quick note part 1

About to go landsailing.

Here's some stuff from the Israel trip.

"I keep turning around to talk to you and you keep bugging out! It's like you're anti-queuing or something!"
--Heard in line at the Frankfurt, Germany airport McDonalds. Possibly the most British thing I have ever heard.

"If you treat Melissa like this, I'm going to tell her to boycott you."
--my Mom to my brother

Israel has some of the nicest beaches in the world. And there's very few beach front properties because the government doesn't allow it. So there are huge expanses of beach with no development around them. It's awesome.

In Israel, (as with most of the rest of the world) the cars are smaller on average due to fuel costs (if you saw the picture of gas prices, you know what I'm talking about). Also, because of this, one of the common perks they receive with their jobs is a company car and the company will pay for gas.

Word of advice I received from SWA and AA: When swimming in the Dead Sea, don't rub your eyes, or fart. The reason behind this is left as an exercise for the reader.

Haifa is probably the only place in the world where the rich live on the mountain and the poor live near the beach.

In Israel, the waiters (or everyone?) are very impatient. We were taking too long to order our drinks so he just left before half the table had ordered.

We had a free movie in the hotel, so we decided to watch Le Divorce. After we ordered it, the movie started and the credits started coming up. Someone said, "Hey, Cedric the Entertainer is in it!" Shortly after this, we realized we were watching Johnson Family Vacation.

Israel has the largest diamond exchange in the world. If the prices are kept artificially high, and this is common knowledge, then why do people continue to buy them?

People stared at us the whole time we were in Israel. We saw maybe 1 or 2 other Asians there (not including the tour groups). This is the reason behind cliques in US high schools that no other country can understand. Everywhere else, everyone looks and acts the same (for the most part). They are all Taiwanese or Israeli (those are the only two countries I've been to). But in the US, everyone is different. So you naturally cling to those who are similar to you. In Taiwan, they were baffled at why movies about high school always had cliques. They didn't think it was real.