Day Trip - Shivta Park

Today we decided to take a day trip in order to break up the monotony of working on the apartment.

Tel Aviv is smack in the center of the country and we decided to go down south to the desert. While it seemed that we were in a completely different hemisphere, we actually just went about 1.5 hrs south. For perspective - we were almost half way to Elat, which is the very tip (border) of the country on the south. There are many hiking and sight-seeing trips one can take around this tiny country; the one we settled on today was a trip to Shivta National Park. It’s an ancient city, which was settled in 1st century B.C. by the Romans, and abandoned in 9th century B.C.; it’s an archeological site now, its nice ruins to walk around in for a while :).

The interesting thing that happened on the way was: it actually rained as we were driving in the desert... I thought that was really cool.

Also its been raining for about 3 days here, which is considered the best thing ever since it rains so rarely, with Israel being situated mostly in the desert and all. So everyone is super excited. So as we were driving and getting close to the site, we saw a bunch of cars puling over on the side of a bridge and people getting out and taking picks. We of course did the same. It turns out people were taking picks of the water that had gathered in a stream below. It was pretty un-climactic, however I guess when you consider where we were it becomes kind of cool. But funny still so we took a pick as well :)

Here is the link to the entire album from that trip:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=159450&id=661621936&l=58b3a158ce