Big Orange Backpack

Julie and I just arrived back from the Red Sea. It was an AMAZING weekend... I can't wait to get the photos back from the underwater camera.. but more on that in a minute..

We took the 5 o'clock bus down to Eilat and checked into our hostel around 9:30pm. We walked down the boardwalk, and I took a tiny dip into the Red Sea. We bought excellent corn on the cob from a shomer negiah man, and ate it on the beach overlooking Jordan. It was unreal. I had heard that Eilat was great, and that it was like a mini-Las Vegas. However, I have never felt the desire to go to Las Vegas... I thought that meant it was all gambling. What I think people meant was that it was a great city in the middle of the desert.. an oasis if you will. So we walked around for a few hours and then went back to the hostel to catch some shut eye. On Friday we went and rented snorkles at our hostel before taking a cab to "Snuba Beach", within the Coral Reef Nature Preserve. We bought a camera the night before and snorkled and took photos.. I really hope the all came out. We were under water for four hours, and the things that I saw... I'm so unbelievably lucky.. I'm not a beach person, so I never thought I'd get to a place where I could snorkle with tropical fish in a coral reef.. But there I was, in the middle of schools of fish, touching coral. We were so close to Egypt that we actually swam into it by accident, and the border guards started yelling at us to come back to Israel. I guess they missed us. Afterwards we went out to an amazing steak lunch, the first time I have eaten good meat in months. We, however, made one fateful error. We did not apply sun screen to our bums. And we are dearly paying for it now. Four hours butt up in 106 degree weather in the desert in July... Yeah. We thought we had to go to the hospital it was so bad. We went and bought four different kinds of aloe (within three trips to the Super Pharm), and we dropped our pants in public places to apply it three times, we were in so much pain we just didn't care. So today we went to the Aquarium, which was sort of a rip off, but maybe we were just much less impressed with the fish in the glass because we had swam with them the day before, or because we were in a lot of pain and kids kept shoving past us and hitting our burns. We were dreading getting on the bus back to Jerusalem and sitting the whole time.. but it wasn't SO bad. And here we are. The bus stopped right outside of Hebrew University and we asked the driver to let us off, which he did, and we jumped off and were able to get a free trip back.

This was my weekend. It was one of the most amazing of my life. Tomorrow is my last full day in Israel. It's a bit devistating.