I would like to personally welcome any new readers to my blog; I recently sent out an email to many different people telling them a little bit about life in Israel and about this blog. So for those that are just starting to read my blog, thanks! Hope you find my stories fun, entertaining, at times educational and enjoyable to read. With that, let's get to the summary of Beit Shemesh!
(In English, Beit means "house" AKA Beit Nativ, or "the house of Nativ" and Shemesh means "Sun", so the name of the town is "House of the Sun."
Thursday afternoon: MDA retest, and as I said I passed! Yay. I went shopping at Mr. Zol's (super market, near Ben Yahudia Street) with Seri, our MDA instructor, Jesse and Jonny. We bought burgers, hot dogs, chips, and other stuff like that for our MDA BBQ. Then I met up with Judah and we went to the shook to buy food to bring to the beach so we would have stuff to eat over shabbat. That night, Thursday, we all took a bus to Talpiyot and had our MDA bbq. Talpiyot is this cool park about 20 minutes outside of Jerusalem, but you can still see Jerusalem really well from it. We played games, cooked food and just had a good time. Around 11:00 we boarded a bus back to Jerusalem and met up with the rest of our Nativ friends who were hanging around the normal area in downtown Jerusalem: sabbaros, Yeruchalme and other places like that. Around 12:15 I was tired so I went back to base and called it a night. I had to prepare for a big day the next day. I set an alarm for 9 AM and went to sleep very excited for the weekend ahead of me.
I woke up before my alarm went off. Yossi, the director of Nativ, sent out a mass text to everyone on Nativ warning us of a heat wave that was in effect in Israel until Monday, warning everyone that hiking was advised against by the Israeli government for the upcoming weekend. Luckily, we were going to a beach with water so it didn't concern me. I couldn't fall back asleep so I took some time to pack up and get ready to leave. Seffi wasn't feeling well so he didn't come with us. We ended up changing plans at the last second, and instead of going to Ashkelon, the original plan (which is in the south) we went north to Beit Shemesh. Beit Shemesh is about 20 minutes away from Tiberous.
We took a bus to Tiberous and a taxi to Beit Shemesh. We ended up at this Kibbutz thats owned by a fellow Nativer's uncle. Ana, the Nativer, was enough to set us up at a good price and get us in contact with him. We arrived at the kibbutz beach, and there was about 80 people already there, with their tents set up and fires burning bright. We arrived around 2 in the afternoon. I went with Tyler, Judah, Marc, Haley, Shira and Rachel. It was a good group of people. We put our tents down and got ready for the evening. We put on our swim suits and went straight into the Kineret. The water was beautiful, and it was such a better beach than last time. This time, there was actually sand and it was legal to swim. We swam for a little bit, then dried off and got ready for shabbat. We took out our pita, hummas, apples, tangerines, assorted nuts, bamba, chocolate spread, pretzels and water. That was our meals for the next day and a half. We made kiddush, motzi, and did all the other prayers. By the time we were finished it was already well into the night. We decided to take our watches off before dinner and leave them off for the rest of the weekend. We turned in shortly after dinner, singing and one more swim session. I checked my watch. It was 9:05.
It took a good amount of time to fall asleep. Obviously, all of the Israelis there had no intention of falling asleep until the late hours of the night. It was not easy sleeping on the hard ground and having a lot of loud Israelis yelling and doing other obnoxious things. It wasn't that big of a deal because I still slept pretty well all things considered.
We woke out around 8:45 in the morning, and it was already hot and sunny. Our day consisted of this: swim, eat breakfast, sleep (that was the morning). Swim, eat Shabbas lunch, sleep. Swim, eat dinner, sleep. We literally did that cycle three times, and it was amazing. It was so nice to finally just get a chance to relax and take it easy. All day consisted of just swimming, eating a sleeping. It also consisted of some light davening.
By the way sorry I haven't written in 5 days, I've been doing a little of this every day.
We made it back to Jerusalem, and I basically just went to sleep, preparing for the first day of school the day, on Sunday. That's to come in my next post.
Thanks for reading! They come more frequently than this promise. Talk soon. For my family at AIPAC, I'm really jealous that you guys are there. Thanks for advocating for the best country ever.
Josh
Here's some pics from the last day of MDA training and Beit Shemesh! Sorry I don't have more it was Shabbat so I didn't take pictures until after it was over.
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