The B'hai Temple

Today we went to visit the B’hai Gardens – the most famous site in Haifa. It is considered the second-most holy site for the B’nai faith, because its founder is buried here.

The gardens, as you can see, are spectacular. It’s as perfectly manicured and arranged as a Japanese garden. Our guide said that their gardeners literally walk around with measuring tapes and trim the plants and bushes to centimeter-specific guidelines. The architect was a famous guy who also built a prominent temple in India, although, sorry Aaron, I can’t remember which one. I’m sure it is google-able.

Laura, my roommate from Holland, was also on the tour. She and I agreed that the whole place is pretty amazing, but we both had mixed feelings about the amount of money and labor it takes to maintain such a place – and then keeping it basically barricaded away, so it can’t really be enjoyed.

Japanese gardens are places for quiet strolls and silent reflection. At the B’hai Gardens, you can’t go in without a reservation, made several days in advance; then, when you arrive, two tour guides shuttle you through briskly, forbid photographs in all but designated places, and tell you to hurry up and “stay with the group” if you linger too long on a landing. All the grassy areas are roped off, of course, and the few benches dispersed around the gardens are inaccessible. Even drinking the water we were carrying was forbidden, and it was 110 degrees outside.

Eze basa I learned to say today. What a pity.

Laura had a neat idea. Wouldn’t it be cool, she said, if you could enter the gardens and linger as long as you like, and placed discretely on little plagues with inspirational sayings or quotations from the B’hai faith, which one could sit and contemplate.

Yeah, that would have been cool!

Our place

It’s official. All the residents in our apartment have cast their votes, and the verdict was unanimous: We have the coolest group of gals on the University of Haifa campus!

Laura is 34 and comes from a working class Catholic family in the Netherlands. In two months, she is flying to London for her conversion ceremony because her Conservative shul back home doesn’t have a rabbi. This is her second summer studying Hebrew in Israel because, she believes, it’s important to know Hebrew if you’re going to be a Jew. In her other life, she works as a laboratory technician in a research facility. Since coming here this time though, she’s strongly weighing her options. Rabbinical school maybe, or at a minimum, moving to New York and earning a master’s in Jewish education at JTS. Next year, she says, she will come to the U.S. instead of Israel, to scope out her options.

Trish just celebrated her 50th birthday – though she has the skin tone of a 35 year old! She lives with her husband and three nearly grown daughters in San Francisco, where she is earning a master’s degree in sociology. She’s thought on and off over the years about becoming a rabbi, but because her husband isn’t Jewish, there’s no where she can go. And, as she says, “I still think he’s kinda cute.” She’s not sure where her new degree will take her, but most importantly, she is enjoying the journey.

Monique is about to begin the third of her fifth year of rabbinical studies at Leo Beck in London, although she is an American. Her new husband, an Irishman, manages an animal sanctuary/camp-type facility a few hours outside the city. Nigel is in charge of the facility, and when she’s home on the weekends, she helps out. She’s also had the chance to officiate at several weddings there. They have about 40 children – all of them with at least four legs. I’m so jealous. Hopefully I’ll get to visit them someday!

Favia, also in her late 40s, is a French wig master and makeup artist for the Paris opera house. She used to be a professional acrobat, but after a serious injury, she learned her new craft and stayed with the theater. She travels around the world several times a year to accompany them on their shows. She’s here to learn Hebrew, in part because she’s Jewish and in part because her boyfriend has many friends here and might, someday, like to buy a vacation home in Israel. Her English isn’t super strong, but she actually learned hairdressing in Germany, so she talks to me in German, I answer her in Eng-Ger-Brew, and between all that, we eventually figure each other out!

Finally, our one brave Israeli roommate, Hadass, is an undergraduate student at Haifa, studying psychology. Her English is pretty impeccable and she has shown gracious patience listening to the rest of us slaughter the holy language on a daily basis. I’m a little confused by all the seemingly disparate school schedules everyone has here, but from what I can figure out, she is still taking exams and is preparing for a big exam to apply to the psych master’s program in another year.

Shabbat at the University of Haifa

On the upside, I've learned how to say the sentence "I threw up last night" really well in Hebrew!

Oye. It appears the antibiotics I finally got for ear infections (probably caused by the diving) aren't sitting too well in the ol' stomache.

It's Shabbat here in Haifa, and I'm spending my last weekend in Israel on campus. It tends to be pretty quiet here in general (as most students live off campus), but it is particularly quiet over the weekends. The minimarket shuts down, the computer labs are closed -- even the library shuts its doors, which took me quite by surprise the first time I realized that!

I've been getting some extra Hebrew help from a generous man named Elan, a Hebrew and Arabic professor who is here on campus chaperoning his 10 undergrad students from Baard College in NY. He tells me that the campus life I've seen in Haifa this summer is pretty typical for Israel.

"Israeli students don't start undergrad until they are 20 or 21, after military service, and then once they do, they usually have to work. They don't have the time or luxury to sit around and only study all day, party at night, for four or five years, like happens in the U.S. They have to actually earn money. The fact they are starting college relatively late, they feel very motivated to get through it, get jobs and have families."

A native Israeli, Elan taught Arabic at Tel Aviv University for 20 years before coming to the U.S. 10 years ago. He said working at a U.S. campus was a huge shock to him when he first got there, because of how starkly different the culture was. He was shocked by how much alcohol and drug abuse there was; and by how many kids endlessly party and never really work very hard.

At first, he said, he couldn't believe that any of these kids actually grew up to have real careers and families -- but he's been teaching long enough to know that the majority of them do. "It's a phase, it's a cultural phenomenon that goes on, and fortunately, most of them seem to grow out of it -- but it still sometimes shocks me to see it," he said.

These are all generalizations, of course, but generally speaking, I can really see what he's talking about. Given that he teaches at a university where the annual tuition is $50,000 (as opposed to, say, a state university), I imagine the phenomenon is all the more true there. Then again there is the infamy of CU-Boulder ...

The effects of the Lebanon War

Hiking in the Upper Galilee, there are many raw and disturbing reminders of the war with Lebanon last summer.

On our way to one hiking trail, we passed a town that had been particularly hard-hit by Ketusha rockets. As we passed through, the tour guide pointed out a home that had been destroyed while a family was eating dinner; a child was killed. Once out on the trail, we passed an entire side of a mountain where the trees had pretty much been wiped out by rocket fire. Nearby was a military tower, which the Hezbollah attackers had been trying to hit (unsuccessfully).

The war has receded from the memory of most Americans, but it is still, not so surprisingly, widely talked about here -- and with a great deal of passion. For the daylong hike I missed due to my headcold and migraine, I couldn't return to Haifa using an intercity bus because it was Shabbat and public transportation shuts down. So instead, I hung out with the driver of our privately hired bus, who was a 34-year-old descendent of Polish and Romanian refugees.

Ehud recounted for me in vivid detail what it had been like to have rockets literally whizzing over his home outside Haifa, and his pessimism that Israel's Arab neighbors will ever stop trying to destroy them. "We have enemies on all sides of us, and all they want is to see us sink in the sea," he told me. "They will never be happy until we are all dead."

Like all Israeli men, Ehud served his mandatory three years in the Army, where he was a truck driver; then he served in the compulsory Reserves service one month out of the year. He was released from that duty a few years ago due to some kind of hip injury I didn't have the Hebrew skills to understand.

Ehud said that despite his years of military service, the war last year was terribly scary to live through. "Anyone who says he wasn't afraid is lying," he concluded.

As for the Haifa ulpan, the students were evacuated to Jerusalem after only four or five days of classes last summer. Many of the students here this summer were here last summer when this happened, and had either completed the ulpan in Jerusalem or gone home. They were back to try and give the Haifa program another try. The ulpan administrators were proud to report during the welcoming orientation that the enrollment this year is actually as high as it was last year -- which was a welcome surprise.

Apparently the same cannot be said about the effects of the war on tourism in general. Our tour guide in the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, who has been a guide in Israel for over 30 years, had to take a job teaching English a few years ago when the latest Intifada broke out and tourists stayed away. He couldn't get enough work. Tourism was just starting to rebound when the war with Lebanon broke out, he said.

"The overall numbers are way down from what they were last summer," he told us. "If you look around this museum here, it's dead, there's almost no one here. This isn't just happening at this museum -- it's happening everywhere."

Hiking in the Galilee

Imagine the following:

You sign up for a weekend hiking trip in the northern Galilee with 40 other ulpan students, the majority of whom are somewhat vacuous undergrad students. The beginning of the first day, your throat is scratchy and you have a low-grade headache because of a headcold. Never-the-less, you finish the three-hour hike without too much trouble and make it to the campsite.

Then the waiting begins. For the food to be prepared. For camp to be setup. For the 39 college students to get their act together, which is a little bit like trying to herd cats.

By the time dinner actually starts, your head hurts so bad you can hardly eat. You nibble a bit, then retire early to your sleeping bag, which is basically on a patch of rocks surrounding by a barbed-wire fence -- the Israeli definition of a 'campground'.

Then you writhe around in pain for 45 minutes because of the headache, which is now a full-fledge migraine, before jumping out of your sleeping bag and throwing up all over a bush five times. Nice.

You have a fitful sleep until daybreak, at which time you wake up -- still congested with a sore throat and a headache -- to discover that your Teva walking shoes were apparently close to the pile of vomit, which apparently attracted some little critter who managed to completely gnaw off one of the straps. The strap that actually affixes the shoe to your foot.

If all this were to happen, you actually not feel to bad about bailing on the next day's hike, which turned out to be 12 km over 8 hours in 112 degree heat. That's right, 112 degrees. Two people in my group apparently got sunstroke and barely made it down.

That's what I am told anyway. I spent those eight hours stretched out on the long seat in the back of an air conditioned bus, alternately reading an Isabel Allende book, napping, and getting great Hebrew practice listening to the driver talk about Israeli politics.

All in all, a pretty good day.

Beit Shearim: The Jewish necropolis

Well ... we had our midterm today. And it was brutal. The grammar wasn't hard, but for the text we had to study, I sometimes wondered what language I was even reading. Yeah, it was that bad. I probably have 10 pages of new vocabulary words from my readings in the past two weeks, and all I can say is, if there is anyone out there with a brain that can learn that many vocubulary words at one time -- it isn't me!

Where is Lt. Commander Data when you need him?

Meanwhile, we've had some neat hiking exercisions, and in particular a fantastic trip to Beit Shearim -- burial grounds of many prominent Jews in the centuries after the 2nd Temple fell, most famously Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, the signator of the Mishna. If you don't know what the Mishna is, put on your SAT hat and think of it like this: New Testament:Christians ... Mishna:Jews

Okay, that's probably an overstatement. But it is the foundational text upon with Talmud and the entire rabbinic tradition of Jewish law (halacha) was built.

But back to the cemetery. It contains thousands of sarcophagi and burial chambers made in carved out limestone caves, surrounded by rolling green hills and trees. It's beautiful. And we were the only group of people there. Most fascinating, the engravings are in a half-dozen languages, in particular Greek, reflecting the many places the interred came from. Apparently, owing to the tradition that Jews buried in Israel will be resurrected first when the messiah comes, wealthy Jews from the diaspora paid to have their bodies shipped here during this period.

One of the burial places is reputed to be that of Yehuda HaNasi's but there is no inscription to prove it. So ... fanciful thinking more than anything.

In the third photo on this webpage, note the beautiful stone menorah carved on the wall in the background. For more neat pictures, visit www.biblewalks.com/Sites/BeitShearim.html

University of Haifa Ulpan

Today we finished our first week of the ulpan. It’s pretty amazing how fast it is going. They run a very organized program here, and unlike Ulpan Akiva in Netanya, they are much stricter about attendance and tardiness. It’s nice actually because in Netanya, there were way too many breaks, and having students trickle in late all the time tended to disrupt the class.

After classes one day, we took a trip to the nearby port city of Akko, famous for its Crusader/Byzantine/Roman architecture, which includes a lot of cool tunnels and underground arches open for exploration. The old city is largely Arab now, and very poor. The living conditions for the humans were pretty sparse, and as for the condition of the animals that were variously left out dying in the heat, and chained up in the steaming sun without any shade, etc. etc. – well, that is probably enough said.

Akko is probably the most famous for being the beginning and the end of the Silk Road to China. Being a port city, it was from here that the silk was transported across the Mediterranean into Europe. It’s also the place where Alexander the Great established a mint in 333 BCE. In 1799, it was still a very important port technically part of the Ottoman Empire but in truth being ruled by a corrupt Arab regime, operating as a fiefdom. Napoleon tried to conquer the city but was repelled by the Arab leader and his henchmen.

Yesterday, there was another optional trip after classes taking a hike in the Carmel Nature Park; an entrance to the park is right by the university. Our guide said it the largest nature reserve in Israel, and we heard some hyenas howling toward the end of our walk. The trail was pretty steep and rocky – Haifa being built on the side of a mountain and all – and it took over three hours to travel just a couple of miles.

About 250 students are participating in the July ulpan, about 90 percent of them are American. This is a very different makeup than Ulpan Avika, where over half of the students were new olim (immigrants), largely from France and Russia.

I have a private dorm room that shares a living space and tiny “kitchen” (if you can even call it that) with five other women. One is French, one is Dutch, two are American and one is a local Israeli student finishing up her undergrad year in psychology.

One of the Americans is also a rabbinical student, studying at Leo Beck, the rabbinical school in Britain. What we all have in common (except for the Israeli undergrad) is that we are all “older” than the majority of other students, who are largely undergrads. I will say one thing: After sitting around and listening to them make their endless stream of plans every day to go out to funky restaurants, salsa dancing venues, art-house theatres, Tori Amos concerts in Tel Aviv etc. etc., it’s really rather nice being an “old fogie”. I pretty much couldn’t care less about any of these things anymore, and am perfectly content to study quietly and go to bed early each night!

Out of Egypt

The bus ride from Sharm el Sheik back to the Taba border, and crossing into Israel basically took six hours. By the time we got to the bus depot downtown, to catch the intercity bus to Tel Aviv, we had missed it by three minutes.

This was Friday afternoon, and because of Shabbat, there were no more buses until 11:30 am Saturday morning. That basically made any hope of arriving to Haifa, way up north, impossible. So instead, we went to the tiny local airport and booked one-way tickets for only $90 a piece. What a deal; it was barely more money than what we would have paid using trains and buses, and instead of spending about 10 hours in public transport, we spent only one.

We arrived to the airport two hours early, at the airline’s advice, because we had an unusual amount of luggage with us (two sets of scuba gear). This turned out to be fortuitous because something about me flip out the airline security officers, and Marcus and I were separated and intensely grilled for over 1.5 hours. They asked us endless streams of highly personal questions, and then left us to confirm our two stories against each other – only to return again and continue.

My hunch is that it was the five Egyptian stamps on my passport that did it, but in the end, we will never really know. We produced the dive shop receipts to prove we were diving; they inspected my dive log and wanted to know why I didn’t have stamps from the dive shop in it; they looked at the pictures of my trip I had downloaded on my laptop; I had to produce my old business card and my rabbinical school ID, as well as the papers of the Haifa ulpan.

In the end, they even called my Israeli friend in Tel Aviv and asked her a bunch of questions. It was pretty trippy. I really wasn’t sure they were going to let us board at all, and when they finally did, it was minutes before our plane was boarding.

Scuba diving in the Sinai

If you are ever traveling through the Taba border crossing between Israel and Egypt, and you think there is even a one-tenth of one percent chance you will want to go diving at the Ros Mohammed nature park outside Sharm el Sheik, learn from our mistake: Buy a visa.

When we started this adventure, we planned on just diving in Dahab, which is further north. Our tour book and the signs at the border all say that foreigners get a free 14-day visa, good for anywhere in the Sinai; since we weren’t going into Egypt proper, we turned down the $15 visa that covers the rest of Egypt.

Upon hearing how much better diving in Sharm was, however, we ended up going further south – and it wasn’t until we actually started diving that we were informed that the two hottest dive sites in the region (the nature park and the Thistlegorm shipwreck) were considered part of “mainland Egypt” and required the special visa. Yes … very convenient bureaucracy that one. Basically, the whole thing is just a tax on scuba divers.

Most divers fly into Sharm, not Tel Aviv like we did, and they automatically pay for the visa upon entry. Since we had not, we heard conflicting reports on whether we could go to the airport in Sharm and buy the necessary visa – or whether we’d have to go all the way back to Taba (a full day’s bus ride away) to fix the problem.

Why would we have to do the latter? Isn’t one border patrol the same as another border patrol? Apparently not. Sharm and Taba are in two different districts, and, it was explained to us, there are apparently turf wars going on. One person thought the fact we had Israeli stamps would be a problem. Another person thought the presence of UN peacekeepers in Taba was the source of the difference. Another person thought the two coast guards just didn’t like each other and by refusing to amend the other group’s work, communicated their indigence. In short, no one really knew.

It would be ridiculous to lose a whole day of diving to go back to Taba, so we really only had one option: Go to the airport and give it a shot.

I’ll save you the long drawn out story of what happened next, and simply say this: After talking to about 40 people; being shuttled through every building of the airport over three hours; forking over $30 for the visa stamps (which were put in our passport); and arguing with the bank tellers who tried to refuse our payment in Egyptian pounds (wanting dollars instead, which we didn’t have) – we were told that we would NOT get the visa. They would not put the official ink stamp on the two paper stamps, which is what would render them official.

The only way to get the ink stamp was to work through an official tour operator (which we didn’t have), or go back to Taba. Oh, and by the way, we wouldn’t be getting our $30 back either.

Our only recourse was to call our dive shop and see if they knew a tour operator who could help us, but all the phones in the airport were broken. We tried calling from the desk phone at the information counter, but the line was so bad, we couldn’t hear each other. The men working there just shrugged and said “Yeah, it’s always like that.”

There was reputedly a set of phones beyond a security checkpoint that worked, but after standing there for 10 minutes with one guy after another passing around my passport and talking furiously in Arabic, it was returned to me with a firm “no.” I would not be allowed to pass to use the phone. I had nothing on me, and all I wanted to do was make a phone call, but no, I could not do so.

Only then did we spot a group of British tour guides sitting in a café, waiting, apparently, for their tour group to arrive. They leant us their phones, which patched us through to the dive shop – but another hour of phone calls by their local contact person to various bigwigs at the airport ultimately didn’t help us either.

Finally, at nearly 10 at night, we went back out to argue with the taxi drivers to get a reasonable fare back to Na’ama Bay. Naturally, as is par for the course in Egypt, when we were still several miles from the bay, the driver tried to tell us that we were “already there” (which we knew damn well we were not). When we told him the name of a hotel we wanted dropped off outside of, he tried jacking up the price another 10 L.E. ($2) to take us there. We argued the entire rest of the way to the bay, and in the end basically had to jump out of a moving taxi when we got to the hotel, me tossing the agreed-upon price at him through the window.

Are you ready for the final irony?

We dived both Ros Mohammed and the Thistlegorm wreck. For the former, the coast guard did do the passport check as we boarded the diveboat, but either they didn’t look closely enough – or they were satisfied with the paper stamps. And for the latter, at our 3:30 am departure from the dock, they didn’t check our passports at all. We walked through metal detectors, and that was it.

Ros Mohammed and the Thistlegorm are, hands down, the best diving in the Sinai, and probably among the top recreational diving spots in the world. If you ever go there – don’t miss it!

It’s now time to go back to Israel. For pictures of the Sinai Adventure 2007 (including the adorable kittens we rescued off the street), send me an email and I'll send you the link!

Sharm el Sheik

Sharm is an interesting city, with a curious blend of European and Arab cultures. It’s beautiful here, a bustling, happening, open-all-night resort town where about 99 percent of all visitors are from Europe. You walk around and hear German and Russian (the most), plus Italian, French, Polish, British English, Scottish. It’s wild. It’s more European than Europe is, just because it’s such a mishmash of cultures in one place.

Then, mixed in with all this are the Arab shop owners and business men, endlessly heckling you to come into their stores or restaurants. And when I say "men" I mean it literally. I can probably count on one hand how many Egyptian women I have seen working.

In fact, the only one I have really communicated with at all is a lovely young woman working the front desk at our hotel, the Camel Hotel and Dive Center, who had lived in New Jersey for 13 years with her parents. When we shared our observations with her, she said we were right: Women working in the Sinai is very unusual, and she had experienced a lot of sexual harassment at several previous jobs. This was the main reason she was very satisfied with her job at the Camel Hotel – the owners were very progressive, she said, and they did not tolerate b.s. from male employees.

Outside in the main tourist district of Na’ama Bay, for several blocks leading up to the beach, traffic is barricaded away because of the terror bombings. This makes a lovely place to stroll at night, the smell of hookah pipes and the sound of Arabic music surrounding you, against the backdrop of Western billboards and neon lights. Upper-class Egyptian couples, the women with their hair covered, stroll around next to Russian women who basically are decked out like gaudy Vegas showgirls. What a curious dichotomy the whole place is …

As for the Americans by the way – we are apparently no where to be found. We have met three the entire time we have been in the Sinai. Probably a dozen Egyptians remarked to us that Americans "never come here anymore," and surprise surprise, we haven’t met any Egyptians who have had anything nice to say about good ol’ "Shrub W".

On an amusing note: Look closely at the photo above of Marcus outside the "Sharm Museum" -- which I think was basically a glorified tourist shop. He is flanked by two huge statues, the one on the right carrying a machine gun and looking eerily like a terrorist. Talk about culture clash that in the minds of whoever made it and bought it, it would be interpreted by Western outsiders as "art"!

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

They're out! The winners of this year's bad fiction contest, where writers submit the worst one-sentence of fiction they can concoct! There are winners in multiple categories, which you can view on www.bulwer-lytton.com/. The "romance" category is always my favorite, so I'm posting the winners and runners-up in this category below.

Winner: Romance

Despite the vast differences it their ages, ethnicity, and religious upbringing, the sexual chemistry between Roberto and Heather was the most amazing he had ever experienced; and for the entirety of the Labor Day weekend they had sex like monkeys on espresso, not those monkeys in the zoo that fling their feces at you, but more like the monkeys in the wild that have those giant red butts, and access to an espresso machine.
Dennis Barry
Dothan, AL

A retired mechanical designer for the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory is the winner of the 24th running of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. A resident of the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael, Guigli displayed appalling powers of invention by submitting sixty entries to the 2006 Contest, including one that has been "honored" in the Historical Fiction Category. "My motivation for entering the contest," he confesses, "was to find a constructive outlet for my dementia."

An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is the essence of simplicity: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels.

Although best known for The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "pursuit of the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the Peanuts beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

--Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)


The contest began in 1982 as a quiet campus affair, attracting only three submissions. This response being a thunderous success by academic standards, the contest went public the following year and ever since has annually attracted thousands of entries from all over the world.

2006 Runner-Up

Sex with Rachel after she turned fifty was like driving the last-place team on the last day of the Iditarod Dog Sled Race, the point no longer the ride but the finish, the difficulty not the speed but keeping all the parts moving in the right direction, not to mention all that irritating barking.
Dan Winters
Los Altos Hills, CA

For winners in the other categories -- Sci Fi, Western, you name it -- as well as the runners up, check the website!