Thursday 3/6 | Shorashim - Israel with Israelis

Thursday 3/6

Hello friends! Our adventures in Israel are going pretty swimmingly, I would say. Yesterday morning we explored Tel Aviv and saw Independence Hall. We enjoyed a particularly entertaining seminar from one of the guides, the take-home message of which was that Jews are not swimmers. In the afternoon yesterday, we traveled to the Negev Desert to the site where David Ben Gurion and his wife are buried, and we learned about the impact he had on Israel's upbringing. In the evening, we stayed at a Bedouin village and slept in a Bedouin tent. We learned about traditional Bedouin culture, traditional Bedouin food, and some of us even got to make use of traditional Bedouin WiFi. This morning, we began our day with a camel ride through the Negev Desert. We completed our ride with minimal kvetching and screaming, and took solace in having named our camels funny names, viz., WIlliam Wallace, Humphrey Bogart, Lovely Lady Lumps, and Lior. After bidding farewell to our Bedouin hosts, we ventured to one of Israel's largest research institutes in desert sciences, including the fields of renewable energy, agriculture, and water usage, transportation, and purification. The niftiest fact we learned is that Israel leads the world in percentage of water reused (> 80 %), with the second highest percentage being only ~ 20 % (Spain). We became learned in the fields of water desalination, harvesting of solar energy, and efforts towards efficient prodution of environmentally benign fuels. We ate lunch in a mall with very clean bathrooms, and now we are headed to embark on a "water hike," about which we are all quite excited. Tonight we will be dining at the Ein Gedi guest house, after which we will promptly go to bed, as we must arise early tomorrow morning to hike up Masada! To quote our fearless and dashing guide Lior, "tomorrow is gonna be a grrrreat day!"