There are two things that have surprised me more than anything else about Israel. First, the overwhelming Per Croc-ita rate that this country has. At least 1 in 3 people wear them here. I hate Crocs. No I’ve never actually tried on a pair, and no I’m never going to. I don’t care how comfortable they are, I refuse to walk around in these ridiculous contraptions. We’ve seen a LOT of people wearing Crocs on this trip, to the point I’ve had fantasies about what it would have been like to be in on the ground floor of that company, but never have I seen the sheer numbers of them like I do here.

Entire families are decked out in them. Apparently the fact that you’re all wearing the exact same pair of shoes is offset by the individuality of each being in whatever color floats your boat. I’m curious if one person in the family got a pair and was like, “Wow, these are really great. You should try a pair sis” and it slowly spread through the rest of the relatives. Or if they all went out together (not during Shabbat of course) and picked them out and bought them. Perhaps receiving a family discount, which would be substantial here since it’s not uncommon to have 9 children by the time you’re 30. I guess the family that wears Crocs together stays together. There’s nothing funnier than seeing a black-hatted black-coated Orthodox Jew sporting a bright orange pair.

The second thing that came as a complete surprise was how absolutely amazing the food here is. Of 30 countries now, there isn’t even a close second. Everything is so fresh, usually arriving that day from the local Kibbutz on which it was grown. No respectable restaurant would serve bread they didn’t bake themselves, almost always coming warm straight out of the oven. And the portions here would put even The Cheesecake Factory to shame. There have been many times when we have ordered and split a single salad, only to have the waitress come out assuming something was wrong because it looked like we barely touched it.

Overall my experience so far in Israel – and somehow we’ve been here over 3 weeks already – has been really amazing. It’s a spectacularly beautiful country which runs the entire gamut of landscapes, from ocean to desert to forest and everything in between. It’s been wonderful seeing all of the faces and places that Joy got to know so well while spending her years here, including a great lunch yesterday with Adi and her new fiancé (as of 2 days ago) Assaf. We still have a week to go, including our stint in Jerusalem which I’m looking very forward to. We have something very interesting planned for Monday which I’ll write more about later.