Drishat Shalom Le...Eretz Yisrael

During the second week in November, the program took us to the Yitzhak Rabin Museum near the university. It was a beautiful museum and I learned a lot about the famous Rabin and how his life was connected to Israeli history. 

A description of the museum from their website:

This is a museum featuring Rabin’s life, in the presence of the turbulence and changes which occurred in the Israeli society in the background, while presenting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - with all its complexity and explosiveness, socially, politically and publicly. All artifacts are arranged around a large cylindrical space, located inside the Yitzhak Rabin center for Israeli studies.

The next week the program took us to a Idan Raichel concert. He is a famous Israeli singer and usually tickets to his shows are really expensive but this youth program called Masa Israel subsidized the tickets so they were really cheap for us. The entire theatre was filled with just people who were on programs through this organization. It was amazing because it was all just people our age. The Idan Raichel Project is started by him, but is a big group of musicians and singers who all perform together. They from all over the world and they all have a lot of different talents. The concert was great, so much energy and everyone standing up and dancing. The lighting was great and there was a huge clear drum that came down from the ceiling that two people then were harnessed to and played during one of the songs. By the end, we were all standing up and dancing to the music. It was a good time.

On October 25^th, I went to one of my friends from high school’s wedding. It was my first wedding of a friend. I had to travel to Jerusalem to meet my ride there. I am so glad he was able to take me because otherwise there was no way I would have known how to get there. I feel like it was in the middle of nowhere. Somewhere in the north on a kibbutz. The wedding was beautiful though. It was outside with twinkling lights strung through the palm trees. It was so interesting to be at a semi-religious wedding in Israel and not only because it was the wedding of a friend from the states. During the cocktail hour, the bride in all her beautiful regalia was welcoming guests and blessing them. When the ceremony was ready to begin, everyone gathered around and in a big procession, everyone followed the bride flanked by her parents on both sides up to the chupah. The chupah was on a raised platform, there were no seats and the guests just gathered around the platform. Most of the guests were very young because the bride and groom were so young and because it was all of their friends from the Israeli army. Plus everyone there was Jewish and knew the ceremony and knew what was going on. Because of this during the whole ceremony everyone was screaming and yelling ‘amen’ to all of the prayers. It was almost like a concert with screaming fans and a band celebrating these two people getting married.

After the dinner – during which the new couple ate in a different room together (because they hadn’t seen each other all week and they had fasted that day, as with the tradition) – the dancing started. It was separated men and women and it was the typical Jewish music with everyone jumping around and dancing in circles around the bride. It was amazing to see how happy everyone was and how much they just really wanted to celebrate this amazing event. I have never been to a wedding like this, where everyone knew what was going on and everyone was up and dancing. Soon the men no longer wanted to be separated and they came over and everyone was dancing together. There was a live band who sang all of the music. After a little dance break where we said some more prayers and Birchat Hamazon (the grace after meals) the bride’s friends presented a couple of things to the couple. They had prepared a dance and wrote a song for them. Up until this point everything had been very Israeli and religious I had felt. But now it moved into being more like an American event for two young people. (The couple had met in the Israeli army but they were both American.) Next, there was a dj and he put on American pop music. Now it turned into a big dance party like you would see at a club. During the wedding I hung out with the bride’s friends from Ramah (the Jewish summer camp she went to in the states) and all of us danced together. I had such a good time. I loved the mix of Jewish and American styles of celebrating. The couple looked so happy and I am so happy for them. 

The trip back to Tel Aviv was pretty uneventful after that, just the long experiences of planes and getting connections and such. I did get to watch A Roman Holiday with Audrey Hepburn on one of the planes. It was a really good movie and it was so cool to see all the places that we had just visited. The only thing that was very strange that the woman next to me watched the movie with me but we each had individual screens so she had to have watched it without audio. Anyway, I was so happy with how the trip went, it was so much fun. The four of us got along really well – with inside jokes galore - and we all bonded a lot. I am so happy I went and now I can say that I have been to Italy!

By this time we only had a few hours to have dinner and explore before we had to be back at the station to collect our bags. They could only hold them until 11:30. So we walked to the Trevi fountain and took pictures and threw coins in while making wishes. We had a nice dinner with end-of-the-trip-celebratory wine and did some souvenir shopping. As we were walking back, we stumbled into a liquor shop. The lady was very generous and gave us tastes of a liquor flavored strawberry, pistachio, and melon (three different kinds). We even tasted Absinthe! We decided to get two bottles – because there was a sale – and we chose hazelnut and peach. She let us try those flavors and chocolate before we bought them. Before heading back we stopped for our last Italian gelato. After collecting our bags, we made a cuddle puddle on the floor of the train station to wait for our 2:30am bus – our flights were all around 4am. We looked very hobo-like (some old hobos even approached us) because we were sitting on the floor drinking straight out of the bottle. But what else could we do? We had our heavy bags and all we could do was wait. We played Never Have I Ever and then Truth(or Dare) and Would You Rather? off of my iPod – all adapted to be drinking games. The hazelnut liquor eventually became too sweet, but we drank for a little while. We had a good time with the awkward and silly questions and laughed at ourselves looking very strange. It was very cold and sitting on the hard ground wasn’t so fun. We eventually just decided to take a taxi to the airport instead of waiting for the bus. We figured we could do all of this waiting at the airport instead. Yet the airport was freezing cold too. And there weren’t enough chairs. So we ended up sleeping on the cold floor of the airport. By the time we could finally check in we were all exhausted and kind of miserable in a we-are-tired-from-being-up-all-night-and-sleeping-on-a-cold-floor way. We parted here because we all had different flights. MC and MS went to other places but luckily LF and I got to stick together through security and waiting at the gate. 

Photo by: LF

For our last day in Napoli, we wanted to explore the city a little more. We found our way to the train that turned out to be built diagonally to go uphill. It was pretty cool. The lady at the hostel suggested we take this to the top of the hill to go to an outlook over the city. Once we got there, we followed the signs to St. Elmo’s castle. It was huge. There was an art exhibit and we looked at the art for a bit. I wasn’t that interested and some of the art make me feel uncomfortable. I don’t know why, maybe because it was kind of violent or not a style I liked. But maybe the artists would have still been happy because they got a reaction from me at all. I don’t know.

Then we got to the top of the castle. Since it was at the top of this hill, it looked out over all of Napoli. The view was absolutely magnificent. The city was laid out underneath us with its so many buildings, all in red and yellow. Then in the distance we could see Mt. Vesuvius and other mountains. The to our right was the sea. I can’t even fully explain it; it was so beautiful. We walked around the perimeter to take in the different views, and then we went back down. All of our time on the hill was extremely windy – it took my breath away. Then we took the diagonal train back to the area of our hostel. We found some lunch – really good pizza (and our last in Italy)– and went back to the hostel to grab our bags. Something held up the tram to the train station so we ended up basically running for our lives to try to catch our train to Rome. We missed it anyway and they put us on a train to a different station in Rome. That train was also delayed so we got into Rome much late than expected. Luckily we had all the time in the world before our flights. It seemed like it would be complicated, but in the end we just took a subway from the new station to the original station in Rome. It was a little nerve-racking though, because we couldn’t sit together on the train and each of us had to know exactly when to get off, though once we were reunited everything was okay again. Once we got to the right station, we figured out how we would get to the airport – by bus – and we stored our bags at the station. 

Photo by: LF

We originally wanted to get tickets to some theatre but everything was sold out. So instead we got tickets to a football game (soccer). By the time we got back to the hostel we were pretty tired from the day and almost decided to just not go at all. (After we got dessert from a super creepy Italian man who was way too interested in LF.) But we talked ourselves back into it – mostly because we had already bought the tickets and it could be an experience – so we got a bus, walked, and got a train to the stadium. We had found out from the hostel that we were late because everyone gets there two hours early and there aren’t assigned seats. So when we got there the place was already packed. In the end we were really glad we went because it was such a crazy cool experience.

All of the fans were standing on their chairs and cheering. There were huge flags being waved. I have never been to a sporting event where all the fans were cheering together. There were hand motions and collective songs they sang. They were SO excited. We moved around a little bit and finally found seats (to stand on). It was very energizing to be in the thick of it all. We all tried to cheer along with the fans. I had such a good time cheering for the Napoli team. We also saw in the stands the fans making some kind of fires. We think they were just light and smoke but I’m not sure. They kept cropping up here and there through out the stands. We wanted to know who the other team was and no one else would just ask one of the people around us, so I asked the girls behind us but they didn’t speak English. LF thought it was two parts of the same team but when we looked it up later, they were playing Parma, a neighboring city. We stayed a little after half time to see the other team make a goal and then we left before the crowds. In the end, Napoli got a goal too but they still lost 2-1. It was so cold that night but on the way home LF bought a Napoli scarf, we got dinner (hot dogs), and we got cappuccino. We came back to the hostel pretty late and watched another episode of Rome but I fell asleep before it was over. It was a very full day.

Photo by: LF

Some of the art that survived in Pompeii.

Photo by: LF

Next, we walked down to one of the amphitheaters. It was so big and we got to walk right on the arena area. I was really excited about it. I could just imagine what it must have been like. By the time we got back we found out that we missed the last bus to the top of Vesuvius (the volcano), so we just headed back to Napoli. 

Internet Image.

Then we saw one of the brothels and the erotic art on the walls.

“Erotic art in Pompeii was discovered after extensive excavations began in the 18^th century. The city was found to be full of erotic art and frescoes, symbols, and inscriptions regarded by its excavators as pornographic. Even many recovered household items had a sexual theme. The ubiquity of such imagery and items indicated that the sexual mores of the ancient Roman culture of the time were much more liberal than most present-day cultures, although much of what might seem to us to be erotic imagery (e.g. oversized phalluses) could arguably be fertility-imagery. This clash of cultures led to an unknown number of discoveries being hidden away again. For example, a wall fresco that depicted Priapus, the ancient gd of sex and fertility, with his extremely enlarged phallus, was covered with plaster and only rediscovered in 1998 due to rainfall. Re-opened, closed, re-opened again and then closed again for nearly 100 years, these artifacts were finally re-opened for viewing in 2000. Minors are still only allowed entry in the presence of a guardian or with written permission.” (Wikipedia entry on the subject.)