I must have been stoned last night when I agreed to meet up with two very sweet German girls at 8AM to head out to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial complex. Normally I don't have a problem getting out of bed early, but 8AM is a little early for me when I'm travelling, especially on a Sunday. Anyhow, as expected, visiting Yad Vashem was a pretty sobering way to spend four hours. The site is huge, and there's an overwhelming amount of information presented, so after four hours, I really felt exhausted, both physically and mentally. When I got back into town, I promptly passed out for a couple of hours.

I have to confess that I was originally a little hesitant about making the visit with J. and K. (the German girls), not only because of the early start time, but because I was concerned about being an intruder on what could be a deeply personal experience for them. When I was in Germany in August, I had some really interesting and educational conversations with a few Germans about 20th century history, and I was quite impressed by the prevailing sense of atonement and collective culpability that was expressed, even by young Germans.  Case in point, as we entered into the museum, J., gave me a sad look and said, "it's so difficult to be confronted with our own history." I think that one sentence pretty much sums up the difference in how we experienced the visit: a site like Yad Vashem has the ability to provoke extremely visceral reactions from visitors of any nationality, and I was definitely affected by the images and information, but perhaps from a position of detached empathy, whereas both J. and K. seemed far more personally and emotionally invested in what they saw. In any case, in the end, I'm glad to have made the trip out there together.
 
Having only a week to spend in Israel, I had originally thought that I would spend just a few days in Jerusalem, and then use the rest of my time to explore other parts of the country. At least that was the plan. Now, after three fairly jampacked and intense days of visiting the sites in Jerusalem, I'm having to reconsider, and may well spend almost all of my time in Jerusalem, with maybe day trips out to Bethlehem (depending on security), and the Dead Sea. I figure it won't be a tragedy if I don't see all of Israel in one go, though I may have to wait until my current passport expires before planning a return visit, as I'd rather avoid another round of border headaches...

On an entirely unrelated note, with only four days left in my stay in Israel and the Middle East, I'm beginning to look ahead to the final European phase of my trip, making transportation and sleeping arrangements, getting in touch with friends who I'll be seeing along the way, and checking the weather forecast for my next destinations... Crappity, crap, CRAP, CRAP!! Those are the words that were running through my mind just now, when I checked the weather bulletin for Munich. With the exception of my brief stay in Cappadocia, in the last two months of travel, I don't think I've been anywhere where the mercury has dipped below the mid to high teens. Especially since arriving in the Middle East, this trip has been all about sunshine and blue skies (it's been 30+ degrees in Jerusalem every day since I arrived), so imagine my dismay when I saw that the three day weather forecast for Munich predicts average day time highs of 5 degrees Celsius, and night time temperatures that fall below freezing! For the record, don't be thinking that a year away without a real winter has turned me into a softy who can't handle cold weather, but at the moment I am particularly poorly equipped to be confronting cooler temperatures, as I have not a single item of cold weather clothing with me. I believe that this qualifies as a real wardrobe crisis, and may justify bringing out the big gun emergency MasterCard and do a little lot of shopping...this could potentially be one of the most pleasant emergencies I'll ever have the pleasure of needing a credit card to remedy;). I just need to stress that I AM a true blue Canadian who can take a little cold weather like a pro, just not in shorts and sandals. I love love love winter and snow, and I can't wait for a good snow storm once I get home, but God help me if I come across any scenes like this between now and November 5th:

Typical February street scene outside my front door at my old T.O. stomping ground