I'm slipping on these posts...

Ok, so my goal is a MINIMUM of one post per week. last post was a week ago... so I guess I'd better post today. It's not for a lack of material :).

Last week I went to the haifa sculpture park with David Erdos, a guy from Ulpan who is from Missouri. After the sculpture garden, we stopped in the ba'hai garden for a little bit and then we tried to find the prehistory museum, which on the map we had, looked like you could get to by a nice walk on a "scenic nature trail."

Finding the scenic nature trail itself was quite an interesting search. After looking all over the area indicated as the start on the map, we finally decided to go down what looked like an access sidewalk for some businesses off the main street. At the end of this, we found a hole in the fence, from which we could see what seemed like it might be the ACTUAL trail that we wanted. Still a little unsure, we crawled through and then continued down past the zoo. There was quite a bit of litter, and some

little campfire rings in the first 1/4 mile or so, and it quickly became clear that the prehistory museum was either the fire rings we were seeing, or that you got to it by some other way. However,

the map indicated that this scenic nature walk had a convient end that we might as well continue on to. We never did find THAT end. Having gone far enough, and passed an abandoned old pumphouse, we turned back to admit defeat.

On the way back up (the whole walk had been significantly downhill), we met two israeli girls who were hiking the trail, which on their (much nicer) map was shown to go almost all the way down to the sea. At this point, they invited us to join them on the way down, and I agreed. David, however, needed to get some things done and went back to the Technion.

On the way down, we found a cool little cave

that looked like it had been walled in and maybe used as a house at some point.

After parting from the Israelis, I took a few pictures of the rocks in the surf, some of which turned out ok.

Then I hung out on the beach for a while

and then walked over to the haifa mall, which was quite nice, though not as big as the "Grand Canyon" (the hebrew word for "mall" is קָניוֹן pronounced "kan yon", so the big mall in haifa is named the grand canyon).

At the mall, I got a kitchen knife for only 10 shekels b/c it was an open package. Great deal. I also bought some childrens books. Then I took the bus back to the technion.

And, a preview of topics to come: the haifa zoo, the weekend trip to Jerusalem.