What I Did Over My Shavuot Vacation
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I took a vacation on the two days preceding the holiday to catch a ride with Becca, Avraham, and Ashira to Jon's farm. We got the full tour of the farm on Monday afternoon. Ashira was with the animals, especially a tiny baby black goat. An old goat named Yogi who was born with lame hind legs impressed us all with his trick of walking solely on his front legs. Words don't quite describe how surprising this sight is. Becca's interest was piqued by some of the building techniques used for the structures on the farm, such as the use of mud as a primary material and the use of inorganic garbage as wall filler.
After a few hours of visiting, the Loewenthals moved on to Mitzpeh Ramon to spend chag with friends there, but I stayed on the farm overnight with Jonathan. Although I was harassed by mosquitos all night and woke up with a mysteriously swollen and numb lower lip (which we can only assume was caused by something like a spider bite in middle of the night), I somehow had plenty of pep available to devote to participating with Jon and his fellows in working the fields. (Don't worry too much about the bug bite; it healed completely before the day was over.) We plucked weeds by hand from the strawberry beds and hoed away the grass that had overgrown between the rows and fertilized various vegetables by hand scooping away a depression around the base of the plant and dumping in a couple handfuls of dried poop pellets that they called kufti. After lunch, Jon and I caught a bus to Jerusalem together. We spent a few hours downtown and around the shuk before we had to scurry off to our respective holiday hosts. I tried to buy Jon a pair of new sandals for his birthday, since his old ones were literally falling apart, but the stores were rapidly closing and we couldn't find a shoe merchant that had what he wanted and was still open. So I just gave him the money, and hopefully he's bought new sandals for himself by now.
Jon spent Shavuot with Dan Siegel and their mutual friends. I slept and ate meals at the apartment of Elroi and Josh, a couple friends I made last summer during the war. As this was one of Elroi's "big gay yontifs", the table was surrounded entirely by fairies, except for a single token straight man (although he more than proved his qualifications as an honorary pansy by manifesting his napkin folding skills at lunch). I went to Pardes for Shavuot night learning, but I'm sorry to say that I barely made it past midnight. Although I was really enjoying a lecture on Korach by celebrated chumash commentator, Aviva Zornberg, I was fighting off a headache from too much sun exposure and tiredness from the field labor earlier in the day. In the morning, I went to a nice shul in the Old City that I'd never visited before called "Istanbuli". It was built three or four hundred years ago under the reign of the Turkish empire, and most of the congregants today are descended from the Portuguese Sephardic community. Jon was supposed to come over for lunch at 2pm, but his exertions from the previous night left him comatose well through the late afternoon. I was a little disappointed that Jon didn't make it out to "meet the queers" (as Josh so eloquently put it), but I had plenty of fun. I played the coy glancing game with one of the other houseguests for most of the holiday, and we exchanged phone/email information motzei chag. He teaches statistics at the Open University, so he gets big points for nerdiness, but I'm not so sure an Israeli is what I'm seeking, unfortunately. I dated an Israeli for a little while a couple weeks after Pesach, and I discovered that I'm really not so comfortable constantly hitting a speed bump on the road to communication, with limited Hebrew on my side and limited English on the other.
I didn't touch base with Seth and Rachel on Shavuot, but I had seen them the Shabbat beforehand when they came to Tzfat with Rachel's family for a bar mitzvah. I guess that's all the news for now.