The Cleanest Place in the World

Japan is everything we thought it would be, plus way too much more. It is filled with huge office buildings, bright lights, kimonos, lots of people, toilets with lots of buttons, many subway systems, good fashion, strange fashion, school children in uniform, soy-based food products, small keychains, zero rubbish bins, and extreme cleanliness absolutely everywhere. Japan is a country with a huge amount of history, with shrines and temples (and Starbucks) on every block, along with huge TV screens and Times Square-looking intersections every couple of subway stops. It is an insanely efficient country. People here could not be more helpful to answer our questions, even if they speak no English.

Here is our Top 10 list of our trip to JAPAN:

1. Tonbo, our WWOOF farm host – Two weeks in Japan is not a huge amount of time to see everything, but we decided before even planning which countries to visit, that we were going to spend a week farming in Japan to experience first hand, living inside a Japanese home, with a Japanese host, through an organization called World Wide Organisation of Organic Farming. Tonbo’s farm was relatively small, but we ate really well, and ate mostly (besides rice) from his own produce. It was an amazing week of broken English, cultural immersion, tatami mats and many swift changes of shoe attire. We also worked our buts off: feeding chickens, weeding, harvesting peanuts, cooking, sawing wood, pulling eyes out of potatoes and learning how to make grasshoppers out of bamboo, which we may or may not be able to show you depending on how kind the quarantine people are tomorrow. Our host, Tonbo, was unbelievably kind and made sure that we ate vegan and made a huge effort to communicate with us. We recommend his farm to anyone!

2. Onsen – We had no idea we would love this so much, but when Tonbo took us to our first hot spring near his farm, we got hooked. Our first onsen featured outdoor pools and a fancy restaurant where you ordered your food from a vending machine. Our second onsen was a “golden” hot spring in the countries oldest spring in Kobe. The water is literally gold as it is packed with nutrients from the earth.

3. 4km of Torii Gates – a long path connecting a small shrine to a larger one hundreds of red Torii gates away.

4.

Bamboo forest - And our day of biking around Kyoto’s Arashiyama area... this was in fact a big accomplishment since Lili is (self-admittedly) not the world’s best biker AT ALL

5. 100 Yen stores – Aisles and aisles of wonderful, almost completely useless, crap (This one is PURELY Natan’s – and he would like to add walking around Harajuku & Takashita Dori)

6. BOLA BOLA Guesthouse – After several painful nights of horrible accommodation, the BOLA BOLA house in Kyoto pleasantly (actually shockingly) surprised us with an amazing room, very helpful staff, and everything we needed.

7. Big Buddha in Nara – Biggest Buddha we’ve ever seen, gorgeous park, lots of holy (apparently) deer.

8. More than one person asking Natan if he had a head injury because of his white kippah – Ha ha.

9. Tokyo Metro System - SO CLEAN, so efficient, so easy to use.

10. Sawara and other accidental parades – Geishas, strange split-hooved shoes (and other ancient Japanese costumes) on parade!

THAT’S IT!

Our backpack honeymoon is over, and after two months of travel around the world, we are now about to begin the next chapter of our lives in Sydney. We are nervous and excited, and cannot wait to take our clothes out of these damn backpacks and eat some vegemite/avocado on toast.

Thanks for reading, or just looking at the blog titles and any interesting photos.

Natan and Lili.

Burk-me, burk-u, burk-a!

So, we discovered that we could not actually obtain an Egyptian visa from the Taba border crossing, as we had previously researched. We planned to grab the visa, go to St Catherine’s Monastery in Southern Sinai, and climb Mt Sinai before dawn to watch the sunrise (with apparently thousands of other daily hikers) from the mountains summit. We thought it would be a great way to start our way, the following day, to Mitzrayim (Egypt) … and basically Natan was itching to see the toilet on the mountain’s summit which has been dubbed The World’s #1 Most Disgusting Toilet, and (ironically), The World’s #1 Toilet with a View.

Bottom line… it didn’t happen and it was really sad. BUT, we spent an impromptu night in Eilat and the following morning in its Egyptian Embassy.

Since we lost a day waiting for our visa, and since it can take up to 9 hours to get there from the Taba Border in Eilat, we decided to make our way straight to Cairo. Taba Border is not nearly as scary as everyone says, in fact it was like any other customs line. However, we recommend to anybody crossing this route, not to use the only ATM in the Egyptian Customs hall.

We found the bus station and three other young travelers who were also going to Cairo, so we managed to get cheap seats in a mini-bus together, “direct” to Cairo. We assumed this meant direct, but we were quickly reminded that people living in developing countries are very lax with time, and after waiting about an hour for a 6^th person to join our mini-bus (who obviously never came), we got driven to some incredibly stark and small town in the middle of Sinai, where we waited for a new driver and mini-bus to take us to Suez, where again we changed driver and vehicle for the third time for Cairo. At one point in this very long day of driving, there were four Egyptian men in our mini-bus, dressed in the appropriate garb, sipping identical juice boxes and eating chocolate bars. All the waste of which, was disposed of, by simply pushing them out the windows of our absurdly fast driven mini-bus, which swerved at every moment to dodge the sand dunes on the road.

After all that, we were exhausted, and couldn’t actually believe we had made it to Cairo. We did know we were there however, because our driver dropped us off beneath a highway, in the middle of a crazy chaotic market with donkeys and people absolutely everywhere. He kept gesturing the way to the metro, but we couldn’t see it, so we panicked and asked that he walk us there. We stupidly had no Egyptian pounds left, (only shekels, which I was hiding with my kippah and tefillin) and out of nowhere, a kind Egyptian man saw these 5 white kids (who looked like death), bought metro tickets for us and took us to our train. I think I’d probably still be standing beneath that highway right now, crying, if not for that man.

We eventually got to the King Tut Hostel, in downtown Cairo, and the rest is history. We got a great deal on a tour guide and driver (both named Ahmed), to take us the next day to the Islamic centre of Cairo, some beautiful Mosques, the Pyramids, a Perfumery (where we got tourist trapped and scored an expensive bottle of imitation Channel 5), and a Papyrus store (where we knew better and walked out empty-handed).

Egypt is chaotic, with donkeys, crazy drivers (who will literally drive between lanes, for kilometers, whilst speeding), hookah bars, disgusting piles of garbage, a beautiful Nile and burkas a-plenty. It houses one of the Great Wonders of the World (which were excellent!!! and actually quite spiritual for us), but the entrance to which, is ironically a miserable pathway made of wooden planks and old doors thrown into a pile.

In the next installment, we travel to Abu Dhabi, and go aboard The United Arab Emirates’ national airline, Etihad … and go to JAPAN!

Natan.

P.S. Give Natan a break—this was his first trip to a developing country… in Africa… Lili

Festival of Booths

ISRAEL has been fantastic. Let's do the shortened version...

We arrived just before Yom Kippur and went to stay with the Kuchars in Efrat. After not eating indulgently for quite a while at this point we decided to treat ourselves to a pre-yom kippur BRUNCH at Aroma Cafe on Emek Refaim, where (in the SOHO location), Lili and I have swooned over many a coffee and mushroom omelette. So, Natan got a coffee and a mushroom omelette AND two types of cheeses, salad toast and an array of olives and pickled things. Lili got her first SOY latte since NYC, plus french toast, and its array of olives and pickled things. We were satiated, and it felt like we were finally in Israel.

We kind of went crazy, and with the help of Lili's parents' visit, we managed to eat at a lot of places:

Aroma (yu-um. it's always nice when you get a free chocolate with your cappucino)

Caffit (Brick Fire Pizza!)

La Boca (VERY yum and a bit fancy. The free dip things they put on the table are the best part)

Babba (Um, excuse me, you served me a hummus, with a lot of yum around it)

Burgers Bar (Theres no point getting the double breast chicken burger, because the single breast chicken burger is, alas, double than what you'd expect.

Luigis (Didn't go because they only have SOUP IN A BREAD BOWL in winter and that's sad)

We didn't go running around Israel this trip, but mainly just walked around Jerusalem, wishing we had more room in our luggage for all the judaica we wanted to buy. We did however visit my relatives in the North, who live on a moshav called Talmei Elazar. They look after a turkey farm, which is frightening and hysterical. And, we had a grand tour of Cesaria, swam in the shockingly warm Mediterranean beaches, went to a cotton farm, visited the Baron Rothschild Gardens in Zichron Yaakov and ate lots of passion fruit and guavas from our cousins' back garden. We also did a quick stint in Akko and Tsfat and hiked a few hours in the Galilee in Nahal Gziv.

Lili's parent's came to visit for their first time, and we visited the new Yad Vashem, got a tour of the four quarters of the Old City (by Vivienne) shopped and ate deliciously from Machane Yehuda. We also frightened Lili's parents with a quick walk through Mea Sharim on Hoshana Rabba.

The best part of Israel is how you bump into people you know everywhere. Here's who we saw (in no particular order):

Tili Fisher (cousin and only blonde Israeli I know)

Simmy Suttner (Sister-in-law-in-law)

Kenny Hendon (Bekeley)

Daniel Feld (Berkeley)

Leah Schwartz (Sydney)

Amanda Wright (childhood babysitter)

Leyat Mill (Mazal Tov!) ... and then a bunch of other Aussies that came to her engagement party at the Luries house in Katamon

Benji & Ranana Levy (Thanks for helping us out!)

Ben Wittenberg

The Seidmans

(Possibly) Joel Weisbord ... it may not have been him.

Our last day in Israel wasn't incredibly smooth, as we had planned to be in Sinai to CLIMB MT SINAI ... but we screwed up on our Egyptian visa. So we stayed at the Red Sea Hotel and ate a possibly unkosher breakfast served by a man named Moishy.

THANK YOU to all the Kuchars who gave us cell phones, booked our buses, translated for us got us from A to B, fed us, and housed us!

Natan. (photos are a coming)