Volunteering with Leket.org in the morning.. and leaving the afternoon to chance.

Since thus trip is part of Eli's Bar Mitzvah celebration ( at least that is the excuse we keep using to justify this trip) a bit of chesed built in was in order. I contacted Pantry Packers in Yerushalaim ( an organization that packs dry goods for distribution to the poor), but they wanted a guarantee of 5 people. We are only 3 and months ago I couldn't commit my sister's family to an activity. I then found an organization called Leket (http://leket.org.il/English/).

Leket has a variety of volunteer opportunities including heading out to the fields to pick fruits or vegetables depending on the season. That sounded perfect to me.  So, off we went to Rechovot. The organization sent us a text with a whole bunch of directions with turns here and there every meter. Knowing our past history with getting lost in Israel I was quite skeptical that we would get there. Lo and Behold we did, even with going under a bridge and turning on a dirt road. The volunteer organizer, Nechama, met us and led us down a clementine orchard road. We were given bins and told to pick the trees clean. terumos a and maaser don't apply while you are on the field, so we were good to go.

Once our bins were full we were to put the oranges into 3 foot tall containers. After a while, more volunteers came and things really picked up. If you ever find yourself about to pick clementines, wear long sleeves. There are some serious thorns on those trees. The lady in charge told us that we were allowed to eat as many clementines as we wanted. Those were some of the juiciest fruit I have ever eaten! My nieces came with us and one of them even enlightened us that the laws of
      We we're finished with our shift at noon. Let me tell you, 2 hours of harvesting oranges is plenty! Nechama presented Eli with a framed certificate commemorating his volunteering in honor of his bar mitzvah. Oh, you don't know how I love a certificate! She also told us that the large bin we filled was about 400 kilos. They give 4 kilos of clementines to the needy families at a time. So we picked enough fruit for 100 families.

     We couldn't go back to Ramat Beit Shemesh so early, and the next place I had planned to go was closed for the next three days, so we had to scramble to come up with something.  One thing that seemed interesting was under ground row boating in Ramla. Of course it doesn't have an actual address and the GPS doesn't have the "Pool of the Arches" listed. We decided to navigate to Ramla's city center and hopefully figure it out. http://www.ramla.muni.il/index.asp?id=1223 As soon as we pulled into Ramla I saw a sign Arches Pool to the left. We drove around and a around, but never saw another sign. All else fails, you ask at a gas station. The guy told us we were only 3 blocks away. Perfect! We found it pretty quickly. If anyone ever goes in search of this place it is on Hagana Street and Meir Chaim. The entrance fee was a grand total of 32 shekel for the 5 of us, which is less than $10. We walked down some very steep AstroTurf covered steps into a cistern. The walls of the cistern were made up of arches. The whole room is apparently is only 400 square meters (not that big) there were several columns in the pool.

We were the only ones there. The guy told us we could all go into one boat if we wanted, so we all piled in. The oars were much shorter than I had previously used so 2 people had to row which makes for some interesting rowing. We crashed into nearly every column. Since it was so small, once we got to the end, if we would have gotten out of the boats then, we would gave been there for 5 minutes. So, I told the kids we aren't getting out until we learn to control the boat without crashing. It could have been very lousy, but we were laughing and having fun. We were pretending to be Harry Potter and Doby crossing the lake and avoiding the Inferi. Soon enough our arms were too tired and we parked the boat and went across the street to eat lunch in the park.
   It was still to early to call it quits for the day, so we decided to look for the Weizmann Institute, or the mansion, or to see if the Science Gardens were really closed. We drove around the beautiful campus for a while until we found the parking lot for the Science Garden. http://davidson.weizmann.ac.il/en/content/exhibits-garden-science And of course, it actually was closed. They are setting up for a dinosaur exhibit. By then, we felt like we have exhausted our list of random activities for the day and headed back into RBS.