Seattle, Alabama, Poland, Israel

I'm currently relaxing at my uncle and aunt's house in the north of Israel, a city named Nahariya (נהריה‎). It's on the ocean and only 10min south of the border of Lebanon. Lots of rockets landed here during the last Lebanon war but thankfully it's quiet now. On weekend nights they actually have a DJ on the beach and people dance with over the top electronic music, Zohan was pretty close with the disco stuff ;). It is also the city my mother and her family immigrated to when they left Morocco so it sort of feels as if I'm tracing my roots.

For the past two weeks I have traveled from Seattle to Alabama, driving the whole way in Rihanna (my beautiful black car.) I went through some of the most interesting and boring areas of the USA, hundreds of miles of nothing, which makes you realize how big our country is. It is a huge contrast when you come to a country the size of Israel. We actually drove today to the very north of the Golan Heights, which means I basically went from the farthest west to the farthest point east and it only took two hours! It is quite beautiful there, snow peaked mountains, fields of vineyards, and of course the wineries. Actually stopped at one and had an arrangement of interesting liquors, the best were a white chocolate and a pear and cinnamon. We also stopped at a micro brewery but the beer here I have found sorta lacks. They rely on imports from Belgium and the Netherlands. The contrast of the beauty of the Golan is the number of mine fields that have not been cleared yet. Some pretty interesting old bunkers and tanks as well from the '67 war.

Anyway, I will trace back a week to my visit in Poland, where I saw Warsaw and Krakow. Cool place but a lot of the sites have to deal with WWII so its pretty depressing. The food is very interesting though since Polish food is basically jewish food for the most part. This is due to the fact that a ton of Jews lived there for a very long time before WWII. In fact Warsaw had the largest Jewish population in the world next to New York City.

Now I will skip forward to the current day, I feel like a literary Marty McFly. Tomorrow is my cousin's wedding and the day after I will go to the orientation for the program I will be on for the next 5 months. The wedding will be crazy because Israeli weddings usually are pretty darn over the top. They definitely don't half ass it here. Insane amounts of food, since all things Jewish really are about the food, and then lots of disco time and fun.

Going to bed now. Till I type again...