Another Round at the Dead Sea, or Mixed With Mud

Here are a few photos from a weekend's excursion to the Dead Sea, with a few helpful captions:

This is a spa near the Dead Sea. They had huts.


This is the Dead Sea, with Jordan across the way. The Dead Sea has shrank noticeably in recent years. As you walk down to the coast, you find markers for where the sea level was in 2004, 2000, 1991, and 1985. Certainly in 1985, all this dry ground you see was covered in sulfurous, mineral-rich water. Somebody call Al Gore.


Ahh yes, the four languages that make Israel the place it is. And of course, all of it just to say the dirt is muddy, and when the dirt hasn't been muddy in years.


Hey, nice shoes! Comfortable for taking the long stroll down to the Dead Sea, but not quite durable enough to go in the water with. Fortunately, my nimble steps kept me from cutting up my feet on the rock hard salty ground on the Dead Sea beach and below the water, so as to not have gashes on my feet that the salty water could rip into like salt on so many wounds.


Despite my failure in gym class to drownproof or float or whatever we had to do for 10th grade gym, I managed to lean back and float on the Dead Sea. I guess I'm not that strong.

I look like either my older brother in the early 90s or Andrei Arshavin. The common ground? Russianness and mullets. The latter feeds into the former, by the way.

Of course, that was when I emerged from the sea the first time. Then, after sleeping in the depths for two thousand years, I ended up getting a little crusty, and a little dirty, and, well...


Somehow I still had spandex on. There's more mud beneath the spandex than on it, by the by. Or is that too much info?


Let's just say that this towel got really dirty after I was through with it. Ok, I only washed my hands off with it, but it was still really dirty. And the sulfur showers did a pretty good job washing off all the mud, except it was a little difficult for the mud in my spandex. No, really, it was real mud, not "mud".

Ok, a few of you have done some sleuthing and are wondering who took all these lovely photos. That is, who accompanied me on this trip to the Dead Sea? Well, fortunately, I got a picture of my companion right over here...



Oh, wait. That's not it. I stopped seeing that camel in August. Hmm. Let me see...ahh...wait...right here...this might be the one...



Or to paraphrase Dazed and Confused, I bet we're pretty cute once you wash all that mud off of us.

And next week is my return to Spain, so stay tuned!

A Dead Sea Appetizer

One of the more interesting ideas our school has is the "Week Without Walls." In said week, the high school students spend two school days doing community service and then three days on a field trip to somewhere in Israel, for a deeper and separate cultural experience of the country. The middle schoolers just do the field trip part. Anyway, it's a nice concept that could lead to exciting new activities and a chance for students (and teachers) to bond in different ways outside of the classroom. In theory.

In practice, most students go with their friends. Those with good attitudes get a lot out of the activity and wish for more. Those with poorer attitudes try to play a garbled gambling form of blackjack beneath the cliff the rest of their group is rappelling on and then get yelled at by the intern teacher when they go back on their word to actually rappel after two hands. Fortunately, I didn't have to deal with any of that...


That said, there's not a whole lot of storytelling to undertake over the trip. We went to a place called Metzuke Dragot, near the Dead Sea and officially in the West Bank, below Jerusalem (a little more on this distinction in my next post). It was a nice little resort complex, and served as a safe base for our rappelling experience. We went to a nearby cliff and rappelled down it a few times. The most challenging part of the whole rappelling bit was the knots they taught us on the first day, knots that for the most part we did not need to tie the rest of the time. Also, the kids giggled a lot when the guides talked about Prusik knots. Actually, the group of 7-8 freshman boys we had on the trip reminded me a little bit too much of myself and my group of friends freshman year, from the ethnic diversity (theirs actually quite larger) to the good-humored/poor taste racial ribbing to the lack of individuality. This tempered my temper, at times. (Also, with regards to the Prusik knot bit - most of the guides giggled just as much as the kids.)

There were a couple other moments of note. The first night, we met up with another group from school that was rappelling about 20 KM south of us, and after a pedestrian drum circle, a high school dance broke out. A group of Ethiopian (or otherwise African; Ethiopians are the most common African peoples in Israel) high schoolers tried to get in to our dance, including one persistent girl especially. She pleaded, she claimed to be from our school but didn't know the name, she begged, and then she resorted to claiming one of the boys from our school, an Angolan, was her long lost brother, and that she wanted to reunite with him. She didn't get his name right even after somebody told her what it was. (It is a tricky name, to be fair.)


On our last night, we went to a spa near the Dead Sea. As such, while the kids hung out mostly in the pool, the spa did offer both a tub of mud to cover oneself in and sulfur springs hot tubs. The SSHTs were hot and smelled like rotten eggs. After about 10 minutes in one, I got out, or right about when I started tasting the sulfur on my lips. (I was warned not to dip my hair in, because then it might stink for a couple days. I mean, stink more than usual.)

After some cleansing chlorine, I covered myself in mud from head to toe. I can't really claim any great benefits of sticking mud on your body, and I only had it on for 5-10 minutes, which is probably insufficient anyway. But I tell you what, smearing yourself in dark mud that you take from a wooden tub of it in the middle of an open spa square at night is as much as it sounds, and then twice more. The whole putting on the mud thing makes up for having to shower in sulfur to rinse it off. Also, the other teacher in my group told me that a guide or someone there told her, "It's best to put it through your hair and on your genitals and everything." Sadly, I only heard about that after the fact...

Ok, here are some more pictures.

This, friends, is the Dead Sea. It's pretty.
A lonely olive tree on our resort at night.

The place wherein we did the bulk of our rappelling.

And for my next trick, we're off to Jordan! Next post, rather.