First, we went on a hike that ended at an awesome waterfall. At the beginning, Hila tried to get us to stop jumping off the rocks and climbing the waterfall, but she eventually gave up. We had a great time. Zafrani decided to jump with his glasses on and lost them (after losing his other glasses last week). He then asked an Israeli with goggles to see if he could find them and after a short dive he came up with a pair of glasses. They just weren't his. So now he's walking around with squinty eyes as he tries to make the new ones work.
Then we went kayaking on the Jordan. I was expecting a really short ride with minimal rapids, if any. I was very pleasantly surprised. There obviously weren't great rapids but there were more than I expected. I was in a kayak with Josh and even though we started after most of the rest of the group, we ended up at the front. So as we rolled along, we saw a group of Israeli guys sitting around smoking hookah and we decided to pull over and join them for a little bit.
After our hookah break, we pushed off again. On our way downriver, we bumped into a raft with a bunch of Arab guys a little older than us. I said, "Sorry," in Hebrew, and one of them responded, "It's ok, we're new immigrants," he chuckled, "from the dessert." and they all laughed. I laughed and, in Arabic, said, "Us too! From the Sinai desert!" We all laughed.
We kept floating downriver and after a botched boarded attempt of Maura and Andrea's kayak, we found ourselves wondering if we had missed the point where we were supposed to stop and get out of the river. But soon enough we saw it and since we were the first ones there we thought it would be better to pull off to the side and hang out in the water, rather than wait by ourselves on land. A raft of Americans got caught on the other side of the river and we waded out to free them. But we were quickly pulled out by the current afterward and struggled to get back to our boat. Of course as soon as we got there, a raft of Arab women got stuck in the same place and we had to swim back out to save them too.
Then a group of our friends started to float by and Josh and I yelled out "Mavi Marmara!" as we rushed their kayaks and tried to take them over. Hannah pushed me off hers and I ended up catching a ride to the end with the other Hannah and Chad. Elif, who's studying abroad here from Turkey, ended up taking our kayak in. Good times.
That night on the Kibbutz, Hannah asked me to lead services so we could sing and do Carlebach. But there was a Haredi guy there who shortly into Kabbalat Shabbat, told the girls to stop singing. They stormed out. Afterwards he told me to apologize to them since he didn't mean to offend them, but halacha says that women can't sing in front of men. I told him that's not exactly true but he wouldn't listen and he then told me that there is still time for me to become religious. Now that's Chutzpah!
On Shabbat we spent most of the day in the Kinneret swimming. The water was really warm and we had a great time. There was also a little farm on the Kibbutz that we checked out in between swims. We saw some ostriches that ate from our hands, some horses, ducks, geese, rabbits and chickens. I felt like a little kid in a petting zoo.
On Sunday our group finally gave our presentation in Conflict Resolution and I think it went pretty well. After that I had Oil Politics where we discussed an excerpt from Munif's "Cities of Salt," quintet. It is a fictionalization of the history of American oil development in Saudi Arabia and was a really good read. If each of the five volumes wasn't nearly 1000 pages, I would consider reading the whole thing.
Today, in Geography, I finally got to do my presentation about Smooha's theory of Israel as an Ethnic Democracy. But I only had about 15 minutes and the presentation I had made was way too detailed so I had to rush through it. I think Yiftachel understood and he saw that I put a lot of work into it, so I think it should be fine.
After class was over I came back to Dimona to work in the Youth Center. I helped the girl that was reading the Wizard of Oz last week with some English homework. Then she asked me for help with some math. It was on fractions and finding the lowest common denominator (which I can now say in Hebrew) but it had been such a long time since I had done any of that kind of stuff that I wasn't so sure how to solve them. I thought I had explained it right but on one problem we kept getting a weird answer. Tamar looked it over and she had learned a different way of solving it which made me think my way was wrong. But in the end, it turned out we were both doing the same thing, the girl had just replaces a plus with a minus that threw everything off.
Now it's time to get some of my own work done!
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