I’m Amy Shugar and I live in Phoenix, Arizona.

Hi!! I realized that you don’t know that much about me. I’m Amy Shugar and I live in Phoenix, Arizona. I’ve lived there my whole life but all of my family lives in Canada. When people first meet me, something they wouldn’t expect from me is that I’m TERRIFIED of birds. I see one and I run the other direction and my friends think it’s hilarious. Where we were today there was a huge cage with a million birds in it and I wouldn’t even go close to it. Another thing is that I’m a very big hockey fan, since my family is Canadian hockey is very important to us. My Muss moment, like I talked about in my last blog, was riding the camels at the Bedouin Tents. It was so incredibly different than I expected and it was so cool, an experience I could never get at home. If someone were thinking of coming to Muss, like a lot of my friends are planning on doing next summer, some advice I would give them is to think positively about everything. Even if it seems really bad and like something you don’t want to do, do it anyways and you’ll most likely end up having a blast. The hikes have been pretty hard for me because in the first week of the trip I broke one of my toes and made the toenail fall off on another one but I’ve still looked forward to everything and tried my best to have fun, even though I STILL can’t wear closed shoes. I think my favorite tiyul so far has been the water hike, we went through this whole thing with water up to our waists and no sight of the ground because the water wasn’t clear. It was so fun and really refreshing with the insane heat and when we got to a certain spot Danny started telling us this story that was fake (but we didn’t realize it was fake) and then he started a splash fight with the whole dorm, the madrichim, and the teachers and it was just so fun and everyone was happy and had a great time.

So back to week 5!! This week has been filled with so many tiyuls it’s been crazy! We started the week with an entire day learning about the Holocaust, it was a very emotional day for all of us, it was long and was a lot to hear and think about but it was really meaningful to me. In the past when I had learned about the Holocaust like in school or Hebrew school, they spent very little time on it and barely give us any information. Learning about it here was a completely different experience, we learned the background, the events leading up to it, how the people let it happen, and all the effects of it after the fact. We finished our experience by going to Yad Vashem the next day. I’ve been to the Holocaust museum in D.C. but this was totally different. Being in Israel and seeing how far the Jewish people have come since this is amazing and it made me so proud to be Jewish.

We also went to an old prison, Sarona Market, spent an entire day exploring Tel Aviv and so many more exciting things! Today we had a really fun tiyul, first we drove to an unrecognized Bedouin village where we got to meet some Bedouins and see their homes. On the outside the houses don’t look so good but they really work hard to make the inside look nice since they often have visitors. We got a tour of the town and saw their school and then we had a mini martial arts lesson with some of the kids and their teacher. It was so cool to see how they live because they have houses made of metal boards in case they need to take them down since they are technically illegally living there and the government could come and tear them down at any time. They don’t have streets or sidewalks and the kids discipline each other. They taught us that the martial arts are really good because it teaches the kids they can coexist with people of other religions because they’re all doing the same thing and they aren’t so different. After the Bedouin village we drove to our hike. It was in the Negev and it really wasn’t as hard as I expected, especially compared to the other hikes we’ve had. We got to see a waterfall and then we hiked up and looked down at the same waterfall. When we made it to the very top it was so pretty because you could see everything in every direction and we even saw some animals running around. The hike took about an hour and then we drove to a spot for lunch and we went to see David Ben Gurion’s house and grave. We learned that he said in his will that he wanted his house to be open for people to come visit. It was a really fun day, we got to see so many beautiful places and we ended the night with DOTS!