Tel Anafa

It's still a little chilly out today, but the rain that we had during the week has gone, and the sunshine is very welcome. We decided to take a drive in the Hula Valley. We went up the east side, part of the way back across the valley, up past Kfar Blum, and then back again to the east side, proceeding northwards from there. On the left side of the road, I noticed a small hill. As we passed it, I saw that there was a small parking area and a sign that read "Tel Anafa". Although we had driven past this spot quite a few times before I had never noticed this hill. We decided to stop and check it out.

The trail leads across a small bridge and them up the hill through lots of lush greenery. Here are some pictures that I snapped with my iPhone. First, an interesting flower that I don't recall seeing before:

Here's a whole group of them:

Finally, here's a view from there looking west-northwest towards the cliffs of Menara. Kiryat Shmona is just out of sight on the right side of this picture:

Highway construction in Haifa

Over the last few years, they have been gradually improving the highway system in and around Haifa. I'll talk here about a few of the projects that I am aware of.

First, there's highway 22. It was already partly in place by the time we arrived here. It's a freeway (no traffic signals or cross traffic) that starts just east of downtown Haifa, where it branches off from highway 4 and immediately crosses the railroad. It wasn't very useful at the beginning, but within the last year or so they have added a bridge across a river and back across the railroad so that one can get almost all the way to the Vulcan Junction, north of the oil refinery. It's still not so useful for us generally, but it will become much more so when it is extended past the Vulcan Junction and around the Krayot, after which it will join highway 4 just south of Akko. Construction has already started on this part, although it has a long way to go.

Another recent project was a bridge for the southbound lanes on highway 4 just south of Lev HaMifratz, in the Checkpost area. A longer bridge for the northbound lanes was already in place when we came here on our pilot trip in December of 2004.

Another exciting project recently completed is the Carmel tunnels. One has to pay a toll to use these, but it makes it MUCH easier for northbound and southbound traffic to get through the Haifa area. Instead of going all the way around the tip of Har Karmel (which juts out into the sea) and right through the middle of downtown Haifa, one can now simply go right UNDER the mountain (well, actually more like a big hill). It actually consists of 4 tunnels, 2 in each direction, with an exit and entrance between them for access to several of the upper parts of Haifa. This exit is almost right next to the Grand Canyon mall (an interlinguistic play on words -- the word for "mall" or "shopping center" in Hebrew is קניון kanyon!). We've only checked out one of these tunnels so far, the northern one in the northbound direction, so I don't know exactly what the southern connection is.

A very dramatic construction is underway right now in the לב המפרצ Lev HaMifratz ("Hear of the Gulf") area. This is at a very busy junction, where highway 75 ends at highway 4. On the other side of highway 4 is one of the 2 central bus stations of Haifa (מרכזית המפרצ Merkazit HaMifratz "The Gulf Center") and the Cinemall, formerly called Lev HaMifratz (before they expanded it with 23 theaters!), which is also a train station. They are building 2 long bridges, one for each direction of traffic, to fly right over this junction (and even over part of the bus station itself!). This will connect highway 75 (also a freeway west of the Yagur Junction) to highway 22, the one I talked about first. This will be very helpful to us in getting more quickly to downtown Haifa and, most importantly, to Rambam Medical Center. Here's a picture I shot last Sunday of the bridge, which is literally being built right over this busy intersection! The cars in the foreground are stopped at the current end of highway 75, waiting at the traffic signal for their turn to go onto highway 4:

Holidays in Israel

The holidays here in Israel are different.

First of all, the big U.S. holidays are not celebrated here at all. No New Year's Day (at least not on January 1), no MLK Day, no Presidents' Day, no Memorial Day (well, at least not the American one), no 4th of July, no Labor Day, no Thanksgiving, and no Christmas (well, at least VERY, VERY little). This is no surprise, really.

However, even the Jewish holidays here are different. Yes, they're the same holidays on the same days (except for no 2nd-day holidays other than Rosh HaShana). But the "feel" of virtually ALL of them is quite different. We experienced a good sample of that today.

We drove down to Rosh Pinna for the Saturday morning children's movie this morning. It happens about one or two Saturdays a month. The movie today was Tangle, a Disney re-telling of the story of Rapunzel (which was, by the way, was shown in English with Hebrew subtitles and was excellent!). As we were taking our seats, two little boys (maybe 5 or 6 years old or so) came in a couple of rows ahead of us, one of them distinctly singing:

אחת-אשרי אני יודע akhat-esrei ani yodeia ("eleven I know")

As all Jews around the world know, this is a tiny snippet from a popular song from the Pesach (Passover) seder. But, remember, this was SHABBAT morning, at a movie. These kids are DEFINITELY NOT religious! Besides that, Pesach is still a whole MONTH away!

After the movie, we went to eat at Greg Café in Rosh Pinna. Again, Shabbat, no religious people, not even a kosher restaurant (because, if it were, it couldn't be open at all on Shabbat). Yet ALL of the waiters and waitresses were in costume for Purim (which is actually TOMORROW)! Here's a pictures of two them:

In fact, Purim is a really BIG holiday here, even though it's mostly for the kids. We begin seeing people in costumes as much as a week or more BEFORE Purim. Our local supermarket has been selling hamentaschen (or אוזני המן oznei haman "Haman's Ears") since about Hannukah!

Of course, there are many other differences, too, but I'll save writing about them for some other time.

Shkediot in town

The rain STILL hasn't come, and I had a 2-hour gap between lessons, so I took the opportunity to drive into town. First, we went to the market to make sure we won't have to go out during the rain that is expected over the next few days (and maybe even SNOW on Thursday!). On the way back from the market, I grabbed some pictures of the beautiful blooming שקדיות shkediot (almond trees) along the way.

This first picture is a view of the hillside above the Sonol gas station near the main entrance to town:

From there, I crossed the street and pointed my camera towards town. The Old City of Tsfat is on the other side of the hill at the extreme right of this picture:

A little further up the road towards home, I captured this lovely sunlit tree:

Here's a close-up view of some of the blossoms of another tree in that same area:

These are all cropped but NOT zoomed pictures taken with my iPhone 3G. Enjoy!

An early morning walk

This morning, I was up early. I had finished checking my e-mail and everything else for the morning, so I decided to go for a walk. Although we are expecting rain today, it was still sunny out.

I headed up the trail north of our house and crossed the cattle guard into the pasture. Many cattle were out grazing. Here's a picture of the first one I encountered:

Further up the trail, I saw this cow and these two calves. Yes, there ARE two calves; look carefully, and you'll see that one the same color is nursing right under his/her mother. And isn't the calf on the right really cute?

Here's a black horse that was out grazing but not in the pasture. He was actually tethered by a chain.

When I got back home, I took this picture of our very own שקדיה shkedia (almond tree). There are also LOTS of wild almond trees near here (although none along the route I walked), and they are all in full, GORGEOUS bloom now. It's really quite spectacular, with whole hillsides and valleys covered with them!
One final note: all of these pictures were taken with my iPhone, which has no zoom. I did crop them, however.

Another trip to the Golan

Today was a beautiful warm sunny day, so we decided to take another trip to one of our favorite area -- The Golan.

We started by driving down and across the Hula Valley, crossing the Jordan River, driving up to the Golan on the other side, continuing through Katzrin, and following the Road of the Falls.

Spring is in full swing here, especially in the Golan. There are gorgeous wild flowers everywhere! We stopped at the first parking lot, and walked a short distance to Ayit Falls. I began taking pictures of the lovely flowers. Here's a slightly cropped version of the second picture I took. It wasn't until I got home, loaded the pictures into my computer, and looked at them that I noticed the lizard you see in the upper right!

Here's a close-up view of another nice flower. There were LOTS of these there all over the place:

Here's a view of the falls itself. It was in the shade but all around it was sun. My camera adjusted for the shade so that everything else around is a little washed out. But it gives us a great view of the falls:

Here's an interesting white-on-green flower:

I have seen lots of these flowers every year. It wasn't until I looked in my iPhone app guide to the flowers of Israel today that I learned that it is called a "Great stork's bill":

This is the view from right next to our car in the parking lot there (you can see a little of it in the lower right) looking directly back towards the mountain we live on!

This is a zoomed view of a reservoir in Syria that has just been built within the last couple of years. You can see that there's a town on the far side and also on this side, including a minaret at the extreme right of the picture:

This is another zoomed view towards Syria. In the foreground, you can see the ruins of the city of Kuneitra. This was a major Syrian base before the Yom Kippur War (1973), and that's how it got destroyed. As part of the cease-fire agreement, Israel returned it to Syria and Syria promised to rebuild it. As you can clearly see, they did NOT keep their promise. Instead, the re-built the city of Kuneitra some distance to the east, as you can also see in the background of this picture. It's important to keep this picture in mind when you hear talk about Israel giving back the Golan to Syria in exchange for a "promise" of peace.

Before leaving the Golan, we drove north to the Druze city of Mas'ade and ate a delicious lunch at מסעדת השלום Misadat HaShalom ("The Peace Restaurant"). Note that, although the Druze speak Arabic, the name of the restaurant was ONLY shown in Hebrew, as are MOST of the signs there.

We drove down the road from the Golan that ends up next to Gonen. From there, we could choose to drive a little distance north and then across the Hula Valley and south on Highway 90, the nice, 4-lane road on the west side of the valley; or we could choose to drive south on the small road on the east side of the valley. At the last minute, I decided to take the latter, and, boy, was I glad I had! On a few kilometers down the road, we came to whole fields of fabulous blue lupens! I pulled over where the shoulder was wide enough and walked back a short distance to take pictures. Here's the general view looking north:

Here's a close-up, zoomed view of a single lupen with sky in the background:

Here are two pictures of two different bees doing their work on two different lupens:

After this, we returned home. We must be sure to make as many more trips to the Golan and other places in northern Israel as we can over the next month or two. The flowers are really great this Spring!