Well, if you’ve been reading the blog you know things went a bit pear shaped in Israel for a while.
The long and short of it is all four of my wisdom teeth had to come out. I’m only including it in this blog because it was such an interesting part of that trip.
To add insult to injury I had them all out for Liz and my 2 year anniversary. Great present.
Anyway, not fun…
‘image removed to protect me at work’
Liz and I stepped up the last couple nights in Greece and stayed at the Vedema. Even better we got the rain man suite; the same suite that Angelina Jolie (yes I slept in her bed) stayed in when they were filming tomb raider. Same as last time I’ll just post a few pix, but Liz and I basically ate, slept and got massages…
We broke the Santorini trip up into 2 parts. The first we stayed at the On The Rock Hotel in Imerovigli. My best friends from London (Shereen and Marvin (one of my groomsmen)) met us and we had a really wonderful bunch of days relaxing by the pool, relaxing on the beach and basically drinking too much Ouzo. Really, we finally weren’t doing much so I’ll just post some pictures and you can see how we did.
Well not to make this trip too relaxing today we left Tel Aviv, flew into Athens, took a cab into Athens to see the sites, took the train back to the airport and caught our last flight to Santorini.
While Liz is the adventurous one, I am very ready to get to Santorini to sit on my ass for a few days.
Anyway we spent 4 hours in Athens: at the Parthenon, seeing 1 of the most famous and amazing ruins in the world.
After Masada we made the trip back thru the West Bank to Tel Aviv.
Liz is this our right?
In Tel Aviv we caught up Liz’s cousins Cynthia and Moshe Cohen who in addition to taking us to lunch introduced us to their dentist.
We saw Jaffa and spent some quality time on the beach before packing up to head to Greece the next day.
Well we woke up at 4 in the morning (that’s AM) to hike up Masada. We took the Snake Path up. It was pretty brutal and the second most challenging hike that we did. (A lot of that has to do with the fact that its pitch black.) We did make the top by sunrise and witnessed one of the most spectacular sunrises of my life. Actually, it might be the only sunrise of my life… I don’t like waking up early.
Instead of taking the cable car down we (troopers that we are) hiked back down as well. Back into the car and off to our last stop in Israel, Tel Aviv.
Happy Independance Day!
Although Liz begged me not to and Liz’s father told her not to, I convinced Liz to travel past Ramalah thru the West Bank. I mean Steven said it was OK and so did the very nice people I asked at the gas station. Besides having extremely big fences, its the desert; What could go wrong?
Anyway, we had an uneventful drive thru the West Bank and arrove in an extremely unfriendly smelling Dead Sea in the early afternoon.
The Dead Sea (one of my favorites) was amazing. The water almost feels like glycerin and burns just to touch. But its such a cool feeling to just kind of sit back and float without having to do anything.
After spending some therapeutic time in the waters Liz and I slathered mud all over ourselves, took Sulfer showers and head back to the beautiful Ein Gedi Kibbutz for Shabbat dinner.
Ein Gedi Kibbutz
We had shabbat dinner at Chaya’s house. She’s a friend of Liz and mine at the Kibbutz… No actually for an outrageous amount of money anyone can have dinner in her house. 2 seatings a night and it really was lovely.
Nice picture of us with Chaya.
7/2/08
We started our tour of Jerusalem with Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Museum). This was a last-minute change from our original plan, but it worked in our favor as otherwise we would have been right in the path of the bulldozer terrorist attack. Thankfully, we didn’t learn of the attack until after visiting Yad Vashem, which allowed us to focus on the awe inspriring complex. Yad Vashem is a tough experience, but it is something you just have to see. The musuem chronologically walks you through the nightmare of the Holocaust, but then concludes with a stirring tribute to the creation of the state of Israel. You’re then led to take in the incredible views out over Jerusalem.
After Yad Vashem we went to our hotel where we learned of the bulldozer attack. It was interesting how blase the Israelis were about it–just an average day I guess. We then took a walk around the orthodox neighborhood Mea She’Arim and basically relaxed around our neighborhood and Ben Yehuda St.
7/3/08
We got an early start the next day to see the Old City, the Church of The Sepulchre and try to break into the Dome of the Rock.
Walking around the Old City is like walking around in a huge bazaar. Honestly it reminded me of some of the bazaars we saw in India. We slowly meandered our way toward the center of the city until we got to the Western Wall. There were wedding ceremonys at the wall, services and multitudes in silent prayer. Liz and I had to split up (men and women are separated) and had some time on our own to pray.
The Wailing Wall
After the wall, I was determined to get in to see the Dome of the Rock and Temple Mount. After walking around semi-aimlessly, and frustrating Lizzie, we began walking through the Muslim Quarter to try and find an entrance to the Dome. I was surprised to find that the Dome is closed to all other than Muslims (I still can’t find that in the guide book).
Anyway this is how close were able to get before being stopped by the military (who were not Israeli).
Liz did learn how to make a nice cup of Turkish coffee tho.
Finally we made our way to the Church of the Sepulchre which I found a little underwhelming, but we had a really nice day in the old city before we made our way back to the hotel to rest up before we headed to Ein Gedi (the Dead Sea) the next day.
Wow, the next days of our trip in Jerusalem, the Dead Sea and Tel Aviv were amazing, spiritual, overwhelming and unfortunately incredibly painful. At this point, my mouth was in a considerable amount of pain. After a number of phone calls home to Dad (the Dentist) I was able to score some amoxicillan.
However, I must admit the next 3 days were not my finest. Liz thought we should go home. But I wasn’t about to let this stop me.
Instead of talking about it in all of the following blogs here is a quick recap:
It got worse before it got better and most time was painful and eating was not good.
In Tel Aviv Liz’s cousins (thank you Cynthia and Moshe Cohen) were able to get me an emergency appointment at their dentist (a wonderful Russian dentist who didn’t speak English).
With Cynthia translating we found out that I did indeed have an infected wisdom tooth and I walked out with stronger pain killers and much stronger amoxicillan.
By Greece (only a day after Tel Aviv) I was about back to normal. But really it wasn’t fun!
So enought about that… Let’s never speak of it again.
Arguably the most challenging hike we would do let me give you an excerpt from our guide book.
‘a challenging trail designed for competent hikers and swimmers and definitely not for those with vertigo (like Liz)…Slightly further on you’ll reach a 9m high iron ladder set into the canyon wall, which you’ll have to descend then leap into the water to swim 30m across a deep pool…’
The whole hike took about 4 hours and really was quite a trek.
After the hike we got the Ginosaur hotel on the Galilee were we relaxed in blast furnace temperatures on the sea.
Later that night we headed into Tiberias were we finally had the Israeli food pizza and Liz sucked down a hookah like a champ.
Liz, I think my mouth is really bothering me.
