Orly Hotel Netanya

... reference to the commonly used Hebrew instruction to raise your gun to sixty degrees. One of the commanders flipped out and punished us with vicious sprints later, though we were quite happy and deemed our act "worth it", as we were truly scared our punishment would be worse. We were later told by our friends that some other commanders had struggled hard to stifle smiles and chuckles after turning quickly out of the tent. We also gave a funny "hakshev" to the commander within our ...

... by a night of no sleep and days of jet lag. The reality, for me at least, turned out to be far better and far worse than I had imagined. Day 1 We met at noon at our church, and the majority of the people in our group piled into the bus for the hour ride to the airport. Some had traveled together before, but for me it was my first experience in a group tour, and I knew only a handful of the 30 people going. I will doubtless know ...

... to eat it

* The Rebbe had a series of apples that he was handing out to people in line along with a blessing. Brendan said that he'd lived in New Jersey and spoke English well, so I should ask for a personalised blessing. While all the others got a few seconds with the holyman, I got about half a minute, as I chatted with him and he blessed me for success with my job at Optiver!

* Before we left, we spoke to one of the most hardcore-looking young ...

... though there's plenty for me to keep myself occupied with. I went for a walk on Rothschild St and picked up some good sushi where the guy who served me looked like Sacha Baron Cohen - the street culture's pretty interesting, with quite a few bars here, though I was pretty tired and headed to bed after half an hour. Tomorrow I'm spending the day with Rebecca Stern, but it's Israel's election day, effectively a public holiday, and I'm not sure if everything will be open.

... went through another one or two sites which were essentially the same variation of the sites above, and then, yesterday actually, I found almost what I was looking for. It's called TripIt.com, and I don't know how popular it is among travelers. This site lets you create your trip itinerary by adding events to each day of your trip. You can choose different types of events, called plans, like flights, hotels or restaurants. Each plan type has different ...

... Anyways, we decided not to think much about it and just enjoy our day off at the beach... which was fantastic. But I couldn't stop thinking about it. There is so much racism here it blows my mind. "Your going to (Palestinian) East Jerusalem?!" asked the Jewish lady from Jerusalem noticeably concerned about my safety. "Well, be careful!" "They just don't care about human life like we do" she continued ...

... The Jews believe God chose them to follow a new discipline. I like to believe it calls on them to follow a higher spirituality which, if achieved, would benefit all humanity. Some young, bright-eyed students of the Torah may believe this, too. But, the Jews - like any race of people - are made up of strong and weak people. Weak people lack the strength to carry humanity, or they lack the insight to see it benefits them to help others. They'd say: "Why should I ...

... middle of the promenade. One was a sushi place, and there was one dude sitting at the counter wasted and had just thrown up on the ground next to him. The workers frrom the restaurant were so ****** and came out and hosed it (and him) down and made him leave. We at at a place called Moses Burger... yes pretty hilarious. Most people here can speak english although Hebrew is definitely when you hear most of. Many restaurants have english ...

... one thing for it; Eyes straight ahead, I shuffled to the left, shuffled to the right, and shuffled my way on board. I stayed with Arran (girl from internship). Jerusalem has less cars and seems much quieter and more chilled out than Tel Aviv. At Pardes it was amazing the depth of meaning that was induced from simple passages in Torah and other jewish sources. They are very cleverly constructed. PS ...

Welcome to the Holy Land! The land of milk and honey as Talmor so often refers to it as (I have no idea how it came to own that name!) WOW!!! It feels so good to be travelling again. I hadnt realised how much i really missed it. My hungry eyes absolutely drank in every detail from the moment we arrived. They felt as parched as the desert we were driving through... A fabulous flight (British Airways), ive become so used to budget airlines, that getting served ...