After leaving Nahariya, I took the train to meet my roommate Paul in Haifa, which is maybe 45 minutes south and also on the coast. We stayed at a pretty conveniently located hostel that had very nice facilities, was very clean, and contained only insane people. If Paul writes details about that experience, maybe I’ll link to it (http://paulheckler.blogspot.com/2008/08/haifa-part-1-ditz-asshole-and-nudist.html ), but I’ll give you just this tidbit right now: The first thing we saw when we walked into our dorm-style room was a middle-aged Austrian guy wearing not a stitch of clothing and climbing onto the top bunk.
Haifa is a) hot and humid, b) located on hills (big hills), and c) a really good walking city if it weren’t so a) hot or b) on hills. It was lovely, but a day and a half there was enough for me. While there, we saw a couple really interesting things. The first was an artists' village called Ein Hod, which didn’t have a ton open because apparently they close down during the summer heat, but did have some beautiful and unique crafts. The second cool thing was the Bahai Gardens, which is located on the side of one of Haifa’s hills. It has nine levels of garden, a big gold-domed shrine in the middle, and nine more levels of garden. I’ll post some pictures of that because it is absolutely stunning and hard to describe.
Nonetheless, the coolest thing we saw in Haifa was definitely the Carmelit, which is Israel's only subway system. The Carmelit has two trains of two cars each that go back and forth on a single line and has a total of six stops. The sole purpose of the Carmelit is to get you up and down the side of Mt. Carmel, so the train cars and each station are on an angle with steps to go from the bottom to the top. But the station are not consistent in their degree of steepness (to reflect the shape of the hill) so any given station may be steeper than the Carmelit cars, less steep than the cars, or at the same angle. NYC Metro’s got nothing on this. It was ridiculously cute.
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