[Israel ride] Shabbat and Day 4: Mitzpe Ramon to Kibbutz Ketura

( Shabbat )

Sunday morning was the usual getting up early to finish packing and have breakfast. I went out before breakfast to find my bike, and the mechanics adjusted the handlebars upward for me. It definitely helped. And I got my hand wrapped again.

( from the Tzofim cue sheet )

I didn't get organized early enough to take advantage of both tour slots, so ended up choosing to see the experimental orchards over the kibbutz as a whole, which meant missing some interesting stuff (next time...). I also missed another meeting with other students, and everyone hanging out by the pool.

The kibbutz is a mixture of trailers, more permanent dwellings (none of them huge), group buildings (cafeteria, shul, lounge, etc), and agricultural construction. It felt more like a farm than Mashabei Sadeh (I don't know their principal activities other than the petting zoo), and more self-sufficient because of that. Or perhaps I was just given the chance to see more of the kibbutz.

Dinner was outside by the pool, a great buffet with some sort of interesting tomato salad (little tomatoes, rather than cubed bigger ones). There was the usual briefing, and a five-minute clip from the movie Ana's making, about food in the US. There were technology glitches (It was outside; no clue how they did whatever cables they needed (Or was it all wireless?)), but it's obviously going to be interesting.

It was fascinating seeing the landscape changes. Just behind the kibbutz, the cliffs rise, and it's fairly barren, especially compared to the green parts of the kibbutz. I could see another kibbutz nearby (on a hilltop, which struck me as strange, because the hill was abrupt, not gradual, so it's a restriction on growth, whether they like it or not), and across the way, beyond the date palm groves, there were other cliffs rising up from the valley, redder cliffs, which are Jordanian. I was surprised at how cliffs so close to each other were such different colors.

The regular evening routine of putting laundry out to dry, setting out the day's clothes, refilling water containers, figuring out how to get up on time in the morning. I was rooming with Ana and Anna, and one of them had appropriate technology :-).

Farm share, week 3, and a book

Still very green, but not all leaves!

• a head of lettuce (I chose a darkly purple one)
  
• a bunch of cilantro or dill (I'm away for Shabbat, so I happily gave my cilantro to some passersby rather than getting dill that might sit until compost)
  
• a small handful of garlic scapes
  
• a summer squash
  
• two zucchinis
  
• a third of a pound of carrots
  
• a bunch of cute little beets with greens
  
• a bunch of Hakurei turnips with greens
  
• a bunch of multi-colored chard
  
• a bunch of wonderfully thin scallions

As mentioned, I'm away for Shabbat. The lettuce will go with me. The current plan is to sautee the turnip greens, beet greens, and chard with some onion and garlic, then freeze them. If I don't eat the carrots out of hand, perhaps sautee them with the beets and some interesting seasoning or other (there's not enough to make it worth roasting, though I adore roasted beets). Likely the summer squashes will be sauteed with scallions and/or garlic scapes.

---

I picked up Looking for the Mahdi (N. Lee Wood) almost at random at the MIT SF library. It's of the "near-future with certain kinds of new technology" sub-genre, and much more a political thriller than I'd guessed when I started, with so many possible sides that I started getting a bit lost in the political wrangling. Still, surprisingly appealing to me, a lot of that having to do with how Muslim-focused it is. It's mostly set in a fictional poor, Middle Eastern country with fundamentalist morals police. The politics and the religion are indivisibly intertwined, in ways that are rarely depicted in science fiction (Yes, yes, The Sparrow, a few others. But on the whole, religion is not dealt with seriously, usually left out, presumably because people don't hold strong religious beliefs, if they have any at all.).

( Possible spoilers ahead. )

But the more that's written espousing peace, in whatever genre, the more likely it feels that peace might actually come.