A new fruit

Spoiler - it's just a different kind of plum. And it's not really as good as the regular kind.  But I'm glad I tried it so it can go on my list of new foods that I tried this year.  It's green on the outside and yellow on the inside.  Here's a not-great picture of one:

Jellyfish at the beach :(

Apparently it is now the season of jellyfish at the beach.  This is bad news, because it's also now the season of perfect beach weather all the time.  The jellyfish are HUGE, too.  And besides the huge jellyfish, there are also lots of tiny things that sting or bite you in the water, so even if you can avoid the jellyfish, you're not safe.

People like to usher them out of the water, either because they are trying to help other people not get stung, or because they just enjoy it, or want to seem brave, or something.  It turns out that you can touch them on the top without getting stung.  The only dangerous parts are the tentacles, but those are plenty dangerous, I hear.  All of this results in some guys in their teens and twenties grabbing jellyfish (which I gather are quite heavy, based on their size and and waterlogged-ness, besides being quite slimy) and hauling them out of the water.  Once they get them onto the beach, the kids take over, throwing sand and rocks at them.  I'm not sure this last part helps.

Here are some jellyfish we saw at the beach last weekend in various stages of the process.  There were a ton of them:

Oh also, we touched them.  Gross!

The Air Conditioner Saga

Long story short, we now have a working air conditioner, and it's great.  But it was a bit rocky to get there...

One day last week, I came home from work to discover that the door to our apartment was open.  I went in and found that there were a couple of guys installing an air conditioner.  This wasn't a total surprise because I had seen them doing it on the lower floors on the preceding days, but it was still quite a surprise because I thought the landlord (who we see multiple times a day) would have mentioned to one of us that the guys would be coming to install the air conditioner that day.  Anyway, since we didn't realize that it would be air conditioner installation day, we didn't think to take or put away our valuables or passports, nevermind wash the dishes and put away the dirty clothes that somehow keep accumulating around the room.  Or, for that matter, provide our own dropcloth.  Who knew we would need to do that?

So I got home and found that they had moved a bunch of our stuff around, and there was a brief period of panic when I couldn't find the Kindle or our passports.  It turned out that the landlord had put them in a drawer on our nightstand, which was fine - once I found them, anyway.  Furthermore, they were using our bed sheet - yes, really - as a dropcloth to cover the desk from the dust and stuff that falls when you're drilling a hole through the exterior wall of a building.

We complained to the landlord - shouldn't the installation guys bring their own dropcloth?  And if they used our sheet, shouldn't the building reimburse us for laundering our own sheet that they used?  Turns out no.  She did offer us a new set of sheets, but when we opened them we found that it was just a bottom sheet and pillowcases, which was exactly not what we needed, since those were still on the bed.

Oh well, at least that night we had a working air conditioner, right?  Well, no.  They only got halfway through the project before quitting for the day, so all the construction debris was on the ground, the windows were left out of the place where you would like your windows to be and were instead against the fridge, and the desk was left blocking the door to the bathroom.

So the next day, of course after they finished installing the air conditioner we had working air conditioning, right?  Still no.  Check this out:

Sigh.  We got back too late from swimming to ask the landlord for an extension cord.  Finally the next day we asked her for one and she got it for us!  Woohoo, working air conditioning!  And it does work, so well.  It's quiet and it comes with a remote control and it really cools off the room.  And best of all, it means that we don't have to leave the (screenless) windows open and get eaten by bugs all night!  Here is the final result:

Cool trees

On our cross-country hike, we saw some really cool trees with red peely bark.  I looked it up online, and I think they're called madrone trees.  Underneath the red bark is green bark.  This photo doesn't really show how red they are:

Look who showed up at work yesterday

I couldn't believe how big this caterpillar was!  Someone at work put it in a tupperware sort of container with some air holes and some leaves and was taking it around for everyone to see.  Check it out!

Walk across a country? Check!

Though we didn't really know what we were getting into at the time, Caroline and I decided that we would do a 4-day trek from the Mediterranean Sea on the west side of Israel, to the Sea of Galilee on the east side of Israel. If you're thinking to yourself "that sounds hard" or "you guys might not be prepared for that" then you are correct.

The hike is called Yam el Yam, which means sea to sea. Hiking is very popular in Israel, and we thought this would be a good way to take part in the national pastime by hiking across the country - in the shorter direction. There is also an Israel National Trail that goes in the north-south direction, but that takes around 4-6 weeks so there was no chance we were going to do that.

There is so much to tell about experience. We learned a lot about hiking, a lot about preparation and planning, a lot about taking risks, a lot about Israel and a lot about ourselves and our relationship.

For some reason, during the hike I found myself making little mental lists, so I'm going to write about the trip that way. As always, we have a zillion pictures, more than we can post on the blog. If you want to browse through all the photos yourself, go here.

Top 5 things we were REALLY glad that we brought on the hike:

1. Enough food that we didn't worry.

This is the food that we had at the end of Day 2. This might seem like a lot of extra weight, and at this point I thought so too. But on Day 3 we were very glad we had packed it. Day 3 was Friday, and we had aimed to make it to Tzfat before Shabbat started to buy more food. Unfortunately, we had taken a wrong trail earlier that day, and by the time we were close to Tzfat it was too late (Tzfat is a religious city so everything closes for Shabbat starting around 3pm). We camped out that night without replenishing our food supply, and while we weren't anywhere close to going hungry, let's just say we were quite sick of almonds by the time we found a place to buy food the next afternoon!

2. Head lamps

I think the absolute highlight of the hike was the Ein Tamir water tunnel that we explored mid-way through the first day. We arrived an area with lots of school groups bathing in the spring water pools, but luckily for us they left the coolest part alone. There was a narrow fissure in the rock on the side of one pool, and after squeezing through we found ourselves in a long, narrow tunnel with water up to our knees. It was slow going, but we made our way through twists and turns for about 20m or more. If we hadn't brought the headlamps, we never could have made it past the first turn because the light completely disappears. With the lights, it was an amazing experience to explore!

This picture shows a lot of the cool parts - the ceiling sometimes got so low that you almost had to be submerged to get through; the water was amazingly clear so you could see the bottom perfectly; and the water was REALLY cold too, as you might be able to tell from Caroline's expression :)

3. The map

Israel has zillions of designated hiking trails all over the country, and when you are on one of these trails, the signage is pretty good. As you walk, you see little colored strips on a white square indicating which path you are on, and markings when there is a split as well. The picture above shows a place where a blue trail splits off from the black trail we'd been on (and you can see how relieved I am to find it!). All the time that we were on a marked trail, it was pretty easy to make our way.

However, we sometimes needed to make a connection between two trails through an unmarked area, or we needed to find our way into and out of villages off the trail where we got food and water. This experience taught me that Google Maps might be pretty great, but sometimes a good old fashioned paper map is the best tool for the job. At plenty of times, Google Maps showed us standing in the middle of a big green area on the map with no markings at all, whereas our paper map showed details like little dirt paths, elevation changes, types of vegetation cover and more. This was a special hiking/terrain map from some outdoors-y organization in Israel. There are around 9 of them covering the whole country; we used map #2 for our trip covering the Upper Galilee.

4. Toilet Paper
I don't need to explain this one :) But we almost forgot to pack this and only remembered to grab a roll as we were walking out the door to start the trip. Phew!

5. The tent

The weather is really warm in Israel this time of year. Here in Haifa it's pretty steadily mid-80s during the day and right around 70 at night. A few people told us that because it is so warm, we could probably camp out in sleeping bags without the tent at night. We really considered it in order to save a little weight in our bags. I had once camped out on the bank of the Dead Sea with my brother with no tent, so it sounded reasonable.

In the end, we decided to bring the tent, and THANK GOODNESS. Because we were hiking up into elevation, it was actually pretty cold the first two nights, to the point that I had to put on a few layers of dirty clothes in order to stay warm enough, even with a tent and a sleeping bag. It would have been really unpleasant without a tent.

Besides that, we also found ourselves up close and personal with a lot of animals during the hike, including this guy, who we found immediately outside our tent when we woke up on Day 4:

After the hike, I showed this picture to a few Israelis and everyone agrees that this is the not-so-dangerous variety of scorpion. Apparently the dangerous ones are more yellow or tan in color, and live in the desert. Still, everyone agreed that it's a lot better to find this guy outside your tent than right next to you with no tent!

That's it for this list. I have a lot more list posts to write, including:

• Lessons we learned on the hike
• Best sights along the hike
• Most delicious things we ate
• Animals we saw or heard

And more! 

I broke open this peach with my bare hands

It was kind of split to begin with, though: