First Day

Dear Diary, Mood: optimistic! Oh diary, you should see it here in Israel. We found ourselves on the first full day in Israel in the Golan Heights, Israel's Wisconsin (ish). We began our morning with a lovely hike through mud. Israeli mud is like American mud except it never appologizes...like Israelis. But Diary, I digress. We had a wonderful hike through Gilaboon and got our quad workout for the day out of the way. People fell in the stream, it was funny because it wasn't me. We left this hike, diary, and made our way to a lovely example of Israeli architecture: a strip mall. Unlike some of our esteemed colleagues in arms, I went with the local cuisine instead of the pizza and french fries. SHWARMMAAAA. We then found ourselves in Har Bental, an Israeli outpost overlooking Syria in the Golan Heights. The fog that gave us 20 foot visibility made us miss the view of Syria. We were informed that we didn't miss anything. We then went to the JNF (Jewish National Fund) site in Gallilee and saw the Hula lake. Let me tell you, diary, the word lake is the overstatement of the century. This was a glorified pond, at best. However we learned the history of the draining and refilling of the lake and that the JNF has planted like 28 million trees. We then drove to the Sea of Gallilee (Kineret) and found that it was not a sea but a glorified lake. Israel has major water issues (especially over the past 10 years) and is accepting donations of bottled water.