Barbara’s Blog

Trip to Weitzman Institute and Druze village

Today was so cool!! In the morning we got on the buses and drove to Rechovot to the Weitzman Institute. We were met by a few people who told us we would have three presentations today. One Physics, one Chemistry, and one biomedical. It sounded cool. Plus they told us what the institute does and what opportunities there are for us. Everything there is in English and there is a summer science research opportunity after 12^th grade. It sounded really cool!! I wanted to get the website for it but forgot to. Oh well. In two years hopefully I will remember it!

Anyways so I got to go to the Physics presentation first. Basically it was a bunch of experiments and stuff. It was really cool and he explained everything and we learned stuff. Pretty sweet. The parts that stuck out to me was when he showed us the video of David Scott on the moon on Apollo 15 in 1971. He took a feather and hammer and dropped them at the same time. Galileo said about 700 years ago that without air friction they should hit the ground at the same time. And David got to test that. Guess what? Galileo was right! Shocker! So we saw the video and it was cool. (Btw this was the third time I had seen the video. But it’s still cool.) Plus, the dude mentioned Challenger and what happened and why it “exploded”.(its in quotes because it is not the proper technical term) He talked about the rubber and how it didn’t go back to its original state. But he did not mention the O ring, or how it sealed between the rocket booster and oxygen tank, or how it had gotten really cold the night before in Florida, or how it was already two days after the scheduled launch, or how the President was giving his State of the Union Address the next day and wanted to mention the teacher in space. (Her name was Judith B. Resnik) Plus he did not mention how in the investigation they found that three people were alive until they hit the water. Basically, he really skimmed the surface with it and many people felt they did not have the full story. And he mentioned Columbia and how NASA did not learn but that was COMPLETELY 100 % unrelated!! I wanted to punch him. But I did not.

Plus a few cool things we saw were dry ice, liquid nitrogen which froze fruit. Then he smashed it and people ate it. (Not me, it was on the ground) plus he had lots of different gases people inhaled. One was helium which makes your voice very high, and the other made your voice really low. Plus he made sound waves on a plate and showed us the patterns and places where it is still. Using salt! It was so cool! It made patterns on the plate. And he showed us other cool stuff. Then we went to this really cool sculpture garden. It had lots of really neat stuff. A water wheel thing, a gyroscope, a pengilum, and a moon swing. I thought the swing would be really cool but it was just ok. There was a wooden circle thing (like cylinder) and basically a harness attached to a pole really high up. You sat in the harness and swung around the cylinder. And kicked off of it. It was supposed to simulate the one sixth of the moon gravity. Whatever.

 Then we had lunch and went to our chemistry presentation. We also saw a bunch of cool experiments there. Plus they drew stuff on the board and wrote a few chemical equations there. So we learned stuff. We saw Hydrogen Peroxide and something else react and it foamed a lot! Plus we then figured out what the products were by burning the bubbles. (to see if there was oxygen) Then we saw a few other things and lastly we got to make our own jello like stuff. It was bright orange and gooey. It kind of reminded me of Mad Science birthday parties we used to have.

Then we had a lecture on Animal Sex. That was the biomedical part. It was weird…..so anyways after that we got back on the buses and went to a Druze village in the Carmel Mountains.

 It was so cool!! We got off the buses and looked around and saw a normal village. Much of the writing was in Arabic but the people were dressed normally and it was a nice place. Houses, cars, shops, food!!! We went to someone’s house and he told us about the Druze and his story. He was born in Lebanon, moved to Israel to have a better life, Druze don’t have a country so they are loyal to the place they live in, there are religious and secular Druze, you get the choice five times in your life of whether to become religious or secular, they believe in reincarnation 73 times, people can remember their past life (just one) and then dude told us about his past life.  He was walking down the street in Lebanon and he saw a house that he recognized. He went inside and remembered everything! His past name, family, and their names! He then went into his old room and there you have it. That was his life before this one. (I don’t know if I really believe them. But they know names and stuff so maybe they are on to something…) They believe that men are reincarnated into men and women into women and Druze people stay in their religion. You can’t convert to be a Druze, you can marry a Druze but not convert. Then we got to eat their food. OMG AMAZING!! Like the Bedouin tents, the bread was so good! We had lafa, lafa with Zatar, chicken and rice and lots of side dishes. Plus we had tea and cookies at the end. (I still didn’t like the tea. I guess it’s just not for me)After that they played instruments and sang to us. Many people got up and danced and it was nice. And then we went back to the dorms. The end.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 1:40 am and is filed under Israel, Life, TIF, This Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.