ni hao, it's nika on tour: 2016-06-26

The time runs so fast as always and I just want to stop it more and more often. Seriously, the longer I am here, the more I love everything about my daily life and dont want to leave. This moth was so filled with adventures, would it be travelling, parties or just qulity time with my friends and family or even improving the situation at work and feeling more comfortable with it. As you see, I have about 80 pictures below and starting from the bottom to the top, every single on tells a great story of almost every day. There was the famous Gay Pride Parade in the beginning that was incredible funny, whole Tel Aviv was outside of their homes, even people from all over the world came to join the pro lesbian, gay, bisexual and trangender culture and pride parade. It reminded me on the carneval parade in Rio de Janeiro, with the loud busses of different styles and music and people dancing around and inside giving us a big show. Before we joined the parade and the rave at the beach, we all made a huge pic nic at the beach with many people who were all like friends of friends and their friends, so I made a few new friends that day. In the evening there were several parties all around the city and we all had a lot of fun. And it continued over the next days like this...

On my free days, I travelled to Tiberias, walked around Jaffo, went to art and culture exhibitions, beach and pool parties, danced Salsa and listened to Blues. I attend a regular event every week on Sunday at the club "Bootleg" which is on the lovely King George Street quite in the centre of the city. I really love the live concerts of the local bands there, that are practically for free. Its a lot of fun to jump and shout to their happy rocky extremely loud music and meeting uncountable new wonderful people every time who become very good friends here. There was the holiday called Shavuot that commemorates the anniversary of the day God gave the Torah to the entire nation of Israel assembled at Mount Sinai. It is a happy holiday and all the people celebrate it in a good mood. What acturally made me happy was the fact that the Jews traditionally consume dairy foods such as on Shavuot, as I am a huge cheese lover. An explanation giving in rabbinic literature is that before they received the Torah, the Israelites were not obligated to follow its laws, which include shechita (ritual of animals) and kashrut. Since all their meat pots and dishes now had to be made kosher before use, they opted to eat dairy foods. I really enjoyed this holiday spending it dressed in white completely eating cheese and drinking wine at a friends place together with the whole family and going to a blues bar afterwards.

One of the highlights this moth (as if the other activities werent enough high) was trying out surfing for the first time. A few friends of mine work at the beach as surfing teachers and showed me how to begin a bit and I wasnt that bad in it (see the picture). I really loved it, what I didnt expect at all, as I am a skier, and the skiers hate the snowboarders and surfing is very similar to that. Nevertheless, now I continue to surf as much as I can, as its so fun to catch the waves and flow with them, the sun and the beautiful athmosphere around.

The second highlight was a hiking trip to the north with a few of my roomates and other volonteers who I work with. We actually took 2 days off from work and boughttickets to the "Sunbeat" festival, which unfortunately was cancelled due to security reasons. But that didnt disturb us that much, we just made up a great plan and hiked around the Monfort Castle which is a ruined crusader castle in the Upper Galilee region in northern Israel, about 35 km northeast of the city of Haifa and 16 km south of the border with Lebanon. It was not an easy hike, as we were walking for around 5 hours up and down very precipitous mountains with heavy backbacks. Well, mine was not that heavy, but I have some problems with my back, so I had to do a bit more breaks in between, than the others. We arrived at a parking place around 6 in the evening where we wanted to camp, but there were way too many wasps, we were afraid of and my flatmate is allergic to it. So, we walked a little bit through the village searching for something else, and lost our way. We found ourselves being in Mi'ilya walking around between some very good and accurate looking houses and suddenly saw a German flag waving in the warm wind. We started to screem in German and an Arab man came out of the house and spoke fluent german with us. He told us that he studied Physioteraphy in Neustadt and lived in Germany for 6 years and just loves the country. He is earning good money working in this area in Israel, having 3 different jobs around the country. He introduced us to his pregnant wife and his little son too and ivited us to sleep in his living room on our yoga matts after having dinner. We were so happy to have met him, it was a very kind offer and an interesting evening full of talks, tasty food and a cozy luxury camping! Next morning we had breakfast at their place too, and head to the main street, where we hitchhiked to Rosh Hanikra. We saw the Grottes, the wonderful view to the sea from above and then went down to the beach by feet and relaxed and jumped in the waves for a few hours. Afterwards we hitchiked to to Nahariya beach and bought a bottle of wine and some salty grilled corn and sit down on the sand to watch the sunset and have some quite talks. We took the train home, that already worked on the end of Shabbat (Saturday, which is religious like Sunday in Europe). I was free the next day, but I had a reason to go home: My father would arrive in the night to Sunday to visit me for whole 10 days. I met him at 4am at my flat and we slept until 11 and spent the whole day in Tel Aviv. I showed him my favourite route to Jaffo, the best ice cream and coffee places and we drank white wine and had a light lunch at a beautiful restaurant with the perfect sea view at the Jaffo port. After the long walks we swam in the sea and went to the centre to watch the german football game. He was quite tired and went to sleep afterwards, but I stayed for my favourite blues night, of course. It was a special one this time, many great artists were playing the blueees and rocking the stage. My dad took a one day tour to Jerusalem on Monday while I worked and My lovely sister finally arrived on Tuesday. I showed her my working place, introduced her to my friends, she even tried out surfing that day and we had a great lunch with a huge fresh fish of 1,5 kilo at the Tel Aviv Port in the north of the city what was filling for the rest of the week! The next day they had a tour to the Dead Sea and Massada together, while I was at a huge pool with the autistic people I work with, to take them out of the hostel a bit. They really enjoyed the refreshing water in that hot weather. Afterwards I went surfing the at the beach again and noticed that I really improved. The last day of the month was just amazing. We traveled all the way up to the north to the Golan the Heights but not that high to the Syrian border though. We hiked in the Yehudia National Park which has a lot of water all over the year where you even need to hike through to get to the main and most beautiful attraction: the Yehudia the Waterfall! We enjoyed this trip a lot as we had beautiful views up and down the mountains a bit of sports and swimming. The long way of 3 hours riding by bus didn't disturb us at all as you have the most beautiful and views out of the window to the Sea of Genazareth, and especially the on the way back when you go back through Tiberias and have the wonderful sunset as a background.

We arrived around 9 pm and split as my father was too tired to go out and planned to travel to Sachse at Lake in the north, the day after. My sister and me met up with friends, changed clothes into white, drank some wine and head to the magical famous white night in Tel Aviv that takes place only once a year and is a very positive and fun event even all over the city and contains a lot of gigs with live music art and culture acts and partying people on the streets mostly because alcohol is sold after 11 what is unusual. We stayed out until 5am and slept at a friend's place until 11 the next morning, when we had a perfect breakfast at the seaside which was the perfect start of the next, forth moth. Keep posted!