Aliyah Blog 82: Desert Wedding & Stars

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Part I: Desert Wedding

How cool is this? While most things in Israel are hard to predict, the weather isn’t one of them. (Double negative.)

Paving roads in the desert is optional or perhaps even undesired – see the road?

Drive down that for about a mile, through narrow roads and blind corners (I was too nervous to take a picture) until you find the ‘wedding hall’.

Also, deserts are rock. There’s very little sand. Clear it off a bit more and your road is now a dining room.

Add a chuppah in front of some rocks shaped like mountains and when people say, “this is the most beautiful wedding” you can say, “why do neurotypical (aka. neuroboring) people say things they don’t mean?” If they said it as this wedding, then you wonder if perhaps, they are on the ASD spectrum (neurosuperior) because they made a true statement:

Then they went all hillbilly and went off in a tractor – how cool is that?

. . . and check out that dance rock / floor:

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Part 2: Outdoor Bat Mitzvah

These are nice too … at a winery. Predictable clear weather in a cold 70 degrees.

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Part 3: Desert Stargazing for Kids

There’s an organization called “eshkoliot” which means “grapefruit” that has various activities for kids – one of them being stargazing. You sign up, pay $10 or so, and give them your Israeli ID number (for all of those that say after the holocaust, “names, not numbers” it’s hard to understand why your ID number is everything around here).

You get some Serengeti vibes waiting for the sun to set while framing oversized bonsai trees in your shot with some ruins which are who knows how old. The first half dozen times it’s … “wow, remains of a community thousands of years old!” After a while, it’s … “once you’ve seen one pile of rocks arranged in a square, you’ve seen them all.”

Then they have different stations and do these cute things for kids –

They’re demonstrating revolving around the sun and earth.

. . . and now gasses and planets. . . . and no one is fearing for anyone’s safety with strangers coming together in the dark middle of nowhere. Can’t imagine this in the U.S.

. . . and they use a laser pointer that has got to be illegal in the United States. It was very hard to photograph, and the best shot I got was with night vision in portrait orientation. Really, it was completely dark out and looked like a planetarium with a highlighted star.

They wouldn’t let the kids touch it.

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