Israel at 60: The Future is Here

The theme for today was "Israel at 60: The Future is Here." A great theme with not so great execution. We were part of the Board of Governors meeting and we went to the School of Agriculture in Rehovot and then to the School of Medicine. Certainly what they are doing in terms of agricultural, scientific, ecological, and medicinal research is incredible and I would have loved a one-hour presentation about these things. What we got was 9 scientific presentations. I have to admit that I slept through most of it. Later, I learned that there were some political reasons (between Melton and the university) why we had to sit through all of that. I can certainly understand politics, so such is life.

One highlight of the day was a visit to the memorial to Chaim Weizmann (first president of Israel) on the campus of the Weizmann Institute. They done a great renovation of his home back to its original state and the memorial was quite beautiful. He was quite a man and I've never been to this site before.

At some point, I thought this might be a crazy thing to be doing, but I got back to the hotel with no problem.

I was scheduled to see my friend Sherri for dinner and she was to pick me up at the hotel. Of course neither of us thought about the fact that Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day) was starting at sundown so many of the roads getting in to the city were quite jammed. We ended up meeting in Abu Ghosh which is an Arab town just outside of Jerusalem (only NIS 70 by taxi). There is a wonderful restaurant that she and I have both been to before and it felt like quite an adventure to get there on my own. My taxi driver was more than willing to come back several hours later to pick me up and he assured me that he knew all of the back roads so we'd be OK as far as the traffic was concerned. Sherri and I had a wonderful Middle Eastern salad sampler dinner and a lovely visit. Then I went off with my Arab taxi driver through the back roads to get to Jerusalem. At some point, I thought this might be a crazy thing to be doing, but I got back to the hotel with no problem.