so this one time, in Israel...day 2

When the alarm went off at 7am, I thought for sure I was still at home and about to get up for work. Who wakes up this early on vacation? The correct answer would be that I do, when I'm on a trip where we set out to accomplish roughly 13938571 things in the span of 30 hours (there are 30 hours in a day, right?).

After breakfast, we drove to the site of our next "walk".

"See those fences surrounding us? Can you read the signs?" asked Iftach, once it was too late to turn back.

Danger! Mines!

The number of hours we had known him had increased to about 30 at this point, so clearly we knew we were in good hands. Either that, or we had all resigned ourselves to the fact that we might not make it home. Or we were still partially asleep, jet lag finally catching up, and were rendered temporarily illiterate. Take your pick.

Once we had been assured that we would most likely not blow up, we set off on our "walk", which amazingly felt like a walk for the first 10 minutes or so, if you don't count the stream we had to cross. It really would have been quite easy, we were told, had we been there before the rain flooded the stream, taking down all branches that may have been some assistance to us.

After crossing the stream, we stopped in a clearing.

To play an ice breaker game.

In the middle of a land mine field.

This was the second time out of 394857132 we were told to hold hands, but this time it was for a human knot exercise. My team was...special. We somehow managed to form two linked circles, meaning there was no possible way to win. After what felt like an hour, we gave up, but not before our fearless leaders Sarah and Ariana (and of course Iftach) had gotten plenty of "butts in faces!" pictures. Lucky for us, they caught another team cheating first, so we were spared the sheer horror of performing a dance in front of everyone else.

Photo from Whitney, one of the awesome photographers on the trip. I was probably still tangled.

And then, we "walked" some more.

Three streams, a bat cave, and a stairway to heaven the parking lot later, we were back on the bus, headed for OMGSHWARMAFALAFELOMNOMNOM. We were just a little excited.

In transit, we learned the only two words in the Hebrew language that will matter the entire rest of the trip: sababah (it's all good / cool) and balagan (mess / hot mess). 

Our day out and about ended early due to Shabbat (wait, what day is it?), so we were back on the kibbutz mid-afternoon to give us an opportunity to shower (!!) and/or sleep (!!!!!!) and/or prepare for Shabbat services even though we (in the Victorian sense) had been to fewer than five Shabbat services in the history of ever. It was definitely a fun learning experience though, and now I can say I helped lead a Shabbat service in Israel! I feel so special.

After evening programming, we were perfect little angels and went to bed right away, obviously. Isn't that what you would do if you were told you were allowed to sleep in until 10:30 the next morning?

...stay tuned for day 3!