Hadassah's 100th Anniversary Celebration and InDNegev!!!!

 I feel like throughout my time here in Israel, every weekend just gets more and more exciting.....
 My past weekend was packed with so many great things that I hope I don't forget to write them all down!!!
The great part about my program is that our weekends start on Thursdays. We have a "siyur" (trip) every Thursday and after that we are free for the weekend!!!
 This Thursday all of yearcourse attended Hadassah's  100th Anniversary Celebration in Jerusalem. For those of you who don't know, Hadassah is the women's Zionist movement and this movement has done MANY great things for Israel in fields like medicine, education and politics. There were thousands of people there (mostly older adults) and a huge majority was from America!!! The reason that all of yearcourse was there is because Young Judea is the Zionist movement of Hadassah and they funded YJ for many many years so why would we not be there to support???? Anyway the whole event was super fun because the food was great, I got to see my friends from other sections that live in Jerusalem and Bat Yam, and the program itself was very well done. There were videos about what Hadassah has done for Israel and there were music and dance performances. There was also a really cool artist that makes art with sand who came to the event and performed.
  All of that stuff was really cool and all BUT the most interesting thing about this event was that the Prime Minister of Israel BB Netanyahu was there!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! He was awarded with a very prestigious award from Hadassah for all that he has done for the nation of Israel. He then gave a speech and talked about how important Hadassah is as well as a little bit of campaigning by naming all of the things he has done for Israel in his time as Prime Minister. I was so surprised that he showed up and seeing him speak was soooo cool! It isn't every day you see the Prime Minister speak............

haha when I sent my mom this picture she thought I was watching TV!!! Such a great experience to see him speak I will never forget it!!!!!! We'll see if he gets my vote when the election rolls around in January!!!! 

 After the Hadassah event, my friends and I went back to Arad, grabbed our stuff and took a shared taxi to the grounds of the music festival InDNegev! This festival was from Thursday to Saturday and dedicated completely to indie music (I did not know one band....). The second we got there and had to set up our tents and belongings, a few of our male neighbors came over to help us set up not knowing we could understand Hebrew..... as one of the guys was setting up our tent he was talking on his cellphone saying how he was setting up a tent for some hot American girls. He was pretty embarrassed when I replied to him in Hebrew thank you!!!!! LOL

 Because we arrived to the festival pretty late due to our previous engagement, the festival itself was over for the day but that doesn't mean we missed out on any fun!!! Those same guys who helped with the tent earlier invited us over to there area for some snacks and drinks and we all sat around and talked until 4:30 in the morning..... SO FUN!!

 That night we all went to sleep freezing and woke up at 8 am drenched in sweat in our stuffy tent..... Yay for desert weather! Once we woke up, we got ready, ate some breakfast from the food that we packed for ourselves and started our day by going into the festival!!! It was 9 by the time we got in and there were already bands playing and people EVERYWHERE. There literally must have been at least 15,000 people there just from the amount of tents around.... My friends and I immediately got a necessary iced coffee and made our way to the stage to check out the music. None of us really knew any of the music/ it wasn't our type of music we would usually listen to but it was still good music nonetheless. 

This festival had so many people and so many different things to do that there was always something new that could have been explored. On Friday my friends and I did so many different things such as:

got painted!!!!

took a nap in a public napping area....

jumped rope!

 watched the sun set

ate thai food!!!! YUM

Friday was the longest day ever with so much going on and so many things that we did!!!!! That night we hung out with our neighbors again and had lots of fun with them! So refreshing to finally meet Israeli guys who are normal and not creepy arsim..............

 Our last day at InDNegev wasn't very long because we left around 1 but it was still fun because we got to see some more cool music and there was a huge white wall and paint that everyone could paint whatever they felt like..... What I drew was not surprising......

and of course we left our mark as well!!!

I was also really happy to see my friend Zoe from camp who happened to be at the festival as well!!!!

Leaving the festival was super hard because it was a Saturday and there were no buses from where we were so we had to find a shared taxi that wouldn't charge us a lot of money because its Shabbat. Props to my friends Yael, Aviva and me for finding us a good ride for a good price!!! The only downside was that the ride was only to the Beersheba bus station which was closed for Shabbat and when we arrived at 2, the next bus to Arad was 7 pm and nothing was open to even keep us busy. 

After waiting around for a few hours, finally another shared taxi drove by and drove us back to Arad and finally we were home!!!!!!!!

Safe to say it was the best weekend yet and I say that after each blog post because every weekend keeps getting better and better!!!!!!

I LOVE YEARCOURSE