haifa.16

Haifa Fornightly(Editor--Huzefa Mehta) 16th edition 15/6/93 Taking off from where I left off. We hiked a couple of places and there were several events. The first was the St. George Monastery in the Wadi Qelt area. Myself Doug and Reena reached the Wadi Qelt hike area and started our trek. It was really very hot. There was a stream running thru the valley. Took us about 3 hours of hike till we reached the view of the monastery. The monastery was closed but the monks allowed us in and also provided me with a pant(I had shorts on) and gave us lots of lemonade. We climbed out of the canyon to the nearest road and luckily we got lifts back to our car. Reena's parents visited us July 4th. And we went around most of Israel. Jerusalem, Tiberias, Bethlehem, Massada..Good food, relaxation , fun and of course a LOT of movies.. Israel was in the news again. Well what can you say..Lebanon has half controlled by the IDF and the other half controlled by Syria. Hizbullah fights for the land controlled by the IDF. Some few "katushas" and lot of paronia and you have in total about 23,000 shells and 130 odd katushas exchanged. The sufferers in the skermish were innocent people. We could see planes and helicopters during the day taking off in military formation. The haifa area was perfectly safe though. We went to a festival at Safed(Zefat). The festival was fun lots of bands, music, food and lively markets. We attended a jazz concert that night and returned back pretty late. For our quarterly we went to the comedy show at the Haifa Auditorium. We managed to catch 2 jokes in the entire show.. guess that leaves a lot of improvement for our Hebrew. We went to Zavitan in the Golan. There were two pools we tried jumping off(5m jumps). The trekking was less though but we had lot of fun. There was intel party (25th anniversary) held at Caesaria which was nice. The waiters were wearing toga dress trying to give a greek touch to it. The food was lousy. The show was excellent. Couple of standup comedies(we could laugh at the visual comedy) and some candid camera shots in Intel cafeteria and parking lot, the band and fireworks. Everyone had a small lighted colourful toy and the amphitheater looked beautiful in the dark. There was a laser show and at the end of the party every one was dancing. We went to Yahudiya today. The park had about 6-7 pools and we had to get into the pools to continue the hike. Was fun. Did some jumps and so did Reena. Well more later and of course Happy Independence day., Huzefa