Got up this morning at 6:30am, and quickly got ready to leave my cousins' apartment. Sabrina dished out a heavenly breakfast: a big bowl of cereal, just like back home in Oz! By 7:10, we were ready to leave. Sabrina drove: Assaf came with, coz he was getting a lift to school after; and Champ came along, just for the ride.
We made it back to the Ramat Aviv shopping mall in fairly good time. There I said goodbye to Sabrina, Assaf and Champ, and loaded my stuff onto the bus.
Honestly, today was a damn boring day, and most of it can be summed up in 3 words: long bus rides. It took about an hour to get going, because the bus wouldn't start, and so we had to drive to the depot to get it checked. From there, we had a long trip to our traditional meeting place: the Burger Ranch on the highway near Be'er Sheba. I lay down on the bus, and listened to music most of the way.
When we got to Burger Ranch, I moved all my luggage onto the Academy 2 bus, and once again we were off, this time the whole lot of us back together again. We drove for about 3 hours, through the Negev and the Arava - with one stop along the way - until we reached a kibbutz 50 k's north of Eilat, where we had lunch.
A monkey on the date palms at KeturaThis kibbutz [Ketura] is the one that some people stayed at, while the rest of us were in the desert (or on Gadna). After lunch, we went on a tour of the kibbutz: we saw the dairy barns; the housing; the experimental orchards; and best of all, the date palms!
Popping out from behind the treesThe date palms are huge, and there are thousands of them planted in rows that seem to just go on forever. So many of them, planted so neatly: looks really cool. I climbed one a little - it's really easy to climb, because of the wooden spokes that stick out all over the trunk - but Ely made me get down, for fear of an accident that my insurance policy might not cover. We took some awesome photos, of a whole bunch of us poking our heads out from behind the trees: tre artistiqué!
We had a little activity at the kibbutz (organised by David, the very annoying American kibbutznik), in which we pretended to be the kibbutz committee, and we had to decide (among other things) if we would let a Christian (but otherwise ideal) candidate become a member. In the end we decided that we wouldn't.
Having finished the activity, we departed from this desert kibbutz, and completed the last leg of our bus journey to Eilat. We reached Eilat by about 5:30pm, and checked in to our hotel.
After dinner at the hotel, we did our night activity. We split up into groups, and each group had to choose the 4 most important Jewish values from a list of about 15. Every group chose Education and Jewish Marriage as 2 of their values.
We also had an auction, where the values were sold off to the highest bidding groups. Each group was given 1,200 NIS (fake money) to start off with. Our group was really pissed off, because we held out to bid for education; and when it came up for auction, another group had the same idea and bidded 1,200 NIS before we could. Bastards! So all we were left with was Bar/Bat Mitzvah: very disappointing.