Happy 2014

Happy New Year to one and all. We hope 2014 will be a  happy, healthy, prosperous, rewarding,  fulfilling and above all peaceful year for everyone.

At 1200 feet below sea level the Dead Sea is the lowest point on earth. But that's not its only claim to fame. Its healing properties have been recognized and appreciated for centuries. Take away the glitzy hotels and today's Dead Sea experience isn't much different than that of someone in Roman times. We love the Dead Sea and as often as we've been there never tire of going. Since we had no other plans we decided to spend New Year's Eve there.

It's important to remember that NYE in Israel is still a non-event. When you say happy new year to someone here, the holiday that's being celebrated is Rosh Hashanna which occurs in September. Celebrating Sylvester, as it's called here, is popular in Tel Aviv but hasn't really caught on in Jerusalem. We figured something would be going on at the Dead Sea because it's such a mecca for international travelers. Not that we were looking for one of those mega-parties one finds in hotels where you can ring in the new year with 5000 of your new best friends, but maybe a bar with some live music where we could stay up later than 10PM. Besides, we needed a break from the cold and rain in Jerusalem.

One of the great things about a small country with so many micro-climates is that it doesn't take much to escape the cold. When we left Jerusalem it was clear and 50-ish, but that doesn't tell the whole story. Just as we have wind chill, Israel should have rain chill for a better sense of what it feels like. In spite of the fact that the weather had cleared up nicely, the rain of the previous night left the city gripped by a penetrating dampness that made it feel more like 35. Yet rain has a magical effect on the desert. The hills just outside Jerusalem are like undulating soft sculptures. For most of the year they are barren; it is, after all, a desert. When it rains the dormant vegetation hibernating beneath the surface comes to life and blankets the hills with a soft, downy cover, a veritable green peach fuzz. The goats and sheep have a field day, pun intended. And within 45 minutes we were sitting at a rest stop at the halfway point where it was in the 70's. An hour and one micro-climate later, it had clouded up and was about 10 degrees cooler. Contrary to popular belief, it's not always hot at the Dead Sea. No matter; the hotel had an indoor pool and we really didn't care about the ambient temperature.

As we checked in, the phrase that kept running through my head was "The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming". Everything and everyone was Russian - signs, notices, menus, daily activity schedules, a large percentage of the hotel staff, and the overwhelming majority of the guests. We were stunned. These weren't the Russians who came to Israel by the hundreds of thousands in the 80's when the floodgates opened. These were real Russians, who were here on vacation. It was a little hard to take in. I've been to Russia three times, twice back in the days when it was the USSR, so my impression is distorted by my experiences there. What I saw was privation, empty stores, and a population so tightly controlled that a domestic passport and travel permit were required if someone wanted to go more than 50 miles from their city of residence. Things have certainly changed since the fall of communism and the breakup of the USSR. People have money and freedom to travel and they love coming to the Dead Sea. In droves. I mentioned to someone at the hotel how surprised I was at the number of Russians. She asked if I was referring to guests or staff and I said both. She said many of the guests come annually, and guests and staff remember each other from one year to another. Who would have imagined, particularly against the background of diplomatic relations between Israel and the USSR/Russia. Something else that was totally unexpected was the number of Arabs and Druse who were there. All in all, English was the foreign language. Besides Russian, we heard nearly equal amounts of Arabic and Hebrew, with English being a distant fourth.

We declined to attend the 400 shekel (about $115) per person NYE "Gala" at the hotel. So we walked to another hotel and had a much more reasonable ($48 per person) buffet dinner. We stuffed ourselves, walked back to our hotel, and not finding anything going on in the bar went to sleep at 10PM. At midnight we were awakened by what sounded like artillery. Thinking it had to be fireworks I went to the window to see the show. But there was no show, and in this country if it sounds like artillery it very well might be. But no, it was fireworks; we were on the wrong side of the hotel to see them. So back to sleep, which ironically made December 31 just another Tuesday night.

And that's how we rang in 2014.