Since the beginning of October I am being petted by the Israeli sun, as I decided to delete cold winter from my reality and escape Poland for two and a half months, to provide my body with a high dose of vitamin D that it needs. For the fourth time I am delighted to visit this beautiful country which is so hard to understand. This time - from a little bit different perspective.
Let me describe for you this mysterious country full of duality. Let's start from the first impression that I got when I came here for the first time in December 2017.
SHALOM, WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
Whenever I come here - I hitchhike, because this is the best and most adventurous way of traveling. For the ones that already have a typical question in their head "Aren't you scared?", the answer is a big NO, I LOVE IT.
Thanks to hitchhiking I got to know most of the information about the country and have learned my first words in hebrew. Hitchhiking works here very well, the locals do it themselves, so it is somehow in their culture to pick up someone on the way. The country is half desert, so let's say you've missed a bus that was supposed to take you four hours south to your kibbutz (a communal settlement where people live sharing the wealth, profits and duties, sometime based on a farm or factory that give the inhabitants place to work) and the next one is in an hour. There is only a small shadow from the bus stop and many cars are driving on the only road in front of you that is going your home direction. Would you sit there sweating and getting thirsty in 30 degrees or more or would you try to get a ride? Exactly. While waiting for a car to stop, you can juggle a bit :>
People here like to help others, especially travelers. Because somehow this is a country of travelers. How is that? As you might know, military service starts here after high school. Teenagers at the age of 18 are going to serve for obligatory few years - 2 for girls, 3 for boys. After this time spend on executing someone's orders, being told who you should be and how you should act, when it is finally over, you want to use your life! Being in the army comes with having sometimes really extremely intense, terrifying and traumatic experiences. Therefore young people feel the need of finding themselves and exploring the world when they finish military service. There is a cultural tradition we could say, of going for the BIG TRIP. The most common directions are India and South America, but all the south-eastern Asia and Australia are also full of Israeli people. While visiting this countries you can really notice them travelling mostly in big groups of friends, all of them wearing the typical Israeli sandals (which is a stereotype, but has a lot of truth in it).
Any big adventure that puts you in a completely different environment and forces you to survive there has a huge impact on how we see the world. It can make you start respecting the other cultures as they are, open more for the diversity of people, teach you a lot about yourself and ,most of all I think, the BIG TRIP shows you that karma always comes back, so it is good to help others, because one day you may also need help in some extreme condition.
The people that stopped for me and 3 of my friends that I was travelling with,mostly have been traveling in the past, so we could connect easily. I remember how amazed we were that everyone was speaking english, even the older people. All of our hitchhiking angels were extremely helpful, smiling and as interested in knowing us we were in knowing them. To show you the scale of these people's kindness I will tell you a STORY:
"Kibbutz Mishmar HaSharon"
It was another really hot day in a country that was still a mystery for us. We came to get some sun and survive from the money that we would earn doing fire shows on the streets of the biggest cities in Israel. We already earned some shekels in Eilat and Jerusalem which are full of street artist as there is always a lot of turists. Our next destination was Nazareth. Me and Gaba (my close friend that helped me to start our circus adventure) caught the first car, while our travelling buddies both named Mateusz stayed behind. It took us few ours to get there but we were already to late to see the main market or any other cultural interesting place because everything was closed. Disappointment was big and accompanied with back ache after walking long distances with backpacks. Suddenly we got a call from Mateusz that they didn't really move any further since the morning but they got a ride with a man living in a Kibbutz Mishmar Hasharon and he would like to invite all of us to his house for the dinner. The man got really excited about us being street performers and he offered us a shelter for the night an a payment for the fireshow that we would perform for the kibbutz community. We were supposed to stay at the children's house where they have activities during the day but in the night it is free, so all the couches were at our disposal, which made our backs happy as hell after many days of sleeping in the tent :D
This was a dream come true for us! We had a place to sleep, we could share our art and get to know some of the local tradition experience. The time of the year was Hannukah - jewish holiday that commemorates the re-dedication of the holy Temple in Jerusalem following the Jewish victory over the Syrian-Greeks in 165 b.c.e. It is also called "a festival of lights", so dancing with fire fit perfectly into the tradition.
We had the honor of taking part in one family's holiday dinner. My heart was melting with thankfulness when the mother of the house was putting more and more fried food on the table, children were singing Hannukah songs, playing with their dreidels and at the end of the evening we lightened one the the hannukiyah candles. It was all going according top the tradition. But this holiday were suppose to be a special one for the Mishmar Hasharon Kibbutz. There was a fireshow!
Around 60 people came to watch our show, most of them were children that made the performance even more rewarding for us with their cute way of showing amazement and excitation. Parents also liked it a lot and for us it was a pleasure to give back some enjoyment, because we were welcomed in this small community with open doors, arms, hearts and minds.
When I remind myself this story I feel again the gratitude for taking care of us and trusting in our good intentions. For this kind of stories I keep on hitchhiking and encouraging people to do it also. There comes another lesson from this situation: sometimes it is worth to do something just for the experience, without thinking about the money :>
Openness, Kindness, Joy of Life, Helpfulness - these are the features of Jewish people that we experienced as first and I keep experiencing it each time I come back here :)
To feel the freedom of hitchhking and some love to the world watch, one of the best traveling movies: "Into the wild" from 2007. But never show it to your parents if you want to hitchhike by yourself!
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