Israeli highways....

.... make me think of Namibia, with all the wide open spaces. With so little natural greenery obstructing the view, it's the best place to get a licence. (Namibia, that is. For me.) And like the apartheid-ruled Namibia, they're very keen BOTH on checkpoints and security, AND on highways where you can go superfast. So if you're in the strongmen's good books, you can zip around more carefree than most places. And if not, well you can end up like my friend J. who was doing fieldwork in the Palestinian territories, and spend an entire day at checkpoints trying to get from places as far apart as South and North London. She's also the one who told me that the colour of the sticker that airport security puts on your passport is a signal to all checkpoint staff what level of a risk you are. The friend I was travelling with had the colour of 'Grade II terrorist' since he works in Gaza. So we decided not even to try to enter Jericho, which is walled in as 'Palestinian territory'.

Caesarea

Caesarea is a place I only knew from brief mentions in early church history - I had no idea what magnificence it stood for at the time, or how beautiful even the ruins of it are. I feel no words or pictures I put here will do it justice, so click on the link for that.

Anyway, what I found interesting was the casual way Israelis seem to treat these historically significant artefacts . Luxembourg is an extreme in the other end, where they seem to spend a fortune on trying to renovate the insignificant into significance, but Norway isn't too far from that either: more money than sites (i.m.h.o.). Then there are other places that just have more sites than money, so they can't afford to maintain them all, like Turkey or Egypt. But at Caeasarea it seemed there'd been a decision to make Caesarea into a facility people use, even if it does chip away at the irreplaceable. So they'd made a picnic area / eating complex where kids played ball on parts of the ruins. Lively, at least.

More photos in the Caesarea photo album.

Michmoret Beach

Frolog and I always seem to gravitate to beaches when we're travelling. Given his Francophone difficulty in differentiating between 'beach' and ''b%#&ch', this is never boring. So this time we decided to go to a place on the Mediterranean coast, more low-key than the crowded resort towns. Kind of cute. Seemed very popular among middle-class Israeli families. At first we had some trouble ordering food, since nobody spoke English at the first 3 places we went. In fact they didn't speak any language at all other than Hebrew. Several places in Israel I found that quite puzzling: meeting young people who look outwardly very 'globalised' / 'modern', and who're reasonably well-educated, who've never learned any other language - not Arabic to speak with their neighbours within and outside the country, and not English to speak to anyone else either. What would they do if they ever wanted to go outside this little strip of land? Or just talk to someone from the neighbouring suburb? At the same time the Palestinians I met, who in outward appearance looked very different from 'us', all spoke English.

Anyway. When we finally found a place where we could communicate, I had the best Chicken Caesar salad I can remember eating. And I don't even like eating at beaches - that's Frolog's thing. I always feel the sand gets in my food - was overexposed to beach lunches as a child I guess.

So here I am, after 2 consecutive Chicken Caesar Salads al Michmoret, looking like that drawing in Le Petit Prince - you know, the one of the snake who'd just eaten an elephant:

Oops!

Ok, ok, so they do have a few things to teach me, my friends the effortless travelbloggers. Like:

Rule # 1: When travel-blogging, blog whilst travelling.

Otherwise life catches up on you, and before you know it, you're 6 months behind on several countries' worth of travelling.

But what the heck- time is an abstract concept, and I have a lifetime of experience with dealing with post-procrastination damage. And Rule # 1 there? Deny, deny, deny. I'll just keep blogging like no time ever passed, and I just got back from Israel yesterday.