Israel: Be here now

by on December 13, 2008 at 5:00 am

jaffa sq 1 small.jpgShould I worry that I can’t really remember yesterday that well, and that today passed in a blur?

Israel is a country that in some ways seems so familiar to me (that NY Jewish thing) and in other ways so completely mysterious and new (an amazing melting pot of different backgrounds, cultures, histories, agendas).  I find myself trying to make sense of it all, but not really having enough context to feel like any of my assumptions are true.

What I do know so far: There is something about both the landscape and the people that is compelling. For a place that is basically hot, dry and arid, there is much beauty. The sea, the desert, the cities have amazing visual richness.JD and I walked through Jaffa yesterday and it was beautiful–broken in some places, refurbished in others, and very interesting and diverse.

And the people here are compelling as well. I’ve been meeting tons of amazingly smart high tech folks, entrepreneurs, and bloggers–but also people from outside my little trans-continental bubble, like Ish Khalidi , a Bedouin and former shepard who is the Vice Consult in San Francisco at the Israeli consulate, who is also on this trip, and the student activists from One Voice who met with me, Craig and JD today (more on that later).

Today was The Marker COM.Vention, then back to the hotel, then falafels and soda at the Garage Geek party in Holon, again thanks to Yossi Vardi.

Some pictures of what I’ve seen so far: politika . domain owner parental blocker . dns information . where is domain hosted . domain dns server . ip analysis . i cloud . web archive website down . apache web server . word cloud

Comments are closed.