Notes from the Holy Land

In short, my weekend was pretty unbelievable.

In not-so-short, here's what happened. This past weekend marked the end of five hours of intensive Hebrew class per day and the beginning of my regular semester of engineering classes. To celebrate, several of us decided to head down to the city of Eilat on the southern tip of Israel on the Red Sea to relax for a few days. The weather was going to be perfect, 80's and 90's F all day every day, which is unseasonably warm even for Eilat. So following a five hour bus ride through mostly desert we hopped off the bus into the balmy night. The city sits right on the border of nearby Jordan and looking down from the land which steadily rises out of the sea on all sides we could see the thousands of yellow lights of Aqaba, Jordan only a few miles to the east. This part of the Red Sea is actually the confluence of several nations borders and on a clear day one can see Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia all from one spot. But the sightseeing was short-lived as the night shielded most of the landscape. So we hauled our bags the two blocks or so to our new home for three days: the Corinne Hostel, Eilat's oldest and cheapest. Now, while the hostel's moniker suggests that it was a dump, this certainly was not the case. (I guess when you go in with low expectations you can't be disappointed). It was however, quite a strange place. The common areas were all wood paneled and some of the guest "huts" in the open air courtyard area were adorned with... wooden reindeer. I'm sure there are many Israelis who've never even heard of a reindeer! Regardless, our room itself was pretty decent. There were four sets of junky bunk beds for eight of us, however we did have a private bathroom, a fridge, and the wifi signal from the common room could be picked up from there. Not too shabby. But this post isn't about where I wasn't during the majority of my weekend, its about where I was.

The next morning was beach day. So a few of us got our things together and we set off on the five minute walk to the beach. Seeing Eilat and its surrounding areas in the light for the first time came with a few surprises, the most prominent of which were the enormous, rugged mountains on the Jordanian side of the gulf which had been hidden by darkness when we had first arrived. Now, there are mountains and there are mountains, these ones before us being the latter. The Jordanian town of Aqaba sat at the base of this massive range which extended from one hazy horizon to the other and was much less impressive then what I could see of Eilat. There were no large hotels, shopping centers, and the like, only a few thousand small to medium-sized buildings squeezed between the mountains behind them and the sea in front of them.

After we had finished taking in the view our eyes came back to the beach. Eilat didn't seem to have the large, sandy beaches I'm familiar with in Tel Aviv, rather they were small strips of sand and small rocks covered with beach chairs and umbrellas. Seeing this, we picked the next best thing: hotel hopping. It wasn't too long of a stroll down the coast before we came upon the lovely Le Meridien Hotel. We then proceeded to walk in as if we were hotel guests, found a few comfortable reclining chairs, and relaxed. Later on, while I was taking a dip in the hotel's large outdoor pool, I had another one of those "How is this happening?" thoughts. There I was, backfloating in the pool of a five star hotel, surrounded by palm trees and overlooking the Red Sea and the Jordanian mountains in the most beautiful weather possible. I've said this in many other posts and odds are good it will show up again: it was unreal.

Later in the afternoon we decided we had had enough of just lying around and began to roam the other beaches looking for water sports. In our quest for a jet ski rental, we came upon one of the many huts on the beach offering such activities. After a few minutes of negotiations in English and bad Hebrew, a nice local gent intervened and was able to get us powerboat tubing in the gulf as well as a jet ski ride for only a hundred sheks ($25). Tubing was first and although we didn't expect much out of it, it turned out to be one of the coolest parts of the weekend. So myself and my roommates Idan and Jared donned our life vests and hopped on the boat for the short ride out to the middle of the gulf. Along the way we chatted with the several French girls who seemed to have come along on the boat just for the ride. "Chatting" was an overstatement since they didn't really speak English and we didn't speak French. So our conversation was pretty much limited to "Bonjour" when we got on the boat and "Au revoir" when we jumped onto the roughly pentagonal raft attached to the back.

The raft itself had a dozen or so sturdy handles attached along its length and as soon as the three of us grabbed a hold of them the driver of the boat shot off into the sea at what must have been 50 or 60 mph. We all laughed as the raft flew up and down in the wake of the boat but then... came the turns. Without warning and at full speed the boat pulled a 360 and shot off in the opposite direction. As you can imagine the tether attached to the boat swung our raft, and us around with ridiculous force! We yelled and held onto those holds for dear life as the driver did this again and again. He must have been trying to kill us! After a few of these violent turns Jared flew off. The boat continued on and Idan flew off followed shortly thereafter by myself. The boat then slowed, pulled the raft along side us and we kept going. I can't even remember how many times I ended up being launched off of that raft in the middle of a turn. There were several times when I even flew off so fast that I skipped along the water like a stone for a good twenty feet! By the time the boat driver was finished torturing us, our arms could barely hold on to the hand grips. We disembarked back at the beach, said a final, exasperated "Au Revoir" to the French girls and collapsed on a bench, recounting how awesome that was and how tired we were.

In comparison, jet skiing was relaxing. We took turns riding the jet skis straight out into the sea and back, this time being able to take a look around instead of having to hold on for dear life. I rode past the hotels of Eilat and the sprawl of Aqaba out to where I could see both the border crossing from Israel into Sinai and Egypt as well as the buildings along the Jordanian border with Saudi Arabia. The sun was lowering itself in the sky as I pulled back into the beach where my roommates were waiting and I'm sure we were all wondering how the rest of the weekend could possibly top this one day.

After a fun night out at a local beachside bar, Jared, Idan, and I decided to get up early the next morning and make the day-long excursion out to the ruins of Petra in Jordan. In case you didn't know, Petra is a 3200 year old city in Jordan which has some of the most awe-inspiring ruins you'll ever see carved right out of the rock. I was in the neighborhood so I saw no reason why I shouldn't check it out. So we took a short cab ride to the border crossing and made our way through passport control. It was a strange feeling to pass through all the Israeli security, walk across a sort of "no-mans-land" from the Israel's checkpoint surrounded by barbed wire fences and signs warning of minefields and into the Jordanian checkpoint where Jordanian soldiers in blue fatigues and berets stood guard. Having just entered an Arab country I had to resist the urge to nod and say "Shalom" as we walked past the Jordanian border guards and then made a mental note to suppress all Hebrew over the next twelve hours or so.

After a bit of dealing with overzealous cab drivers we found a really cool driver named Hatem who would take us on the two hour trip from Aqaba to Petra. Hatem had lived in the U.S. for seventeen years so his English was very good and he turned out to be a very interesting guy to talk to. Along the way we talked about Israel and Iran, the Palestinian conflict, Bedouins, and Jordan in general. One thing that struck me about our conversations was that although he had opinions on everything, he was also very apathetic towards everything. I don't know if that came from living in constant conflict of Middle-East rhetoric the States, from living in constant literal conflict in Jordan, or a bit of both but he just seemed very weary of it all. Honestly, I can't blame him.

As we rode down the highway I was captivated by the landscape we passed through. Those rugged Jordanian mountains popped up here and there along the way but there were equal parts rough desert extending out into the distance. Hatem pointed out Bedouin settlements along the route and explained how many of them no longer live in desert tents, rather they are given free houses courtesy of the Jordanian government.

Soon enough we reached Wadi Musa, the Jordanian town closest to Petra and bid Hatem farewell. After having lunch in this local restaurant (which had the best hummus I've ever tasted), we obtained our tickets and a tour guide for our walking tour of Petra.

As we walked by the first ruins in the very large area of the Petra site I could only imagine how difficult it must have been to carve such intricate structures out of solid rock over three thousand years ago. The people who built all of the structures on the site are known as the Nabataeans, a culture of Arab traders who lived in the Middle East and built Petra as their capital city. Eventually the Romans came around and conquered the Nabataean empire, making it their own and even influencing some of the architecture in Petra. I could definitely identify a sort of confluence of cultures at certain ruins where Egyptian Obelisks were built in tandem with Hellenistic columns. It was a really neat thing to see, (if you find that sort of thing remotely interesting).

After a short while we entered what is known as the Siq. The Siq is a narrow gorge made from tectonic shifts and worn smooth by thousands of years of running water. In Nabataean times it served as the main road into the city of Petra and as a natural defense from enemies. After the Romans conquered Petra they built a stone road through the Siq to Petra, much of which still exists. At one point I just stopped and looked down at the 2,000 year-old cobbled road. There was something about seeing those old smooth rocks covered with hundreds of sand impressions of the Adidas and Nike shoes which trample on top of them daily that seemed to give me a better appreciation of where I was. This feeling, together with the afternoon sun washing over the top of the high gorge and the echoes of the clip-clop of horses ferrying tourists through the Siq made this passageway to Petra breathtaking in its own right.

Although I was very impressed by the Siq nothing could prepare me for what was to come. Once we began approaching the point where the canyon ended our tour guide told us to stop. He said there was a "magic rock" in the wall to our right and that we all needed to gather very close to it and stare directly at it. We reluctantly did this, at which point he instructed us to begin stepping backwards, slowly, looking directly at this one, square-shaped rock in the wall. Right as we were about to back up against the opposite wall of the gorge we were told to stop and look to our left. This is what we saw:

You might recognize it from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as the location of the Holy Grail. It's real name is "Al Khazneh" or "The Treasury". As you can see it is enormous, 150 feet tall with huge columns and intricate (but mostly destroyed) bas-reliefs. And I thought all of those little ruins I had passed earlier would have been difficult to carve! After standing in awe of this structure for a good while we moved on past Al Khazneh to the main section of the city. Here, built into the mountains and surrounding hills were the large tombs of the upper class and royalty. These ruins shaped directly out of the rock are all that remain of the city of Petra because thousands of years of earthquakes in the region shattered all of the less structurally sound homes of the lower classes. Even so, tombs aren't the only reminders of the Nabataean civilization. There is also an amphitheater, built in classical Greco-Roman style and capable of holding thousands of people. This theater also had a very advanced sound system. It's parabolic shape was intentionally set up so that a speaker on the stage could speak very quietly, yet his voice could be heard by everyone in the audience. This technique was standard in many Roman and Greek theaters but to see it used all the way in Jordan attests to the influence those civilizations had across the ancient world.

Our guide didn't take us through the whole site but after the tour had ended he recommended to us that we take what little time we had left and take the rugged trail up to one of the furthest away ruins in Petra, El Deir or "The Monastery". This ruin stands 250 feet tall and lies at the end of over a thousand steps of uphill travel. Go big or go home, right? I had every intention of walking those steps up to the Monastery but my friend Jared had other plans. He suggested we take up one of the many nearby animal ride vendors' offers and take a donkey ride up. Once we found out that it would be twenty minutes faster than walking, I was perfectly fine with it. So we mounted our donkeys, (I named mine Humphrey), and started up the trail. Though we were the ones riding the donkeys they were definitely in control. The trail itself was pretty steep and there were several point where we all would have fallen off if there hadn't been a harness to hold onto. Humphrey didn't seem to mind the lazy American on his back one bit though. There were some times where one of the donkeys would seem to get lazy and stop, at which point the young Jordanian boy who was escorting our excursion came up behind the donkey in question and whipped it with a folded over reed. That got them moving.

Once we reached the end of the line and dismounted the donkeys there was still a few hundred feet to go to the Monastery, which was still out of view. We marched up those last remaining steps and turned to face the amazing ruin of El Deir. I think because it was so late in the day that the sunlight striking the ruins made this one so much more impressive than ones we had seen before. Also, since this one was so far away from the main area, there were less tourists around to impede the experience. So myself, Idan, Jared, and a Swedish guy from our tour group named Oscar scaled the 6 foot high or so ledge and climbed into the hollowed out room in the ruin. It was a very large, very empty room, filled only with the slanted light from the setting sun and with walls covered with centuries of graffiti. At the end of the room there was a small alcove where I can only imagine an alter might have been at some point and it was from here we took some pictures crazy group shots.

After we left the Monastery ruin we still had some time to kill so we decided to head a little further to a high overlook where you could get an amazing view of the surrounding mountains. At the top of this overlook we found a small hut and met Abed, its sole occupant. As we looked out at the great vista before us we talked to Abed (who spoke very good English). He lived in the area around Petra and made a living by selling small souvenirs and leading groups through multi-day explorations of the surrounding mountains and valleys. He was kind enough to offer us tea with mint as we talked about his life in Petra and took in our surroundings. The way Abed treated us seemed to be part of a trend I was realizing. While there are always those out for tourists' money, there were so many people I met in Jordan who turned out to be the nicest people you could meet. Hatem was one, Abed was another. Abed even refused to accept a few Jordanian dinars in return for his tea and hospitality. Coming from nations full of people with very "western" attitudes like America and Israel, its always surprising to find such nice people in places you'd least expect them. So as a way to pay Abed back for his hospitality we promised we would come back to Jordan, not to see all the tourist attractions again but instead to pay him to set up a trip for a few of us where we could stay a few nights and experience what his life is like: sitting around fires at night with other Petra vendors, telling jokes and stories, and watching the stars and moonlight shine down on the ancient ruins beneath them.

As it was getting late and we had an arranged taxi waiting for us at the visitor center to take us back to Eilat, we bid Abed farewell and made our way out of Petra. On the ride back I watched from the taxi as the sun melted into the haze which once again began enveloping the hillsides and valleys of Jordan. By the time we made it back to Israel it was dark out and all I could do was go over in my head each amazing event I had experienced that day. I thought my first day in Eilat would be the best and I was dead wrong.

My final day in Eilat wasn't nearly as exciting as the previous two had been. Our bus back to Tel Aviv was leaving at five so we spent most of the afternoon lounging at the Meridien and eating lunch on the beach. Lunch was pretty interesting though. We ate at a restaurant/bar right on the sea and sat outside in orange plastic chairs easting good food Israeli food. The best part though was that while we were waiting for our food I grabbed a pair of swimming goggles that Jared had brought with him and went for a little dip in the sea. I didn't realize the water was so blue in the "Red" Sea (haha) until I actually looked beneath the surface. There were little schools of fish swimming around eating scraps of food probably thrown into the sea by restaurant patrons and I killed some time by chasing them around in the shallow water. Then getting out of the water to find a plate of falafel waiting for me on the table was exactly what I wanted. So we ate, swam, and basked until it was time to finally leave Eilat for good.

That weekend was one of the greatest times I've had so far. And considering nearly every day in Israel great, thats a pretty tall order to fill. I saw some incredible sites, met some great people, and all around had an amazing time. So I'm going to raise my virtual glass and say "L'Chaim" to Eilat and hope that many days like those are coming my way.

A few weeks ago, a senior leader of Hamas, the dominant, anti-Israeli political group in Gaza, was assassinated in his hotel in Dubai. Immediately, fingers started to be pointed at Israel's foreign spy service, Mossad (equivalent to the CIA in America), as the culprit. Now, whether Mossad did it or not, leaders in Gaza decided that they did and in typical Middle-Eastern fashion, they retaliated. Shortly after the assassination, barrels full of TNT started washing ashore in Israel. They're thought to have been launched from Palestinian fishing boats off-shore and although all of them were safely destroyed by Israeli police, it became a different story when I learned that three of these bombs had washed ashore ten kilometers south of Tel Aviv. For those friends from good old Berlin, CT who are reading this that is less than the distance from the high school to the Meriden mall. For Bostonians thats roughly the distance from Boston Common to Boston College. Basically, thats pretty damn close. To most Israelis though, this sort of story doesn't seem to phase them. One of my counselors at TAU is a grad student who grew up in Ashkelon, a city south of Tel Aviv. He once told a few of us a story about a rocket launched from Gaza which landed and exploded in an empty street in Ashkelon. He said that immediately after the explosion, Israelis began coming out of their homes and examining the crater. Instead of being fearful and discussing the possibility of another rocket attack the Israelis stood around the crater just chatting with each other as if they had simply run in to one another on the street.

I wouldn't call this behavior a sort of numbness to violence against Israel, rather, it seems to me like Israelis have a certain "awareness" of things like these. They are used to them, so they aren't surprised by them. It's a rather odd sense to think about, being able to shrug off bombs and rockets and all sorts of security procedures, but I guess this is just part of life here. I'm just starting to get used to it. And while I was still a little taken aback when our bus to Eilat was stopped at a checkpoint outside the city and an IDF soldier boarded with a loaded M-16, walked up and down the aisle, and checked all of us out, there are smaller things I don't have a second thought about anymore, like bag checks and pat downs in nearly every entrance to every building and soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders walking around everywhere. Maybe that means I'm starting to absorb some of this "awareness"? Maybe its just part of assimilating into the culture? Maybe.

All I know for sure is that I can't see myself standing outside a smoking crater anytime soon chatting about the weather.

Notes from the Holy Land is the blog I set up to chronicle my life as an American student studying in the Middle East during the Spring of 2010. Check back often for laughs, curiosities, photos you'll wish you were there for, and hummus. Lots and lots of hummus. Also, check out my more local blog: Notes from the B-Line.