Now it’s time to clean up the dining room and return it to some semblance of order.

This is the first time that we’ve ever owned a house. It definitely has a lot of perks and a lot of negatives. My favorite parts of the house is that it’s ours. If we want to change something, we can. We didn’t like the kitchen, so voila, we’re getting a new kitchen. My least favorite part is dealing with the yard. I’m just not that great at planting flowers and remembering to cut the lawn. Guess that will come with time.

So when we purchased the house there was one proviso, we had to redo some of the kitchen. We were going to use the Home Owner credit to pay for most of the renovations, but due to some unforeseen complications the process took a lot longer than we expected. We applied at the end of October and I just deposited the check over the weekend.

The video that is below shows our kitchen. It’s not awful, and could have been a lot worse. The problem is that there isn’t really any counter space. We have about two feet on either side of the sink. We currently don’t have a microwave because there isn’t space for one (the previous owners kept the microwave in one of the cabinets) and our toaster oven is on some crates in the dining room.

So the main goal was to create counter space, yet still maintain the look of the kitchen. We were also limited in the fact that we couldn’t redo the area around the sink. This was mainly due to the white tiling on the wall. The tiling doesn’t go behind the cabinets. So if we took those out, it would look awkward. So it was either remove all of the tiles or leave the sink area alone. Since we did have a budget, we chose the cheaper option.

So here is the video of the kitchen as it looked before we started renovation.

I wish I could post the after video, but alas construction has taken longer than the contractor expected. He said one week, I thought two weeks. Now, we’re on week 3 (although he was busy last week, so no work was done).

Here are a few pictures of what is done so far.

So hopefully I’ll have some more pictures to show by the end of the week.

So here is a link to the Flickr page instead. In the upper right corner, there is a link to a slideshow which is the easiest way to view the pictures.

In March, Jess and I went with some friends hiking near the Dead Sea.

Trip to the Negav

At the end of March, HUC took the students on a trip to the Negav. This included going to a solar facility, hiking, hanging out in a tourist Bedouin tent, and going to 2 kibbutzim.

Birkat Hahammah

According to Wikipedia: Birkat Hachama (ברכת החמה, “Blessing of the Sun“) refers to a Jewish blessing that is recited in appreciation of the Sun once every 28 years, when the vernal equinox, as calculated by tradition, falls on a Tuesday at sundown. Jewish tradition says that when the Sun completes this cycle, it has returned to its position when the world was created.

This happened on April 7, 2009.

Paris, France

For Passover break, Jess and I met her mom and Aunt for 5 days in Paris. We explorer Musee D’Orsay, the Louvre, Versailles, Arc Du Triumphe, and eat a ton of great food. After they left, it happened that my old friend Julie and her husband were going to be in Paris for a few days, so we met up with them. Here are the pictures:

Here are some pics:

I’m not really going to talk that much about non-safari stuff, since we didn’t have that much time to walk around any of the cities we were in.

You can either view the pictures here, or click the link to ‘view the slideshow on Flickr’. I’d recommend doing that as the pictures will be larger.

Masai Mara, Kenya

View slideshow on Flickr

Masai Mara is a national park in Kenya. It is the Kenyan part of the Serengeti. Our safari started with 3 game drives in this park. Our driver, Jackson,  was great. (He has a daughter who is 6 years old) He talked about the different animals and how they are inter-related in the great ‘Circle of Life’. We also had a Masai guide, Kim (short for something I can’t remember). Basically a native Kenyan who lives in a village outside of the park.  There is a picture of him in the slideshow.

We had the jeep to ourselves which was great!  We got to move around the Jeep and didn’t need to make room for other people.   Unfortunately,  at the same time…we didn’t get to meet anyone else and trade pictures with them. The campsite here was much better than expected. We had a permanent camp site. The tent was huge and had a separate room in the back for a toilet. Outside there was a heated shower. They cooked our meals for us and had a campfire going both nights we were there.

Highlights:

- seeing all of the animals together. Apparently, zebras have a great sense of small, so lots of other animals like to graze near them for protection.

- baby animals, especially the 3 Cheetah cubs (adorable)

- standing on the border of Tanzania and Kenya

- meeting a bunch of Kenyan’s who are studying to be guides. They were very friendly and extremely jealous that we saw male lions while all they saw were lionesses

- Watching the monkeys play in the trees

- seeing all of the vehicles crowd around the ‘unique’ animals. A driver would radio in that they saw a leopard, and then every driver in the area would go there. This helped us to see a lot of stuff that we wouldn’t normally see.

- watching a bunch of cheetah hunt. we were too far away to get any good pictures, and they didn’t catch anything, but it was still cool watching them

Lowlights

- eating some bad spaghetti sauce. Jess was sick, while both the driver and I weren’t feeling well in the morning. We skipped our last morning game drive so that Jess could have some more time away from a bouncy vehicle.

- extremely bouncy jeep. Nobody told me that I should bring elbow pads on safari

- Too many vehicles crowded around the ‘unique’ animals.

Lake Nakuru, Kenya

View slideshow on flickr

After Masai Mara, we drove north for a couple of hours to Lake Nakuru. Lake Nakuru is a soda lake (A lake, fed by alkaline springs, that has no outlet). Due to the nature of the lake, there are a ton of pelicans and flamingos that inhabit the shore of the lake.

Highlights

- watching a herd of zebra running through the savannah.   Every once in a while,  a couple of the zebras would attack each other. I got a picture of one of them biting another

- standing at the lookout in Baboon Cliffs we  heard some cracking branches in the trees behind us.  Then I  saw a leopard walking in the trees. We promptly got back into the jeep.

- thousands upon thousands of pelicans and flamingos

Lowlights

- Jess still not feeling 100%

- this being our last game drive with Jackson

Driving to Tanzania

The drive to the start of our next safari included great views,  incredibly bumpy roads, and a pain in the butt border crossing. In the morning we got to see Kilimanjoro which is cool because it’s the highest mountain that I’ve ever seen. We also met a bunch of people that were about to climb, or had just finished climbing the mountain.

Lake Manyara, Tanzania

View slideshow on Flickr

Of the 5 parks that we went to, this was the least exciting. Pretty much just saw some monkeys and baboons.  (However, there were some cute baby monkeys and baboons.)

This was the start of our second safari. Like last time, it was just the two of us. Although we stayed in different campsites, we kept running into the same people.   That part was nice. This time, we were actually camping. The guide set-up our tent and we slept on sleeping pads at night. There were shelters in the different campgrounds, and they served us dinner there.

Highlights

- the smallest cutest little elephant

- seeing lots of baby monkeys and baboons

- watching the male baboons fighting

Lowlight

- the realization that we didn’t like our guide that much: he definitely wasn’t as good as our previous guide

Serengeti National Park

View slideshow on flickr

The Serengiti is the same park as Masai Mara (see above), except it is the much bigger half that is in Tanzania. Throughout the year, the herds of  millions of zebra and wildebeests migrate between the 2 different parks. In January, the herds are in the Serengeti grazing.

Highlights

- watching 3 lionesses and 3 cubs, while watching a nomadic lion approach them. Nomadic lions will attack and try to kill the cubs of a tribe as they are future competition. Needless to say, the lionesses were very alert and slowly ran off with the cubs. As we were leaving, a second nomadic lion walked down the road right towards the same spot. In fact, it walked right past us, within a couple of meters.

- seeing a lion and a leopard in a tree

- the huge herds of wildebeests and zebras

- elephant knocking down a tree with it’s trunk

- listening to the gaseous sounds of the hippos (that one is all Chad)

- watching the starry night

- the rainbow that appeared at sunset

- watching a leopard and it’s cub eat a gazelle or impala

Lowlights

- our guide. he would find cool stuff, but basically drove around and didn’t tell us anything unless we asked

Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania

View the slideshow on flickr

Ngorongoro Crater is a huge crater with a diverse amount of wildlife. Normally, there is a huge soda lake with a ton of birds, but it’s mostly dried up right now. Needless to say, we saw several  similar animals, just with a different backdrop.

Highlights

- watching a lioness lie in the field with zebras walking toward her. then watching a warthog walk right past her.

- seeing 2 warthog piglets playing and knocking each other over

- watching the kites (birds) fly around our lunch spot

- seeing the flamingos flying in the distance

- elephant that hung out near our campsite

- beautiful sunrise (again, this was all Chad, I was asleep)

- laying in the field watching the stars

- seeing a baby rhino in the distance

Lowlights

- as much driving as we did, realizing that this was our last game drive

- the amount of dust that would fly in the window (not good for people who wear contact lens)

- having to spend 12+ hours driving back to Nairobi

Zanzibar, Tanzania

View slideshow on Flickr

So once we finished up with our different safaris, we flew to the island of Zanzibar for some R&R. According to a The Guardian, a UK newspaper, the beach we were staying at was one of the top ten beaches in the world. Nice It was definitely a beautifully white sandy beach, with very calm blue water.

Highlights:

- watching the inauguration at the bar. We sat there, watching a beautiful sunset, with CNN on the TV. As it got closer to 8pm (12pm in Washington D.C), more and more people started pulling up chairs. You could hear people from all over the world (Americans were in the minority) excitedly talking about the upcoming inauguration. During the actual ceremony and speech, everyone was clapping and really excited.

- Jess went on a discover dive (where they teach you the first of the 4 days of the scuba class, and then you dive with a dive master), and I got to dive with her. So it was fun sharing an activity that I absolutely love with her.  (and Dan, the dive master was excellent and really patient, he went out of his way to make sure that I felt comfortable… )

- at the end of the dive, we saw a pod of 30 dolphins, and I was able to jump in the water with my mask and snorkle and watch them swim around underwater

- walking down the beach at night

Lowlights

- knowing that it was the end of the vacation

Animals

If you haven’t seen this video yet, it is truly awesome. I only wish that we could have seen just a small piece of what this video shows:

President Obama

I just like the sound of those 2 words. More importantly, it was really cool to be traveling around Kenya and Tanzania because there were  Obama posters and paintings everywhere. Obama’s father was born in a village in the far west of Kenya, so the people there feel incredibly proud and excited that Obama is the president. I took some pictures of different Obama signs that I saw, but I haven’t uploaded any of them yet. It was one of the few times that I was proud of America while traveling. All the rest of the times, I felt like I had to apologize to the rest of the world for the country that I lived in, but not this time. This time, I’d say I was from America, and then we’d talk excitedly about Obama. Way to go America!

Conclusion

Well, that’s our trip. We have a ton of other pictures, so if there is a favorite animal of yours, we could definitely find a good picture to send you.

Christmas Eve

The strangest thing about Christmas in Jerusalem is how normal the day felt. Stores were open, people were all around. No Christmas lights, or Silent Night on an endless loop. To be honest, it didn’t feel like Christmas at all.

Since Chinese food is hard to find, and the movie theater is far away, we decided to fore go the usual Christmas Eve festivities.  So what to do instead? Well, Jess and I ended up doing different things, but in the same line of though. So what did we do? Well…we went to Midnight Mass. Ironically, in Jerusalem it seems like a cool thing to go to Midnight Mass and see how Christians celebrate. In the states, I would probably never go to Mass. Figure that out?

Well, Jess went with her friend Nikki (grew up Catholic and converted to Judaism about 4 years ago) to a service in the area, while I went with a few people to Bethlehem to see how Christmas is celebrated in the city where Christ was born.

I’m not sure what I expected in Bethlehem. First off, it’s in the West Bank. We needed to bring our passports and go through a security checkpoint to get in. Once across the fence, the entire landscape changed. We went from nicely paved roads, nicer buildings, and Hebrew signs, to very rundown, dirty, and Arabic signs. It was a bit of culture shock, and it was only about 30 minutes from where I live!

We got there a few hours early and they had this whole concert set-up. The weird part of it was, they had a lot of the groups were singing in Spanish. Huh? They would say all of these pro-Palestinian lines at the end, but again it was in Spanish, so nobody was really listening until they said something like ‘Viva Palestinian!” and then everybody would cheer.

Around midnight, we tried to get into the services, but tickets had been sold out for weeks. This is the service that a lot of the big wigs show up to. Supposedly Abbas was there. Outside of the building were a ton of dignitary limo’s with flags from all different parts of the world represented.

We were able to go into the Church of the Nativity by entering the ‘Door of Humility’. Basically it’s a door that is about 4 feet high, so you have to bow to enter or exit. From there, we were able to go to an alcove and listen in to the services, which we did for a few minutes. Unfortunately, we had no clue what was going on, so it wasn’t that impressive.

The most interesting part was just walking around and watching the people. Palestinians were walking around in Santa outfits handing out pro-Palestinian rhetoric. People were there to celebrate, others were there for the free music and festive atmosphere. It was a cold night, and tons of people were walking around selling two from what looked like the tea kettle from their house.

Jessica on the other hand, went to the entire midnight mass, and probably had a much more interesting experience since she was able to get the play-by-play.

New Year’s Eve

So one of the students organized a New Year’s Eve celebration for any of the students that wanted to join. She rented out a bar, organized the open bar, decorated the place, and bought snacks. The theme? Prom. So you know what this means? In the mighty words of Barney….SUIT UP!  So everyone got all gussied up in the finest clothes that they brought to Israel.

Ever weeks of trying to get up the courage, I finally was able to ask the girl I was interested in if she wanted to go to Prom with me. Thankfully, she hadn’t been asked yet and said yes. So Wednesday night finally came along, and I showed up to pick up my date in my finest suit. There was much dancing and hanging out with friends, and midnight came and went.

Overall, a very fun evening. To top off the evening, we caught up with almost all of Jess’s family on Skype.

Packing and Finals

So this week is Finals for Jess. She has had 2 ten page papers to finish, one oral exam in chanting Torah, and 4 additional tests. Needless to say, she has been a bit stressed. As of right now, she is over half done as she handed in both papers, took both the oral exam, and one of the written exams. I’m just tired thinking about all of the work she is doing. Right now, her and a friend are studying Hebrew in the main room.

We are also leaving for Africa late Thursday night (Jess’s last final is Thursday morning). So this week, I’ve been finishing up work and trying to remember where I placed all of the things that I want to make sure to bring with us to Kenya and Tanzania.

This will probably be the last post for a little bit. If we have the opportunity, we’ll try and post while we are traveling, but if not…there will be a long post when we get back with hopefully a ton of pictures!