Today I let Arlan and David take me to the Zoo in Haifa. I'd never gotten around to Haifa before, and I was duly impressed with how pretty some areas of the city are. The gardens of the Bahai temple are the centerpiece of this beauty, and I look forward to taking a tour there with Dad in a couple weeks. I also noticed a museum of Japanese art that I hope will tempt Mom. The zoo itself a pretty standard animals-in-cages sort of affair, but well-executed in a lovely valley full of shady trees. As people who raise snakes, David and Arlan were most interested in the snakes and, to a lesser extent, other reptiles. The reptile house didn't disappoint, and especially featured snakes that are native to Israel, as well as turtles, tortoises, crocodiles, iguanas, lizards, a monitor, a skink, and so on. The grounds had peacocks roaming free and various farm animals in wooden pens, including a friendly billy goat with his two nannies. The tiger was magnificent, but she seemed a little thin and paced quite restlessly around her pen, which seemed a couple sizes too small for her. The leopards seemed a little more serene. I especially enjoyed the nocturnal animal exhibits. There was a pair of barn owls that sat up on a ledge almost as still as statues, peering down at us like gargoyles. The eagle owls were of grand proportions and had gorgeous eyes and ferocious talons. The bat display gave me the most effective show of the little beasties that I'd ever seen. It was illuminated with a red light that seems to be invisible to bats, so they were active and happily showed off their aerial acrobatics. Speaking of acrobatics, the striped lemurs danced so expertly among the trees that they seemed to be giving a performance. There was a monkey cage directly adjacent to a cage full of colorful roosters, and that struck me as an odd juxtaposition. It was a fun afternoon, and we topped it off with a trip to a fancy bead store to fuel David's latest cottage industry of producing necklaces and earrings.

Today I joined with Seth and Rachel and Jackie to greet Paul and Carol Siegel and Paul's mother Muriel at the airport as they arrived to make aliyah. Nefesh B'Nefesh put on a whole ceremony for the new olim. Rachel and Jackie held up signs for them to see as they got off the plane. It was the first time I had been to one of these things. It must be nice to come into the country with so much cheering and enthusiasm. Right now, the Siegels should be settling into their lovely new apartment in Rechavia and are lucky enough to be starting their new life here with a friend's wedding tonight. I wish them all the best.

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.

As mentioned last time, I spent Shabbos dinner in Nachlaot, lunch in the German Colony, and the afternoon through the end of Shabbos back in Nachlaot. Jon and Dan (Siegel) made an appearance for third-meal, and spent most of the time gabbing about old Seinfeld episodes. I also got to gross out Seth and Rachel's friends with a gory detail or two regarding SRS. Hey, it's not my fault the conversation wandered onto that topic. But on that note, I did have a fun time after Shabbos watching Trans America back at Moshe's apartment.

On Sunday, I spent the morning working and then went out to town to do some shopping. First, I went to the camping store near Kikar Tzion to get some new hiking shoes, where I also picked up a copy of a guide/map book for hiking the Israel Trail, a trail that runs the entire length of the country. One of the guys I know from yeshiva is looking for a few people to join him in a hike of most (if not all) of the trail this spring, and I'm seriously considering taking him up on the offer.

After the hiking store, I went to the cell phone store to update my service plan and to get a new phone, since the old one was getting all kinds of worn out. The most important feature for me was being able to copy address book information back and forth between my computer and my phone, preferably with the wireless yumminess of Bluetooth. But I splurged and got a Nokia 6280, which has a lot of nice features in addition to that: a calendar, flexible alarms, a facility for jotting notes, an MP3 player, and an FM radio. However, the most interesting feature for you, gentle readers, is the 2-megapixel digital camera. It is true! I have finally, at long last, joined the age of digital photography. (Or, more accurately, the age of any sort of photograpy.) I'm finally able to document my adventures with visual accompaniment. Let us celebrate with a scary nostril-shot!

At the phone store, I met up with Avishai, and we went out for shwarma and then hung out at his apartment for a few hours, drinking tea, watching TV, and dozing a bit. I finished off my day with a meeting for English speakers at the Jerusalem Open House, where we watched the movie Jeffrey. I stayed for a while afterward to schmooze a bit, but soon had to catch the last bus back to Tzfat. And that's the end of that weekend.

The highlight of this week is a weekend trip to Jerusalem. I'm conveniently managing to pack plenty of social events into one weekend. The first was a wedding I attended last night in which the sister of one my yeshiva classmates got married. There were so many people from Tzfat who came to this wedding that approximately half of the passengers on my bus ride to Jerusalem were going to the same wedding.

I brought along my fire poi and related parapheralia and did three rounds of dancing, which was quite well received. And the wedding hall staff didn't even complain at all about this admittedly somewhat risky form of entertainment. I was far from the only specially-skilled performer to show off last night, though. There were also a couple break-dancers, just when I thought the art had been lost in the mists of the eighties. Particularly impressive to me was a graceful young man who has a talent for balancing things on his head and held in his mouth. He did the relatively cliché wine-bottle-on-the-head routine, but also presented more interesting feats, such as an upside-down chair held in his mouth with an identical chair perched atop it, its legs resting on the bottom of the upturned chair's legs. Especially impressive was how he balanced three one-liter Pepsi bottles on top of each other.

Last night I slept at the apartment of one of my older Nachlaot friends, Alex Margolin, whom I hadn't seen since his wedding a bit over a year ago. It's been nice catching up with him and his wife Lisa last night and this morning. Tonight, I'll be having dinner at Orit Gil's, and tomorrow I'll be eating lunch at Moshe's (this is the same Moshe I hosted a couple weeks ago). After lunch, I'll head over to visit with Seth and Rachel until the end of Shabbos. It's good to be making the rounds.