Hanukkah

This week is Hanukkah (or Hannukah, or Channukah, depending on how you want to spell it).

Embarassingly (but probably common with many other people), before nearly everything I learned about Hanukkah I learned from Adam Sandler: "Instead of one day of presents, we have 8 crazy nights"

For those of you who are interested (and who isn't!): Adam Sandler's Hanukkah song
and, although I was surprised to find it, there's also an Adam Sandler Hanukkah song part 2

Now I know oh so much more. I've learned that Hanukkah is essentially about foods cooked in oil. One of the most popular is....


Suffgoniotes (aka donuts). These were everywhere! Every Hanukkah party, in class, and even arriving at our office doors when we were least expecting it. I'm told that since Hanukkah is a holiday based around oil, most traditional holiday foods are cooked in oil, like Latkes and the suffgoniotes.

For those of you who are worried, I do know more than that about Hannuakah now. A little summary: Hanukkah is the festival of lights. After the Maccabees won the war over the Hellenistic Syrians. When the temple was reclaimed, the menorah in Jerusalem was lit to let everyone know that the Temple was theirs again. There was only enough oil for the Menorah to burn for 1 day, but it burned for 8--1 of the miracles of Hanukkah. Now Hanukkia's (Menorahs lit for Hanukkah) are lit on Hanukkah (1 candle each night) to symbolize this. There's more to this story, which you can read about here.

For our own celebration of Hanukkah, my friend Angela and I went to Sinai for the long weekend. We stayed at a beach camp near Nuweiba. Here's a picture of our beach hut


And the camp itself.

Yes I was standing in the water when I took this picture. There were sand bars that made it easy to walk out for an incredibly long ways.

I went snorkelling for the first time in the red sea. It was pretty amazing. You could walk out to the coral, it's so close. And the camp we were at doesn't allow scuba diving, so the coral is still in good shape. I saw all kinds of crazy coloured fish, and even a small octopus!


Sinai's an interesting place geographically. As we were crossing the boder, we realized we could see Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Saudia Arabia, all at the same time. Here's a view of Saudia Arabia across the Red Sea from our camp.

One of our days in Sinai we went on a camel trek.


We took the camels to a canyon called the white canyon. This picture is inside the canyon, with one of the Bedouin guides. You can see the powder on my pants--the rock is really smooth and covered with white, sandy powder. Makes for some interesting climbs!


Here's Angela in the canyon.


Our other guide took the camels around the Canyon to this oasis, where we had lunch in a Bedouin camp. Then we were taken on a tour....essentially of all the wells beside the camp. Since there wasn't much english, it essentially involved a lot of pointing down holes until we agreed, that yes, there was water there.


Here's our other guide, taking a break with one of the camels.

Look at his feet---then scroll up a few pictures and look at mine.....we have the same shoes!

And then we took the camels back to the huts where we'd started our day.