Pesach in Arad

This weekend I went to Arad with my friend Efrat for the Pesach (or Passover) weekend. There is a very long story behind Pesach which you can read about here, which I won't try to go into in any detail at all. Essentially, it is the weekend to remember the escape of the Israelites out of Egypt. The word Pesach means "to pass over" and it refers to one of the 10 plagues that God imposed to help the Israelites escape--where the Jewish houses were passed over when all the first born in Egypt were killed.

One of the things that makes Pesach so noticeable here, is that khametz (bread products or things that rise, although a lot of things seem to be included in (and excluded from) this category that I don't understand) cannot be eaten during Pesach, and is replaced with Matzah. This is because the Israelites needed to leave Egypt in such a hurry, that they had no time to let their bread rise. There are a lot of rituals here about cleaning the khametz out of the house This sometimes involves selling the khametz to the synagogue (who apparently sells it to the non-Jewish community) although this seems to be more of a ritual than a physical selling of the khametz.

On Pesach, there is a traditional Seder dinner, which I went to with Efrat's family. This was the longest dinner I had ever been to, beating even the 5 hour Christmas dinner I had in France this year. The word seder comes from a word that means 'order' because there is a specific order that the dinner is eaten in. The family reads the Hagadah, a book describing the reasons we celebrate Pesach, and at particular parts in the book, you are supposed to eat or drink specific things. Efrat's family bought me my own Hadadah, in both English and Hebrew, and although I could read the Hebrew in it (thanks to those handy pronounciation dots that can replace the vowels) there's no way I could read fast enough to keep up with her Father.....at least usually I was on the right page. At the end of the dinner are the traditional songs of Pesach--which it looks like you can listen to on the same link as above, if you are so inclined.

But, of course, travelling with my friends means there is a hike somewhere. As we didn't get back to Arad from the dinner in Tel Aviv until 3:40 am (!) our hike started a little later in the day than usual. We hiked in the area around Arad, where Efrat grew up. So, most of the rest of this post will be, as always, "cool things we saw on our hike".

This is Arad. You can see it on the cliff in the background. On a clear day, you can see the Dead Sea from the town.

Here's the area we went hiking in. Most of the vegetation is finished by this time of year--there's very little green left at all, and basically what you see is a rocky desert.

Some of the desert plants not only have amazing defenses against water loss, but also against herbivory. I can't see what would want to eat these seeds.

Going with Efrat, we always find great spiders. She's got a finely-tuned image for webs and spiders that I just don't see. Here's a wolf spider--it was about 10 cm from head to tail.

And a black widow. There was a male there as well--it's probably about 1000 times smaller than the female.

Finally a herd of goats. They walk along the sides of the hills in straight lines--they look a little like a goat abacus. They leave trails along the sides of the hill, and so it feeds back, because those trails are easier to walk along. Every time I looked at this herd there were goats walking in single file along the hill--one of the first times I had seen a proper line-up somewhere here.