She’s back, baby! And it feels SO good. I had always intended to return to Israel someday, and with some opportunities that came up recently, I decided no time like the present! So Matthew and I are here for a 7-day guided tour followed by a few free days in Jerusalem.
I really should start with the flight over. First of all, if you have the opportunity to fly Turkish Airlines, definitely do it. They gave us at least one full meal on each flight (even our late-night two-hour flight to Tel Aviv) and the food was amazing; the seats reclined quite a bit farther than any other airline I’ve been on, which made for more comfortable sleeping; and they gave us a little welcome packet with socks, slippers, a sleep mask, and ear plugs, in addition to a large blanket and complementary headphones. It all felt very old school, like the way flights used to be in the 90s. Heads up: they do have a strict weight limit for carry-ons, and we ended up having to gate-check our roller. But the meals were delicious and were even served with a warm roll and dessert!
The bad news is that we had a delay coming out of Seattle that put us behind a little over an hour. This was a problem because our connection in Istanbul was just over an hour… so, yes, we missed our connecting flight, which decidedly put a damper on our travel experience. The original itinerary was to arrive in Tel Aviv at 7:30, then be in bed in our hotel by 10:00. Instead, we got rebooked for a flight that left at 11:55 pm and landed at 12:55 am, and we didn’t get to the hotel until 3 am, which was as terrible as it sounds. I was able to contact the tour company, and they still came to pick us up. In fact, the in-country business director drove us out to the hotel in his personal car. I also had a funny encounter with our guide at the airport (the tour company contracts another company to help you through border and customs). I told her I’d studied abroad here in college in 2009, and then I watched her brain visibly short-circuit as she realized how old that would make me (because she didn’t think I looked that old).
Our touring day started bright and early at 7 am, which was a tough wakeup, although amazingly, I feel like I actually handle jet lag way more easily in my 30s than I ever did as a teenager. Like, I remember just being so trashed when I came over the first time, and even with our crazy flight issues, I’ve felt pretty ok most of today. We had a traditional kibbutz breakfast, which made my heart happy; the cafeteria actually looked just like the one at the place we stayed in Galilee, and I went with my Galilee staple of yogurt, jam, and granola and was very happy about it.
So today we went to Masada, Qumran, and the Dead Sea, an almost identical day to one of my last field trips on study abroad. I remember that day I was feeling pretty down (for… reasons), but I had this moment today where I went to the restroom and looked in the mirror and saw a mature, confident woman looking back, and it made me feel really good about where life has taken me since then. And in a way, I almost feel like I’m showing the Holy Land how much I’ve grown, haha.
Masada is a fortress/palace of Herod at the top of a massive butte in the middle of the desert next to the Dead Sea. You take a cable car ride to the top, but Matthew decided he would like to hike to the bottom once we were done, so we got permission from the guide to depart from the group. There’s a stairway for hikers, and it was fun to make our way down and enjoy the view a little more (when I wasn’t looking at my feet), but by about the bottom third, my legs were getting a little wobbly, after sitting idle and stiff all the last (technically) two days.
Our guide is a deep well of information, and by that I mean he gets really in-depth on things my BYU teachers were really only able to touch on, since they were almost as new to the experience as we were. He drew this really neat comparison between Ezekiel 37 and the zealots who made their last stand at Masada. They were besieged by the Romans and had to have known how it would end even days or weeks before it did (as they were about to be overrun, they committed a mass suicide to avoid becoming enslaved to Rome), and in the synagogue they used for worship, a scroll of Ezekiel 37 was found buried, which indicates that they would have read that one often. And as we read it aloud, I could really imagine the people taking comfort in reading about the dry bones being restored to life and the promises of restoration God had made to Israel.
Then at Qumran (which was less hot but more breezy than my previous visit), he told the most comprehensive story of the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls that I’ve ever heard. Qumran is the ruin of a compound of the Essenes, who are believed to have written the Dead Sea scrolls, and there’s an overlook where you can see one of the caves where the scrolls were found.
The Dead Sea was a lot more fun to do with my sweetheart (than, essentially, alone like before). Matthew towed me out to the deeper water so we could "stand" (something I still find so trippy), and then we went and smeared the mud on ourselves. We let it dry a bit and then washed it off in the salt water, and it made our skin sooooooo soft. I think I showered mine off last time, and washing it off in the salt water made a HUGE difference, since I recall not knowing what all the fuss was about before. It was kind of difficult to walk, because there were hard (probably salt) deposits every few feet in the shallower areas, and there were also some waves today, which kind of made the swimming area (they have it roped off; it’s actually not very large) feel like an extra-buoyant wave pool.
Now we’re on a bus headed toward Galilee, which is a two-hour drive. We’re just passing a very cool rainbow stretching down from a patch of clouds to the top of a mountain in the distance. It’s short and fat and has a very finger-of-God vibe to it. Hurrah for Israel!
Your Grandpa Max and I spent 3 weeks in Israel. It's the one foreign country I'd love to go back to. Your post brought back some special memories.
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