and so it begins…again

hello hello!

hm, where are we now since my last check-in…i think i left you all after a week in tel aviv, and it has been busy busy ever since. i traveled up to the north to a beautiful town called Tzfat, or Safed, or Zefat, or a bunch of other spellings/pronunciations. haven’t quite looked into why these people never got it together to agree on one name, but anyway. it’s one of the 4 holy cities of israel, built vertically onto the side of a mountain; it is associated with the element of Air, and i tell you, the minute you step off the bus and breathe in the mountain air, you feel it filling your soul along with your lungs. i squatted for the few days at the dorms of an organization called Livnot, which basically runs volunteering programs; they had just finished a session, so we had the run of the place, with a kitchen (and leftover food in the fridge!) and washing machine and library. if the supermarket in tel aviv with free water and internet was heaven, well, then i must have died in heaven and gone to heaven all over again because THIS was even better. and believe it or not—FREE. well, it did come at a price: we sold our bodies for hard labour to pay for our accommodations. basically we did some livnot free-lancing, and just showed up at a work site and joined a bunch of israeli handymen who were fixing up these really depressing bomb shelters in the basements of some apartment buildings…we scrubbed, mopped, painted, chipped, inhaled copious amounts of dust, sweated alongside our hebrew-speaking comrades, and collapsed after a half-day’s work. i gained so much respect for these guys, who do this kind of work day in, day out..it was intense. also, they didn’t give us a lift back into town, so we had to climb about 3000 stairs (through the old cemetery and men’s mikveh—an ancient ritual bathing site), which was great because we got to narrowly squeeze by all these religious guys with their towels slung around their necks coming and going from this purification process, and here we are, disgusting, covered head to toe in dust and sweat…hah what a sight we were. but a shower fixed everything, and we continued our exploration of our home for the week. tzfat is famous not only for its mystical contributions (the zohar, the main text of kabbalistic teaching, was written there), but for it’s artist’s colony. i went nuts going in all the galleries and chatting up the various kooky artists who had somehow made this place their nest. i wish i could go into more detail about it all, but it’s already feeling like a long time ago, and i have other things to catch you up on, so we will continue.

shabbat. ah yes. we came back to jerusalem right in time to be swept up to a settlement in the mountains outside of the city, to stay by our friends (eliyon and leyla shemesh, our lighthouse people) with a bunch of other girls from montreal. it was like a family reunion in the middle of nowhere. it’s amazing. this couple and their 4 kids live in a caravan on top of a mountain in the desert. you can see jerusalem on one side, and you turn around and seriously see nothing but hills and hills for miles and miles. their settlement consists of about 30 young families from various walks of life (this is the theme in israel..such a random mishkebobble of people crashing together to make life happen) with about 100 kids running wild on this mountaintop.we drove down to a natural river and found a hidden eddy under some foliage, and splashed around in our skivvies. so what if there was a sign by the water that said “swimming prohibited due to contamination”. if i survived blue-green algae in st-donat, i think i can handle a little toxic sewage run-off. besides everyone else jumped in without qualms. at night i walked around under the full moon and felt like i had fallen into a dreamscape. the silence was earth-shattering. that was the good part—the bad part was, adrienne and i picked something up in our falafel adventures in tzfat, because the two of us turned our bathroom into a warzone. thank god for over-the-counter pills (aptly named Stop-Eet)—a word of caution: NEVER LEAVE HOME WITHOUT THEM—5 days later and i think it’s safe to say i’m fully recovered.

so i moved into my house in jerusalem after shabbat, and it’s a gorgeous (albeit as of yet unfinished) 7-room, 2 floor apartment/house. i honestly thought i would never tread in the same sackville waters again, but i am outdoing myself: if living with 9 girls on 52 salem was intense…try living with 12. yep. 12 women. 2 showers. you do the math. lol all i can say is, we’re gonna go through a LOT of toilet paper. and the infectious israeli stomach bugs aren’t helping. but it feels like family already, and is making me homesick for sackville and that cozy time of life. here is a chance to feel that love again, and so far it is smooth going in ironing out the creases. classes have started, and they are also looking promising. all in all, i am exactly where i need to be right now, surrounded by a network of supportive friends, and in the words of penny lane/kate hudson in almost famous: “it’s all happening!”.

i am slowly learning the bus routes (i sit with my map unfolded on my lap and vigilently trace my trajectory as we go along—yes i look a weirdo tourist, but hey, it’s gotta be done), and getting lost is never so bad as it seems. had a very fancy shmancy birthday dinner for yossi last night with his sisters (minus chagit—you were with us in spirit babe) and put away a big steak and potatoes and the exceptional chocolate souffle that should be mandatory after any meal, really, and could have kept going—the fat man in my stomach has definitely recuperated after the damage inflicted on him last week. wound up at a house party of a friend of a friend, and again felt transported back to university, where people were just hanging out in semi-dingy living quarters, eating, smoking, drinking, playing music, talking…all the fun stuff of living on your own. i met a very cool californian girl and got into a very deep and very long conversation about everything and nothing, and was dragged home by an exhausted chaviva; we crashed into bed and started the whole process of Fun all over again this morning.

anyway, this is where i leave you for now; i am off to rishon l’tzion this weekend (no idea where that is) for my first cousin thrice-removed’s bar-mitzvah. never heard of these people until a few days ago—after a string of emails and middlemen (and women), i spoke to uri, my dad’s first cousin, on the phone and he asked me why i had been in israel a whole month and hadn’t called him. he was shocked to hear that i didn’t know he existed until the day before our conversation. so that’s pretty exciting. aside from his 13 yr-old, he has two older kids, 23 and 25 (my third cousins, i guess)—so hopefully i will make friends with them! that will be where i pick up next time.