Israel!!

This will be short, because I'm so exhausted, and I have to wake up soon, but I must write for three minutes about being in Israel.

I arrived (via Dubai and Istanbul) on Tuesday - for Dena and Juan's wedding, which takes place on Thursday. After 21 hours and three flights, and honestly very easy traveling, I arrived. I haven't been here in two and a half years, which is actually quite long for me to not be in Israel.

A few interesting moments -

I took a sherut (like a van that follows the bus route and charges about the same but gets you there a bit faster) from B'nei Brak area from my cousins to Jerusalem - the MOST religious areas. It was all men in the car, and I wanted to pass up my money to pay, but they wouldn't take money from me. It's not modest to take something from a woman. Obviously. So the guy put my change down on his sefer (his religious book he was studying), and I picked it up. It was weird.

Today Dena's good friends and family got to spend the day at a spa in the Dead Sea - I literally think that all bad things that were on my body are gone. When I went in the sauna afterwards to get off the extra gross skin, there was nothing left! I feel pure. I hope Dena does too.

Tonight Eli and I went with Dena to the kotel. We took a taxi, and there was a ton of traffic approaching the old city. We couldn't enter in the taxi, because there was a chefetz chashud - a "suspicious object" somewhere in the old city. Though, we wanted to tell the guards, "we have a bride, and she needs to get through!" Luckily the chefetz chashud can only harm cars, and people were allowed to walk in just fine, so we just did that instead.

Being in Israel reminds me of lots of funny and bizarre experiences I had when I lived here. I remember thinking that living in Israel was really exotic and really feeling like I had lived abroad. While it is certainly not America, and people speak less English than I remember (though my Hebrew is surprisingly good), the culture is so much closer to what I grew up with, and the traditions and people are all familiar - and Singapore/Asia just feels so totally different.

I'm going to bet that none of my thoughts are coherent in this posting, but rather than re-read it and fix that, I'm going to bed.