What Are You Gonna Do Now That You’ve Spent A Week In The Desert?
Go to the desert, of course.
Wednesday morning, we have a reservation for a tour of Masada and the Dead Sea. In retrospect, I booked the wrong tour for us. I should have known it was the wrong tour, because it was scheduled to leave Jerusalem after 9AM. Masada and the Dead Sea are in the Judean Desert, which is hot. If you want to go and be at all comfortable, you go to Masada at dawn or before, and walk up the Snake Path. Instead we went in an 18 passenger van, full, with poor air conditioning. Two-thirds of the passengers did not speak English. Turns out to be a bilingual tour, Spanish and English. So at most half the information can be conveyed as a monolingual tour, since everything needs to be said twice. Oh, also, some of the passengers speak neither English nor Spanish–there’s a young Japanese woman with very limited English, and two French women, only one of whom speaks Spanish (and a little English) who is simultaneously translating for the other one, which is not distracting at all. I and the woman from New Zealand are, I think, the only Jews in this group, which I suppose was fair for Derek, considering the whole previous week.
Anyway, the tour was too commercial by half. We stopped at the Ahava cosmetics factory store by the Dead Sea, where the tour guide assured us of the miraculous powers of the skin treatments, and where we paid scurrilously high prices for iced coffee drinks.
On to Masada. We should have brought our ride water bottles, since bottled water was at least 3 times the price as in the city. Here we rode up in the cable car and had a very rushed hour of seeing the ruins. His information was fine, but just too little, too fast. Back down to the visitor center for lunch, where we get coupons for free bottles of water with a purchased lunch, which we skipped.
Now to a beach at the Dead Sea. Neither of us wanted to go in, but we sat in a shaded hut and watched people on the beach slathering themselves in mud and getting in the water. A forbidding environment, full of Russians. We moved back up to the snack area and got beers, which were cold and therefore good, and sat with the Kiwi, an Australian, and the Japanese woman. I practiced by 10 words of Japanese, for which she was politely (but I have no idea how sincerely) impressed.
Back in Jerusalem, we met up with Bruce Shaffer, who made aliyah just last week from Boulder, for a lovely dinner in a quiet neighborhood restaurant with garden patio tables. The couple who owned the place were extremely nice, and the pumpkin soup was terrific. Bruce was thrilled when the husband identified him as a Jerusalemite and us as tourists. Considering the short time since his official immigration, this gave him quite the boost. Afterwards, he took us on a little walking tour of the neighborhood around Gan HaPaamon (Liberty Bell Park). In the park, we saw the basketball courts where young haredi men were playing against secular teams. Very local slice of life. We also chatted with a woman who was waiting for a cab on one of the residential streets, for no reason except that she said hello. She was unusually bold in her conversational style, asking me right away if I was blind. I have no problem at all with open questions like that, and told her yes, at which point she took a conversational left turn and asked if I played music. Apparently, she thinks blind people are all musicians. Talking to strangers is so entertaining–I really should do it more often. Bruce gave her a hug when she also thought he was a local, and when he told her that he was newly immigrated, she told him to look her up with my favorite sentence of the trip: “My name is Yael Shwartz, spelled with one vav.” That just made me smile.