Friday

So Friday we woke up a lot earlier than we usually had done and had breakfast around 7. I noticed that there were a lot more people there than there were at our usual 8am. I figured we like to sleep in but probably most other people like to get early starts. Maybe they were saying to themselves, "those lazy Americans finally woke up early". In any case we got a decently early start and checked out of the hostel and started the drive to the Dead Sea.

Once we got to the Dead Sea everyone jumped into the water in pure joy! Just kidding. You're actually not supposed to dive in or dunk your head or anything but float on your back, really. So you wade in past these rocks covered with salt (even underwater) and then sort of lie down on your back. We had a couple people who weren't going in take a bunch of pictures and videos for us. I have to say that at first I wasn't too psyched for the Dead Sea but it was pretty cool to experience once. Floating takes zero effort. It actually takes much more effort to try and keep your head up and sit up because everything tries to float including your legs and feet! So that was pretty neat for about ten minutes. Then I wanted to get out and then the bad aspects of the Dead Sea kicked in. Any part that was sunburned or had a cut started to burn as soon as I got out of the water. It was a good thing they had a fresh water shower right outside next to the water! After I rinsed off I took some more pictures and them went to the bathroom to change. Unfortunately for me, the bathrooms with showers and changing rooms cost 2 shekels to go in! Ridiculous! And because I had just brought my swimming trunks (rather than wearing them on the drive) the dip in the Dead Sea cost me 4 shekels. Like someone on the China tour a few years ago used to say, it's cheaper than a plane ticket back!

We ate lunch at this little restaurant/buffet right on the Dead Sea, which, I have to say, definitely exceeded my expectations! I had some slow cooked chicken and some salad.

Then we drove off to Masada, which is a fortress that was built up primarily under Herod (do you see a running theme here?) and is quite amazing. It's at the top of this huge mountain an has two or three aqueducts feeding into big cisterns for the water supply from nearby mountains. It also had three courtyards on the northern side for Herod himself (the top one) and for entertaining guests (the lower two). But things like that aren't enough for Herod, he had to go and put a big swimming pool up on top, too. It was so big that we had trouble exploring the whole site in an hour and a half.

There are two ways to the actual Masada mountain where the ruins are. One is by a tram that takes you up via cable car. The other is called the snake trail and, like its namesake, is a very winding trail all the way down. It's supposed to take about an hour going down and maybe twice that going up. But when we got there (around 1pm-ish) the staff told us it was too hot an they weren't letting anyone go up, only come down. So we took the tram up and I tried to explore the whole thing and ended up having to really book it to one end to see the views, but I got there so I was glad. After that we hiked down in about 40 minutes and man that was pretty tough going on my knees. Thankfully most of the way the trail is fairly wide and has railings. At the bottom everyone was tire and hot so we all got ice cream (Magnum bars!) even though they were pretty expensive compared to ones we've sen at convenience stores.

In fact, Magnum bars have become our de facto standard for determining how expensive ant given store is. "Ooh the Magnum bars are only 10 shekels here". Or "man what the heck they're 15 shekels at this place!"

After Masada we had a fairly long drive through the desert to get to our next stop, Tel Aviv. Once we got there and checked into the hostel and settled on we set off to find some good eats. We ended up at this place near our hostel called Jeremiah's, which was quite good. They were even playing American music the whole time we were there. Although it was pretty eclectic collection, cause I was the only one who knew what half the songs were.

After that we decided to get our laundry done even though it was getting late (almost 11ish?). There was a laundromat across the street that was open 24 hours, so we put our loads in and then walked around for a bit. Tel Aviv is a pretty cosmopolitan city and the area was actually livening up even more after 11. There was a young guy waiting at the crosswalk with us who asked where we were from in really good English. Turns out he was from LA but was in Israel for the time being doing his military service. He was training to be a paratrooper and said soon they all had to do a 75km hike with all their gear and stuff. Crazy! That's like 45 miles!

So after we were done with the wash and waiting for the drying to finish we were just hanging around outside the laundromat and started playing this game where you have a riddle and can only ask yes/no questions and you try to figure it out. It was fun for a while, but I had forgotten most of my good lateral thinking problems (someone remind me to look them up when I get home). Then we were all pretty tired so we went to bed. End of Friday!