This chapter concerns itself with the tour of the Burma road and the archaeological dig.
Well, we're back to Friday, so that means it's time for another slightly-too-short entry. One might question the logic of giving shabbat special treatment considering all the complaining I've been doing about Judaism. Well it's my journal, so I can do what I want. Put that in your nargila and smoke it.
Dressed in our new birthright shirts or modified versions thereof (some people went a bit nuts with their scissors), we headed to the so-called Burma road for a "Nature Day and Navigation Race". It ended up being neither of those things.
We parked the bus very far away from where we were supposed to be for some reason. It reminded me of an outdoor concert. I've been to more than one of those, and they always seem to have the parking lot three town over. It's too bad it wasn't a concert, actually, because by this point in the trip many of us were dying to see the Israeli hip-hop band Subliminal in concert. But that's another story.
Pardon my rambling. We walked to the area from which the race was supposed to start, wading through a veritable sea of soldiers and their, ahem, gear.
A pile of guns. That's right, a god-damned pile of guns. This country is not pacifist-friendly. This was my second-last picture of the trip.
When we reached the site of the day's activities, we found ourselves in a gigantic crowd of other tour groups. I don't know if all or any of them were other birthright groups. But as you know, I am not a fan of crowds in most circumstances. I had a bad feeling about this activity. It turned out to be merely boring, not upsetting in any other particular way.
It was decided that we wouldn't be allowed to do the navigation race because we wanted to stay together as a group, so we just did a guided tour. The Burma road was blah, blah, war, soldiers, army, blah, Jerusalem, blah. I seriously don't remember because I was sick and tired of hearing about the exploits of the amazing Israeli army. Can't these people talk about anything else?
At the final checkpoint of the tour, I took my last picture.
This is Omri, one of our soldiers. Now, I'm sure the safety is on on this gun. It's probably not even loaded. Nevertheless, I just had to take a picture of the idiot resting his gun with the barrel on his foot!
As we were walking back to the bus, I happened to be walking next to Yuval and he asked me, "So, what did you think of this?" I quickly looked around for an avenue of escape as I made some mumbling comment about not being interested in war stories. I was in a seriously rotten mood for the entire second half of the trip, so I didn't worry too much about insulting him. I did so much more blatantly a bit later on. Read on to find out about it.
We proceeded on to the next stop, the archaeological dig. I had been seriously looking forward to this, because it was the only part of the trip that sounded like it was going to be decent when it was described to me weeks before I went. I know, I know, I'm very cynical. In any case, I was looking forward to it. It was just about as I expected, no better and no worse. I could live with that.
We went down into a partially excavated room. Gill, Josh, and I told Esther that we had heard the caves around there were inhabited by bats. I'm not sure if she ever believed us. Anyway, we spread out to various corners of the room and started filling buckets with dirt. That's archaeology, folks: filling buckets with dirt. We were looking mostly for shards of pottery. A few people found some really interesting and mostly-intact items like bowls and lamps. Unfortunately, I did not.
Filling buckets with dirt. [photo courtesy of Shira Wolch]
When all our buckets were full of dirt, we brought them outside and dumped them out on sifting grates, finding many more broken shards of pottery. I'm tempted to make some joke about how the ancient Israelites should have been more careful with their clay bowls. I won't make it.
We left our shards of pottery in buckets for the real archaeologists to come and study, and made our way to the second portion of the activity, some good old-fashioned spelunking. We descended into a cave that had apparently been used by Hebrew guerrillas in ancient times to hide from the Roman army or something. The claustrophile in me loved it, but it was not designed for someone as freakishly tall as me. Still, I managed to squeeze through.
This was one of the wider sections of the cave. [photo courtesy of Shira Wolch]
The cave was illuminated by dozens upon dozens of candles. I have no idea who sets those up and makes sure they stay burning. I asked Yuval but he never answered. Either he didn't hear me, he was insulted at my crack about war stories, or much more likely, he didn't know. He himself set a few candles, but nothing approaching as many as there were in the first place.
When we reached the other side of the cave we ascended and Yuval finally revealed that we had just climbed through an ancient toilet. I couldn't tell whether he was joking or not. I suspect not. In any case, there were numerous jokes about people whose shirts had gotten dirty on the way through. I was lucky enough to have been wearing my spring jacket at the time, so I did not have to endure the mocking.
We took yet another group photo, washed off at a nearby restroom, and headed off to Ramat Rachel to prepare for Shabbat. On the way we stopped at a mall for lunch and I got a plain old Whopper from Burger King. I had had my fill of shawarma.
Stay tuned for more exciting adventures.
Chapter Eleven