This morning, we went on an archaeological dig. We went to caves from the time of the Maccabees, and climbed into tiny, claustrophobia-inducing spaces, digging into the ground with hoes and buckets. People found two-thousand-year-old pottery – it was really something. We also saw a huge black snake, which freaked me out despite assurances that it wasn’t poisonous. (Costa Rica and Australia were a few years off, still, and I wasn’t yet over my phobia of things that slither). Everyone got covered in a layer of dust that got into absolutely everything.
After the dig, we got on the bus and drove down to the desert town of Arad, near the Dead Sea. On the way, we were informed of a terrorist attack that had just taken place outside Tel Aviv. Apparently, a terrorist stole a bus and ran over eight Israeli soldiers who were standing waiting for a bus. Numerous bystanders were injured.
It freaked everyone out a little, I guess because we’d gone into what I like to refer to as the “Israeli travel bubble” – none of us had been watching the news or paying attention to the matzav since arriving. People back home hear the news a lot sooner than people in Israel; while there, we simply don’t feel it. It’s as though there’s no real security threat even despite the news reports. I mean, there were soldiers everywhere with guns (four on our bus – one security/medic trip employee, and three soldiers matched up with the group to spend time with us and hang out for the week) but we hadn’t witnessed any conflict or problems. And they kept trying to tell us that as long as we stayed away from the Territories, we were perfectly safe. But then, eight people are dead, near Tel Aviv where it’s supposed to be safe, and it really made everyone wonder, how false was this sense of security? (Keep in mind that this trip happened 7 months *before* 9/11).
We stopped at a rest area for lunch, and everyone scrambled for the pay phones to call home and reassure our parents that we were okay. They would just be waking up for the workday in Montreal and Toronto, and we hoped we would reach them before the news reports did. The people from western Canada waited it out, because they really didn’t want to phone their parents at 3am.
Upon arrival in Arad, we headed to a “Bedouin tent” – of course, it’s one of the operations set up purely for the tourists. The real Bedouin have a semi-strained relationship with the state of Israel, but enterprise is enterprise, so there are plenty of those made-for-tourist experiences where you can eat in a tent, drink hand-ground coffee and get a lesson – in English and Hebrew of course – about the Bedouin way of life. We had a veritable feast, and then headed to our hotel in Arad for the night.