Time moves slowly, but passes quickly...
-Alice Walker author of The Color Purple

The joy of being in a small country is that it's easy to travel around

Each of the first 3 weekends here on the farm I went someplace. The first weekend was Yom Kippur so I took the opportunity to stay in Modi'in at a host family's house and attend services. It was nice just because it's Israel and I wanted to have a place to observe, or a least a little. The family was nice and I went with them to their conservative services with mostly olim, people who've made Aliyah. Like my family they're originally from Chicago.

The next weekend I went with Ryan, Max, Marissa, Becca, Josh and Hal to Haifa and was a bum all weekend. It ended up being so much fun. We arrived by train on Thursday night and bought some beer then found a cozy place to set up camp on the beach. Some of the others got a little crazy and went swimming in the middle of the night. We were on Hof HaCarmel :) and no body cared that we were there... except for some drunkard that came up to us in the middle of the night. That I could have done without.

Got up early in the morning and made our way up the mountain and found a nice park to bum around. It was such a nice park, gan in Hebrew, that we used it as our meeting place and next day's camping ground. They even had a free concert there that night...which made sleeping there pretty shady. Yet no body cared there either.



We went to the Bahai gardens. I still think they're beautiful even though they aren't very in tune with permaculture and I've been there before.




The next day, Saturday/Shabbat, we went the the Arab village Acko, right north of Haifa because we knew that more would be open there. On our way we met a really nice woman originally from Texas who invited us into her Sukkah and gave us cake and ice water. Her sukkah overlooked the bay of Haifa.




Acko is a very cute old city by the bay. We sat in a hookah cafe on the water's edge and chilled. We went through the arab market and ate hummus at what is supposed to be the best hummus in Acko. It ended up being just a very nice chill weekend bumming around and not spending much money.




The next weekend was a very different but just as great, if not better. It was Simchat Torah so we had a 4 day weekend. I went up to the north to Tzfat (the city of Kaballah and blue doors), a religious, but and all about Kaballah city to see how they celebrate Simchat Torah. It was very religious in a way because the city is up on top of the mountain, so no body was driving though the city and everyone was in the synagogues dancing around the torah and singing on erev simchat torah. Then the next night when the holiday was finishing there were 2 places in town where everyone went outside to dance together with the torah. And because the holiday was over they had a klezimer band playing live and blasting out of some huge speakers. Hundreds of locals and visitors, both religious and non-religious were there together dancing in the street. There was so much energy there that night! It was so spiritually rewarding and the first time I felt so good at a very religious place and time.

The next day we made our way down to Yehudiyya, a national park to go hiking. The first day we did a four hour hike down to a small stream and a few pretty waterfalls, the Zewitan. The park rangers told us the hike would be so long, hot and dangerous and that we needed good shoes and 3 liters of water....to us it just felt like a beautiful short hike and we even came out with most of our water.





The next day we did the 7 hour hike that the park is famous for, the Yehudiyya! Absolutely gorgeous. We hiked down into a small canyon then along the small river down there and crossed a bunch of cold, refreshing pools of water that we could swim in. At two places we even climbed down some 15 ft ladders into a pool of water with our bags and had to swim across the pool to continue with the hike. We knew we were going to be doing it so we didn't really care that all of our stuff got soaked. The cold water was refreshing in the heat and washed off all of our sweat!
I was with 2 guys from the farm. Hal, the shorter, is almost my age and from New York and was working as an engineer for a couple years. The other guy is Josh, and he's only 17 and just graduated from high school. He's here in Israel just before for goes off to university.




So after those really crazy, fun weekends I decided I needed some relaxation time with myself and stayed on the farm this weekend. It was also great. We got the first really hard rain and were still trying to put the plastic windows in our big dome when it started pouring. I also had to put some in my dome's windows when it was raining cats and dogs and I was also soaked in 1 min. It was fun though and only went on for 20 mins when the sun came out with beautiful blue skies and dried everything up. Then I helped everyone who was left here on the farm get ready for Shabbat by baking challah and cooking and putting our zoolah back together after the rain. It was just perfect that there were only a handful of us to just sit around cooking and preparing for dinner.
We have mud ovens here which are taking a while to get used to. We have one up in Domeville in our kitchen but the mud door is still broken. So this weekend a Amy and I were figuring out the mixture of sand and mud to make a new door. Hopefully by next Shabbat we'll be able to use our own mud oven. But for the mean time I'm using a lot bigger oven down the farm by the Shinshinim (the high school grad Israelis that are doing a year of community service here on the farm). So to start the oven we have to burn a really hot fire in the oven for 30 mins to 1 hour then let the hot embers sit in the oven for an hour to heat up the mud. Then we can start baking but it's hard because you never know exactly how hot the oven is. The first time I made Challah I put it in 2 hours after the fire was sitting and it burned in less than 20 mins. The next time I put it in the oven after an hour and had to reheat the oven after 30 mins because it was cooling down too much and then after an hour took it out and it was only mostly cooked. The last couple of times has been getting better but I'm still letting the oven cool too much and end up waiting more than an hour for the bread. Of well, I guess it's good everyone loves this bread because they're constantly getting me to make more and get used to the oven. I'm having so much fun here on the farm.

Hava v'adam

So I've been here in Israel on the farm for 3 weeks already. And even though the days feel really long, waking up at 5:30am and doing stuff all day until after dinner at 7pm, I already feel like the time is flying. We took a lot of time the first 2 weeks getting acquainted with how everything works on the farm. Everything here is about permaculture and sustainable living, which is so drastically different from what I came from in China. The only things that come into the farm is water and a little bit of food that we buy until our fields start producing enough for all of us to eat. And the only thing that leaves the farm is a very small amount of trash that can't be recycled and some recycling that is too much that we can't use it all here on the farm our selves. That means that everything else that we need to live is delt with here on the farm. All electricity is harnessed from the sun, we have some solarpanels and solar water heaters. Then all human/animal waste and kitchen waste is composted and used to fertilize the soil. All plastics, papers, glass and so on is recycled and used for art or building. For example; we stuff all of our small trash into plastic bottles then use them in the walls of our mud buildings for insulation, we recycle plastic bags by weaving them into shapes for bowls, plates or any other art, we recycle broken mugs by making mosaics in the mud walls or on the pathways in the garden. Everything here is natural and/or recycled. All the furniture was found around Israel, recycled and rebuild into useful stuff here on the farm not bought at the store. It takes some getting used to, like the Grey Water System filters the kitchen water through a straw filtration and then the water goes to some tropical plants here that need a lot of water.

This is where I live, Domeville! Our very cool semi-permanent tent domes. 2 people in each dome and very comfortable, or well for living outside that is. My 'dommie' Joy is from New York. There are 6 domes, but as Eco-Israel has grown over the years they added 2 new 'yherts' (you can see behind the domes). They're a bit bigger and cooler (literally) so 4 people are in each. Outside each dome we have our own gardens where we can grow anything we want except that there isn't too much space in them. I almost feel like I'm back in university or camp living so close to the people I'm working next to.

Next, since we basically live outside. This was just one place we had class one day under a fig tree. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, class, work almost all outside.






This is what we call our classroom, ketah in Hebrew. A 'yhert'! If only I had had a yhert in China to teach my students all sitting around in a circle.






Our outside dinning room was a bit too small for the 21 of us so we spent a week digging the ground and expanding it to fit all of us. And just in time for Sukkot! So we decorated it by making the 4 walls the 4 directions with their corresponding energies. East-wind for the spring and morning, south-fire for the summer and noon, west-earth for the fall and evening, and last south-water for the winter and night time. We call it our Zoolah, I have no idea how it got that name but already had the name when we got here.

And the best thing about all the work we put into it was that we got to have the first night celebration of Sukkot in our new Zoolah! Yumm, we spent a whole day cooking and getting ready. I baked challah and helped make goat cheese, barley and sweet potato stuffed peppers. Who knew a vegitarian farm could still have good food. And that's another great thing about life here is that we take turns cooking for everyone which usually means we have some pretty interesting meals. :)