Pesach Chofesh

The Sunday chofesh started began with a morning of classes. A 'Big Burning Issues' Hadracha elective followed by Sunday Selection which for me involved a tour around Emek Refaim from the perspective of a person with disabilities. In the afternoon we packed up and people headed off in all directions, many in fact staying somewhere in Jerusalem for Seder, but others to destinations far and wide (as much as is possible in Israel anyway) across the country. I headed to Ben Yehuda street with Romy (one of my crazy and amazing Aussie friends from Machon) to do some last minute Pesach gift shopping, bagel eating and smoothie drinking after which we parted ways and I headed to the Etgar flat where I planned to spend the first few days of Chofesh.

After a chilled Sunday evening and Monday morning, Aaron and I headed over to Jeremy's for Seder. Although in many ways very unlike our Seder, the welcoming and buzzing atmosphere made us both feel completely at home and comfortable. The many bizarre and fabulous new traditions we experienced involved a sea complete with plastic bugs in the middle of the table, whacking each other with spring onions, eating jelly, playing 'just a minute', costumes, and VEGGIE soup! All in all it was a wonderful night that we both thoroughly enjoyed and it was fantastic to finally have a 'this year in Jerusalem'

After Seder in Jerusalem we headed to Herzliya for one night just to dump out stuff before packing up and heading off to the Golan for our Pesach tiyul camping trip. I won't disgust you all with the details but lets just say it was a rather unpleasant bus ride up North. We arrived at Kiryat Sh'mona and jumped in a taxi to our camp site, only they took us to the restaurant not the camp site, so some dude who worked there gave us a lift to the actual camp site. The camp site was beautiful so we chilled, munched, rafted and hiked (a tad) and met some lovely people. We had dessert, true Israeli style, with a couple we met, the guy was Israeli and the girl was a South African volunteer who had made Aliyah a few years ago. It was really sweet actually, we bumped into them and then later they came over and invited us to join them for their dessert which involved some really interesting conversations, mainly with him, about his claim that Israel didn't need volunteers and how he didn't like it that people went home with the impression that Israel needed help or was vulnerable. We had an extremely eventful couple of days and went rafting just the two of us down a precariously treacherous course on the Jordan River. The gas station, which was the only place to buy food, was a tantalising 10 metres on the opposite side of the river which involved a forty minute walk around...each way...to get any food.

After our adventurous experience we shlepped ourselves back to Herzliya to chill and shluf for the rest of Chofesh. This involved much sleep, munch and a lovely day with Gavi and Mike when they came to stay. The boys cooked us Spanish omelette while we 'supervised''. Chofesh was concluded with a lovely dinner out to celebrate mine and Aaron's six month anniversary.

This afternoon I headed back to pack and sort myself out in preparation to head home at three thirty in the morning to meet the gorgeous Dylan Joseph Grabiner!!!

Lots of love

S x

P.s. photos to come