, decided to buy genunine pashmina ;-) shawls, at a bargain 2 for £5, as she complained about the bitter cold, which, apparently, was average for England but downright cold compared to Israel. We could have definitely spent more time there people-watching! (Maybe next time).

Our next little bit of fun was meeting up with my friend Vanessa, with whom I survived my Borneo adventure two years ago! There was extreme bonding (bondage?) in that shared adversity, which those of humankind not on that trip will never completely understand. It was terrific to see her again, and it wasn't even raining (oddly enough for London), much less typhoon conditions! She cleans up real nice ;) -- as we knew each other from a flea-infested grungefest, it was lovely to see her in her home environment where in real life she is a women's clothing buyer for the British Home Store, jetting off to Milan and New York every now and then ...

And Vanessa had been super nice enough to get us tickets to see the Lion King musical in London!!!! Yay! I had not managed to see it in New York thus far, and had heard how great the music, costuming and sets were, and the London performance did *not* disappoint! First we went out for a very nice seafood dinner at a place nearby called Live Bait (http://www.livebaitrestaurants.co.uk/) where Vanessa in true British fashion encouraged us to try the mushy peas along with the fish and chips! I give the fish and chips 5 stars and so does my mom, but I think the mushy peas can be safely tried once per lifetime and that may be enough! Apparently they put my mom into a minor coma (or maybe it was all the walking she did that day?) and sadly she fell asleep at times during the Lion King, as she has a tendency to do with all brilliant and expensively priced performances where the lights are dimmed ;) For more on the spectacular Lion King, including a brief video, check out http://www.lyceum-theatre.co.uk/. If I had more time (a recurrent theme) I'd definitely have done more shows and museums in London! Anyway, fabulous to catch up with Vanessa and looking forward to an upcoming visit by her to the Left Coast of the US, even if it's not a fashion capital!

The next day, my mom was tuckered out still somewhat but felt better. She checked out the Portobello Road Market (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portobello_Road) in Notting Hill, which she enjoyed and featured a lot of antiques, while I went on another great Sandemann's walking tour of London (http://www.newlondon-tours.com/), led by a very enthusiastic short-skirted and blue-nail-polished young woman named Jade!

This went on for 3+ hours and we walked all over from Wellington Arch to Hyde Park to Buckingham Palace right at the time of the changing of the guard (just got a glimpse, but did get to see the horseman's parade that followed) to St. James' Park, 10 Downing St., the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben and all his big friends. Got to hear about some very amusing break-and-enter stories that happened at Buckingham Palace (one version of the most amusing one can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Fagan_incident).

After all that walking, met up with my mom and we then took the tube together to meet up with my dear friend Koren, whose friendship with me dates back to Thai cooking school, and her relatively new husband Frank, who sometimes live in Florida, sometimes England. We found ourselves back at Borough Market, which we didn't mind at all --at least we knew how to get there! We went to a very popular tapas bar called Brindisa and of course I meant to get photos of the four of us and forgot due to the heavy drinking that always occurs whenever I see Koren (I remember that evening fondly but slightly hazily :) A great time was had by all! And we got to see photos of her kitsch wedding at Costco in Jacksonville, along with the somewhat more formal one that took place in the Champagne region of France. And Frank was a delight :)

The next morning was our last day in London -- so we grabbed in just a few more things like taking the Tube to St. Pauls Cathedral (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Paul%27s_Cathedral) -- pretty damn impressive and probably most famous for hosting the wedding festivities of Charles and Di. They also have a really nice garden, and from there it's a hop-skip-and-a-jump to the Tate Modern museum over the Millenium Bridge. So we did that walk. I wish I had liked the Tate Modern more, there were some cool things within it but in retrospect we should have gone to the V and A and seen the Grace Kelly exhibit! So many museums, so little time.

And with that, we ran out of time, then made it to Heathrow in plenty of time, and flew to New York for an uneventful several days of decompression there, some heavy rains and strong winds, a bad cold picked up in the plane from London to New York which hit my mom harder than it did me, along with random chores like major work on my mother's garden, which she somehow convinced me would be "just as good" as going to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. She's shrewd even when she's not feeling well. I don't think the garden turned out quite as good as the BBG, so I will leave you with a link and a recommendation to that as I have no pictures since I didn't go this time around: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Botanic_Garden.

A Few More Musings about Israel: extra thoughts which didn't fit into the blog.

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Sat, 22 May 2010 22:51:00 +0000

One thing I must mention -- when I told people I was going to Israel they just immediately assumed it had something to do with my crazy lust for adventure, high-risk activity and danger. Only one work colleague said something about a "religious pilgrimage?" but I'm sure that knowing me, he was being sarcastic.

But, I have to say, having spent 3 weeks there, I did not for one moment ever feel unsafe. Some of this has to do with the luck of coming during relative peacetime, and not during any suicide bombings that I know of. Perhaps it was the protective effect of the ash cloud over Europe? ;-) But seriously, in a country where crazy shit is known to happen, I've never seen so many hitchhikers! Certainly much more common than in the US. And your typical street crimes, muggings, violence, etc., are very very rare. We never worried. Of course the current systems that exist to try to keep the peace and protect public safety grew out of what happened during the Intifadas, and most families know someone who was affected by the random bombings. Kind of like New Yorkers with 9/11. Similarly, they just try to go on with life and not let it rule their day to day activities...

I also saw some evidence of Jews and Arabs coexisting peacefully ... Israel's legal population is about 20% Arab. The best examples of this were in the markets, in food-related enterprises (in keeping with my theories of how cuisine must be involved in achieving world peace and understanding), and at Hadassah Hospital.

Some people may have wondered just how religious Israel is. These are clearly people who haven't visited the country. The obvious answer is, "it's as religious as you want it to be". In general, a majority of the population happens to be nominally Jewish but is nonreligious. They view the ultrareligious population as a bit of a threat -- as they follow the "be fruitful and multiply" commandment, their percentage of the population grows and the amount of political pandering the different parties must do to the religious population in order to achieve a coalition government with their "swing vote" just gets very very complicated ... For this reason the nonreligious folks are grateful for the huge wave of Russian immigrants which came in 1991 or thereabouts, as they tend to not be religious (in fact not even all of them are Jewish, some are just married to Jewish people and got in that way) and therefore "balance out" the religious community.

The nonreligious population also, in my experience, has some resentment toward the religious population because their young people keep getting one religious deferment after another to avoid being in the military, which is a rite of passage that all other Israelis have to go through, male and female both. In a way I feel like it's a bummer that this separates those populations at early adulthood and diminishes the respect they might have for one another. My mother (who likes to make her opinions known ;-) felt strongly that the religious people should serve in the military too, if everyone else has to ...

And of course a quite healthy percentage of tourism to Israel is fueled by Christian church groups who are eager to "walk the path of Jesus" -- literally, in pilgrimages of various sorts. I came across large church groups of people visiting from Mexico, Germany, and Holland. None of these people seemed to be fighting off the constant spectre of terrorism interfering with their journeys, at least not right now.

I'd also like to comment on the Israeli economy -- really quite impressive. Everywhere we went we saw massive construction projects, with seemingly no expense spared. Leaves the currently shitty American economy/recession/?depression in the dust. Their secret seems to be a large percentage of personpower being brainy/well-educated/tech-oriented with exciting projects afoot. Sadly, by necessity, some of this tech enterprise includes security and military defense type systems. But there's lots of IT and biotech too. Something for everyone, apparently :)

What were my favorite things? Hmmmm. In no particular order:

In Kfar Saba: the grooviness of the mall, and Achlah :)
Nachlat Binyamin crafts market in Tel Aviv on Fridays
The tayelet (promenade) along the Mediterranean in Netanya and the cool sculptures there
Machtesh Ramon
Timna Valley Park
Our amazing tour of Kibbutz Ketura
Snorkelling at the Coral Beach Nature Reserve in Eilat, and the observatory there
All the date palms and the amazing stuff they have done to carve agriculture out of the desert
Jerusalem, which would have been even more beautiful with a healthy dose of sunshine
Hummus Lina in the Old City
Hadassah Hospital and the incredible things they do there
Yad VaShem -- not fun, but really powerful
The beauty of the Galilee, Kibbutz Sasa, Highway 899, and the Hula Valley Nature Reserve
Guy Restaurant in Tiberias
The Baha'i Gardens in Haifa
The old city of Akko
and of course our wonderful hosts!

Actually, that's a lot of favorites for 20 days :)
Definitely a country worth seeing and worth visiting!

An Unexpected Detour to Binyamina ... and the last bit of our time in Tel Aviv!

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Sat, 22 May 2010 22:13:00 +0000

When last I wrote, Dyanne was going to arrange a trip for us to Caesarea and an Arab village. Unfortunately, the husband of someone she knew died, and she had to do other things that Friday. So she was going to put us on the train to Tel Aviv. She checked ahead and apparently Israel Railways was doing some work on the line, so she could not take us to the station closest to the kibbutz. Instead she said she'd take us to Haifa.

When we got to the train station there, I overheard a woman muttering something in Hebrew about a "sreifah" (or fire). I told Dyanne, and she went in to check with the staff, and they assured her there was no problem whatsoever. So -- we bought our tickets and boarded the train. She told me to let her know if we had any problems ... About a third of the way to Tel Aviv (the journey was supposed to take something like an hour and 13 minutes), there was an announcement that all passengers must get off at Binyamina, as there was a brush fire on the tracks. Once we got off there were more announcements: a) that the train was going to turn around and go back to Haifa and we could return to Haifa if we wanted -- not our goal really, and b) they had ordered busses to bring us the rest of the way to Tel Aviv. All announcements were made only in Hebrew and there was no one to ask questions of. I started looking for Binyamina in my guide book, and didn't find it. Why? Because it was approximately the middle of nowhere.

Because I didn't want to go back in the wrong direction, against my better judgment my mom and I got out of the train station with all our stuff and were standing in the street, in the burning sun (about 35 C or 95 F that day), waiting for said busses with another few hundred increasingly angry Israelis. Israelis do not just "suck it up" when they get pissed off -- there was lots of shouting, some accusations, a shrug of the shoulders and not a word out of the mouth of the guy who was supposedly in charge, and I heard that someone called the TV news. Time went by, the busses did not come, taxi drivers started to take advantage of the situation and make deals with people going less far away ...

My mom, when faced with idle time, generally makes friends with people. She befriended two young women who were recently out of the army. We waited a little longer. Then Dyanne called me to make sure everything had gone ok. I told her the truth. She said she wasn't sure what she could do but would think about it and call me back. Had I been able to browse Wikipedia, I would have seen a tiny entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binyamina) and pondered the wine and honey industry of the region while still being stuck with a bunch of luggage in the hot sun...

And then Dyanne called me back and said she'd just remembered she had a friend who lived in Binyamina! The lovely Jane, originally from England, arrived in about 5 minutes, the two Israeli girl-soldiers loaded our luggage into her car, and she took one look at us and decided we needed to go to her air-conditioned house for some nice cool water and a home-cooked lunch!! Jane unfortunately had an appointment that afternoon so could not help us further, but Yael, a young woman who was collaborating with her on some translation work at her place, told us that she was planning to drive to Herzliya in an hour and would we like a ride there?

The only kicker was that Yael's car had no trunk, and our luggage was large and ridiculous. But she had a luggage rack on top of her roof! We then enlisted Nimrod, Jane's next-door-neighbor and landlord, who loaned us some ropes and helped climb up and get the luggage on top of the roof and lash it tightly. Next thing we knew, we were off to Herzliya. In the middle of these machinations, Esther, the sister of a friend of my mother's called trying to figure out when we could get together, and when she heard of our predicament, she arranged with Yael to rendezvous in Herzliya and then drive us to our host in Tel Aviv!

So it started out as an utterly shitty day, but due to the kindness of several previously unknown guardian angels, our misfortune was turned into fortune :) Thanks to all who helped out, and we arrived in Tel Aviv only 4 or 5 hours late, no thanks to Israel Railways!

There wasn't much time or energy left to do anything that day, so we went out for dinner with our host, Judy. The next day we had to pack in a lot of different stuff -- NOT enough time for Tel Aviv and there were so many things to do and people I wanted to meet that I didn't get the chance to that I'll put it on the list for "next time"!

But we did grab in the Eretz Yisrael Museum (http://www.eretzmuseum.org.il/main/site/index.php3?mod=firstPage&langId=1), which was full of cool archeology, old stamps and coins, glass, and ethnological artifacts, stuff about the Rothschilds, an exhibit on women who joined the armed forces in the early days before Israel was a state, and a lovely café (http://anina.rest-e.co.il/) at which we had yummy shakshuka and french toast before starting in on the museum.

From there we went to Bet haTfuzot, otherwise known as the Diaspora Museum

(http://www.bh.org.il/) which is on the beautiful Tel Aviv University campus

and features all the different far-flung Jewish communities. Well worth a wander. For those of you who feared we would somehow run out of museums, rest assured: Israel is full of them and we didn't even begin to touch the surface. For a listing with links, check out http://ilmuseums.com/. Next time I will check out the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, definitely.

After that it was getting toward the end of the day. So we took a bus that went all the way through TA to Old Yaffo, the town just south of TA which everyone had said we must check out.

Of course we were kind of late for the big market which was just closing, but did sample some nice zaatar pizza -- not anything like a New York pizza but better than any other Israeli approximation thereof. And then we went to Barbunya and ate fish. It was kind of sad thinking this was our last night in Israel. It went by soooooo quickly and it felt like there were so many more things I'd have liked to do, even though my mother reminds me we actually did do quite a lot and saw most of the country ;-)

The next morning we got up at a crazy early hour and packed quietly in order not to wake the other people sleeping in the house (so early and such that I managed to forget my eyeglasses at Judy's house!) and Judy was kind enough to give us a lift to Ben Gurion Airport. We were told we had to be there a minimum of 3 hours before the flights, but got there more than 4.5 hrs early. Big yawn. We were exhausted and cranky. At least there was free wifi at the airport which killed a little bit of time .... and then we were off to London! We were NOT looking forward to taking El Al after that last experience, but I must say the flight to London was ... normal! Like a regular airline. Seating was nowhere near as cramped, and there were no penguins. My mom was still not impressed with their security measures which supposedly are the tightest in the world -- as I managed to get through a 1.5L bottle of water which I'd forgotten about in my backpack ;-)

Adventures with Dyanne :)

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Wed, 19 May 2010 22:45:00 +0000

The next chapter in our saga started with meeting our wonderful Couchsurfing host from Kibbutz Ramat Yochanan, a woman named Dyanne. She had arranged to pick us up in Tiberias on Saturday morning as she was attending the Jacob's Ladder annual music festival in nearby Nof Ginosar on Thurs and Fri. Originally we were going to come along to the festival on Saturday, but Friday had been hot as hell and Saturday promised to be even warmer than that. So we switched tacks and she drove us to Haifa, which she lives not too far away from. (Below is Haifa City Hall - very futuristic looking!)

Being on the Mediterranean coast, it is cooler. We managed to get there just in time for the daily tour of the Baha'i Gardens on Mount Carmel -- also known as the Shrine of the Bab -- (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraces_(Bah%C3%A1%27%C3%AD)) at noon!

This place is supposed to be one of the top 5 gardens in the world, and having now walked through it (you start at the top and walk down through 19 terraces, and my mom even braved the 700 step walk down!) I would most certainly agree. It is taken care of with tender loving care by a total of 100 gardeners -- 70 paid professional Israeli gardeners, and 30 Baha'i volunteers! This is a challenge because apparently according to the Baha'i faith, Israel is too holy to live in unless you are specifically doing work related to the shrines and such (there's one in Akko too). Therefore -- not much of a community there! The Bahá'í Faith is a monotheistic religion founded in nineteenth-century Persia, emphasizing the spiritual unity of all humankind, and recognizing most of the prophets of all the other prior religions. For more on the faith, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1%27%C3%AD_Faith. Kind of interesting, but the gardens are enough to truly blow you away!

Dyanne was kind enough to pick us up at the bottom, and then give us a bit of a driving tour of Haifa on our way back to her Kibbutz. She, of course, has a very interesting life story, which involves reading a Leon Uris novel called Exodus at age 12 and deciding she wanted to be a part of this interesting thing called Israel, despite the fact that she wasn't Jewish. She went ahead and moved to Israel after/during the hippie movement about 10 years later, arrived in the immigration office in Tel Aviv, told them she wanted to study Hebrew in an Ulpan (an intensive immersion program in Hebrew language for new immigrants), and they told her they had some openings available in certain kibbutzim. When she asked about Kibbutz Ramat Yochanan, the lady told her they had an ice cream factory and so she said "That's where I want to go!" When she got there it turned out it was a plastics factory, not an ice cream factory, but that's where she met her husband in an apple orchard, and 40 years later they are both living there happily ever after! She also loves travel and had similarly harrowing experiences in Sumatra! The only difference was, she broke her arm there and had an orangutan sympathize up-close-and-personally with her...

We loved seeing her kibbutz and the beautiful house she lives in! Due to her 10+ trips to India, the place is decorated with and covered in the most stunning Indian fabrics, including the guest area. This kibbutz is doing very well with its plastics industry, and actually owns several additional factories in England, China, and the US. As a result of their financial success (once again, Israel does not seem to be enjoying the same economic downturn that we are) they are building new homes for every family in the kibbutz. It comes empty and you are given a certain amount of money to furnish it however you want -- and Dyanne went to town! She was a fabulous host in so many ways -- if anyone is interested in a trip to Ramat Yochanan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramat_Yochanan) just let me know :)

The next day we went to several other nearby points of interest. The first was Rosh ha-Nikra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosh_HaNikra_grottoes), the northeasternmost area of Israel right next to the border with Lebanon. Here there are spectacular sea grottoes created by a geological formation. There is a cable car you can ride down to the grottoes and a cheesy film you can see about some ancient bride who jumped into the sea and how the current dancing of water against the rocks really is like the love affair of the bride ... oh, so romantic! ;-) Maybe not as romantic in Russian but I'm sure the Spanish version had to be as good as the Hebrew... Anyway it was a beautiful sight to see.

And after that we went to Akko (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akko), a town with a TON of history, including the Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman periods. Apparently it is one of the places with the longest continuous history of people living in it in Israel, since apparently the 16th century BC, which is pretty impressive. In the current day it is a cool town with a mixed Jewish and Arab population that seem to get along just fine together -- and a really great bazaar, or shuk. I especially liked this shuk because it was not superultratouristy like the one in Jerusalem would of course have to be. I would sort of compare it to the difference between Oakland Chinatown and SF Chinatown. There. Now I'm sure you understand, exactly ;-)

In the old city of Akko, which is undergoing a lot of conservation efforts and has been deemed to be a UNESCO world heritage site, we also went on an exploration of the Knights' Halls and the Crusaders' underground tunnels. Not at all what you'd expect from seeing the above-ground parts of the city and very well worth seeing!

We also saw an old caravanserai which Dyanne, if she won the lottery, I imagine, would convert into a lovely B and B and deck out with fabulous Indian fabrics ;-)

We had a great time at the kibbutz too, meeting Dyanne's other family members and trying the local falafel in Kiryat Attta, the nearby town ... All this was going to culminate in a trip the next morning to Caesarea and also to a nearby Arab village that Dyanne volunteers in an NGO in. Read on to the next blog to learn what happened instead ;)

Tzfat and Tiberias

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Wed, 19 May 2010 21:55:00 +0000

From Kibbutz Sasa we continued on to two cities near the Sea of Galilee/Kineret: first Tzfat and then Tiberias. Not that I had SUCH a preconceived notion about Tzfat, but in addition to it having tons of acceptable spellings in English (such as Safed), it was different from what I expected. Next time I'll know better than to base my thoughts on an Israeli movie called "The Secrets" about two girls studying in a religious school with a crazy French lady and lesbian intrigue thrown into the mix!

Instead, what I found was that a seeming majority of people in Tzfat spoke English and with a distinctly New Yawk accent! Total shocker! Apparently the Chassidic Rebbe had some sort of vision in 1982 that Tzfat was the hot, or should I say, holy place to go and the newfound center of mysticism. Traditionally this was the place that the Kabbalah was invented, I think, so there's a tie-in there. So, anyway, a whole bunch of religious New Yawk Jews moved there, without bringing any decent pizza-making skills with them, as we found out. Tragic! We thought for sure we could find a decent slice of pizza there but no!! For more on Tzfat, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safed.

In addition to being famous for being relatively high up in the mountains, being mystical, and having a lot of famous synagogues, Tzfat is also known as somewhat of an artist's colony. We had a nice time walking through the artists' quarter which has cobblestoned streets and a lot of lovely galleries ... but somehow did not feel compelled to make any purchases of religious art ... We did not stop in at the Ascent Center which is perhaps known for the most cultlike of Kabbalah enthusiasts ;) Also right in the area is the Biriya Forest, which is where the money of most people who have ever donated money to "plant a tree in Israel" ends up. Apparently for $18 I could have planted one myself. That would have been fun, but we ran out of time.... Next time!

After our long hot stroll around town, we got lost driving to the to the B and B I had booked at, and then got found. The B and B turned out to be lovely, had super friendly hosts, and included the use of the hot tub which I definitely availed myself of that night! They also recommended a super-duper restaurant, appropriately named "Gan Eden" (English translation: Garden of Eden, or Paradise). All the food was scrumptious, my mom had an amazing salad and I had some very delicious pasta!

The next day after a delicious breakfast, we moved on to Tiberias (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberias), another town with more than one name (in Hebrew it's more like "Tveriyah"), which was the place I was supposed to return the car. We dropped our stuff off at the hotel we were staying at for the night and then finally returned the car to Eldan intact. I realized that both Tzfat and Tiberias were cities where it makes absolutely no sense to have a car, it is more of a downside than an upside as there isn't a lot of parking and/or places are walkable. So I was glad to get rid of the car before I sustained any damage. We then walked all over Tiberias, a town right on the sea of Galilee with some shopping on a main strip, some hotels right near the water, and not a huge amount else.

One interesting spot I checked out was the grave of Rambam (also known as Maimonides, one of the most famous Jewish doctors/philosophers/renaissance men of all time -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambam). I thought that was pretty neat because I also saw his birthplace in Cordoba, Spain about 10 years ago.

We also saw some very cool public art work there,

but missed out on the opportunity to try the 30 or so falafel stands on "Falafel Row" -- supposedly the best falafel in Israel, but really, doesn't just about every community claim that? ;-) -- this because Shabbat was coming, those stands are not open on Shabbat, and we had to choose one place to have an amazing meal. And that place was most definitely Guy Restaurant. I managed to get a copy of their business card -- unfortunately they have managed to misspell their own name "Gay Restaurant" -- but whether or not it's the gay-guy restaurant is hardly important as the food was so excellent!!! I would call it "Sephardic Moroccan home cooking" and they specialized in different vegetables stuffed with either meat or rice. We had the eggplant stuffed with meat, amazing, and the St. Peter's fish, which is oh so common and delicious in those parts. Plus some other goodies. And we got to see the little lady who made the food. Really lovely.

We then sank into an airconditioned food-induced coma for the rest of the day... :)

Stunning Sasa!

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Tue, 11 May 2010 04:35:00 +0000

My mom and I took a morning walk to the Eldan office in Jerusalem, rented another car with much more waiting and disorganization, and then I thought we'd have no problem getting out of Jerusalem. Wrong. There is a conspiracy in that city against drivers who don't love one-way ("chad-sitri") streets! Perhaps this somehow links into Jerusalem syndrome (for more on this phenomenon see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_syndrome), but I think I just managed to exit the city without going insane.

Our next stop was Bet Shean, where there were incredible ruins of an old city that was big in Greek/Roman/Byzantine eras. Just before getting there, I guess because we were near a Jordan border crossing, we passed a checkpoint. Up until now, at every checkpoint we have just been waved on through, but this time the officer asked for our passports and after looking through mine she told me to drive to the inspection station. So I drove over there and after no immediate response on my part to "Mah ha-inyanim?" (which is like Israeli slang for " 'S up?" and I hadn't been able to figure out what the right response should be to that -- I know now it's "b'seder" -- which is probably the most commonly spoken Hebrew phrase) -- the officer asked me to get out of the car. He then proceeded to question me about why was I in Israel, where was I coming from, who did I stay with in Jerusalem, hmmm my last name sounds like a Jewish name and is it? Why then do I say I have only friends and not any family in Israel? The response I came up with -- I'm sorry, but everyone in my family who did not make it to the US was killed 60-70 years ago -- finally satisfied him. They didn't question my mom at all. And very surprisingly to me, after all that they did not want to inspect the trunk and the massive luggage in it. I figure it must be because they had some advance intelligence on how heavy the luggage was and how it contained dirty laundry ;-) My mom later speculated they must have stopped me because of the interesting-to-Israelis stamps in my passport from visits to Muslim countries like Malaysia and Indonesia that Israelis are not allowed into. My later host, Dyanne, told me they must have had some sort of intelligence info that there was some kind of incident that day and to look for some specific kind of person. Still, I doubt it was a redhead in a rental car who could speak some of the language travelling with her mom. But anyway, after all that they gave us directions how to get to the tourism oriented antiquities site of Bet She'an.

For more on that very interesting site, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bet_Shean, and my pictures which will follow at some point. It was really a whole city, again on the scale of Ephesus in Turkey and very impressive. Pretty much under any piece of ground in Israel is some sort of deep ancient history. Unfortunately it was very hot and my mom was tired, so she didn't feel like walking around crumbling stones (which to her is what archaelogy equals) so I did it on my own and tried to come back before she melted. We also stopped at a supermarket in Bet She'an and got a great picnic lunch of baba ghannouj and hot baked pita bread.

Next stop: Kibbutz Sasa. Partway there from Bet She'an, the surroundings started to become stunningly beautiful, green and lush. This is deep in the Galilee and close to the northern border with Lebanon. We were there to visit Gideon and Rina, our CS hosts. This kibbutz was started one year after the founding of the state of Israel (1949) by some very inspired pioneers from the US and Canada, including Gideon who was there when it was a start-up and was one of the founding members! They were a lovely couple, and at age 83 he is the oldest CS host in Israel. They were featured in a newspaper article about Couchsurfing that appeared in "Yediot Achronot" (a major Israeli newspaper) in 2007, which was actually how many of my other hosts were inspired to join! So it was cool to read that article which they had a copy of, and also to hear about the starting-out days of the kibbutz which was rough. Interestingly, my mom remembered that her grandfather had had a farm in New Jersey in the 1940s-1950s and that there were some young people that were part of the kibbutz movement who lived down the road and were training for a year before making their way to the grand adventure of Israel in those days -- and their house burned down and my great-grandfather was one of the farmers that allowed them to set up tents and camp on his land in the late '40s. Gideon said that some of these people were the same ones who helped found Sasa! So, a delightful piece of history coming full circle.

Sasa is now a very successful, wealthy kibbutz which has a plastics factory which manufactures vehicle armor. While they are more famous for this, they also produce broiler chickens and have a beef herd, and grow kiwi, apple, avocado and grapefruit. Everyone who lives there has a nice amount of space and seems to be into cultivating flowering plants as a hobby, therefore it was a beautiful, colorful place. I particularly enjoyed hearing the history from Gideon, and hearing Rina's news -- she just got granted her PhD at age 70 in linguistics, which she's been working on for 6 years! Proof that one can probably accomplish anything one sets one's mind to, and a good excuse for celebrating :) That evening we got to go with them to a sort of happy-hour with drinks and desserts at the Moadon, which is like the kibbutz' clubhouse. Very fun.

The following morning, we set out to see Bar'Am, the ruins of perhaps one of the oldest synagagoues in Israel (there's a lot of competition for that title).

After that, we decided to go to the Hula Valley Nature Reserve -- and drove along Highway 899, which after having "done" Israel I can now say is my very favorite road in Israel for its amazingly spectacular stunning views. Every two minutes I wanted to stop driving and take photos and sadly I could not, so you guys will just have to go there! The area is hilly with twisty/windy but good roads, and when you're up at higher elevation you can see the agricultural fields and other landscapes unfold below...

Hula Valley is pretty damn cool too! It was a swamp which the land of Israel was going to completely drain out in the early '50s and then at the last moment the conservationists convinced them to set aside a chunk of land for a nature reserve, as this is one of the major spots of the migration of birds along the Syrian-African Rift when each year they commute between Europe and Africa. For more, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hula_Valley. The huge migration in spring tends to end by late March, and during that time you can literally see thousands of birds darkening the sky above all at once, and I'd like to go back there during that time ... but for now we had to settle for an amazingly sophisticated multimedia presentation including a 3D movie in English with special glasses AND special effects called "Frequent Fliers" -- that and seeing the reserve itself and hiking a little trail. We did get to see a fair number of water birds, including a hide constructed over the water where you can sit and observe them without them noticing you. Of course it was nothing like the mass migration but still plenty to hold the attention and of course less tourists mobbing the place than I'm sure there are in March. We also saw lots of turtles, huge African catfish, and frogs. Missed the water buffalo. Next time!

After viewing wildlife I'm always hungry ;-) So we next went for an incredibly decadent and delicious lunch at Ein Camonim, a goat-cheese dairy where they have these lunches where you can't order anything specific -- they just bring you an enormous cheese board with a slice of at least 12-15 different types of cheeses, soft, hard, goat, non-goat, Israeli, non-Israeli, you name it! plus wine, plus all those little yummy salads you find in Israel, plus breads, plus coffee/tea/dessert. Apparently they will bring you as much as you want till you are satiated, but we were satiated after the standard serving size which was quite generous. It was a beautiful setting, very elegant, reminded me of the good things about Napa Valley ... yum!! Check them out at http://www.ein-camonim.co.il/cheese.html or a review at http://www.frommers.com/destinations/safed/D59742.html.

After that it was all we could manage to go later to a nice party at the kibbutz for all the people over a certain age celebrating birthdays in March through May. This featured ... cheese platters! Groan! I did however manage to have some truly delicious borscht, and Italian frizzante. What a vibrant group of older people many of whom were in the founding generation of the kibbutz. Though they are mostly from English speaking backgrounds, they seem to have a mutual agreement to use Hebrew as the spoken language.

We had a great time with Gideon and Rina, and were sad to say goodbye to move on to Tzfat and Tiberias ...

Jerusalem of Gold, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Thu, 06 May 2010 20:20:00 +0000

Our next adventures in Jerusalem the following day included a visit to Hadassah Hospital and a trip to Yad VaShem, the impressive Holocaust memorial.

I had set up the Hadassah visit and private tour weeks in advance, as I knew my mom would want to see the place she had done fundraising for for decades. She also really wanted to see the famous Marc Chagall stained glass windows that adorn the Hadassah Hospital. Well, we started out on the bus bound for Hadassah. Only, I forgot to ask the bus driver WHICH Hadassah. How was I to know that the #19 bus goes both to the massive Hadassah-Ein Karem campus and also the Hadassah-Mt. Scopus campus in the Arab eastern part of Jerusalem? Well, we wound up at the second one.

As soon as I got off the bus I thought nice hospital campus, but somehow it just doesn't seem as huge as I was expecting ... and then I realized we were at the wrong place. We ended up getting back on the #19 going to the complete opposite end of the route and so as a result were of course late for our tour, but I was able to call the lady and explain what happened and she was totally cool about it. I will now have sympathy for patients' family members who show up an hour late and say "Oh, but I thought she was at the OTHER John Muir..."

For some of the history of both campuses, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadassah_Medical_Center.

Our tour guide Annette was an American expat who's lived in Israel for about 40 years. She is very proud of the amazing work that Hadassah does. They really are very ahead of us in a lot of ways such as compassion, stuff provided to patients and families, and awareness of possible upcoming disasters/mass casualties/biological warfare because these issues are so real in Israel. Another thing that most people probably do not realize is that well over half the care is provided to Arab patients (and on the Mt. Scopus campus, 80%). First she took us on a tour of the pediatrics area, including pediatric oncology and long term stays. The place is decorated in a very nonforboding way,

and a place is provided for the parent to stay with the patient (it is expected that they will) and the patients are matched up by parents having the same language in common so they can support each other. Food is provided free for the patient's family also. They have very extensive art therapy and also a very major clown program. I got to meet and talk with one of the clowns, who was originally from France.

They started with 3 clowns and now have over 70 nationwide. They are the key to distracting the sick kids while they get IVs and such. They also receive dolls where everything that happens to the patient, they get to sort of reenact on the doll, such as putting in ports. This takes away a little of their feeling of helplessness and disempowerment.... Additionally they have a school on premises with teachers in both Hebrew and Arabic so that the kids don't fall behind if they are there long term. All staff is required to be bilingual in Hebrew and Arabic (and English doesn't hurt either, apparently). Hadassah boasts an 82% cure rate for childhood cancers. I don't know what the US cure rate is, but I can't imagine it's higher.

Part of what makes things easier is, of course, that everyone in Israel has health insurance coverage guaranteed to them by the state, unlike the US. They all belong to one of 4 different Kupat Cholim organizations (like HMOs) and are allowed to change primary MDs and/or health plans every 3 months if they want. So if someone needs some complicated treatment there aren't massive problems with compliance issues. And there is no one clogging up the ER due to homelessness, very very few due to drug-seeking behavior, and less for problems that could have been solved as an outpatient. A pleasure! I found this out during my tour of the ER where I got to talk with one of the ER doctors who was trained in internal medicine in New York and moved to Israel about 6-8 years ago. She agreed that there was vastly less ridiculousness to make her job unpleasant -- but she did complain about the salary, which I had no polite way to try to quantify. What else --they staff very generously so everyone gets seen quickly, workups happen quickly, and no one is super grumpy. The ER is full of posters about biological warfare and they have regular practice regarding major trauma/terrorism events. They can very quickly double the bed capacity with equipment that comes out of the ceiling in the waiting area and other things that magically unfold. The last major thing that happened was a wedding with 250 people where I guess the floor of the building collapsed and they suddenly had all these people rushed in. That must have been very very vigorous dancing of the hora!

Hadassah has a 700 bed capacity but is already in the middle of constructing a massive new 14 story tower to be finished in 2012 that will supply another 500 beds. There will be a healing garden on every other floor "because people do better when nature is emphasized" ... and 4 floors that are completely underground including the OR, the doctors' offices, and medical records -- this is in case of war and bombings. Sad that this kind of thing always has to be taken into account, but that's the reality sometimes of life in this country. Also sad is that because of this construction, those Marc Chagall stained glass windows in the synagogue have been covered up to protect them! So we'll have to come back. We'll add one more thing to the long list of things we missed in Jerusalem, which also includes seeing the underground excavation area with the tunnels under the Old City...

From there we went to Yad VaShem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yad_Vashem), the massive Holocaust memorial and museum. It was really done on a grand scale, which of course helps mirror the hugeness of the atrocities committed. We spent 3 hours just looking at the exhibits of the major museum. I was especially captivated by the audiovisual histories of different survivors that were playing (mostly in Hebrew with English subtitles as these are people who had found refuge in Israel after the Holocaust). We then realized we had finished so late that we missed the accessory museums including artwork by Holocaust survivors, and the outdoor garden area, and a few other things.

That evening we went for Ethiopian food which I thought would be interesting since there is such a sizeable community of Ethiopian immigrants. The restaurant wasn't that fabulous, but I did enjoy talking to the proprietor in Hebrew about the difference between the injera from Oakland to Jerusalem (he claims more authentic teff comes to Israel from Ethiopia, which is really just a few hours away by plane).

The following day we decided we had not yet overdosed on museums, so we went to the Israel Museum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Museum)-- but hadn't realized it is undergoing a massive renovation and will probably be reopening later this year. It's the largest museum in Israel, but all the art and stuff was off limits. We were relegated to the Dead Sea Scrolls, housed in an interesting building called the Shrine of the Book which resembles a white Hershey kiss but is actually supposed to simulate what the earthenware pots looked like in which the first 7 scrolls were found.

I had a nice hour long tour of this exhibit, which was about this weird cultish group called the Essenes who had moved away from Jerusalem in the 2nd century or so, were into ascetism and communal living in the Dead Sea area (somewhere away from Sodom and Gomorrah, I'll have to assume), and wrote these scrolls found at Qumran. There was also an interesting exhibit on the Song of the Sea (the celebratory song that was sung in the Bible when the Egyptians drowned in the Red Sea) and different audiotaped renditions of it depending on the different cultural origins of the singers. The other thing that was very interesting (and not off limits) was a reconstruction on a 1:50 scale of Jerusalem during the 2nd Temple Period.

From there we went to another interesting but smaller museum called Ticho House (http://www.english.imjnet.org.il/HTMLs/Ticho_House3.aspx?c0=13392&bsp=12940), an old restored house owned by an opthalmologist and his artist wife, which had art by his wife, his Menorah collection, period furniture and also a modern jewelry exhibit by 4 female artists. In addition to that, it houses a really lovely restaurant called "Little Jerusalem" where we had a delicious meal.

We finished the evening by walking through Ben-Yehudah Street again, the pedestrian mall that was this time beyond full to capacity due to a free concert going on at the end of it. It turned out my mom was better at pushing through the mosh pit than I was! Apparently they've been organizing these concerts lately to better serve the "secular" (non-religious) community of young people, which is cool. This street has tons of all types of stores, but especially features religious paraphernalia (cool stuff like stunning art mezuzot, and less cool stuff like kippot embroidered with the name of one's favorite football team) and somehow we didn't manage to get out of there without buying a few items :)

The next morning we were on our way to the Galilee in the north and Kibbutz Sasa, but not before I got lost getting out of Jerusalem by car (however nowhere near as badly as getting in -- it only involved one or two complete circles around the old city... ;-)

More soon.

Jerusalem of Gold, Part 1.

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Tue, 04 May 2010 19:49:00 +0000

So once we finally found the right place in Jerusalem with my patient and kind host Noa trying to give us directions over the phone, it was beautiful! She lives in a very central and green/flowery neighborhood named Rechavia in a nice apartment building. By the way, one thing that is striking about Jerusalem is that you realize that all the buildings are built with the same Jerusalem limestone that the ancient buildings are, too. This is a city code and it is truly amazing to see the amount of restoration work and rebuilding done in order to make new look old! Also there doesn't seem to be an economic slump here at all -- construction and life continue unabated.

By the next morning we had recovered from that drive sufficiently to decide that we should take the "99" bus tour of the city -- a circle tour much like the British double-decker buses that hits some of the major points of interest. We thought it left from one spot which was walkable from Noa's place, but once we got there it turned out that all of Yaffo Street was being dug up and therefore we had to take a bus from there to the Central Bus Terminal (Tachanah Ha-Mercazit).

Wow, it was huge! 3 floors of comings and goings and a ton of military people (really kids because they're all between 18 and 21) floating around, probably on their way home for Shabbat. Mixed in with very religious people, average people, tourist people, etc., etc. It made for a very colorful bout of people-watching. Of course once we got there we found out we had just missed the bus and had to wait about 90 minutes, during which we did more people watching. I haven't mentioned this before because it is such a normal part of life, but of course whenever you enter a bus terminal, train station, mall (even outdoor pedestrian mall), etc., you have to go through security and often a metal detector. We got used to these small intrusions pretty quickly and have been fortunate enough to have nothing but a feeling of safety throughout this trip, but it's a constant reminder of the terrorism issues people have suffered through during the Intifadas of the last decade...

Anyway we got on the bus which had headsets through which you could listen in your choice of 8 different languages (but when I turned to the button for English it kept giving me either Hebrew or Spanish -- there's a message to me, I guess). As soon as we were seated on top of the double decker bus with the open sides for easier photography, the weather turned nasty, cold, windy and occasionally rainy and we thought by the end of that two hour trip that we were going to either a) freeze to death or b) develop pneumonia. Luckily I can now report 4 days later that neither of those outcomes ended up happening. We did get a decent overview of the major sites including the Old City, the Mount of Olives, Ein Kerem, the Knesset, some of the major museums I'd driven by the previous day, the hills in the area and the architecture ... but overall I would not really recommend this bus tour unless the weather is stunning and you like overtouristy things. We later found out that of course almost as much could be accomplished with normal city buses, but you kind of have to know your way around.

The David's Harp bridge was pretty damn cool, an architectural masterpiece:

After all that we walked to the famed Machaneh Yehudah market, or shuk (see http://jerusalem.wikispaces.com/The+Machaneh+Yehudah+Market, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahane_Yehuda_Market, and a terrific photo essay at http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/117142), which was a total frenzy on a Friday afternoon right before Shabbat! Fabulous produce and all sorts of middle eastern spices and nuts and dried fruits which I took some photos of. However, the merchants are not the nicest you might encounter. I asked a guy a question about some dates or raisins and his response (in Hebrew) was something like "Lady, I don't have time, years are passing!" Another not-nice merchant was the guy who sold chocolate rugelach -- but at least they were delicious! After all that wandering around the market, naturally one would develop an appetite -- fully satiated at Levi Brothers Falafel, where a huge laffa (suitable for at least 2 people to share) with falafel, your choice of salads, and even fries stuffed in will run you 17 shekels (about $4.50 USD). We did leave with a smile on our faces...

And then we walked from there around the central neighborhood, into the Ben-Yehudah Street pedestrian mall. It was kind of a ghost town (because of being pre-Shabbat),

actually we didn't realize how MUCH of a ghost town till we were there several days later in the evening and it was then much like a mosh pit.

We strolled around there and then back to Noa's place in Rechavia. We rested for a little while and then ventured out again, as a friend of mine named Ronna who I've known through the Internet for at least 5 years but had never met had invited us for Shabbat dinner! The way the taxi system works in Jerusalem is simply amazing (and the exact inverse of my level of fun driving around Jerusalem) -- either you stand on the street and within a minute a cab stops -- or you call a cab phone number, they tell you they will be there in 5 minutes but are there in 3. And though I'd read all sorts of crap about how you had to insist they use the meter or they would try to suggest some sort of bogus price for the trip that would always end up being more than the meter -- not a single cabbie in the multiple cab rides we took did NOT automatically put on the meter right away. They are generally as pleasant as the bus drivers are not.

We had a delightful dinner with Ronna who had all sorts of lovely things prepared for us like stuffed grape leaves, quinoa, salad, chicken, and wine. And we chatted late into the evening just like old friends who have simply never met face to face before :)

The next day, tired though we were from all the walking of the previous day, we decided to go on the Sandemann's tour of the Old City at 11 am. For those of you who haven't heard of Sandemann's --check out their web site at http://www.newjerusalemtours.com/ -- they are a group of enthusiastic and inspired young people who do free tours of multiple cities in Europe, and also Jerusalem. They work for tips, on the philosophy that everyone of any budget should get to enjoy a professionally guided tour of these cities and then if you'd like to tip them, it's up to you. Our tour guide, Amir, was fantastic, not at all pushy about the tipping thing, and super-knowledgeable. He's a college student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem studying philosophy and I can't remember what else, but I bet he's a good student. He was really good at providing fair and balanced info regarding all the world religions and groups that had a piece of Jerusalem's 4000+ year history.

He led us to each of the four quarters of the Old City up and down several billion steps and onto some of the rooftops for spectacular views. For those of you unfamiliar, the four quarters are the Christian Quarter, the Armenian Quarter, the Jewish Quarter and the Muslim Quarter (which is really a lot bigger than 1/4 of the total, but anyway): here's the Wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Jerusalem. We saw religious types of every type as well as ordinary people, tourists and of course much of it is one huge Arab souk which is really fun to browse all the kinds of stuff for sale there. We saw lots of Armenian art, various churches including Syrian Orthodox and Ethiopian, we saw the Western Wall (also known as the Wailing Wall because it's the last remaining wall of the 2nd Temple). Normally it is also like a mosh pit -- but not on Shabbat. The really religious were mostly busy observing Shabbat elsewhere, so we could get up close and personal with it -- but the only downside was no photography was allowed on Shabbat.

We placed little notes with wishes and requests into the crevices as there's a belief that your prayers will be answered ... this has been done traditionally throughout the years, but apparently now you can also send an email to the Chief Rabbi who will then have it placed for you. (This stuff is vaguely akin to kids writing Santa in the commercialized Christian religion about what their wish-list is.) Per the tour leader who was very funny, apparently Obama placed a folded up wish into the wall shortly before his election, so who knows how powerful it is ... and also he told us a story about what happens to the old notes, why is there always room to shove more in there? Apparently once a month someone goes around at night and collects all the notes and then buries them somewhere in the ground to make room for the new ones. Who knows if that's true?

Amir was really funny and informative and gave us more than 3 hours of his time and we ended up giving him a nice tip and I hope most of the other people did too. Most of them were from other countries, many non-primarily-English-speaking. Anyway, I would recommend this tour 10x more than the #99 bus!

Once again we were hungry after walking, so we went back in through the Jaffa Gate and walked almost all the way to the Damascus Gate (the mostly Muslim Quarter). On Via Dolorosa (somewhere near one of those stations of the cross) is an absolute gem called Hummus Lina. I'd read about this place on Chowhound as possibly the best Hummus place in the old city (and there is lots of competition!) and I think they may have been right. We ordered hummus with pine nuts, and Arabic salad with labneh with mint, and yummy yummy pita bread. And fresh squeezed grapefruit juice, a whole jug of it. This was one of the least expensive meals we have had this trip, and at the same time one of the best! The contented sighs coming from our table were a fitting end to an exhausting day. Here is someone else's obsessive rave review of this place, with photos: http://humus101.com/EN/2007/07/16/old-jerusalem-part-ii-hummus-lina/. Enjoy :)

That night it was Lag BaOmer, a Jewish holiday with Kabbalistic significance which celebrates the end of a plague and involves lots of bonfires ... for more info see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lag_Ba-Omer. Unfortunately we were so tired and I had a migraine that we kind of missed going out to see the bonfires. But I'm sure they were fab.

More Jerusalem tidbits, to be continued in Part 2.

The Sea of Salt

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Mon, 03 May 2010 20:10:00 +0000

The drive from Eilat (which we reluctantly left -- could've spent a little longer there) to the Dead Sea/Ein Gedi region was somewhere between 2.5 and 3 hours. So we decided to prepare ourselves for the long journey by dining at ... that's right, Achlah! :) While driving somewhere the previous day and getting slightly lost, I had seen it out of the corner of my eye. I figured at that point that it must be a chain. When we ate at the one in Eilat, I asked for a business card only to discover that they have a total of 3 locations in Israel -- the third is in Petach Tikvah which we won't be hitting. Next time ;)

Anyway after the morning snorkeling, the aquarium, and then all that food with all that yummy laffa BREAD, lo and behold, on the drive north I began to feel very verrrrrry sleepy. I had to pull over at Kibbutz Lotan for a carbo-load-induced nap. After that I continued on, but we didn't get to our guest house (Bet Sarah -- part of the Israeli Youth Hostel Association and really excellent!!!) till right around sunset. I pulled over on the way to photograph humongous mounds of salt (they of course mine salt from the Dead Sea). We also sadly since we were running late had to pass up Sodom (which is still a real place, but I suspect much less action than in Biblical days) and just got a passing glance at Eshet Lot (remember Lot's wife who turned into a pillar of salt? Well, this would absolutely be the place to do it!) Our guest house digs were actually quite lovely and located very close to the Ein Gedi Nature Reserve. Once again we passed out from exhaustion ... and awoke fairly early in the morning.

That next morning, we had what I think has most qualified for Top Israeli Breakfast so far. This means an incredible extravaganza of all products dairy -- cottage cheese, yogurt, sour cream or something like it, something like feta cheese, etc. -- as well as all different kinds of salads, including those featuring eggplant, amazing breads, fried eggs, and herring! My mother really enjoyed the herring but regretted it later in the day when she was very, verrrrrrrrrry, thirsty ;)

From there we went to start the day at Ein Gedi Nature Reserve (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ein_Gedi). Ein Gedi is an oasis in the Judean desert right near the Dead Sea. It has a remarkable number of types of wildlife unique to that area ... we were looking out for the ibex but instead found lots and lots of adorable rock hyrax, which I will be boring you with photos of.

I did a hike to David's waterfall -- actually it's a series of waterfalls with these amazing pools you can swim in, only I couldn't both carry my camera and go bathing as my mom was not able to hike this path. The camera won. Good thing I did this hike early, because there was a ridiculous number of school groups touring the area and the day was only going to get hotter! I would totally recommend spending more time in this place.

It's close to Massada and Qumran where the Dead Sea Scrolls were written by the Essenes (more on that later). There is also a kibbutz around there that apparently has an amazing botanical garden worth seeing. (Next time). We also saw an archeologic site of an excavated temple from the 2nd century, one of the oldest in Israel. It had great mosaic floors with designs.

From there we went to Massada (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massada) which is the site of a massive rebellion/siege that took place about 2000 years ago during the Judeo-Roman war -- when it appeared the Jews were going to lose, they committed suicide rather than surrender. The IDF (Israeli army) often take their vows at that site -- proof, I suppose, that they're really serious. In any case, it has been excavated over the years and was a whole town and series of buildings, amazing archeology much like some of the sites in Turkey like Ephesus I would say. Maybe not quite as spectacular but on the same scale. And it's a fortress with incredible views and a MASSIVE hike up called the Snake Trail which I would have very much liked to do but once again my mom couldn't so we took the very efficient cable car which takes 3 minutes instead.

Next stop was Ein Bokek, which I would not recommend bothering with. Too overtouristy with some nasty people manning the beach. This is the place where everyone takes the photos of taking a dip in the Dead Sea while reading a newspaper and staying afloat with no problem. That and applying Dead Sea Mud to treat whatever ails them. I just waded in a little bit and found that a wound I had on my left foot started burning like hell. So I aborted the attempt to heal myself, because I don't like the "no pain, no gain" type of healing all that much (see my blog on the healer from Bali to see what I mean by that)...

We then went back to Ein Gedi beach, but realized that though this beach was a LOT nicer, we had really kind of run out of time if we were going to make it to Jerusalem by 6pm, which was the original goal ... So we ditched it and I will go back to it next time. And then we went to the Ahava factory outlet store (they made dead sea mineral products but turn out to be still ridiculously expensive at the factory outlet, so no purchases made). At least there was an interesting exhibition of art made from salt.

And then I drove to Jerusalem which takes about an hour from there, passing through a town called Ma'aleh Adumim to buy gas once again. Did I mention gas costs oodles!!? We spent another $60 or so on that tank. And I was going to drop off the car at the Eldan outpost in central Jerusalem, only ... I missed a turn on my Google map directions and got unbelievably lost in Jerusalem with godawful traffic and people honking their horns behind me. Awful stress. I called our host there, Noa, who tried hard to direct me but was limited due to the fact that she doesn't drive and nearly all the streets turned out to be one way streets! We managed to pass through two very religious neighborhoods (we were definitely in Ma'alot Dafna and I think Mea She'arim) where we saw more penguins ... and then we passed the huge menorah of the Knesset

and a gorgeous rose garden, so it was a bit of an impromptu driving tour but one under great stress ... and we finally got to my host at 6:45 pm. Eldan had closed at 6. Luckily we found a place to park overnight and Eldan was cool about returning the car early in the morning the next day, but boy, I was never so thrilled to return a car!!! More to come on Jerusalem.

Hai Bar, the spectacular Timna Valley and the underwater world of Eilat!

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Mon, 03 May 2010 08:05:00 +0000

We continued to enjoy the desert ... this area of the Negev is where a lot of the stuff in the Bible happened. The landscapes are so spectacular that it's easier to understand why the language the Bible uses is that of hyperbole. Our next stop on the tourist trail was the Hai Bar Wild Animal and Nature Reserve -- here are some links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yotvata_Hai-Bar_Nature_Reserve, and http://redseadesert.com/html/060haibar.html. Endangered and extinct animals mentioned in the Bible are bred here for possible reintroduction to the Negev desert. There's an area where you can view noctural animals, another one to see Israeli birds of prey, and the main area where you drive through with your car and the wildlife roams free. Pretty cool! We saw lots of Arabian oryx, some Somali Wild Ass, lots of Nubian Ibex, and a ton of ostriches!!! And the ostriches were so bold that they waddled right up to the car and started tapping on my driver's side window with their beaks!! So I'll have some extreme close up photos to show :) They were literally seeing eye to eye with me :) Don't know why I have this Dr. Doolittle thing going on but it sure is fun!

Our next stop was the incredible Timna Valley Park -- see this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timna_Valley_Park. This is an area of much history made into another national park ... there are 9 km of driving trails and then many many different sites that you can explore by foot. It features amazing sandstone formations, nicknamed "the mushroom", "the mushroom and a half", "the arches", some copper mines dating back 6000 years with ancient tools found as well (everything in Israel turns out to be archaeological), King Solomon's pillars (which actually have nothing to do with King Solomon, but the name stuck, and I got to climb around there with a German tour group and then exit through a shrine to Hathor, the female Egyptian goddess of mining. They also had built a life-size replica of the biblical tabernacle, which was described in exact dimensions and such in the Bible, kinda interesting to see... It's too bad it was about 100 degrees that day (38+ for you Celsius fans)!

The following day we left for the hmmmm... not greener, but wetter pastures of Eilat, which is just a half hour south and on the very very southern tip of Israel at the Red Sea. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eilat). Israel is incredibly narrow at that point of the triangle and therefore very very close to land borders with both Jordan, to the East, and Egypt, to the west. Luckily these are fairly friendly borders. The Red Sea, of course, is a misnomer. For more on that see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_sea. It's not red. Also, in Hebrew it's not called that -- it's Yam Soof, which I have to assume meant that they thought it was the sea at the end of their world. This is also the sea that parted in half during the Biblical escape of the Jews from Egypt. In order to observe this phenomenon, my mom and I took a little boat trip with a company called Yam Yisrael -- they have glass bottomed boats with a few decks where they go from Eilat to the edge of both Jordanian and Egyptian borders, and back. It passed an area called "Dolphin Cove" where you can see dolphins surfacing, for some reason they especially like that area though they are not contained there (free food? ;) You can see all sorts of amazing sea life through the glass bottomed area, and coral, especially in one area that I have not been able to figure out why they call "the Japanese Garden". Most of the other passengers on the boat were Arab or Russian. The boat people turned up some catchy Arabic music and the Arabs entertained themselves and others with some inspired dancing. The Russians didn't do much to entertain -- there being no vodka around. Anyway, folks, I have to tell you, the Red Sea did not part AT ALL during our little boat trip, tragically. I asked for a refund but those folks have no sense of humor! ;-)

Later that evening we went on a search from our hostel to find Eddie's Hideaway, an aptly named restaurant which was really just a block or two from the hostel and featured delicious fish and seafood, apparently owned by an American. Because it was so hidden away down an alley which emptied into a courtyard, it was just us and a large number of locals who all know about it, but no identifiable other tourists. Very nice :) They feature denis, which is also known as sea bream and local to that area.

The next morning we got up super early and went to the Coral Beach Nature Reserve (http://www.parks.org.il/BuildaGate5/general2/data_card.php?Cat=~25~~410455042) and I got to go snorkeling there and it was AMAZING. I'd say the fishies and coral in Malaysia in the Perhentian Islands which I went to 8 months ago were even more amazing, but this was pretty cool indeed! I loved floating past all that color and sea life.

Just sorry I couldn't do it for longer -- but we had to move on to the incredible Underwater Observatory (http://www.coralworld.com/eilat/eng/) where there are terrific and beautiful tanks of unusual fish but also a large area where you descend into the ocean inside this building and get to see the sea life all around you through windows without getting wet. They also have tortoises, a shark tank where we got to see the feeding, a small Amazon section, and very lovely and patient staff who go through all sorts of interesting information and explanations in both Hebrew and English. As a result I got to learn more words I never learned in bilingual school, important words like anemone שושנת-ים, shark כריש, fins סנפירים, etc. I had so much fun I didn't want to leave!

But we had to move on, from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea (I think it was called that because no life could exist there, it's 10x more salty than other oceans, but recently microbiologists have ruined all the fun with discovery of 11 bacterial species that can survive there -- but once again in Hebrew the name is more appropriately titled ים המלח or "Sea of Salt"). More on that in the next blog entry, but till then here's a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_sea

Enjoy!

Wandering in the Desert -- Ein Avdat, Mitzpeh Ramon, and Kibbutz Ketura in the Arava.

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Sun, 02 May 2010 16:30:00 +0000

Sorry about no decent internet access for quite a while to post updates but I feel as though I've been here a really long time and done so much and at the same time it's not enough ;-)

So when last I left you, we were in the loving care of Iseec and his wife Leah. Iseec hand-delivered us to the Eldan car rental company the following morning, where we were delighted to discover that though I had booked a tin can car rental on the internet, instead I was given a Mazda 3, apparently the most popular car in Israel. I think Iseec had something to do with the upgrade, must have put in a good Sabra word for me ;-)

The nice Ethiopian guy who got my car for me was very apologetic having spent 10 minutes looking for a map for me in English but couldn't find one. Iseec told him it was no problem as I can read Hebrew. I too thought it was no problem, but later (of course) when I was asking my mom to help me with map reading it occurred to me that she can't read Hebrew! So driving at highway speed and reading a Hebrew map was a little much. I was lucky to be in the desert where the drivers are less ... Israeli, shall we say (by this I mean aggressive, tailgating, honking the horn if they think you're driving too slowly, passing you by going into the lane of oncoming traffic... -- actually very much like New York City).

So off we went, from Netanya south, farrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr south, to Ein Avdat and Avdat -- a site where there was an ancient Nabatean civilization. Lots of very cool archeology to see but my mom got tired walking so I did a quick buzz through on my own.

There I happened to meet a woman who was a Black Hebrew who lived in the area --her family had immigrated to Israel from Chicago and she was born in Israel but spoke English with an African American accent though she has never been to the US. Apparently a community moved from the Midwest at some point in the past, including some relatives of Whitney Houston's. Hopefully they had a better outcome than she did, eh? We gave her this woman a lift to Mitzpeh Ramon which was our next stop. Here there is an incredible geological crater. I will try to put in some photos. I can't even begin to describe what this would resemble in the US? Maybe the Grand Canyon? Except of course I have never been to the Grand Canyon! Anyway it is quite impressive. We would have liked to go to Bio-Ramon, the sort of zoological park that goes with the crater visitor center, but ran out of time. At some point we bought one of those all-Israel National Park Passes which is priced pretty high at about US $35ish per person, but you can get into 63 different sites over a two week period and it was just easier than spending separate money each time.

From Mitzpeh Ramon we went on to where we were spending the night, Kibbutz Keturah in the Arava (an agricultural area within the Negev Desert). This Kibbutz was set up in the 1970s by North American immigrants. They had quite a nice B and B that we stayed at, and a gorgeous pool which unfortunately was only open between 3 and 6 pm so we missed out on that too. The following morning, a very nice guy named Mike who had lived there since the beginning gave us an incredible tour of the kibbutz and the experimental orchards and algae farming they have there. Most kibbutzim (which are collectives that are part agricultural/part industrial) have privatized in the last decade or two, but this one has not, meaning that no matter what a member does for a living, his/her salary goes to the group at large and everyone benefits or profits equally from the work of the group at large. Socialist, kinda. But the people are very happy there and they're doing well.

The two biggest moneymakers there are date orchards and algae farming. They produce medjool and deglet noor dates that are yummy, and they have an interesting understanding with the surrounding middle eastern countries -- they'll buy their products as long as there is no mention of the word "Israel" on it. So they market them as "Jordan River Valley Dates" with a mailing address that is a PO Box in Jericho (which is in the West Bank), and laugh all the way to the bank, and their neighbors get to eat the yummy dates they crave. The other business, the algae farming -- he told us all the scientific names which a week later I have since sadly forgotten but I will look up when I get home. They grow them in closed systems which use as little water and recycle as much as possible, given that they are in the desert, and these algae when fed to salmon first of all have major antioxidant properties, but also cause them to turn the lovely salmon pink color that makes people want to buy them instead of the gray color they otherwise would have been. Very high tech stuff. In the experimental orchard they are also growing various types of trees to determine what would be good to provide fodder for animals in Africa, and also spice trees and some acacia trees and lots lots more. The stay at the kibbutz was very comfortable, the only downside was the food is served in a dining hall and was less than inspired. We did pay a visit down the road to the Kibbutz Yotvata dairy, where they have very very fabulous (and pricey) ice cream.

Another comment on Israeli food -- they eat salads all day long. Including breakfast. The Israeli breakfast is kinda famous. Tons of really wonderful dairy products, salad salad salad, terrific bread, maybe some sour cherry jam, coffee. But not big on cereal, pastries, etc. And, no dessert even at dinnertime. No wonder they all look thin and healthy. The tomatoes and the avocadoes are supreme. At Shmuel's house we had an avocado that probably weighed almost a kilo. They dwarf anything sold in the US. Don't know how they do it.

Also at the kibbutz I bonded with the local cows. They are raised primarily for dairy and not for meat. They are black and white and cute all over. One night I drove in after a day out in the hot desert sightseeing (see the next entry) and decided for some reason looking at the cows that they would probably enjoy licking my salty arm. So I parked the car and stuck my arm into the pen and sure enough 5 cows lined up to get a piece of me. They would grab my whole hand into their mouths and suck on it! Their teeth aren't sharp so it wasn't a problem. For those of you who are thinking ewwwwwwwwwwww, why, that's gross -- actually their tongues have a nice consistency, kind of scratchy like a cat's tongue. I think if on my way back into the country I am asked if I did anything agricultural, I'm just gonna say "of course not" (and "please don't read my blog" ;-).

Next entry will discuss Timna Valley Park which was AMAZING!

Bienvenidas a Israel!/Bruchot ha-Baot! (Kfar Saba, Tel Aviv, and Netanya)

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 22:19:00 +0000

After that relatively icky flight, we arrived at Ben Gurion airport, and went through a very long and disorganized immigration line in which I met about 20 people from Mexico who were friendly and nice to talk to and on a religious pilgrimage. There was a 'march of the penguins' into a separated line. Finally we went through and the Israeli immigrations official was not at all interested or concerned about my passport including several Muslim countries. And customs was a nonexistent thing where no one declared anything and everyone just went through and the three guys there looked to be having a very boring afternoon.

And then, there was Shmuel/Eduardo, my wonderful Couchsurfing host, holding a sign that said "CAROL" in big letters on it, welcoming us to the Promised Land! Actually a different person named Carol had approached him, wanting her to take him to the Hilton in Tel Aviv ... but he declined since she looked nothing like my photo. Instead he ended up bringing us to his home in Kfar Saba. In his *fabulous* brilliant blue Prius, which even my mom has now fallen in love with!

I mention both names because he is originally from Argentina, and immigrated with his family to Israel when he was 11, at which point I think everyone except his mom started calling him Shmuel. He is a lovely man who pioneered and patented a series of notebooks for schoolchildrent that is very innovative and sold in many many stores in Israel. His terrific wife Aliza runs a company which makes electrical connectors and sells them to the military. But each of them has another amazing talent/love -- Shmuel is a fabulous glass artist, in addition to a musician and Aliza makes the most gorgeous quilts --each one different, vibrant, and filled with color. So if you can imagine their house as a beautiful conglomeration of the two in Kfar Saba (a Tel Aviv suburb), you've imagined pretty accurately! It was a paradise in which to recover from jet lag.

The first afternoon, Shmuel took us to "a little mall" near his home that was stunning and impressive and had a beautiful square in it with decorations left over for Yom Ha-Atzmaut (Israeli Independence Day which was a few days before we arrived).

He then also took us to the "green line" which is the border wall between Israel and the West Bank, only a few miles from his home. You could look right across and see an Arab village named Kalkiliyah on the other side. They used to have free trade between Kalkiliyah and Kfar Saba and many of the people from Kalkiliyah were employed in Kfar Saba ... but when the Intifadas happened and enough suicide bombings happened, that normal neighborly relationship was normal no longer. This actually screwed the people living on the other side even more, financially. Very sobering to look at this sad evidence that neighbors just can't get along. And no one really has a solution for these issues...

In keeping with my feeling and belief that world domination and relationships between nations should, of course, be based on food, in the evening he and Aliza took us out to a YUMalicious restaurant called "Achlah" (which means cool in Hebrew) where they bring out like 15-20 different plates of different mezze type dishes and you just help yourself to that and the most delicious bread ever and they keep bringing out more to replenish whatever you've just eaten.

Since at least 5 of these dishes contained eggplant in various permutations, I was literally in heaven. I had to close my eyes at times to savor the experience with enough respect. This is the type of restaurant that the Israelis would refer to as an "Oriental" restaurant. This has nothing to do with Asia whatsoever, but their word for "oriental" or "eastern", Mizrachi, refers to the Middle Eastern region, not the far eastern region. So because I had read up ahead of time, I didn't feel like it was a bait-and-switch at all ;-) After the meal we got to go behind the scenes and watch them make up all those mezze plates, throw the bread against the wall of the tandoori-style oven, and chat with the Indian guy who makes all the hummus. I got some great photos.

The reason why I have entitled this blog entry like I did is that whenever Shmuel, whose English is actually quite good, could not think of how to say something he would say it in Spanish or Hebrew. Both of which I understood. And when we met his 84 year old mom, she speaks only Spanish and Hebrew but mixes both of them into a sentence not quite realizing what she is doing, but it was totally cool because I understood the whole sentence because of knowing both languages -- in the US we call a weird mix like this with English "Spanglish" -- so I guess I was hearing "Spebrew" in Israel! We also got to meet his son Nir (another redhead!) and his girlfriend Inbal, who were cute young people in their early 20s just out of the army. They showed us some Facebook photos of Nir's experience in the army, a reminder of how this pervades all young people's lives there. All except the ultrareligious, who everyone else resents for getting an excuse out of serving in the army. And we got to meet Aliza's lovely cousin Miri, who was amazingly fluent in English too!

But in general I feel like I arrived in Israel with a language chip implanted into my brain. I very rarely travel in countries where I actually speak the language well (with the exception of Mexico of course). And it was interesting because in my current life I get almost no practice speaking Hebrew, but given my bilingual school background in the deep dark past, I have been able to understand 90% percent of what has been said (and simultaneously translate it to my mom who understands no Hebrew). It is totally cool -- like I've internally downloaded an app. I'm a lot less worried about map-reading and such.

On the morning of the 2nd day we took the bus into Tel Aviv to Shuk ha-Carmel, an amazing produce (and everything-else) market, and the Nachlat Binyamin pedestrial mall area crafts market which is held on Tues and Fri. Of course there I met a vendor who had moved here from Mexico to follow a boyfriend 4 years ago, learned Hebrew fluently, but was delighted to speak Spanish with me. We saw a lot of cool items, and ended up buying some apricots, dates, baklava, a freshly baked bread with olive oil and herbs, and cheese. And falafel.

Outside the market, Tel Aviv is an entirely modern city with very lovely white Bauhaus period architecture and a huge diversity of people. Something much beyond anything my mom expected but which didn't surprise me.

And it is completely secular and nonreligious. After the markets, we walked to the beach promenade (Tayelet) which runs down the whole length of Tel Aviv which is bordered by the Mediterranean on the west. It was gorgeous.

We walked for a while, then caught the bus back to Kfar Saba in time for a special Shabbat meal which included Persian rice, stuffed grape leaves, an interesting beet dish, etc., etc.

This morning after a delicious breakfast of shakshuka and other Israeli treats, Shmuel and Aliza took us on a fantastic driving tour of Tel Aviv. We saw the very cool architecture in the hip downtown which is being restored with gentrification, we went to Kikar Rabin where Rabin was murdered in 1995 by an ultrareligious guy, and is now a monument to peace,

and then we went to the very hip/artsy/and yet oldest neighborhood in Tel Aviv which is called Neve Tzedek, walked around there, and then had wonderful ice cream -- a brand called "Glidah Savtah" which literally translated means Granny's Ice Cream -- motto being "60 years of quality" which is kinda wild since the country was itself only founded 62 years ago!

Our first hosts then were kind enough to deliver us very directly into the hands of our second hosts, Iseec and Leah, who live in a beautiful seaside community of Netanya, about a half hour north of Tel Aviv.

They gave us a warm welcome and a delicious lunch including yet another variation on eggplant :) And then some really detailed and useful tips and advice regarding my upcoming drive into the Negev desert tomorrow. And then we walked to the stunningly gorgeous beach promenade with all sorts of Gaudi-esque statues of weird fantastic sea creatures, made with mosaic tile and glass. And featuring an equally stunning sunset! We noticed while walking around that Netanya has very large Ethiopian and Russian recent-immigrant populations ... And then it was back home for a yummy dinner and more delightful discussion.

In addition to the language being wonderfully familiar, I feel that way about the people I've met so far. They have treated me, and my mom, like family. Actually better than family. The kind of family you'd have if you could actively *pick* your family members. I guess this is another plug for couchsurfing :)

A long day's journey into Israel

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 21:47:00 +0000

After much too much work, much too little sleep, and obsessive last minute planning, I left San Francisco on April 20, having worked the 19th till midnight and then stayed up packing till 4:30 am when I had to leave for the airport. As a result, I forgot just a few basic things, like toothpaste, deodorant, and I'm sure if I had been wearing socks they would have been horribly mismatched. I had not taken out a suitcase till after midnight when I came home from work, the better to deceive my cat that all was normal. As soon as he saw the suitcase, he was Not Happy. He followed me and the suitcase up the stairs, crying, which made me feel terrible. At 4:15 am I called the usual car service that I use to get to the BART. They picked up after a million rings, to tell me they didn't have anyone available. They suggested dialling another number. That car service said sure, 15 minutes. After a half hour it turned out that the first driver had apparently "given up" (anyone who's tried to drive in my neighborhood in the pouring rain in the dark for the first time would understand why) and the second one was waiting ... 3 houses away. So, the stress continued as I was no longer sure I'd make it to the airport on time. However, it turned out I had made a mistake and while I thought the flight was leaving at 7 am, it was leaving at 7:20 so it all worked out!

I apparently had taken a suitcase with a ridiculously stable and therefore heavy frame, so it weighed in at 49 lbs, with another overhead bag with a huge amount of heavy paper and books in it. Whew. Just under the cutoff. When I boarded the plane, I was so tired that I barely noticed the man next to me except that he had a somewhat unusual accent. I became immediately comatose, even before the plane took off, and woke about a half hour before landing. On landing, my seat-neighbor pulled out a cell phone and I realized it was Hebrew he was speaking. How's that for a bizarre omen!

My mom picked me up at JFK airport and all went well with that. We went out for dinner and then I had to spend the rest of the night and next morning reorganizing my ridiculously packed and heavy luggage, repacking it into one of her extra and lighter suitcases. I also organized my Israel info into various folders.

The next day we had been told to arrive at the airport by 4 pm for a 7 pm flight. We actually arrived at 3:30, got checked in relatively quickly with just a few extra security questions beyond the standard ones, and my mom felt a little disappointed/let down at the lack of interrogation on the way to Israel. I did point out to her that we both do share that innocent look and perhaps they were questioning other people more? When we got upstairs we sat waiting next to a woman with a cat in a carrier who turned out to be a vet who had come to Oklahoma from Israel for her 7 year training in veterinary internal medicine. She was paying >$1000 for the cat to fly in the seat next to her. He was a redhead, and his name was Simba. She confided in me that she was flying her other 13 cats and a few dogs in cargo...

When we got on the plane, we realized it was unbelievably tight seating with zero leg room. I literally had to crawl over the 2 outer seats to make it to the inner seat. We were just totally fortunate there was no one between us in the middle seat! And the two of us had a dinner with excellent hummus and pita bread, but lousy chicken, and then fell asleep almost right away, (as Schaffers are excellent sleepers) and slept for many hours, but woke up still well before the 11 hour flight was over. We woke up to realize that there was a very large number of ultrareligious people on the plane (who I will henceforth refer to as 'penguins') and that they were very annoying. They kept getting up to pray (because with the changing time zones, I guess it's always ma'ariv or shacharit (the timed evening and morning prayers) *somewhere* in the world, isn't it.

It turns out that penguins are very messy, as you might imagine, when they go to the bathroom, and Israeli flight attendants think it is below them to actually clean anything. So that was a really bad combo by hour 11 of the flight. Enough said. Suffice it to say that in the future if returning to Israel I will purposely look for another airline to fly, other than El Al.

We arrived at Ben Gurion airport, and went through a very long and disorganized immigration line in which I met about 20 people from Mexico who were friendly and nice to talk to and on a religious pilgrimage. There was a 'march of the penguins' into a separated line. Finally we went through and the Israeli immigrations official was not at all interested or concerned about my passport including several Muslim countries. And customs was a nonexistent thing where no one declared anything and everyone just went through and the three guys there looked to be having a very boring afternoon.

More in the next entry ... :)

I'm off to see the world again :)

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 23:10:00 +0000

Hi folks!

For those of you who were wondering what I've been up to (other than that dirty 4-letter word, WORK), I've been frantically doing last-minute planning, as usual, this time for a trip to Israel with my mom who's always wanted to visit there! I am flying to New York on 4/20, then flying with her on 4/21, nonstop to Tel Aviv, landing on 4/22.

Hopefully.

Since the unitiated may be unaware that I cause major cataclysms in the world just even by making travel plans, which I've written about before, let me share the latest news with you. No, not the latest earthquake in China -- too far from our itinerary for me to have caused that one -- but try this on for size:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2010-04-15-volcano-disrupts-europe-travel_N.htm?csp=34

Right. An Icelandic volcano eruption has cancelled all/most flights anywhere in the vicinity of Europe, which I believe one has to fly over to get from New York to Israel. When will stuff be up and running? No one knows!

So, wish us luck with the skies clearing up, as I am chafing at the bit to take my Mom on a crazy Couchsurfing adventure. And anyone who has any advice about Israel, please feel free to email me!
London too -- we'll be stopping there on our way back, from May 12-15.

And -- apropos to nothing -- please enjoy the current views of my yard, which I'll miss while I'm away:

:) Carol

Tamales, Mines, Museums, and Tequila

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 06:23:00 +0000

When I last left off I had just visited the Hospital de Plaza Mayor. Shortly after that, I had arranged to meet with Pedro, another Guanajuatense Couchsurfer. Pedro had a car! He also brought a friend of his along, and the two of them brought me to this amazing and famous restaurant which no tourists go to, called Tamales Purepecha.

I have no idea exactly how we got there, but one of my Spanish teachers, Vicente, confirmed the next day that it was the best place in Guanajuato for traditional food. They had all types of tamales, I had the one with strawberry in it which was very very good, and then a quesadilla con flor de calabaza (with squash flowers in it). To polish that off, we had champurrado, which is like a hot chocolate drink with atole in it (a corn based porridgy thing that gives it texture). Ultra yum. And no tourists sighted. And though Pedro speaks English, his friend did not, so the entire night was spent speaking in Spanish only, which was great practice. He insisted on treating me to dinner, and then took me on a lovely driving tour of parts of the city that are more uphill that would have been quite difficult for me to get to on my own, including the beautiful Paseo de la Presa neighborhood, and something that closely resembled a castle but which was a hotel, and all the ambassador´s homes. It was really super nice of him and an experience that none of the other students at my school had had. :)

I have spent almost no time alone; the other students at the school have been so friendly that I have done all kinds of stuff with them. The next day after school I had a private medical Spanish tutoring lesson with Carolina who was the mother of one of my teachers at the school, and she taught me some stuff I didn´t know which included "me hace un corraje" which is used to signify that getting upset and/or angry has no doubt caused some GI distress. Then I was supposed to go on a tranvía (tram) tour with some other students which didn´t actually happen as the tourist office here is fairly lame. Andres and Susan and I ended up going to the Mercado Hidalgo instead (the lovely old market here which sells foods and a few souvenir items) and eating some tostadas de camarón plus some cerveza Victoria.

Walking back later with Susan, we came across a complete obstruction of the pedestrian mall -- blocked by a huge dance festival which was in preparation for some other festival/celebration! I got a great spot to stand and watched amazingly costumed groups of dancers representing many of the different states of Mexico. I got some great photos and even shot some video!

After I parted ways with Susan, I bumped into Andres and Craig again, eating at a wonderfully divy shrimp taco place, with coconut-shrimp tacos, so I sat down again with them and tried one which was terrific. We ended up buying some sort of random ??lottery tickets/fundraisers from some cute school children.

Friday was my last day of language school. Very sad because I loved my teachers and the other students in my very small classes. I traded email addresses with most of them and in my culture class we played the Mexican version of Trivial Pursuit which is called Maratón.

I was very impressed with myself because I got an answer right that involved knowing which Mexican woman had fostered the Revolution in her own home -- which I only knew because she was from Queretaro and there is a street there named after her! She is nicknamed La Corregidora. Anyway, Michael and I came from behind to win the game! We named our team Los Quejumbrosos (The Whiners), and prevailed against Los Mucosos (The Snot-Noses) and Los Tardios (The Latecomers). Victory never tasted so sweet!

After school, a few of us went out to El Midi, the South of France restaurant, for lunch. They had a great plum tart for dessert, after some lovely quiches which included almonds and squash in them... Then we went on a school trip which had been organized to La Valenciana mine and the nearby church as well. This was a mine that used to operate, largely silver which is what made all of Guanajuato state so wealthy, and we were able to climb down into it with hard hats. It was hard to breathe in there! And they had used slave labor hundreds of years back. No wonder why -- not sure anyone would voluntarily work in a place where they were likely to develop silicosis (which by the way is the same word in Spanish) and had to carry 100 kg weights. The church was apparently spectacular, but after I spend a few minutes in one, that´s kinda enough.

After that about 10 of us went to dinner at El Abue (the only restaurant in Guanajuato written up in the New York Times!) and then to see the Guanajuato Symphony Orchestra perform at Teatro Principal. El Abue was lovely, with inexpensive yet delicious glasses of white wine, and they were willing to serve me half an order of chiles en nogada (a chile pepper stuffed with meat, spices, raisins, nuts, and other fabulous things). The orchestra was amazing as well, there were at least 60 performers in it, they performed Mozart among some other pieces, and we got plum seats! Not bad for about $6.50 USD!!!

After that there was some more wine and lovely conversation with one of my language school friends. Got up this morning and labelled all of my house mother's Indian spices brought back from India by her clothing-designer daughter who forgot to translate them from English to Spanish! We had a nice breakfast, the whiny and neurotic gluten-insensitive other boarder was not there because she had gone to see the butterflies which may or may not have still been in Michoacan, and then I went to meet up with Stephen and Silvia for some museum-hopping.

First stop: Museo de Diego Rivera. That´s right, this famous painter was born in Guanajuato and lived in this very house till age 6 -- which in Spanish they called "the crucial time of his personality development". So it is now a museum, furnished with the furniture of the times (he was born in the 1880s). Upstairs there are about 100 of his works. I was familiar with his best-known muralist style that he's famous for but hadn't realized that in the 1900s and 1910s he went through many other styles, including cubism and a series depicting old prehispanic gods which we decided must have extensive symbolism that we were not hip to, so we decided to make up stories that described these pieces satisfactorily and had a grand old time:) This museum also had some great modern exhibits on display as well.

Next we found ourselves in a very cool gift shop called El Viejo Zaguán -- all kinds of artsy stuff and a cafe and then I realized the CD they were playing in the shop sounded sooo familiar -- it was the Idan Raichel Project, an Israeli band that can be best described as world fusion with an Ethiopian lead singer but most of the songs are in Hebrew. Funny finding that in Mexico! I told the shop owner that they had performed in SF a few years ago and he told me that they had also been at the Cervantino Festival in Guanajuato 3 years ago along with other bands from all over the world! Very nifty! The world continues to shrink majorly.

After being revived by a Cafe Mexicano, we moved on to the Alhóndiga Museum -- featuring interesting prehispanic stamps with designs, and a lot of Mexican history, and some very very disturbing murals. So much of Mexican history has to do with the plundering and acquisitions of the Spanish, the maltreatment of the indígenas, and the major revolution that occurred. The building that the Alhóndiga museum is in was an old granary, and on the four corners were hung the cut-off heads of the rebels to serve as a warning to the people... Luckily things are a lot calmer now.

After this, Stephen and Silvia went out for lunch and I went home because it was my last chance to eat with my family. Unfortunately they were finished eating and the Señora was just about to pack up the leftovers, so I missed the rest of the family, but she made me a delicious lunch from the leftovers and we chatted for a while. We discussed for a little while how crazy and neurotic the other boarder was and how she wanted my host mother to solve all of her dramatic problems which she had expounded at on great length in English while Guadalupe understands Spanish only. She had gone totally far out of her way to try to respect this boarder's nutsy gluten-free, sugar-free, salt-free, spice-free neediness without so much as a thank you. I told her she probably needn't have tried so hard and that people like this forget that the world does not revolve around them. We then took some photos together and then she showed me the designer daughter's studio, which was filled with stunning one of a kind pieces, dresses she had created from Indian silk, etc. That was a special treat!

From there it was on to see the inside of the famous Teatro Juarez. Very interesting and fancy -- it was funded by the dictator Porfirio Diaz at the turn of the century and had some over the top smoking lounges (for the men) and hair-combing lounges (for the ladies)!

I then met up again with Silvia, Stephen, Michael, and Angel and we went out to Truco 7 for dinner and had a yummy dinner of all sorts of appetizers which we shared, plus a bottle of tequila Michael and Angel had gone out and bought which we passed around the table under the nonwatchful eyes of the people who run the place -- totally the sort of thing teenagers would do ;) But I think we ordered enough stuff from them to keep them happy as well...

We had so much fun together I really am sorry to be leaving this place!!! Sadly I've got to get up early to get on two buses to Mexico City and then 3 planes home. Bleh! However, I think I am likely to survive, as I always do. I feel supremely privileged to have been able to plan all this last-minute, have it work out so damn well, have a fabulous host family, a perfect location, beyond-perfect weather, improved Spanish abilities, and new friends :)

Hasta pronto!!

Guanajuato Gems

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:48:00 +0000

This is just an amazing town. I have settled into the Spanish classes, the level has sorted itself out, am with other students who I really like, and only 3 or 4 to a class. I am SOOOOOOOO sorry I can't stay longer! It is difficult to squeeze in tourism activities between so many classes! Oh yes, and medical emergencies (read on toward the end...)

On a more touristic note ... on Tuesday night I hiked up to El Pípila with Claire, the flaky other student staying with the same family. Our hike was delayed by my needing to try to explain to her how to use Skype in order to quiet her constant complaining about how the phone cards cost so much to call the US. Finally we started climbing up the little streets and reached our destination right before sunset. El Pípila is a statue of a man overlooking the entire city that has something to do with war ... but whenever I heard the word ¨war¨ I just turn off. So I'll have to insert a link to a Wikipedia reference here. The view going up was just spectacular -- as I have mentioned, the houses are all different colors and at different levels.

Just above El Pípila we went further looking for El Hotel Casa Colorada which was a stunning mansion like hotel with desert plants and views that were perhaps only slightly more stunning than the ones on the way up. We got lost a few times, but kind people helped re-direct us. On the way down, a different but equally spectacular view of the city lights.

After that I met up with Barbara, an Austrian woman from Couchsurfing who is living here for a year and a half and teaching German at the university, and I brought along Silvia, another student at my school from Austria because I thought it would be nice for them to meet each other. We ate at a cool restaurant (which I later found out was Austrian-owned, what are the chances of that??) and then Barbara told us that our lives could not be complete without having tried mezcal, so she took us to a cantina that featured it. Note on cantinas: they are not the kind of places which ¨nice¨ women go to. Apparently it's more acceptable to go there if you're a prostitute and don't mind being groped by drunk slobbery men. However, there ARE two cantinas in town which are ok for women, and we went to one of them called "El Incendio." It was over 100 years old, covered with murals all along the walls, and full of different types of mezcal, some bottles of which contained worms.

One of the workers proudly showed me some of the murals and told me the history (they moved 44 years ago but are settling into their new location nicely). A few friends of Barbara´s came by so we could all drink together. Also, some men at the next table (who could have been 70, or a well worn 55) introduced themselves to us and told us they were butchers, and if we were in the market for meat they were at our service ... ;) I still don't know if this was designed to be a double-entendre in Spanish! Anyway, I tried mezcal flavored with oranges, mezcal flavored with guava, mezcal that was pure and transparent, and I think the one kind I didn´t try was the kind that was supposed to be "good for your stomach" -- I avoid that kind of thing at all costs! The glasses are not big, but cost barely more than $1 USD each! And they are served along with free snacks such as popcorn and jicama with red pepper sprinkled on it. An important cultural experience :)

Of course the next morning I woke up with a big headache and still had to go to school, but was able to medicate myself appropriately, enough so that during my one hour morning break I was able to grab in the museum that is right next door to where I live -- El Museo Iconográfico -- devoted to paintings, sculptures, drawings, and other depictions of Don Quijote and his trusty sidekick Pancho Sanza. To be honest, I had never read Cervantes' novel, but Guanajuatenses are obsessed with the myths surrounding this character! They even have a "festival Cervantino" in October to celebrate all of Cervantes' works. Weird, given that he was from Spain, not Mexico... Anyway the museum was really more interesting than I was expecting, they even had copies of the novel translated into Braille and into Chinese and some of the paintings were fascinating. The idea for the museum, and apparently the seed money, came from a man named Eulalio Ferrer who was Cervantes-and don Quijote-obsessed, and it was the one fantasy that helped him cope with being in a concentration camp in France in the 1930s. I'm not completely sure how he got put there or how he got out, but I'll have to look that topic up a bit more. In any case, the larger than life horse-riding figure and his buddy dominate the Mexican mythological landscape....

Back to class. I have 2 grammar classes, one in "practical Spanish", and a class which is a lecture on cultural issues in Mexico, led by Vicente. He is nothing if not very animated and passionate about the issues! We have discussed the health care system, the economy (I didn't know before now that in actuality more people are currently sending money from Mexico to the US than vice versa), the war in which Texas was stolen by the Americans, and today a fascinating discourse on the tradition of Day of the Dead. More on that to follow. The other classes are great too. Luis especially is the kindest most lovely person when one makes a mistake... I really wish I could spend another few weeks here.

Now -- many of you who are not first-time readers know that calamities tend to both precede and accompany me wherever I go. These can usually be divided into the climatic-disaster, political upheaval, and medical types. My last trip to Indonesia activated a lot of earthquake activity, in Java before I arrived, and in Sumatra while I was there. I just want to say here that I cannot take any responsiblity for the Chilean earthquake -- too damn far away for it to be my fault! On the other hand, there were some weather conditions that involved massive flooding here in Mexico a little bit west of where I am in mid February and those most likely were my fault. Sorry. Because of them I am vacillating about whether or not to go on the school field trip to Michoacan to see the butterflies that make their migration from Canada to breed here. The thing is, they're usually done (breeding and living) by March. So -- not sure if it's worth it. Dear readers who might know, please feel free to weigh in on this subject in the next day.

Anyway, on to the medical excitement. 2 days ago, a woman who is another student at the school (who I hadn't yet met) had a seizure in the street right between the school and the Bagel Cafetín (the surprisingly excellent bagel cafe right near my house). Another woman who had heard I was in the school found me an hour later and told me about it. I went to see this lady, in part to try to determine seizure vs. syncope as she had no real history of either before. She was clearly mentally a bit confused still, though nonfocal on exam, so I decided it had probably been a true seizure. I advised her that with a first time seizure, and being in her 50s, she really needed imaging of her brain. I also told her about neurocysticercosis being a possibility after having lived here in Mexico for 2 months (this is a condition caused by a pork tapeworm called Taenia solium that can form cysts in the brain, with surrounding edema, and cause seizures. I've seen it in immigrants from Mexico to the US). I wrote down all that she needed in Spanish. I was later told by other students at the school that she had been admitted to the hospital not far away. I went to visit her last night. HIPAA be damned! A large sign downstairs announced the names of the patients. She was the only one there. I climbed up the stairs to her room; the whole place looked rather medieval! She had an antechamber and these enormous oxygen tanks which I suspect could not be moved, which she didn't need in any case. They were giving her seemingly unnecessary IV fluids and insisting that she stay for 72 hours of observation despite no repeat seizure activity. She showed me the CT of her head, which looked normal, and her lab tests, which were normal too. They wanted to put her on an antiepileptic drug which they had not told her the name of, till she returned to Texas. And they concluded that the whole problem "was probably altitude related" -- which made no sense whatsoever since she's already been here 2 months and no doubt already acclimatized. Plus, the hospital is at the same altitude so keeping her there made no sense except to jack up the bill. Which, by the way, is going to come to a shockingly crazily expensive $800 for three days including the CT scan. Anyway, it was an interesting little adventure to visit the hospital, learn a little more about the private health system here, and I discussed it with my family who of course were quite familiar with cysticercosis, which the lady doesn´t have.

More adventures to follow -- this email is getting too long!
:) Carol

Gorgeous Guanajuato!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:05:00 +0000

Wow, imagine being in a place with absolutely PERFECT weather, daily bright blue sky, a city ordinance that does not allow houses next to each other to be painted the same color, lovely pedestrian-only walking streets, and people that say "Salud!" to a stranger when they hear you sneeze!

That´s Guanajuato. No wonder it's a UNESCO World Heritage site. And many of the buildings in the center, including my home for a week, are labeled "Inmueble Catalogado" -- protected landmarks! My house was built in 1846, and the woman that owns it and hosts foreign guests continues to be completely lovely! Her name is Guadalupe. $21 a day for my own room in this grand home, a bathroom shared with one other guest, and 2 meals a day lovingly prepared, including snacks to bring with me to school in case I get hungry before the traditional lunch, typically served here around 3ish pm. Who could complain?

My classes at Escuela Mexicana are going well. A few of us had some questions about how people were placed into certain classes and a few being somewhat overcrowded with 7 or 8 students. It all sorted itself out by today. I have 3 teachers: Vicente, Luis, and Alejandro. They're all really good! 2 grammar classes, one culture and conversation class, and a "practical Spanish" class daily held on the sun-soaked roof of the building with spectactular vistas in every direction. I have found a few fellow students who are roughly at the same level. The students are from everywhere, but a majority are Americans -- some from New Mexico, some from Portland, one other woman from SF (but she's not in the same classes) and a few from NYC. There are also a few students from other places such as Canada, Austria, Germany, and Japan! The power of the internet is amazing in attracting people from near and far. My host has also hooked me up with someone with whom I can do some private classes. With all the classes, I'm not sure when I will get to do all the touristy stuff! But I'll try to squeeze it in of course. I can't wait to put the photos into the blog. Lots of ooohing and aaaahing like when I firstgot to San Francisco.

More later!!

Mundo Pequeño...

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:56:00 +0000

So when I last left you, I had just moved to Robin's place. Spending time with him was like meeting up with a long-lost friend. We did a lot of nothing in particular ... The first day I was over there I got to meet a few of his students as he works as an English teacher. Some of the students come to take classes at his house, and he also leads an English conversation class/group thingie at a café run by a Canadian woman named Sunny.

She was fun to meet (and I found out from her IF I had cable which channel I could watch for a brief recap of the Olympics, but alas no cable), and I also met her business partner, Maria, who it turned out had attended the same school in Guanajuato that I am starting tomorrow and loved it. That was reassuring to hear! Both of these women moved from Canada and the US, found a new life here, and ended up marrying locals and living happily ever after. Robin also introduced me to Ray, who runs the Queretaro Language School I was thinking of attending, and he was a fascinating delight as well. A Filipino guy who grew up in Turkey and then moved to the US before enlisting in the Peace Corps at which point he was placed in Chiapas and then met his (Mexican) wife. He speaks Turkish, Cebuano, English, and Spanish fluently and accentlessly. Someone to admire! I felt guilty for not having enrolled in his school, as they really include some medical experiences for doctors. If this current gig goes well, I might go to San Cristobal next year where he is starting up a similar school in Chiapas.

Other things I got to do with Robin including tagging along to his acupuncture appointment, during which a crazy woman came in complaining of diarrhea and then tried to panhandle me when the acupuncturist told her to come back later, and a Scrabble night that he organized that no one actually attended at Sunny's cafe -- but it was a fun, close game, and we met some other English teachers, including one from Orinda of all places, small world that it is. And walking past a cafe which was having a very extensive butterfly and scarab-beetle exhibit which the proprietor? waiter? explained to us in extreme detail in Spanish. Luckily I did understand most of it so it was actually interesting. The collection was not just from this area but from all over the world. However, the Canadian monarch butterflies do apparently migrate to Michoacan state, about 2-3 hrs away from here, around this time of year, and that would be very cool to see.

Robin and I also rented one of those audioguide walking tours offered by the tourism office and managed to get to about 6 of the sites before returning it and then succumbing to liters of Micheladas for 40 pesos each (this is for you, Koren!). The audio tours were horribly dry and boring. Basic deal is that the city has been around since 1531 as part of Nueva España ("new Spain") and there is lots of history regarding the old rich Spaniards who lived there and then the revolution that rose up to get rid of them, part of it plotted by a woman called La Corregidora. We also got to see the pretty amazing acqueduct system (photos to come) that has 70+ Roman arches and was supposedly built by someone who was in love with a nun, to impress her. It didn't work.

Anyway the biggest charm to this town is walking around the downtown on the cobblestony streets and looking at all the cool architecture, painted interesting colors ...

I was able to take the bus downtown from Robin's house and back without difficulty, totally safely, no problems. I did that on Saturday and was supposed to be back by 2 pm when his wife was going to arrive with her friend to pick us up for the party we were going to in Ezequiel Montes (a smaller town about 45 minutes away). Right. I should have gone on that wine and cheese tour that was only going on Saturdays that I was interested in and I STILL would've gotten back in time to have met them given the time we actually left. I also really wanted to see the Mercado de Santa Cruz and cut short my time in order to be on time (which just means I'll have to go back there again! ;-). I did end up sitting in one of the lovely public parks where several women clad in white offered me a free blood pressure check. Doesn't even happen that much in the US!

So yeah -- apparently Mexico is really truly a "mañana" culture where when someone tells you they will do something or will definitely be somewhere, good luck. Most of the time it doesn't happen. At least, not on time. This is one of the things that I think frustrates both Robin and Juan Carlos about living here -- they don't operate in that sphere and get disappointed when it turns out that everyone else does. So, Gerardo, the friend of Diana (Robin's wife), turned up late to pick her up in Mexico City and go to Ezequiel Montes to set up the party that they were sort of planning together in a family home of his (which was stunning), then realized he didn't have the keys, then considered climbing up and entering through a 2nd story window, then realized they could borrow a ladder from a relative of his, etc., etc., etc. So she didn't come and pick us up till 6:30ish pm for his party which was to have started at 3 pm, which obviously didn't.

Surprisingly, about 15-20 people did turn up for it, all much later than it even started. The party did not include food, and we had to go across the street and eat sincronizadas, and then back at this beautiful house it was really clear that the party was organized by a guy when it turned out there was no toilet paper or soap in the bathroom and the toilet didn't actually flush... ;) Total guy kinda thing. However, he was really friendly. And then later there was some sort of charades/20 questions type game organized with male vs. female teams where someone was supposed to describe a famous person and their team had to guess the name. Well, most of the names were not names I had ever heard before, and I could barely follow along with everyone kind of drunk and screaming stuff out all at the same time in Spanish, so let's just say I was not much of an addition to the team...

Robin and Diana and I ended up sharing a huge bedroom in the house and were really tired and went to bed around 1 am. However, the incredibly loud music went on till 6 am. I tried to cower under the blankets and put on my Ipod earphones to drown out the other noise. Actually, somehow I managed to pass out! In the morning we got up and realized how even more beautiful the house was in the sunshine...

Then we took a little walk around town, found some some very dry tamales that made us look for something to drink, and then some fresh squeezed orange juice from a woman who has been squeezing it on the corner for 20 years. We got a peek at the lovely local church and square, too.

Then we found the bus depot and I got on a local bus back to Queretaro, complete with musicians playing. Once at the Queretaro bus depot I bought a Primera Plus bus ticket leaving in an hour for Guanajuato.

On that bus, I happened to meet two men from New Mexico who were on their way to attend the same language school starting tomorrow as well. Of course! Wouldn't you know. We worked on a Sudoku together and talked about language school plans. One guy was staying in a sort of dorm, the other staying with a family about a 20 minute walk from the school. I felt embarrassed to tell him apparently my host was a 1 minute walk from the school, when I'd booked so recently!

Anyway from the Guanajuato bus terminal I easily got and haggled down a taxi to my host's house. Guanajuato is basically a very wealthy and gorgeous town carved into a valley in the mountains with lots of tunnels and stunning architecture and the whole downtown being primarily cobblestone-clad pedestrian streets. I was fairly blown away by the beauty and then discovered that my host was in the absolute best location she could possibly be, in a beautiful grand old house built in 1846. The whole family had waited for me to come and eat lunch. They were lovely! She has 5 adult kids, one daughter is currently in India with her boyfriend, another son is doing a radiology residency in Guadalajara, and others live more locally. Including her American daughter-in-law! And there is also another woman from Washington state studying at the school who has only been there a week and really does not speak Spanish well at all. She told me she thought I could teach courses rather than take them, which once again means she speaks poorly enough to overestimate the Spanish I speak! Nice compliment though.

Anyway I think I'm going to be happy here. I asked my host if every day here is as stunningly blue-skied and perfect, and she said "pretty much":)

Cansada en Queretaro...

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 23:31:00 +0000

So, it was a birthday filled with travelling, with almost no sleep beforehand. I guess that's not so terribly unusual for me, but at least everything went off smoothly without a hitch. I was picked up at 3:15 am, then by some miracle since I was checking in with United I didn't get charged that annoying $25 fee to transport luggage, even internationally. Slept the entire flight. Landed early in Phoenix, took the shuttle to the other terminal at that user-friendly airport, then slept the entire flight to Mexico City. On both flights I was in a cluster of 3 seats where the middle seat was empty, so that was nice. Then after clearing aduana y inmigracion, I got some money out of an ATM, went to the bus ticket office, then right downstairs to the waiting Primera Plus bus and got right on. Nobody hassled me in any way, and the next thing I knew I was Queretaro-bound on a luxury bus which included reclining seats, individual tv screens, and a sandwich and drink. I convinced the lady across from me to let me use her cell phone to call my host to let him know an arrival time, then slept the rest of the bus ride only waking up to witness an absolutely spectacular sunset over the countryside between the two cities. I was about 5 minutes too late to capture decent photos. Bummer! The sky is pretty stunning in this area. It is considered semi-desert...

Once again I have been fortunate enough to have wonderful people agree to host me. Have I put in enough plugs for Couchsurfing yet? 1.7 million people are now a part of this global network, which you can read about at www.couchsurfing.org. My first hosts were Juan Carlos and Maria Jose, and their two kids who were actually quite smart and cute. They are originally from Guatemala and are happier living in Queretaro because it's so much safer ... They live in a beautiful neighborhood called Milenio III that was built about 10 years ago, up in the hills to the east of town. The windy roads up reminded me of my own neighborhood! And the houses are painted in sort of adobe and dusky pink and beigy colors, sort of Arizona-like. There is lots of light everywhere and it was a lovely house. JC was kind enough to make dinner and we talked about Guatemala and Queretaro and lots of other things late into the night. They warned me that their kids wake up around 6:30 am and that they didn't think I'd be able to sleep through the deafening noise, as I was sleeping in a doorless room.

I was comatose. I slept till almost 9. Recuperating from the previous work weeks. Then I got a lift into town with JC and had the loveliest time meandering around the downtown fairly aimlessly. There are lots of public parks and green spaces, and they all have free wi-fi, in case you needed to be convinced of how civilized this place is. The downtown architecture is beautiful, and there are lots of andadores, which are streets closed off for pedestrian strolling.

One of my first stops was to an OXXO shop (much like 7-11 in Thailand, they're *everywhere*) in order to buy a cheap crappy cell phone with SIM cards and minutes already included, for 299 pesos (about $23.50 USD) since despite my well made plans, my regular US cell phone doesn't work here because it's locked, and my unlocked phone which I bought in Thailand and which worked all over SE Asia didn't work because it refused to pick up the Telcel signal. Grrr. So now I have a cell phone for each of various parts of the world! Registering for the network was a non-intuitive pain in the ass as well, but the lady at the OXXO shop took pity on me and helped me out.

Next I overheard an orchestra practicing, so wandered down that street and just sat and took it all in, they were wonderful, about 35 or so men with brass instruments. A few other people were sitting and watching and they were sort of amused by me being there, or so I thought.

I also went to two museums -- one was Museo Regional which had an amazing "féria" exhibit in miniature, it was like a whole Mexican pueblo with various vendors, people celebrating different stuff, very colorful and adorable.

The other was the Museo del Arte, situated in a beautiful ex-convent, which I guess a lot of museums are in, usually with courtyards in the middle. They had a David Alfaro Siquieros exhibit, and a great exhibit called Apariciones by Humberto Spindola, whose stuff was really fanciful and again very colorful, which I like. It was more modern. Of course there was the usual colonial era art, and European art, most of which seems to involve stuff like crucifixions and raptures and things of that nature. I gave that a quick perfunctory glance and then went back to the cool multimedia different versions of clouds and such.

Then a visit to the tourist office where I discovered that there is a lovely wine and cheese tour that goes to the nearby villages of Bernal and Tequisquiapan, but they only go if there are 5 people signed up and the tourism business is sadly kinda slow. I think I will end up renting a walking tour headset which they have in multiple languages and takes about 3-4 hours walking around town.

Somewhere along the way I found an absolutely lovely quesadilla with guiso de patate, made at a little hole in the wall place called Cafe de Olla. Then I met up with JC and got a ride home and just lazed around in the evening and then talked for hours and tried some tequila that he had. Only a small amount, as us old people (which I somehow became on Tuesday) are only prone to debauchery and insanity in occasional spurts.

This morning JC brought me to my next host, Robin, who is a friend of his. He is from Australia and recently married a woman from here who unfortunately is out of town in the Big City (DF) for work this week. He is a lovely baker and cook and I got to sample some of his homemade treats and also saw the huge colony of leafcutter ants who are very industrious, luckily outside the house, not in. I am currently using his computer to blog while he teaches an English class in his home. Next we are going out to a pub that he's going to do a conversational English class at and I guess I will be like a guest-English-speaker with a different, funny accent! Tomorrow, walking tours, and a party on Saturday in another town... Below: a photo of Robin in the best Indian restaurant in Querétaro -- Bhaji!

This is a delightful town and the weather is sunny and in the 70s during the day but comes down to the 40s at night being semi-desert ... but perfect for daytime exploring, so looking forward to doing more of that! No crazily bizarre adventures as of yet, possibly because Mexico feels so non-foreign and I do speak the language. But we'll see what comes up! :)

On the road again...

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:56:00 +0000

Haven't posted anything in a while. Mostly because this winter has entailed work, work, and work! There was a brief interlude, a road trip with my mom to Palm Springs in December for a week, but it was pretty tame. For some reason in the Palm Springs area instead of all the hoity-toity stuff like golf, we seemed to keep finding the Mexican points of interest -- a chain of supermarkets my mom fell in love with called Cárdenas, an open-air night market in Indio that turned out to be 98% Mexican, an impromptu Mexican festival with live music... Don't worry, we still went to the Shields Date Farm and the amazing Palm Springs Art Museum. But it got me thinking -- I haven't been to Mexico in over a year. Perhaps instead of visiting a part of the US that isn't too far from the border and resembles Mexico in parts, I should visit Mexico itself!

So -- about 2 weeks ago I snapped up some plane tickets to Mexico City and off I go for my birthday! My plan is to spend time in two cities -- Querétaro and Guanajuato, which are originally silver mining towns in the heartland known as the Bajío at about 6600 feet altitude and only a few hours away from Mexico City. They're supposed to be pretty fabulous. In Querétaro I will be Couchsurfing, and in Guanajuato I'm going to do language school at Escuela Mexicana (http://escuelamexicana.com/) and stay with a family in a homestay. At some point I may make a quickie trip to San Miguel de Allende which is between the two, otherwise known as gringo heaven. Mostly I'm going to try to avoid the gringos, though, in order to improve my Spanish skills :) Should be fun. I'll try to post my adventures here on the website... so stay tuned. I leave on Feb 23 :)

Happy New Year!

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:30:00 +0000

I wish you all a happy new year, feliz año nuevo, shanah tovah, selamat tahun baru, สวัสดีปีใหม่, yeni yılın kutlu olsun, and manigong bagong taon! And an early gong xi fa cai and chuc mung nam moi! :) May 2010 be a huge improvement over 2009! :)

My blog is now chock full of photos!! :)

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:55:00 +0000

Finally embedded photos of my Indonesia/Malaysia trip into the blog -- only took a month ;-)
Hopefully this will make it worth going back and seeing if your visual imagination was better than, or different from, my camera imagery :)

For those of you none-too-familiar with how to navigate around a blog, please go to the right hand column where it says "Blog Archive". I recommend starting with the September 11 post and then going forward to the present day ...

Kuala Lumpur once again ... and on the home stretch :(

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:53:00 +0000

On Tuesday I left Bali sadly for Kuala Lumpur once again, thinking I would have an easy time of it with Malaysia Airlines' lenient 20 kg baggage policy. Instead, I encountered the one asshole who works for Malaysia Airlines who was determined to make an example of me. He decided that my new batik bag (which I was calling my carryon) and my very small purple day pack BOTH constituted carryons and that was "not allowed". Fine, I said. I will stuff one into the other and then it will be one piece. Are you happy now? Nope, he was not happy. He then weighed my batik bag and determined that it was 1.5 kg too heavy. By the way, almost no one who works for the airlines who is not also a member of the Nazi party would bother to weigh people's carryons. Fine, I said. I will take a few books out of the fucking bag and put them into the bag I am checking in which is not over the weight limit. Are you happy now? It's 7.3 kg now. Is the extra 0.3 kg more than you can tolerate??? Then he decided that the few wood pieces I was carrying which weighed a few ounces each constituted "carry-on" as well. By this time I was in a sweat. I asked what had I done to make him so unhappy and what it would take to make him happier. Checking in those wooden pieces would absolutely, definitely, break them. I could understand his making trouble for me if he was pocketing the extra fees he would have liked to charge me, but no! Finally I resolved the issue to some satisfaction after begging his supervisor to treat me like a human being.

Compared to all that buildup, the flight was a boring noneventful 3 hours to Kuala Lumpur. Then a heinous hour waiting in immigration behind a huge number of people in red-and-white jackets saying "New Life". I shuddered to ask, since I am not terribly interested in salvation or reincarnation. Anyway I guess the Malaysian officials had a lot of questions in their minds too, so the process was godawfully slow.

After an efficient ride on the KL Express train, my host Siew Cheng (from CS) was waiting for me at Sentral. She is a lovely person originally from Johor Bahru living in the Maluri area of KL and teaching in a school for tourism and hospitality management. Her hospitality is a good example, I'm sure!! She has a master's and is actually thinking of doing a Ph.D. project about the Couchsurfing phenomenon. I think it would be fascinating.

I was exhausted and crashed early that night (probably from the ordeal with the baggage check-in). However, I awoke early the next morning and Siew Cheng gave me some great advice and guidance about taking the public bus to Batu Caves, a 45 minute ride away from KL downtown where there is a huge cave system and within it a Hindu temple. Oh, but first you must climb 272 steps to get there. It was really impressive, and I wanted to do something Hindu-ish since I had missed Deepavali which ironically they don't observe in Bali though Bali is Hindu, it's its own special brand of Hinduism. At the uppermost part of the cave, I both realized that the SD card in my camera was stuck in a locked position and I could not take any photos, and also that there was a large family of maybe 12 macaques who were playing around amusingly. One level down there were roosters wandering around -- I couldn't figure that one out!

For more on Batu caves, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batu_Caves for a terrific discussion. One of the most impressive things is the huge 42 meter tall statue of Lord Murugan, who I've never met before yesterday, but he was very golden ;-)

Halfway down the 272 steps I realized I did indeed have another SD memory card I could delete some photos off of in order to take photos, so then I climbed up the rest of the steps again! Sadly the macaques were gone by that point and some staff told me they were "resting" -- but at least I had gotten to see them, and take photos of the other aspects of the temple and caves.

I then went to one of the nearby Indian vegetarian restaurants at the foot of the caves where it was absolutely mobbed at 11 am plus I was the only non-Indian there, so I figured (and rightly so) that the masala dosa would be lovely!

On the way back on the bus, some Nigerian guy started trying to chat me up while totally ignoring my body language that was busily shouting "leave me alone!" I told him I was leaving the next day, which was true, but he still wanted to get my phone number. I had to tell him "that only really would make sense if both parties were equally interested, which is not the case" and he finally got the message and got off the bus without my number.

Once back in town with my daily cultural exploration needs met, it was time for some last-minute *shopping*, involving a special Deepavali shoe sale at Sogo, a number of products I deemed necessary to buy at supermarkets, and stocking up on two more 8 GB SD cards so I would not have memory storage problems again in the near future. Overall, a success. In the middle of this it started absolutely POURING rain (a little spillover from the typhoons in the Philippines??) and I started to think yes, perhaps now IS the time to leave Asia.

Siew Cheng met up with me and we went for a lovely dinner at a really nice restaurant near Jalan Alor featuring her "hometown" Hakka cuisine. Ultra yum. There was a great vegetable named Kailan -- or perhaps it's the way it was prepared? :)

This morning I caught up on internet stuff, haggled with a taxi driver, took the taxi to the train to the plane, saw the nice Deepavali display,

then took the plane to Taipei, and I am now in Taipei using the copious and generous free internet and waiting for the plane to San Francisco. Oh, and free massage chairs in the Zen relaxation center.

Sad to be coming home, but I have had some terrific adventures and met some absolutely wonderful people. I will find it hard to readjust to work and to the wasteful, "throw-away," often-entitled culture of the US, but very very easy to readjust to high quality toilet paper and the lack of mosquitoes ;-)

Hopefully soon after getting home I will upload some photos to this site to make it worth looking at again :) Also look out in the future for the addition of my past travels which will be easy to cut and paste from their original text form.

I would love to hear from people once I'm home! Hope you've enjoyed this almost as much as I have :)

--Carol

My last days in Bali

noreply@blogger.com (Carol Schaffer) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:23:00 +0000

I spent my final time in Bali kind of wistfully. I wished I had "gotten out" more from Ubud, and at the same time I enjoyed every minute there. Monday was spent doing a cooking class with Dorothy and a nice Australian couple at Bumbu Bali (see http://www.bumbubaliresto.com/cookbumbubali1.asp). Nyoman had offered me the opportunity to come see his clinic in a small village an hour away at the same time, but sadly, the cooking won out (I'll check out the clinic next time!) Our cooking class included a trip to the local Ubud produce market which is always fun, a review of the ingredients most of which were familiar to me (but has anyone reading this used candlenuts for anything before? If so, please tell me what and where you stock up on them in the US). We made some yummy things, the best of which was a prawn dish in a lovely yellowish curry. I will definitely try to duplicate this at home!

Though we were completely sated from the 7 course meal we had cooked, it was never too late to start planning for dinner (as it was to be my last dinner in Bali). So I suggested we go to Indus Restaurant for dinner (http://www.smh.com.au/news/Indonesia/Eight-great-things-to-do-in-Bali/2005/02/15/1108229998260.html) which I had been to 5 years ago. Still situated with beautiful rice paddy views, lovely ambiance, but not quite as great as 5 years ago and up in price like everything in Ubud -- I'll call it the "Eat/Pray/Love" effect. It was still a lovely if slightly melancholy goodbye dinner!

OK, this blog is a bit out of order. There are other things I wanted to mention, more highlights of my Ubud stay. Lest you think that all we did was eat, I wanted to mention 2 art gallery/museums that were particularly fascinating. Now, they would need to be truly special in order to impress against the backdrop of Ubud that includes everyone being an artisan and there being gorgeous art everywhere, especially depicting scenes that could only be happening in Bali (the legong/barong/kecak dances, women carrying huge offerings piled on their heads to the temples for one of the ceremony days that seem to happen 3x a week, the beautiful rice paddies, etc., etc.). But these two were expats who moved to Bali.

The first one was Symon's Studio (see http://www.symonstudios.com/studiosartzoo.html and click on "The Ubud Studio"). He is originally from Michigan, and per his website, "Symon has lived in Bali since 1978 and is best known for his bold portraits of sensual young Balinese men, done in vivid tropical colours and often to an exaggerated scale". Guess what: we got to meet one of his muses, a guy named Sugi! Fun! And I loved the art. A lot of it was iconic stuff involving Obama, Michael Jackson, Madonna, and other pop figures of our time, a la Andy Warhol. Check it out.

The second was the Blanco Museum, chronicling the career of a Spanish/Filipino artist who also moved to Bali and married a local gal, and had a long productive career producing sensual art of the more female variety. A nice companion piece to Symon though the style was very different. The museum is situated in what was his fabulous home and gallery and studio... but what fascinated me the most was the incredible collection of tropical exotic birds living there, kind of as pets mostly. A bird who I think was a toucan (but with a blue neck pouch???) took a liking to me and would not leave me alone. He started nibbling on everything shiny I was wearing (ring, bracelet, those elephant earrings) and I had a grand old time.

In addition to food and art, we also did much walking, which I mentioned in a previous entry, especially the walk through the rice paddies which was absolutely beautiful. We made a number of stops (see http://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g297701-d1422324-Reviews-Sari_Organic-Ubud_Bali.html -- not sure I put that in the last entry) including seeing the organic farm that supplied the restaurant we went to and climbing up a little tower to get a really nice bird's eye view of the rice fields. We walked from about 8 am to 6 pm till I thought my feet would fall off... And then in the early evenings we would come across little bands of men and boys who were marching and playing music and had barong/lion dancers with them in order to ward away the evil spirits on Galungan.

I ended my last night in Ubud with a combined massage and manicure for US $10. The lady insisted on painting flowers on my big toenails as a parting gift, though she was not actually doing a pedicure :) On Tuesday morning I bid a fond farewell to Dorothy, my new friend from Singapore who I hope will make it to the US one day. I was leaving for the airport -- and she was leaving for a cremation, a HUGE big thing in Bali. I was jealous! 3 times in Bali and I still have not managed to attend a cremation. I'll have to check out her blog for more details of that.