Chapter Seven - Gladiators and pimps

We woke up at around way too frickin' early and had an extremely simple breakfast for a change. It was just tea and biscuits. A welcome change, although I didn't drink the tea. Still, it was nice to have just a small breakfast for the first time in several days. The reason we had to wake up so early was to climb Massada (a mountain about as high as the CN Tower) and see the sunrise. Apparently it's quite spectacular. I wouldn't know, as you shall see.

So we piled on the bus while it was still dark. I actually stumbled around for a while trying to locate our group, since I have trouble seeing in the dark and I was none too alert considering how little sleep I got. But eventually I found them and we got on the bus. What followed was, for me, the highlight of Yuval's ten-day stint as our tour guide. The bus sound system played the first few tracks from Hans Zimmer's score to Gladiator while Yuval narrated the battle. I could attempt to reproduce some of Yuval's narration here, but I won't because it would only be a poor mockery of the real thing. But it is an awesome experience, listening to Gladiador really loudly while the first rays of dawn show themselves above the mountains, not to mention hearing a guy with an Israeli accent narrate a horrendous, bloody battle between the Romans and a group of Jewish zealots.

For you see, the attraction of Massada is not just the sunrise, but the battle between the Roman army and a group of Jewish zealots that occurred on top of it. I don't remember all the details, but you can look them up easily enough if you're interested. It doesn't end well.

When we got to Massada, we took the short path (called the Ramp) up and made the hike in about half an hour. It was surprisingly bright out because it was overcast and the clouds were reflecting sunlight from below the horizon. So no one, for example, fell off the side of the mountain in the dark. Too bad, that would have been entertaining.

At the top of a mountain is a large fortress, built by king Herod and partially reconstructed by the archaeologists who unearthed it. Yuval gave a lecture on most of what happened up there while we waited for the sun to rise. Then we moved to a lookout point and stood around like idiots for a while as the sun refused to rise. Eventually we conceded that it had probably risen already and was probably just hidden behind the heavy cloud cover. It was very disappointing.

Not the sunrise. That's the Dead Sea down there.

Dejected, we started our tour of the fortress. Yuval pointed out that the Romans were all hedonists and made some unflattering comparisons with modern Western culture, which I did not entirely appreciate. He also pointed out some features of the fortress that indicated it must have housed Jews at some point, including the mikveh (a ritual bath of some kind) and more interestingly, the synagogue. In a cute little ceremony, three of the girls in our group, who had not had Bat Mitzvahs, read a little from the Torah.

Elena, Naomi, and Leah [lee-ah]. People's heads were constantly getting in my shots through the trip. Damn heads.

We moved on to the edge of a cliff, where Yuval finally gave the remainder of the story of Massada. The fortress was on fire and the Jews knew they wouldn't survive another day against the Roman army, so they all committed suicide. Suicide is forbidden in Jewish tradition, so actually they all killed each other, except the last guy, who had to kill himself. Gill stood up on a crumbled stone wall and delivered the Jewish leader's final speech, in which he tells his people to kill each other. The speech was recorded by a woman who, quite sensibly, didn't want to die, and so she hid to evade the slaughter and was eventually captured by the Romans. She told the story and the Romans recorded it.

Gill imploring us not to allow ourselves to be slaughtered by the Romans.

After the speech we got a treat. We went to the farthest edge of the plateau on top of Massada, directed ourselves toward a nearby rock wall, and yelled, "Am Yisrael Chai!"--"The nation of Israel lives!" The echo effect was unbelievable. On the count of three we would yell, and a full two seconds later, the mountains would yell back, "Am Yisrael Chai!" That was awesome.

The acoustics experiment ended after several trials, and we headed back toward the fortress. I tried to take a picture of it, but it was from a stupid angle so it doesn't look like anything.

A bad picture of Massada.

We headed down the ground via the Snake Path, which is considerably longer than the Ramp even though it covers the same vertical distance. Marie waited for the cable car while the rest of us walked down. The guys in front of me amused themselves by counting the steps. Oh yeah, that was fun to listen to. Also, at one point I slipped slightly and then said, "I would have plowed right into you, Esther, and knocked us both off the mountain." She made me walk in front of her for the rest of the way down.

When we reached the bottom we encountered a pack of highway robbers, I mean juice vendors. Twenty shekels for a glass of orange juice? I'll admit that it was a very big glass, but that's almost six dollars! So I bought one of those, like the sucker than I am, and it was very good. Perhaps even worth half what I paid.

Our next stop was a nearby building where people, but not I, did some souvenir shopping. I just hung around outside with some people.

I wanted to get a picture of Jesse without the shadow of a hand across her face, but here she's just awoken from a brief nap and thus looks a little groggy. She's the one on the left, by the way.

By this time I was ready for bed, but unfortunately it wasn't even past noon yet. We headed to a nearby building and had the same blasted breakfast as we had every day at Ein Gev. I like cottage cheese, but this was getting a little ridiculous. I recall I did finally try the chocolate spread (akin to Nutella) on some bread at this breakfast. Chocolate for breakfast. Yum.

Our next stop radically altered the nature of the trip. It was the start of the Mifgash programme, a sort of exchange programme in which we were to gain ten new members to our trip. Ten Israeli soldiers, that is; seven guys and three girls. Our trip was already weighted towards the male side, so this upset the balance even more. It upset me deeply because I've spent four years studying linguistics, where the demographic is at least 90% female.

On the way to the pickup, Yuval mentioned that these people were safe to "play with", no doubt making reference to the sad story of Boaz and Captain Azulai. He also said something like, "A happy soldier defends the country better, so make sure they go home happy." Whoa, back up there, Yuval. There's no part of that sentence that doesn't make me uncomfortable. I seriously did not appreciate his pimping, and that was just another thing to put me in a foul mood for the entire second half of the trip.

When we arrived at Ein Gedi (which I'll describe in just a moment) we were greeted warmly by the soldiers. They all said their names, but the only one (or is that two?) I caught and was able to remember at the time was "Hila". That was the name of not one, but two of the girls. Some sort of clerical oversight, I'm sure. Seriously, I have no idea why they were both assigned to the same trip. One of them could just as easily have been traded over to the Montreal trip, which, as I mentioned, was traveling with us.

So we played some "stupid games" with them. Most of them involved splitting the group in half and then having races to see which group could order itself by [some property] the fastest. Our group lost the age one by a second or two, but it wasn't fair. We had ourselves ordered not just by year but by month and, in fact, exact date. The other group did not.

The stupid games concluded and we started our hike in the desert oasis of Ein Gedi. We had been instructed to wear bathing suits for this, and luckily I took the instruction seriously. It was a modest hike, nowhere near as strenuous as the one up to Tzfat. We were supposed to see wildlife according to Yuval, but it stubbornly refuses to show itself. Anyway, we stopped for a break at a waterfall and a natural pool underneath it, where most of us frolicked in the water. Hence the bathing suits.

A waterfall at Ein Gedi.

Frolicking.

When we had climbed as high as we could go in this oasis (it wasn't all that high), Yuval gave a lecture on hydrodynamics that involved splashing water on people. Esther didn't take too kindly to that so she splashed him back and, in the process, knocked him flat on his back, very close to a dangerously pointy rock. It could have been ugly. Luckily, Yuval escaped relatively unharmed, except for a seriously bruised male ego. In his defense, Esther is very tall for a girl.

We trekked back down to the bottom of the oasis and headed to our next destination.

That's right, the Dead Sea. You may be aware that the average ocean is some three or four percent salt. The Dead Sea is thirty. Yuval told at least two embarrassing stories about people who were foolish enough to open up bodily orifices in the Dead Sea and suffered the agonizing consequences. He also warned us that it's possible to drown in the Dead Sea if you lie on your stomach and can't push yourself up. Because it's impossible to sink to the bottom and reorient yourself with your feet, you see. Needless to say, he did not recommend we float in that position.

Before we arrived we divided ourselves into rooms. We had to have one soldier per room. As is always the case when I'm in that sort of situation, I get left out in the cold (Gill and Josh wanted to room together, naturally, and I was not an Israeli soldier), so when Ben said, "I need someone else for my room" I volunteered. Which worked out fine, actually. I was in a room with Ben and a soldier named Sela.

I'll talk briefly about Ben here. I already mentioned that he's huge. Later on in the trip, one of the soldiers likened him to a "roadblock". He's a baseball player and a bodybuilder, if that gives you an idea. He doesn't smoke but he likes to drink, and he's really nice. I would have pegged him as a typical jock, but then I realized that I have no idea what a typical jock is like, since I've never been one or hung out with any that I know of. So anyway, I didn't have any problem rooming with him, so long as his enormous feet didn't usurp my bed again. As it turned out I got the single bed in the room anyway, so it wasn't a problem.

Oh, and he has an incredibly loud, raspy voice.

The room assignments being completed, we got our keys and headed to the beach. I will tell you now, floating on the Dead Sea is a really weird experience. You think, "Nah, this is bullshit. There's no way this is going to work." Then you lean backwards and are astonished to find that you're floating. It's really, really cool. I was eager to demonstrate how knowledgable I am by pointing out that buoyant force is equal to the weight of the water displaced, so Dead Sea water must be significantly heavier than fresh water, but I never got the opportunity. Well, here it is. The weight of the water displaced. Remember that.

I floated around for a while as other people spread the fabled Dead Sea mud over their bodies. The mud was in a canister near the water, but there wasn't much of it left. I didn't really feel like scraping the sides of the barrel to get some mud to plaster on myself, so I never got to find out what magical skin-soothing effects it has. Oh well.

When I started to feel my skin burning I got out of the water, put my shirt back on, and hung out with Sela, who also has a serious melanin (that's a skin pigment that protects you from sunburn, in case you didn't know) deficiency. It was on the subject of this conversation that I wrote my next rant the following morning.

After fun with salt water, we all headed our separate ways until dinner. I don't know what everyone else did, but I wandered around and took some photos.

Ben and Sela slept here.

I slept here.

The Dead Sea at dusk. This was by far my most successful attempt at artistic photography. E-mail me if you want this one at a higher resolution for your wallpaper.

The Dead Sea resort.

We had dinner in the resort's dining hall and then had another one of our interminable discussions about Zionism. I don't recall the exact topic. In any case, by this point in the trip we were all operating in a state of constant exhaustion so I was totally falling asleep through the entire thing. I think it was part of their dastardly plan to keep us exhausted so that we'd be more impressionable, but it backfired. I was not impressionable, I was just asleep.

This was the first night we were required to sign in with the madrichim so that they knew where we were, and Steve said the sheet would be up at 10:00. It was about 9:15 at that point and I was so exhausted that there was no way I was going to make it to ten. Marie kindly agreed to sign in for me.

After I retired for the night, there started another after-hours drinking party. I don't know how these people do it. Anyway, I went to bed and tried to ignore the sounds of Ben and Sela coming in periodically to retrieve more alcoholic beverages from our small fridge. The party started out right outside our door, which was totally pleasant. Especially considering Ben's incredibly loud, raspy voice, which I've already mentioned. Eventually someone realized that they might get noise complaints, so they moved the party down to the beach and I got one of the best sleeps I had all trip.

Chapter Eight