Israel, Day 3

“This is morning. It’s when I spend the most time thinking ‘bout what I’ve given up…” –Jack’s Mannequin

I love that song. It’s entirely applicable to a number of situations. In this case, what I appear to have given up, and not for the first or last time on this trip, is sleep.

Reuben got up at some crazy hour of the morning, and woke Marc and me to ask if we wanted to watch the sunrise with him. Marc’s breathing didn’t even change. I sprang awake and leaped up the stairs to the roof, because I’m a morning person. Then I ran back down the stairs, grabbed my camera, and bolted back up them, because I’m also often a forgetful person.

It was overcast. I felt the clouds spread from the sky into my head and over my excitement, leaving me with a resigned relaxation. Overcast or not, it was still a very beautiful silence. Reuben and I went to work with our respective soul-stealers; he is much more an artist than I, so I’ve borrowed one of his unbelievable captures to picture below.

We shot without talking, but equally enjoying the view and without getting in one another’s way. At about 6:00 AM I went back downstairs and dozed off.

I snapped awake again at 6:23. I had pushed my alarm back ten full minutes after Javier interrupted my sleep a few hours before, but I still managed to wake up two minutes before it went off. I imagined some new curses into existence and flung them at my overly accurate internal clock before throwing on some clothes in which to go rousing the folks.

Reuben offered to come with me when Marc didn’t budge. We both tried to wake him up, but it seemed Javier had an iron grip on his eyelids and wasn’t giving an inch. Javier must be even more jacked than Marc, which is an accomplishment because Marc is an aspiring Virginia Beach policeman with arms the size of my neck.

I decided we’d hit Jesse’s floor first, recruit her, and then try to get Marc in on it for the last several rooms. That plan went about as well as expected. Because I’m such a sport, I’ll let my esteemed readers choose the operative word in that sentence.

Skipping over breakfast, which was much the same as the day before, I’ll fast forward to Hadera, a sister city of Charlotte. Our schedule didn’t indicate Hadera, our plans didn’t include Hadera, but our tour guide announced that Hadera would be our next destination and we all just shrugged and said ‘O.K.’ because, really, what else were we going to do? It’s not like we knew Israel so well as to be disappointed, and we had all agreed that changes to our itinerary, however sudden, were not problematic. The Taglit-Birthright motto, at least with Israel Outdoors, is, “Be flexible.” We were flexible as hell. Flexible with our pronunciation of new Hebrew words, flexible with our interpretation of certain instructions, flexible in our use of bomb shelters… more on that later.

We drove to Hadera and got lost. Well, we didn’t get lost; our driver, Apollo, seemed to have gotten lost. At least, that’s what Andrew reassured us.

“We’re not lost!” he announced several times. Why he would need to announce this throughout the drive instead of not announcing it until such a time as when we might be lost was lost on me. “Straddling the seat with my ribs is uncomfortable, but I’m only bracing myself because he tends to brake and turn around a lot. By the way we might be in Gaza by now. But we’re not lost!” he repeated.

The bus took several sharp turns and sudden stops before settling in front of a random street and letting us off. I stepped off the bus and followed the group onto what looked like a scholastic campus complex. Ran and Tair led the group into a building that reminded me of a billion other facilities: trade schools, colleges, hospitals, rehab centers, mental institutions, etc. They sat us down in a circle and asked us to state our name, followed by our addiction. “My name is Garrett and I… have a hummus problem.” Okay, that’s a lie.

Our hosts did sit us in a circle, though, so that they could explain what the Talpiot facility was for. A foster care and counseling center for at-risk kids, Talpiot assists kids ages 5-15 by placing them in temporary family units, providing after-school day care, or simply working with their families to strengthen internal familial relationships. Sometimes they receive kids from the Israeli version of Child Protective Services and act as a foster agency. They provide a whole spectrum of family-assistive services to the community.

This was a great explanation of a wonderfully helpful service to the Hadera community, and we absorbed as much of it through our half-open eyes and our half-attentive ears as we possibly could, given that the vast majority of us were still, for all intents and purposes, asleep. It was a huge relief when our hosts announced we would be leaving now to go spend some time flying kites with the kids.

I heard several renditions of the tune from Mary Poppins entitled, “Let’s go fly a kite,” in several different keys, start up and end at different parts of the same song on the way to the beach. Some of them ended in snores that I swore weren’t part of the original tune.

I’m really not great at kite-flying and I really didn’t want to impose my horrendous ineptitude at the sport on some unsuspecting Israeli kid, so I was absolutely thrilled to note that there were a couple of young boys passing a soccer ball around. Excellent. I quickly added my name to the introductions that Dan, Robby, and Eli had begun with the youngsters, and we got a game going very quickly. Dan and I laid some trash cans down to act as goals and a couple more Israeli boys joined in. Instant camaraderie. There’s nothing like a pickup game of the world’s most universally played sport to create a bond ex-nihilo between complete strangers.

The park was crowded. There had to be at least 200 of us there between our group, the kids, and the other adults. Kites were getting tangled, legs were getting tangled, and I was shocked to see that hair was not getting tangled. Yet.

What this meant for our game was that we would have to move to avoid getting it tangled with the kite-flyers. We decided to hop from the sidewalk down the nearby ledge to a sandy area with three or four trees creating something of a clearing. This was our new soccer field. I took my shoes off so I could run barefoot in the sand. It was scorching hot in some places, comfortably warm in the shadows; it was soft, though, and it felt like small pieces of grainy cloud between my toes. Whatever that image does for you.

Jessie, the girl whose luggage had been lost (but was now retrieved), Anna, Shai (the guard/medic) and several other Haderans joined in, and we set up a tournament to make it less crowded. My team drew first play.

The game was fun, but the best part was watching Shai trying to maneuver the ball through clusters of players with his rifle still strapped over his shoulder. It kept slapping him in the butt like an overzealous lover, and he kept batting it away or using one arm to hold it behind him, but the Haderan kids kept stealing the ball anyway. My team won, and Shai went to go do other things. This was inopportune for me.

During one play next game, I was trying to get a pass off from right against the wall. Eli moved towards the goal so I shot a cross over to him. It was a beautiful pass. It soared over the sand like a dove, and my follow-through was perfect; it sailed after the ball in harmonic bliss. Unfortunately, the harmonic bliss was subject to interference by the stone wall just to my left, and nearly all the skin on my last toe was scraped right off. That stung.

I went off in search of Shai. He was chatting up a couple of American girls, his gun swinging awkwardly behind him, and I asked him in staggering Hebrew, “Eyfo ha-sherutim?” Where’s the bathroom? “I need to get this cleaned off. Can you get your kit and help me out, please?” He would have understood the English; I was just trying so hard to learn some Hebrew that even with my toe bleeding and covered in sand, in danger of infection, I felt the need to speak anything I could in this new and exciting language. Calvin was laughing so hard at me he nearly fell out of my head.

Shai got his kit and cleaned and bandaged my wound just in time for us to board the bus. Jessie sat next to me and we played Scrabble on my iPod on the ride. We joked about how Facebook has taken over the world; nothing’s technically official until it’s on that site. Strange thought, how the Internet has changed our conception of the real.

Speaking of technology, we were on our way to the Technoda, a center for scientific exploration by the driven youth of Hadera. It’s like a mini-university for kids. Totally unique. They seek out kids in underprivileged environments and give them an enrichment program. This place has all kinds of cool stuff I wish I had in grade school: the largest public-access telescope in the middle east, astronomy courses and a planetarium, a medical education center… even driving school for kids too young to think about a permit. Don’t worry; they don’t get behind the wheels of actual vehicles, but mock-ups close enough to the real thing to really teach them. This tour had the teacher in me squeeing with joy. Many of us were having more fun than we wanted to admit, playing with the children's educational tools.

When the sweet tour of this sweet place of learning was over, Ran came over the bus intercom to make a very important announcement.

“We’ll be heading to a military base now to see--”

He was cut off by shouts of, “What about lunch?” and “We’re hungry!”

“Oh,” he answered without missing a beat, “We’ve decided to skip lunch today. You can eat spirituality!”

To the next round of protests, he announced that we’d be stopping shortly at a place where we could get some lunch.

Somewhere in there I heard the word ‘pizza’ and all else was lost on me. I love pizza so much that all of my friends know it. I love pizza so much I could eat it in its various incarnations every day, for every meal, for eternity, and be the happiest camper in the world. I love pizza so much that when I hear the word ‘pizza’, my stomach does a double-take so fast my head has to catch up with it.

At first I was wary of getting pizza in Israel. See, I’m a New Yorker, raised on Long Island and spoiled by the wonderful pizza that is ubiquitous in that metropolitan area. Naturally, nothing else labeled “New York Pizza” ever truly measures up. I like to try different styles of pizza and compare them on a different scale, but it’s different than trying so-called New York pizzas and comparing them to that of my home. Still, I was worried that pizza in another country, especially a kosher country, would prove lackluster and make me regret my luncheon decision.

Still wavering between pizza and falafel, I followed Jess into a market where my eyes rested on something nearly as wonderful as pizza: gummy worms. We looked at each other, nodded, and proceeded to happily fill plastic bags with many different yummy gummy treats. When we finished, I began to think about real food and was dragged by my nose back to the pizza place.

Pizza in Israel is, as expected, very different from that in New York. I ordered a small personal pie with mushrooms and peppers. The sauce was sweetish and the cheese layer was not too thin but definitely not loaded. It’s got a very thin crust and it’s eaten using cardboard slices. After using one of these on the first slice, I switched back to the more familiar fold-and-devour method I’m used to. Overall pizza rating: 7/10.

When we piled back on the bus, no longer hungry and anticipating more excellent Israel adventures, we were ready for this military base. We were unloaded from the bus into a small room, packed in tightly in the heat, and set in front of a TV screen. Our educational day was about to become even more educational; we were going to learn about Israel’s border patrol! Well, some of us were; many of us were trained from infanthood to react in a Pavlovian manner to television screens running educational films: movie on = nap time.

This elite crew of varying ages serves Israel by guarding the borders, securing Israel against terror attacks, and performing other protective tasks. Each recruit does six months of basic training, and their SWAT team is world-renowned. Various countries from around the world send their troops to train with this elite Israeli group.

The coolest part about the whole base, though, was the dogs. Assault dogs, drug sniffing dogs, and bomb sniffing dogs. These are trained attack dogs, bred to do what mere mortal men cannot in the search for peace and justice. The army guy giving us this information was speaking entirely in Hebrew, so Guy, one of our awesome Israeli friends, gave us the English version. “They are extremely dangerous and you should not go near them under any circumstances,” Guy translated for us. “You must remain at a safe distance. Do not make any sudden moves, and don’t run. Also, don’t yell or make loud noises. Any questions?”

“Yeah, I wanna see one of these dogs in action!” Marc muttered.

“Okay. Take off at a run and I’ll show you the video on my digital camera in the hospital later,” I retorted.

The demonstration began. A man in a protective suit brought one of the muzzled dogs out. He took the muzzle off, and at a command the dog was on him, tearing ferociously at the suit, teeth latched on tightly.

“See the force of the bite,” Guy continued translating. “You can tell the dog to let go, but you’d rather him not let go of a terrorist.” No kidding.

We had a photo op with the (caged) dogs. During the photo op, Guy forgot his own advice and skipped around the group to get in the picture. Perhaps there’s a mental block between translating words and actually retaining comprehension of them, Calvin suggested. The dog charged, but was kept at bay, luckily for Guy. Photos were taken, then were piled back onto the bus to head to Jerusalem. As we drove, Ran explained a bit about the West Bank to us.

Half a million Arabs left the area we were in for the West Bank and other places like Gaza in 1948. Israeli Arabs are 20% of the population in Israel, now. They don’t fight in the Israeli army because they don’t want to, and if they did, as Ran honestly pointed out, Israelis wouldn’t want them to, anyway. Israeli Arabs are caught in the middle, because they’re not really welcomed by Palestinian Arabs, either.

The West Bank separates Palestinian territory from the rest of the State of Israel. “Eighty percent of this divide is fence and twenty percent is wall,” Ran explained in his thick Israeli accent. “It’s necessary. It prevents suicide bombers from coming over here and blowing themselves.”

I didn’t bother to point out to him the grammatical error in his sentence. I don’t think I would have been heard, anyway, over Calvin’s maniacal laughter. “Why would that be a problem?” he asked me. I had no response.

A while later we were in Jerusalem.

And my suitcase was soaked.

We unloaded the suitcases from the bus to bring them into the hotel. I knew right away something was wrong. My leg felt wet against the suitcase, but when I put the suitcase down to feel my leg, my leg was dry. I started walking again. Again, a wet sensation, and again, dry. Something’s going on here. I brought it up to my room, unpacked it, and noticed something odd.

I ran downstairs and confronted Andrew and Tair.

“My stuff’s all wet. It must have happened on the bus, because my suitcase was on the bottom.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Andrew asked. He looked really concerned. I told you we had great staff members.

“I think it got soaked in coolant or something. There’s this weird water that leaves a sticky white residue when it dries.”

“I can explain that,” he replied with a sly smile. Yeah, okay, Andrew.

“What were you doing under the bus?” Calvin asked.

“Oh, not me,” he explained coolly. “Shai gets excited sometimes.”

Shortly after that I discovered I was not the only person whose luggage was soaked. Blaire and Jessie (yes, the same girl whose luggage was lost at the start of the trip) came downstairs complaining of the same symptoms. Part of me felt bad for Jess, and part of me felt glad it was her and not someone else, if only for the fact that she was handling the whole thing like a champ. I don’t know if anyone else on that trip would have been as sporting about it. She was really admirable, taking it in stride and laughing about it when she could.

Tair walked us around the corner to the Laundromat. On the way back, Jess and I bought a bottle of wine; we would both need to relax later. Referring to this whole clothing debacle, I said, “At least you’ve got a friend in it with you.”

“We’re not friends,” she replied. Deadpan. Completely serious. I was stunned into silence, thoroughly confused. Well, all right. If that’s how you want to be about it… I guess I completely misjudged you. I shrugged inwardly, though I was kind of hurt. Usually I’m really good at making friends, because I’m an entirely open and honest person and the only thing I take seriously, as a general rule, is my own morality. Whatever, I guess.

When we returned, it was time for an activity.

Israel and Music: a History. We got a walkthrough of Israeli history through a history of its music. The best part: our host for this talk was a woman with a strong British accent. It was better than The History Channel. Or MTV. Or both.

I was amazed to find the Beatles’ influenced penetrated Israel along with all the other cultures they pierced. They were even set to perform in Israel, until the government intervened. According to them, the Beatles “lack the artistic capacity” to reach the youth. Government intelligence, neh?

She got to the musical rebellion of mizrachi music, and there were laughter and cheers from the Israelis. “Belly dancing,” she explained, “became pretty big over here. The traditional dance is that the guys will kneel, and make big hand claps, and stare adoringly at the girls. The girls begin dancing, making figure eights with their hips.

“Now, girls, when you belly dance, you can make it your own. Jazz it up, for sure, but seem like you’re suffering,” she said. “For some unexplained reason, belly dancers always look like they’re in pain.” Everyone laughed.

I have to admit, I was in heaven right about now. I’m a huge music buff. I am head of a National Honorary Musical Fraternity, after all, and I’ve loved music forever. Learning about a culture through their music is about as exciting an angle as I could imagine. When she moved on to the ‘80s, when the US and Israel “became tight”, and I heard the familiar power drum beats and synthesizer melodies, a grin slid across my face. A few songs later, I was frantically scribbling down every title and artist I could so I would be able to look them up when I got home. For the record, I did.

Also a few songs later, the whole room was up and club dancing to Israeli favorites. Our speaker had killed the lights and started the music, leaving the floor open for us, and we just broke loose. A dance circle opened up. There were limbs flying all over the place. Half of them were probably Reuben’s; he tore up the floor. I dropped the worm, which is the only break dancing move besides a couple of stalls I’ve come close to getting down. Even Andrew and Tair got up and joined in the fun.

Tair took Jess and me to get our clothes from the Laundromat around the corner, and we grabbed another bottle of wine on the way back just in case. She clarified that earlier, when she said we weren’t friends, she was referring to the whole Facebook conversation. Because we weren’t friends on Facebook, so it didn’t count. That made a heap more sense after that. Calvin punched me in the ribs and chuckled. I told him we weren’t friends anymore.

Soon it was time to get changed and head to dinner and then bed. When I say it’s time for bed, it usually means the staff went to bed and everyone else found a bomb shelter.

Bomb Shelter was our code word for party room. But you didn’t hear that from me.

Seriously, though. Nearly every party room we found was also, coincidentally, the bomb shelter of the building. They’re made for late-night parties. Thick walls, secluded areas… what more could you want? The suicide bombers may not be able to come over and blow themselves, but we were able to have more than enough party for everyone.

“You guys can have a little fun; just don’t piss off the British.” Andrew was referring to the British birthright group that we saw come in a few hours ago. They had been riding the elevators up and down the hotel, sitting down on the elevator carpet, hitting every floor. They were young teenagers. “I don’t want to be Paul Revere running up and down the halls yelling ‘The British are coming!’” Calvin thought that would actually be a really funny image, but I wouldn’t let him provoke it into reality.

“So what is that, one if by land, two if by sea, three if by elevator?” Emmanuel asked.

“Haha, no, hopefully not,” Andrew asserted. “I don’t think they like us very much.”

That night, in the bomb shelter, was Mega Event 2: Jesse’s birthday party. She was the youngest one on the trip, so we made her party especially fun. So fun, in fact, that many of the details won’t make it into this manuscript. Use your imagination, folks. Use your imagination.