oops, it's been a while...

so two weekends ago was the last Building Future Leaders conference...lots of fun, friends, learning, and sad goodbyes, i suck at good byes. Among things like going to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and hearing important people speak, we herded sheep and goats!! One of the best things I've done in my life, let me attempt to explain the amazingness that was this experience... My group went first with no prior knowledge of how to actually herd sheep or goats just the understanding that we had to get them from one place, to another, to another, then separate them and put the sheep in one place and the goats in another. Sounds tough, but do-able. We figure: surround them and bring them together then lead them and they will follow, after all...that's what real shepherds do, right? well, wrong. After pushing and prodding, screaming and yelling, speaking in every language we knew, falling over, and laughing hysterically, we moved the group a few feet only to have them stop again and we had to do the whole process over. These are some damnn stubborn animals. Anyway, after 17 minutes of strenuous work, we accomplished our goal. I could not have had a better feeling than when the animals were actually following us from one destination to the other. I felt a sense of accomplishment as if I had just won an olympic gold, and i wish i were kidding. So the other 2 groups did it in much less time (cause they saw what worked for us and what didnt) but i still felt like i won, for sure. Tips for future sheep and goat herders: the herd has a leader, its a goat, a girl goat, and once you get that one moving...the whole herd will follow. Also, when sheep are scared they huddle together with their heads in the center to protect thier necks...their most vulnerable part, do not try and break them up physically, it just doesn't work, get the goat. And no, of course we didn't have any idea about this until after.

More exciting adventures that I can remember: I met up with Allie in Jerusalem to sign the lease for her apt. Her landlord was kind of scary..a "sabra" or, very typical israeli (note: Allie's face in the picture), but the apartment's pretty nice and in a pretty good location (see: beautiful sunset).










Last weekend I went hiking up north. We did three wonderfully beautiful hikes, went to a hot water spring resort thing that was awesome but smelled like northern Jerz (I mean sulfur), had a campfire/tea/made pitas at a nearby kibbutz (socialist community thing, they're all over Israel), and went "rafting" in the Jordan. Rafting was amazingly hilarious. I attempted to take charge of our 6-man raft trying to paddle but it was quite a balagan (mess/disorder), we couldnt co-ordinate the two paddles and we ended up in a lot of trees/branches on the side. I broke the paddle on a rock and we got laughed at by a lot of arseem (read: Israeli guidos, watch that hilarious video) hanging out on the side of the river.

I went to Ein Hod yesterday which is an artist's village on the way up to Haifa. Super cool village and we got lessons on stained glass from a resident. Went to the beach with Allie today then I went to the Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer game. VIP tickets with free food and beer, yea connections :). Maccabi won but the last 3/4 minutes were real close, we scored to go up 2-1 but had to bicycle kick the ball out of the goal in the last 5 seconds to prevent the tie. Going to Sderot tomorrow, if you don't know about the city you should read about it, or i'll tell you about it next time!

I didn't forget about the serious/thinking post I said I would write, I will. And two photo albums to come at some point.

Lauren