So! Tomorrow we are leaving on a fun excursion. I’m going to keep our exact destinations away from the blog until after I come back, just in case there is a random crazy in Israel who is trying to stalk me. Although I think if someone were trying to stalk me, s/he could have done that easily by now. But we’ll be kind of isolated in some of these places, so it’s best to keep that secret.

However, among the many places that we will be visiting, we will be getting spa treatments at the Dead Sea, have lunch in Dimona (where the Black Hebrews are - I don’t know what their official community name is), will spend a night sleeping out in the middle of the desert, and so on. It’s going to be a very intense three days/two nights, I am probably going to be tired at the end, but I think it will be fantastic.

We kicked it off by going to this awesome hole-in-the-wall Ethiopian restaurant to plan everything. I’ve never been to a real Ethiopian restaurant before, but you know this place is authentic when the only other people in there are Ethiopian Jews. The menu was in Hebrew, Amharic (I don’t know how to spell/pronounce that), and English. The dishes were served on bread and without utensils. Awesome.

The bread was kind of weird, gray and spongey. But tasty. I had a red lentil curry-like thing, which was very spicey (but not too spicey), and extremely tasty. We stayed pareve for a few reasons, including that it is during the nine days before Tisha B’Av and also I was scheduled to have pizza with friends in less than the amount of time it would wake for me to no longer be fleishig (for my non-Jewish friends: the effect of eating meat - after you eat meat, there is a certain amount of time when you are “meaty,” which means you cannot eat dairy. the amount of time varies according to your family’s tradition, but since my family doesn’t keep kosher I adopted the 3 hour rule).

Anyway, here I am with my food. Aww…

It’s so tasty. You can see that I’ve eaten most of the bread already. [I also look really weird]

I haven’t updated in quite a long time. So this Shabbat was fantastic. I basically slept and read the entire day until dinner. How much better can Shabbat get? Then after Ethiopian today I went to class and then out for pizza that is sold by the meter. But really, this is deceiving, because they sell it by the 1/2 meter. So it’s not really like you can buy an entire meter of pizza unless you buy two of them. But in any case it was delicious.

I guess most of my adventures in Israel so far have surrounded food, but no more! I can’t wait for this huge trip. I hope to come back with so many beautiful pictures of the desert and a lot of awesome stories.

Quick picture of an interesting construction site:

It’s so weird how in Israel you can walk through live construction sites. I’m pretty sure this is illegal in the US. Here’s another picture from a while ago of us walking through another construction site:

It’s kind of funny, but also dangerous and weird. I don’t know if I’ve posted about this before, actually … maybe I have! It still amuses me.

Okay, I have been boring lately! But I will be back on Wednesday and I’ll be able to tell everyone where I’ve been and how cool it was. Woo!