Sukkot is a long holiday and a lot of stuff happens in general because it's a week of freedom from the regular schedule.

Yigal called me the Tuesday before, saying he was in Jerusalem for the night and so I went out to Ben Yehuda Street with himl. We walked around for a while and over some fresh bagels (the only ones I've seen in Israel that resemble real bagels) he invited me to his moshav for Sukkot. He lives on Sde Yaakov, which is halfway between Afula and Haifa and halfway between Nazeret and the shore (go find your own maps; it's really hard to find good ones online). I'll skip the part about the busride not because it was uneventful but because there are more interesting discussions.

Yigal lives there when he's not off on a trip with a youth group, which he does quite often because he really loves teenage groups, it seems. For parts of the Chag, his grandfather and his new wife, his parents, his brother, his other brother with his wife, and his sister were there. The dynamic at the dinner table was always very...well, dynamic. Pepe's telling stories from before he moved from Morocco in Hebrew and French; no one else knows French besides Yigal's dad (who is the rabbi for all of the Izra'el valley), but the younger brother gives everyone else laughs as he tries on a ridiculous Frencch accent with the three or four words he (almost) knows. The house has several old collections. The Rabbi has collected chanukiyot forever ("since before we were married"); there are now "at least four hundred; that's where I lost count," says Yigal. Also since forever, or at least since secocnd grade, Yigal has had a collection of erasers. So when I had to clean up my room before leaving Chicago, it was ostendibly because I can't live there forever and maintain my "shrine" (guess whose words). But he's 26, I think, and has already done several tours of Miluim and still gets to keep his tchotchkes around.

We slept in the sukkah for both nights, though there's some sort of loophole that permits a sukkah to be built in the added-on room of a house if the room has a retractable roof. So though we slept in the sukkah it wasn't really outside. We did quite a bit of walking around the moshav, though, and meeting with all these other BA kids who are like Yigal's younger brothers, it seems.

On the second day (Chol here) we drove to a nearby pool that's newly discovered. It's not yet on the maps and the people who we saw there could trace their knowledge of the place only a few word-of-mouth generations to friends-of-friends from the area. It appepars to have been an ancient mikveh because it's certainly not natural; it's a rectangular prism. The unusual thing is that it's so much bigger than most of the old mikvehs, and it's also cementish, not made out of rough stones. So maybe it's not, I'm not sure. We did some Israeli-style tea over the little bunsen burner and went for a dive in this pool along with two bikers who'd come from Ra'anana starting at 7 am and were planning on making it to Tveriah by the early afternoon. Crazy.

The rest of the chag was full of non-class, just some general fun days. Third day we woke up early to go to the Kotel for Birkat HaKohanim, which is a huge deal on the Regalim.

Fourth day we drive to Nachsholim, between Netanya and Haifa, to dive for Hilazon. About a dozen years ago it was found, using the Talmud and a few other sources, that this variety of snail is the one from which techelet, the blue dye of the tallis, was made. Theroy says that it became a lost custom because if the snail was hard to get by diving from the Israel shore, it was harder to get while in exile in Babylonia. So for a while some people used it but it died out. So it wasn't really "diving" what we did, but there were snorkels and I found two living Hilazon snails with which I photographed and then which I chucked back into the Sea.

On to Neot Kedumim, which is supposed to be a biblical garden of sorts. During Sukkot they set up many different types of sukkot and then take Mishnah quotes to demonstrate which are kosher and which aren't (tall ones, double-decker ones, treehouse ones, triangular and circular ones, ones on the back of a camel, ones with a cow for a side, etc.). We also herded sheep and goats, ten of us and ten of them. So if that was hard I can't imagine how to lead 100 with one person. I think the trick is to have your best friend be a sheep and have that sheep be the one that all the others like to follow. So it's sort of an inductive process.

Fifth day we started at a place to pick poor people produce (pecks of unpickeled peppers). That was only fun when we came across a group of first-grade-age kids, mostly because we know they're below our level of Hebrew and so any grammar mistake will be fine. But the rest of the group was having its fun by throwing peppers at itself. [Sorry, that's just a really awkward sentence when I avoid the British "rest"/"their" constructions.] And honestly, that's a really prickish thing to do in this field near Rehovot which has the sole purpose of feeding the poor. In Rishon later that day, we had a sort of Color Wars thing (camp style, not Akiba style) with different cooperation-needed activities, then later just playing around in the park area. Naturally our Green team won. In the end, the Sukkot Wine Festival in Rishon L'Zion. I walked around with Justin for a bit at what we thought was the main stage with the great Greek-ish Israeli band playing, and when we went to hunt down a few others and gave up ("What do you mean, 'you're by the water near someone wearing pink.'? There's water everywhere!") we wandered into the greater street festival, which was just incredible. There was a dancing troupe on a stage, and next door was another group (of nuns) on a balcony, with the two musics overlapping and interfering. Moving (shoving) dowin Rothschild Street, we finaly got to the end where an Israeli pirate was trying to get kids around him to dance and instead grabbed both of us and a woman and starting marching us in circles, hoping the kids would catch on. But they only finally ascended the table when the pirate's sidekick Mrs. Pirate was given a bottle of wine by someone in the crowd and proceeded to drink while the kids were dancing. It sounds strange? Yes, it was strange. Then we had to come back, so we figured to wave to Spiderman for a seccond and then wander through the Israeli dancing section for one song. Significant bets that most of the rest of the Jerusalem section didn't make it as far as we did because they stopped to buy bottles of wine first. A few people in particular. I had my half-glass of red and sip of white.