Road Rally and Netanya

Hello!

The week following Tzfat was fairly uneventful, and consisted mostly of finishing up my midterms. Following sushi Wednesday, our beer pong team had yet ANOTHER win! Although we are no longer playing, as this week starts the tournament and (surprise!) we didn’t make that, it was really great to end our glorious beer pong career with another win.

On Thursday night was something called Road Rally. Basically it was a huge scavenger hunt around Jerusalem. It was completely student run and initiated – my friend Jaime had done this at his high school so he set up the whole thing. It was actually really impressive – each team got its own envelope with the list of 102 tasks, and there was a 5 shekel buy in per person, so the 1^st and 2^nd place teams each made a profit, the 3^rd place team was reimbursed, and some of the money even went to Tzedakah (charity). We had from 10:00 pm to 1:30 am to complete and photograph/video as many of the tasks on the list as possible. The teams were comprised of 4 or 5 people. My team was me, Jordan, Jake, Emily (the one coming to Europe with me), and Ariella. Our team name was “The Commandos” and on the front we stenciled the team name and on the back we wrote our own names with Commando nicknames for each person.

Tasks on the list ranged from just silly (trade clothes with someone of the opposite sex and walk down Ben Yehuda like that), to selfish (buy the judges blowpops), to things that I can’t write here. Our team was really great and we all participated. Ariella came out to a cab driver (“Can I tell you something? I LIKE GIRLS!”), Jake swam in the fountain in front of our building, Emily asked some guy if she could get on the back of his moped and put on his helmet for a picture, Jordan washed his face with toilet water, and I drank a cup of olive oil (not one of my best decisions – it was way more disgusting than I was prepared for). We also got piggyback rides from strangers, proposed to people we didn’t know, took a video of the Arab guy at the liquor store saying ‘skeet skeet skeet,’ and wrote “Nativ 28” on our foreheads for the whole night (it took 2 days to get that off). Overall we just ran around the city and had a great time – and our team came in 5^th place, which I thought was totally admirable. It was definitely a lot of fun.

This weekend I again decided I wanted to try and travel up north – the fact that my time in Jerusalem is almost over is becoming clearer every day. But my friends Misha and Kesha and I couldn’t decide where we wanted to go. There’s this website called “couchsurfing” and what it is is you create a user profile and basically look for people all over the world who are willing to host you. You can check them out beforehand and there are varying degrees of security verification. Once you find someone you think you’d like to couchsurf with, you message them and ask if you can come stay, they check you out, and then they approve or deny you. It might sound a little sketchy, but the whole idea behind couchsurfing is a very hippy concept, about trust and forming a community and meeting people from all over the world. As long as you don’t couchsurf alone and always have a backup plan in mind, it’s often a very successful way to stay somewhere for free. So we found this sweet-looking girl named Rachell who lives in Netanya. We messaged her and she told us that this would be a perfect weekend to come. We took the bus up to Netanya (a city in between Tel Aviv and Haifa) on Friday morning and met her and her sister Friday afternoon. They were really great – they took us to their favorite ice cream shop and then walked with us around the town on the edge of the water. It was gorgeous and warm out and I couldn’t believe I was walking on the beach in early December.

We got back to their apartment, which was a beautiful penthouse because Rachell (who was in her early 20s) lived with her parents, although they were away for the weekend. We all hung out and watched some TV for a while, and then Kesha stayed there to nap while Misha and I went and read on the beach for an hour or so. That night, Rachell and her sister went to Haifa for a few hours, leaving us alone in their apartment and giving us a key – like I said, the whole principle behind couchsurfing is trust. We went out to a local restaurant and had a lovely Chinese dinner, and then went back to the apartment to lay around, snack, and watch TV. It was really relaxing and so great to just be in a house instead of a dorm room, with a kitchen and cable and everything.

Saturday morning we all accidentally slept until noon (see Nan? I am getting enough sleep) and when we woke up Rachell and her sister had gone out and left us a note. So we prepared lunch with the food we brought to make lunch for them as a thank-you – it was great to be able to cook for ourselves after 3 months of eating out. Then we headed off to the beach for a few hours – it was so beautiful and warm enough that I went swimming. After the beach we went back, changed, and caught the bus to come back to Jerusalem.

Overall it was a great, inexpensive, relaxing weekend – way better than staying in a hostel.