Two Trips

So, there have been two different weekend excursions that I've been meaning to talk about on here. One was a while ago, and the other was last weekend.

I took a day trip up to Akko with Tracey, a materials postdoc here at the Technion. It was pretty cool, as the old city is really small, and completely see-able in one day. There was this cool tunnel there that they only discovered like, 20 years ago. The walls of the city go right into the Mediterranean sea. It was a Crusader port back in the day when all that was going on.

see pictures here: http://picasaweb.google.com/mordecai.veldt/Akko

The other trip was last weekend, when I went with some people from www.couchsurfing.org to the artists' village of Ein-hod. (www.ein-hod.info) It was pretty cool, too. The main attraction was the Nisco museum of mechanical music, this collection of music boxes from back when music boxes were made for a family to be able to have music, even if they couldn't afford a piano.

here's some of the music boxes playing: first second third last

There was this one slightly crazy-acting guy who did microbrewing and also sold pizzas that he made in a home-built oven. We also stopped in a few galleries and then went to this REALLY tiny secondhand clothes shop there, where I bought a tie, just to buy something really.

After the secondhand clothes shop, we walked over to this place that did pottery and would have pottery workshops where people could come experience pottery on a wheel. This place was in someone's backyard basically, and they also had a used book collection. I bought a copy of Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman and finished reading it this week. A good book, overall. I think my favorite line from it was something about him discussing how he never could throw a ball accurately... he would aim somewhere and "it would be off by about a radian." For those who don't know, a radian is an angle measurement which is a little less than 60 degrees.
some pictures here... including some of the couch surfers actually on a couch. http://picasaweb.google.com/mordecai.veldt/EinHod

After the artists village, we went to the beach and hung out there for a bit. I took a short swim, and it was not too cold.