Just a weekend away

This past weekend was spent in Haifa, a port city located about 95 km north of Tel Aviv. A fellow worker-in-deafness, Emily, and I headed up Friday evening via sherut since all the buses and trains had stopped for Shabbot. A sherut is like a group taxi, or a van, that runs both between cities and along some of the major bus routes. It's slightly cheaper than the buses, and the only way to get around on Shabbot.

We ended up staying the weekend with Emily's friends from an organization called Habonim, a Zionist youth movement in which they and Emily are involved. The movement not only works to build a connection between North American Jews and Israel, but also for various social justice issues. They share a two bedroom apartment between the three of them, right in the middle Haifa.

Haifa is built on a mountain and is complete with windy roads and many, many staircases. Unlike Tel Aviv, many of the backstreets are very quiet and tree-lined; much more suited to raising a family than the big city. This brings in a whole different age demographic. I actually heard the neighbors infant son crying at night, and children playing in the school grounds next door. Maybe it's because I spend much of my days either downtown or at the university, but seeing large groups of children under the age of twelve seemed quite novel.

The other noticeable difference between Haifa and Tel Aviv as the mixture of the city. Haifa has a large (comparatively) Arab population, with Arab neighborhoods mixed in with the predominantly Jewish ones. It's always so amazing to me to hear the Muslim call-to-prayer being played during the day and is something you will never hear in Tel Aviv which, aside from Jaffa, is practically all Jews. Haifa is also the only city in Israel that has buses which run on Shabbot.

After a Friday night of hanging out at the apartment, having a few drinks, and watching television (I don't have a television, so this is one of a handful of times in the past three months I sat down to idly watch TV), Ben, Emily, and I got up early-ish on Saturday morning and headed down to the tayelet/boardwalk at Hof haCarmel/Carmel Beach for rikud/traditional Israeli folk dancing. Rikud takes traditional Israeli dances and dance steps, and sets them to both modern and traditional music. Dances are either done alone, in pairs, or in a group.

Ben, one of our gracious hosts, explained that they do rikud every week at the hof and he goes often. He was, therefore, far more adept than Emily or me. Dignity not being a commodity of trade, though, the three of us and Ben's cousin rolled up our sleeves and jumped in. The dances usually consist of a series of steps, some longer than others, that are repeated three or four times. There was often the sense that, right when you start to get it, they switched to a new song but the execution wasn't the aim. Whole point was to get out and do it.



This struck me as something really powerful. Not only was it an expression of culture and history (mixed in with some Israeli pop music) but it was also an amazing sense of community. Imagine a couple hundred strangers getting together every Saturday morning to do the Electric Slide and other various dances for hours in the US; it would never happen. And yet, here were people of all ages dancing together on the boardwalk of the local beach, exercising their bodies and their culture together. The violent crime in Israel is far, far below that of the United States. I can't help but wonder if community-oriented activities like this don't have an affect on interpersonal violence.

After some dancing (more by Ben and Emily than me) Emily and I left Ben and his cousin and headed back towards the city. We grabbed lunch in the German Colony, met up with Paul and Max, and headed to the Baha'i Gardens. The Baha'i Faith believes in such things as equality, unity, and peace. It was a religion founded in Persia in the 1800s, which makes it one of the youngest religions in the world. The Shrine of the Bab (which we didn't get up to) is the central point of the the 19-terraced Gardens in Haifa, and is one of the holy places in the Baha'i religion.



As non-Baha'i followers, we were not allowed to make the ascent from the bottom of the gardens to the Shrine and, without time to go outside of the gardens and enter through a side entrance half-way up the mountain, we were contented (for the moment) at the bottom garden. The gardens are more an ode to landscaping than a flower garden. The garden employs 100 full-time gardeners to care of the land, and it shows; it wouldn't surprise me if they mowed the lawn daily. Never have I seen such meticulous care to detail when it comes to plant life.

After heading back to Hadar, we met up with my friend Doug at the apartment to rest a bit (there are a lot of stairs in Haifa) and watch television. Did you know that Marilyn Monroe may have been killed with a poisoned, barbiturate-filled enema? Well, you do now. Also, Fox News is infinitely more surreal when watched outside of the US. Without trying to get political, I don't know why they bother showing it outside of the US; its right-wing leanings are so blatant you feel like you're watching some kind of news show parody. We all, literally, sat and watched in stunned silence for about 45 minutes.

We then shook ourselves free of the idiot box and headed off to dinner, where we ate our body weights in sushi (it's so good). We finished off the evening back at Paul, Ben, and Max's apartment playing games and chatting, before watching "The Gods Must Be Crazy" and turning in for the night. Sunday morning, after coffee/tea and "goodbye"'s, Emily and I walked down to the train station and hopped a train back to Tel Aviv. All in all, it turned out to be a wonderful last-minute weekend holiday with great people, great conversations, and great scenery (photos!). And now, back to the daily grind...

I'm going to try to update more often with the daily stuff, instead of trying to make Posts Of Big Important Cultural Observations. This is for two reasons: you people are relentless (relentless) when I don't post for a few weeks; and it will give you a better idea of daily life here. I promise to make Important Cultural Observations, too, when they happen. כל בסדר/col beseder/that's OK? Good.