Birthright Day 2: Shabbat In The North

As a reward for surviving the longest day of our lives, my Birthright peers and I were able to sleep in on Saturday.  Well, that's not really the reason-- the real reason is that it was Shabbat-- but it certainly felt like a treat.  (Oh, and by "sleep in" I mean "wake up at 8:30am.)  And because it was Shabbat everything in Israel was closed and we weren't able to use electricity until sundown, so we ended up playing games in the later morning.

One of the games was a rapid fire name game.  There were two teams and each team would send up a representative to stand on one side of a bed sheet, and then the leaders would drop the sheet and the first person to say the other person's name wins, and the loser has to join the winner's team; the team with the most people at the end of the game won.  This game was really difficult, as there were 39 of us (at this point-- we added more people later, but more about that on another post), and we had only been acquainted for 48 hours.  Because I was having a lot of trouble I began thinking of ECT and how when I was undergoing that procedure I had marked difficulty learning new names.  In my head I was panicking-- did the ECT permanently ruin my ability to learn names?  But by the next day I had learned everyone's name, so I was a little less panicked.

Another Shabbat activity that we engaged in was swimming; the kibbutz that we were staying at had a pool and we were permitted to use it.  But my body image was so atrocious that I didn't even put on a bathing suit, I just wore a t-shirt and shorts and only dipped my feet in.  And actually, there were a few of us who were not interested in going in the pool so we played card games.  It was actually pretty fun.

After Shabbat ended (that is, after the sun went down) we were driven to a town called Rosh Pina and were "set free" to get ourselves dinner and do whatever else we wanted to do.  A big group of us went to a restaurant called Rene.  At this point I was still having a bit of trouble with eating, so I ordered a salad.  On top of the salad was feta cheese and basil wrapped in phyllo dough.  I was too afraid to eat it, but I couldn't stop thinking about it so I put a bite in my mouth and chewed and spit.  I don't think anyone noticed.

When the clock struck 12:30am we gathered back on the bus to drive back to our kibbutz to get our 5 hours of sleep before the next day began.