January 30-31

Today we went our first tee-oul (best Hebrew to English translation I could do) We went south to Be'er Sheba and the Negev Desert. On the way we stopped at the Negev Brigade Memorial, a memorial to all the soldiers that died while defending Be'er Sheba during the Israeli Independence War in 1948.



All the names of the soldiers who died fighting are engraved in concrete all over the monument

The city of Be'er Sheva from the monument

 Random picture of Jerusalem from the bus.

 The monument from afar

 A tall concrete tower symbolizing  a guard tower riddled with bullet holes

 A view of part of the monument and Be'er Sheva

 An overhead picture of Tel Be'er Sheva. A Tel is a man made mound created out of the destroyed and rebuilt towns created over a long time (from before c.4,000 BCE to Greek times for Tel Be'er Sheva). The significance of Be'er Sheva is that it is known as the place where Abraham made a pact with G-d.

 Looking into the depths of the water storage system of Tel Be'er Sheva. Water is a lacking in the Negev, therefore some residents of the Tel created and enormous water collection system involving a system of underground tunnels (pictured below) to harvest the water of flash floods

 A picture from underground in the water collection system of the Tel

 A picture of the camel I rode to get to the place that we slept at in the middle of nowhere, close to the border with Egypt

 A picture of our dinner consisting of lamb/beef (I don't know, but it was delicious), Israeli salad, carrot, cabbage, and fresh hummus with laffa (its sort of like Israeli tortilla).

 A picture of the dining hall of the mud huts that we stayed in, located in the middle of nowhere in the Negev desert.

 On both Wednesday and Thursday we experienced something that happens only 5 to 7 days per year in the Negev, rain. It was cold and damp the entire time but we were all able to appreciate the rain in the end.

A first-person view of camel riding.