Masada and the Jilabon
Hello all you folks at home! I promised my mom I would blog, so here goes. We don't have a lot of time now because we need to go to sleep even though it's only 9pm because we are climbing MASADA tomorrow, and we have to get up at 3 AM to do it. Yay. But this is actually one of the things that I looked forward to the most on the trip, so I'm super excited. We went in the Dead Sea today, and it was really cool but super strange and semi-painful. I had lots of scratches on my legs from tripping on the desert hike the other day (which was ridiculously cool, I felt like I was in the Prince of Egypt!) but it was so cool because we just floated in the water. Just floated.
One of the first days we hiked in the Jilabon, which was also great. There were beautiful flowers and streams everywhere, and it felt like a rainforest. Another one of my favorite things was when we went to see the B'hai Gardens in Haifa. It seemed to me what the Hanging Gardens of Babylon probably looked like. It was absolutely gorgeous and we took so many pictures. Haifa is Boston's sister city. When we went to Haifa, we voluteered at a school and played with children, many of whom were of Ethiopian descent.
~Melinda

