Israel in a nutshell

In August 2013, I went to Israel to see if I wanted to move there. I didn't and, ironically, events on that trip lead to me moving to New Zealand a year later. Now life had come full-circle, with my eldest going on a gap-year program in Israel and me coming to visit her.

We planned it to coincide with the two-week school holiday, which happened to include Easter Friday, Easter Monday and ANZAC day (all public holidays in NZ) plus Passover*.  At the end of the seder dinner each year, the last thing you say is, "Next year in Jerusalem!" so even though we'd miss our friends, it was pretty cool to be celebrating in Israel.

The itinerary was pretty complicated. We started out as three -- me, my partner and son -- meeting a friend of mine from the UK and staying at her sister's place in Sde Boker, in the Negev, which happened to be near where my daughter was. After a few days, we'd say goodbye to my friend and take my daughter to Netanya, north of Tel Aviv, where my partner's cousin lived.  My mother-in-law from Scotland was meeting us there, and then the five of us were going to Zicchron Yaakov, halfway to Haifa, to see my mother-in-law's cousin.  Finally, we shifted to Jerusalem for three days, but one of those days was taking my mother-in-law to the airport and visiting a friend in Modi'in.  Finally, on the last day, even though the airport was half an hour away we had to drive two hours to drop my daughter then ninety minutes back to the airport, return the car and check in by 11am.  (I knew that would never happen.)

Things got even more complicated when we had a car accident. Fortunately no one was hurt, but the car had to be towed away. The rental agency gave us a new one which was much smaller, but because it was Passover we didn't have any other option. (Passover is a pilgrim holiday, which means lots of people visiting Jerusalem.)  Cramming five people in the car was bad enough, but there was no room for all of our suitcases!  Fortunately, my partner and I were able to cram our stuff into one large suitcase and leave the other at the kibbutz.  (That suitcase was mostly filled with things for my daughter, so it was fairly empty.  Since we planned to return our daughter to the kibbutz, anyway, it wasn't a big deal, although we later realised she was perfectly comfortable getting around by public transportation so we could have cut out three hours of driving, but now we had to go just to grab the other suitcase!)

In two weeks we saw Avdat (a Nabatean City), Ein Avdat (a canyon with a spectacular waterfall), Masada (a Roman palace that became the last stand of the Zealots), the Dead Sea (lowest place on earth), Shuq haCaramel (a large market in Tel Aviv), Stella Maris monastery in Haifa (unfortunately we arrived on a Bahá’í holiday, so the Bahá’í Gardens were closed), Cesearea (a Roman town that became a Crusader fortress), Zicchron Yaakov (which we were only using as a base, but the city was one of our favourite experiences), and Modi'in (a city between the original Balfour line and the 1949 armistice line, in no man's land).  In Jerusalem we explored the Western Wall, the Old City, Mahane Yahuda market, Mamilla mall  and (accidentally) the Muslim quarter and the West Bank.

The most amazing experience, by far, was Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Remembrance Centre.  I've been to Holocaust memorials around the world, but there is nothing that prepares you for this.  The detail, the faces, the stories are all recounted, until you feel you know these people, and then suddenly you're faced with a pile of silver menorah looted from synagogues, or a pile of shoes, and it is unbearable. We all cried, and we could have spent days there.  The Children's Memorial, in particular, was incredibly touching: In a dark cave, one-way mirrors turned five candles into a million points of light, while disembodied voices read off the list of the 1.5 million children who died.  That's unfathomable.

By the numbers, we  met 16 family members, three friends and two people we knew from New Zealand (it's a small world); we moved five times; and we drove entirely too much.  To be fair, Israel is a very small country (New Zealand is seven times as big) so the issue wasn't the distance, but just how aggressive Israeli drivers were.  I was overtaken in a roundabout! Driving was stressful and exhausting, and left me very irritable.  I'm sure I took it out on everyone at one point or another.

We'd promised our daughter we'd take her grocery shopping, as options on the kibbutz were quite limited, especially gluten-free.  What we didn't consider was that we left on the last day of Passover, which is a day of rest, and because it fell on a Friday that meant all shops would be shut for two days in a row.  As a result, when we got to the supermarket it had been ravaged, and they closed early as well!  We were driving back from Modi'in and I decided to take us through the West Bank because, of course, the Muslim shops would not be celebrating Passover!  It was an interesting experience, with lots of barbed wire and a checkpoint or two, but the supermarket was actually nicer than the one we'd been at.

I have to note that Google Maps is a nightmare in Israel.  It seems to insist on taking the most inappropriate routes.  When trying to get to the Western Wall, it took me on a half-hour excursion through some of the poorest sections, with the narrowest streets. In getting the supermarket, it took me down a back alley and through a flooded ditch.  I later discovered there was a main road we could have taken.  Everyone recommended I switch to Waze, which was created by Israelis, but it would only display the street names in Hebrew, which was not much use to me.

Another interesting discovery: "Kosher for Passover rolls."  One of the fundamental points of Passover is that you are supposed to get rid of all "leavened bread" products: Bread, cake, pizza, etc.  Some groups take it to extreme and avoid a raft of other things (oats, legumes) but in Israel the restaurants just switch over to gluten-free bread and carry on as usual!  For my partner, who is coeliac, it was like manna from heaven, but for me it just felt like cheating.

Another oddity is that it's very hard to find falafel in Israel that don't contain wheat.  I don't know why this is -- they shouldn't contain wheat -- but we asked everywhere and only found one place, in Zicchron, that said their falafel didn't contain any wheat.  We eagerly ordered two, chose our fillings and took them down to a little park to eat.  It was then we discovered there were no falafel in our falafel sandwiches.  (But the bread was gluten-free, go figure.)

Enough talk, here's some photos:

* The Last Supper appears to be a Passover celebration, so you'd think the two would be linked, but Passover is celebrated on the 5th day of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, and Easter is the first Sunday at least 13 days after the first new moon after the vernal equinox, so while the two are usually in spring, they rarely coincide.