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Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Israel, Part 3: Yes, We're Actually In Israel Now

Shabbat was a great tour guide. Unlike some tour guides I’ve had in the past, he could tell when the popular mood was desirous of sleep, and didn’t talk at those times. In general, though, he spoke quite a bit; and though his imperfect English was punctuated fairly frequently with “um” and “ah” and — my favorite — “AEGHHHHHHHHHHHH”, he was generally pleasant to listen to and told us lots and lots of interesting things that I could probably fill up fifty pages with if I weren’t lazy and remembered what they were. I would say a good 64% of the stories he told us began with, “Two thousand years ago…” because apparently that’s when most of the interesting stuff in Israel happened. Shortly thereafter, the Hebrews got their asses kicked by the Romans and things weren’t so happy for the next couple millennia.

The tour bus was a mildly luxurious charter bus with overhead racks just narrow enough to stop my backpack from fitting. Also, because the side entrance to the bus was on the right side, the seats on the right side of the bus had significantly less leg room than their left side counterparts. Interestingly, I did not notice the difference until very near the end of trip, when Marina pointed it out to me. I’m guessing most people were stupid and unobservant like me; otherwise I expect there would have been nuclear warfare before every commute to determine who got to sit on the left because let me tell you, normal legs just didn’t fit in the right seats.

Our first stop was a scenic spot overlooking the old quarter of Jerusalem in the distance. Meeting us here was a group of three singing, drum-banging men dressed in what appeared to be togas who I thought were ruffian beggars that our tour guides would shoo away. Instead it turned out we hired them. Marvelous. One of the freaky toga singers was equipped with a microphone, so as to torture us better. The drums never stopped pounding their swaying, hypnotic rhythm; the miked singer never stopped screaming. Eventually the drummers coaxed a few mentally imbalanced people from our group into dancing in a circle to the joyful never-ending song. It was not a benign, mind-its-own-business kind of circle, though; this circle was evil, cancerous, forcibly sucking into itself innocent onlookers standing too close to the edge. You could see the horror on the victims’ faces when one of the way-too-friendly-looking toga men would grab their hands, beaming a smile of comradeship, mirth, and threat that if you didn’t join the circle, that smile would eat out your eyeballs.

Upon noting the development of the cancer circle, everybody quickly took three, four, or sometimes as many as fifty steps back, some disappearing from the trip forever.

At one point, the lead singer offered us a chance to sing. Nobody took up the offer, whether due to embarrassment or the hope that if no one accepted, we would sooner go home. Nobody, that is, except for Brad, an alcoholic smoker with bad knees and a terrible singing voice. Brad got drunk pretty much every night and allegedly passed out twice on a couch, pissing his pants both times. I personally cannot validate the rumor, but there it is. In any case, Brad sang a decent song, and then a not so decent one, which despite the drummers’ vainest efforts failed to follow anything akin to a beat. Eventually the lead singer politely but forcefully dispossessed Brad of the microphone and the hectic pounding/singing/screaming/evil dance circling continued.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, we took a break to hear a welcoming speech from Shabbat that probably involved something which happened two thousand years ago. Shabbat also presented us with challah, the traditional Jewish bread, and some traditional Jewish wine. I tore myself a hunk of bread but skipped on the wine; any Jewish person can tell you why. Challah is quite yummy, but the wine…how do I explain this?...fill a tub with grape juice, add forty cups of sugar, then a small packet of mayonnaise, and finally a dead hamster, then let it rot in the sun for a couple of days — that’s Jewish wine. Not enjoyable.

After the welcoming ceremony finally ended, we drove to our hotel and received room assignments. There were three people to a room; I was paired with some random kid from the other bus I had never seen before, and Brad. To be fair, at this time I did not yet know about Brad’s drinking problem or his inability to retain his consciousness or his urine, because of course none of these infamous escapades had happened yet, but I did know that he smoked, talked really loudly, and sang, without any shame or talent whatsoever, in front of over ninety perfect strangers; from these facts I gathered that Brad was probably not the type of guy who peacefully read books in the evening and went to bed at 10:30. My room assignment worried me, and I wondered if I was going to get any sleep on the trip.

Brad, like me, had a few friends on the trip, and fortunately some of his friends were male, meaning he could room with them. One such friend, Jordan, who was a decent-enough chap even though he wore big goofy sunglasses all the time, came up to Brad after we had gotten our room key and asked if either me or the other kid would be willing to trade rooms with him. As quickly as was possible without betraying my swelling desire to get away from Brad, I agreed. Jordan said his roomies were brothers who were “very cool guys.” They could have been a pot-smoking gay couple for all I cared; I figured the risk was worth it.

Luck was beside me, because my new roommates were awesome: Jeff, the bearded, law-school-bound opera/English major; and his brother Mike, who had a computer science job of some sort that he hated. I didn’t ever talk to Mike very much, but he was a big sports fan, and on our first evening together asked if I would mind if he watched some sports game at 3:00 AM. I said I didn’t mind at all, even though I minded a great deal, but it turned out he was joking. At least, I assume he was joking; possibly he turned the game on and I slept through it. Mike’s toiletries bag was designed, on the outside, to look just like a basketball.

Jeff and Mike were both quite intelligent. When we were all lying in bed on the first evening, they flipped the TV to an Israeli news program. As I slowly realized that Jeff had no intention of changing the channel, I began wondering why they would want to watch the news in a foreign language. “Oh, by the way,” Jeff suddenly said, perhaps noting the puzzled expression on my face, “we both speak fluent Hebrew.”

“Really?”

“No.”

After we received our room assignments, or possibly before, or maybe even during, heck if I remember, Quest and Foot each had a separate group meeting. We sat in a circle and played another icebreaker, although this one was much grander in scope than the LICE game and involved a ball of yarn. One person started out holding the ball of yarn and had to talk about himself, where he was from etc, and then conclude by expounding on his reasons for coming to Israel and what he hoped to get out of this trip. Naturally a lot of BS was involved here, because what 95% of the trip’s participants wanted was a free trip to Israel, but you couldn’t really say that. You had to say that you wanted to forge a deep connection to your spiritual Judaism and uncover your cultural heritage and walk on the sacred soil and breathe the hallowed air of your ancestors or whatever. Then, when the person finished talking, he had to pass or throw the ball of yarn to somebody else in the circle, but hold on to a few loops of string, so that after everybody had spoken, there was a big tangled interconnected mess of yarn in the middle of the room, and frankly I forget what the hell we did with it.

Chuck — a friendly guy with a penchant for smoking, tattoos, and body piercings — and Brad somehow managed to get thoroughly trashed before the meeting/yarn game, and consequently made loud, unhumorous comments throughout the entirety of the evening.

Israel, like all foreign countries except Canada, has much more to see and do than can be seen and done in ten days, but that didn’t stop us from trying. We went to sleep late, got up early, and a lot of times I felt like I wasn’t really seeing Israel at all, but rather fighting to survive from one bathroom break to the next. Although I assure you Israel is a perfectly civilized country with very decent plumbing, peeing in the woods was a necessity for me on at least one occasion I recall, and a common habit for others, some of them girls. Whenever we had the opportunity, those of us who didn’t much care for guzzling alcohol usually went to sleep as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

So when the phone rang at 11:30 the first night, Jeff, Mike and I were already lying in bed with the lights out. Please, I prayed, please don’t let it be for me. Please don’t tell me it’s my stupid da— “Boris, it’s for you,” Mike’s groggy voice groaned in the darkness. Fuck. With a sigh, I clambered out of bed and poked around the black room until I hit Mike’s hand and found the phone, which was situated such that when I held it the cord probably lay across Mike’s face. My dad wanted to know how things were going and all that other crap, which I told him in as brief a manner as possible without making any effort to conceal that (1) he had woken us up, (2) I was pissed, (3) and embarrassed.

The next day, Tuesday, we went in the morning to Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial. Some of you may know about The United States Holocaust Memorial in Washington, DC; Yad Vashem is, depending on who you ask, either basically the same thing, or completely different. After seeing Yad Vashem with my own eyes and giving the matter much thought, I decided that the two memorials are in fact quite different; the largest difference being, that unlike Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial is a memorial I have never actually visited.

Our tour of the memorial was interesting and informative, highlighting an individualistic, personal side of the Holocaust that is often glossed over when people talk about the large, tragic numbers of victims. The guide spoke with a good accent and had a better command of the English language than some Americans I’ve met, for example Brad. In addition to going over the basic history of how the Holocaust progressed and how the minority of Nazis in Germany were able to brainwash the rest of the population into offering no resistance to their atrocious schemes, she told us many small-scale, personal stories that powerfully conveyed the sadness and the terror of the era.

The memorial consisted of several buildings, the coolest of which had a long, dark hallway with mirrors everywhere. Somehow, these mirrors were arranged around just six candles so that it looked like there were a million candles flickering all over the place. Recorded voices in several languages gravely read the names and ages of kids who had died.

Although photography was not permitted in many parts of the memorial, it wasn’t prohibited everywhere, a fact which Irene utilized to full advantage and took fifty billion pictures of me looking like an idiot eating a sandwich.

After the memorial we went on a day hike, taking the Spring path from Kennedy Memorial Park through Ein Hindak to the Sataf. At least, that’s what the itinerary says. From now on I won’t talk about each individual hike, partly to avoid needlessly straining my memory and partly because let’s face it, hikes are pretty boring to talk about. Basically, whenever we weren’t doing something touristy, we were hiking. One of the neat things about Israel is that it’s not all barren desert like I expected — there were rocky hikes, bushy hikes, watery hikes, hikes with caves, hikes with possibly poisonous berries that people ate anyway; there were a lot of hikes. We were Foot, after all. My favorite hikes were the ones where we got to explore caves. Cave crawling left some of the fondest impressions in probably everybody’s recollection of the trip, except for the losers. Crawling on my knees and sometimes even my stomach through cramped, dirty tunnels in the ground made me feel much cooler than I really am.

One of the most exciting such hikes was a forty minute trek through a water tunnel that was built (you guessed it) two thousand years ago. The water came up to my knees at times and the ceiling was so low that in some places even Irene had to duck. You can imagine, then, how sore Yana and I were by the time we got out. The tunnel was pitch black; I couldn’t see my proverbial hand in front of my proverbial face. Although there were a number of flashlights that were supposed to be dispersed throughout the group, somehow they all wound up in the very front and very back, whereas our clump was in the middle. We couldn’t catch up to the people in front of us because they got too far ahead, and we couldn’t slow down to wait for the people behind us because walking through complete darkness gave us the juicy illusion that we were hardcore.

I was at the back of our group, which was a nice place to be because if, for example, we encountered a sudden drop and the people at the people at the front of the group sprained their ankles on it, they were usually nice enough to pass a verbal warning back. Whenever Marina said, “I’m ducking,” I got ready to double over. Since everybody was blind, the best way to travel was to grab on to the straps of the backpack of the person in front of you. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t think to take hold of Yana’s backpack until we were already enshrouded in darkness; I couldn’t see where the straps were, and since straps are generally located at the base of the backpack, I didn’t particularly feel like groping around down there lest I accidentally grab Yana’s ass. As enjoyable as that would have been, we hadn’t yet been in Israel long and I thought it imprudent to create tension for the rest of the trip. So I had to maintain my hold on the middle portion of her backpack by means of a little plastic ring that gradually cut off all circulation to my right index and all subsequent fingers.

.: posted by Boris 9:11 AM

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