To the Dead Sea

The company is taking us on a vacation this weekend to the Dead Sea. Tomorrow afternoon work ends early, I'll probably just work from home, we'll take the kids out from school early (they'll be so disappointed) and we head southbound.

The dead sea is an interesting experience. Very few people actually like to go into the salty water. It can burn your eye out and tastes disgusting if you get any in your mouth. It hurts a lot if you have any scratches on your body. But it is supposed to be good for healing. So it might hurt a lot now but then it will feel better later, so it is worth it.

Friday, the scheduled activity is Masada and then a Bedouin lunch, they ordered Mehadrin for us (which means the Bedouin stole a rabbi along with the kosher sheep). We're not going to do Masada because the kids have already been there and no new ruins have been "found" since then. We'll probably do something like Ein Bokek, which is one of the Shabbos activities, because we are not participating in any of the shabbos activities.

We're driving ourselves, as are the other religious families. The buses were supposed to leave from there after shabbos ended, but then they changed their minds and said they would leave on shabbos. I argued against the buses leaving on shabbos because we're a Jewish company. I went through the list of people coming and pointed out a couple people who might prefer to leave after shabbos even if they are not publicly shabbos-observant. In the end we compromised and one of the buses is waiting until after shabbos to leave. I told the HR manager that I was watching out for the people who didn't know they were shomer shabbat.