This past my May I went on an amazing trip to Israel and Jordan. It was my fifth time in Israel and first time in Jordan.
Our tour was mostly in southern Israel but we also visited Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and even Gush Etzion in Judea and Samaria. We also visited communities in the Gaza envelope including Sderot and Halutza.
Other places visited in Israel were the Arava, Mitzpe Ramon and Beer Sheva.
After the JNFuture tour ended in Jerusalem I took a bus back south to Eilat located along the Red Sea and then took a day trip to Petra in Jordan. Petra was the most amazing place I have ever visited. The great Nabatean Kingdom capital city.
August 1, 2011 -- After spending six days exploring Tel Aviv-Yafo, it was time to be assigned to the kibbutz I would be working on. The Kibbutz Volunteer Center directed me to Kibbutz Lahav, which meant an hour-and-a-half bus drive south from Tel Aviv.
The Tel Aviv Central Bus Station is now the second largest bus depot in the world after the Millennium Park Depot in New Delhi, India opened a year ago. Most Israelis use buses for intercity travel so it is an impressive site to see so many buses coming and going every few seconds. The station opened in 1993 but the seven-story structure seems much older. There is a run-down shopping mall that occupies much of the space with over 1,000 shops and restaurants. Only three of the seven floors are used as a bus terminal and the maze of escalators can be hard to navigate, especially if you can't read the Hebrew signs.
Lahav is located around 18 miles (30 kilometers) northeast of Beersheba and less than a mile west of the 1949 Armistice Agreement Line and Judea and Samaria (West Bank). The bus driver dropped me off a stop too far, at the Lehavim Junction near the planned community of Lehavim. The Kibbutz Lahav volunteer coordinator had to drive to the intersection of Highway 40 and Highway 31 to pick me up.
Soon I would arrive at Lahav for my next adventure -- washing dishes and scrubbing pots and pans at the only Jewish-run pig farm in Israel!
Here is video leaving Tel Aviv Central Bus Station on Metropoline route 351 to Beersheba. Metropoline is a bus company with routes mostly in southern Israel (Egged is the largest transit bus company in Israel). You really get a sense of how much bus traffic there is as we drive past bus after bus after bus on our way out of the busiest station in Israel.
Here are more photos of the bus trip from Tel Aviv to Lehavim Junction. Click here to see the set on Flickr.
This Friday I passed by the growing Occupy D.C. demonstration encampment at McPherson Square in downtown Washington and was amazed to see that since last weekend the park has been transformed from a few sleeping bags into a tent city. It is amazing how similar it looks to the tent cities I saw across Israel this past summer.
The Israeli Summer has turned into the American Autumn and while some of the issues being addressed by the demonstrators might be different (unemployment in the United States versus the high cost of living in Israel), there is a strong thread running through these movements, and it has to do with government being accountable to the people and not corporations and the richest 1%. The demonstrators on the East Coast and Middle East want to ensure that, as Abraham Lincoln so eloquently stated in his Gettysburg Address, "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Click here for a link to photos I took last weekend of the Occupy D.C. demonstration (before the tents were pitched).
And here are photos I snapped this past summer of the demonstrations around Israel.
