Today, like every day since I’ve moved here, I wake up in a daze. I say a daze, because I still have trouble believing I am in Tel Aviv. October, verging on November, and it’s still 25 degrees centigrade out. I make my way to class along with thousands of others, blending into the crowd, a part of the campus and the city.

This weekend, Dani and I have decided to do something out of the ordinary: we’re going on a yoga retreat. It is out of the ordinary because most twenty-year-olds in Tel Aviv spend their weekends partying through the night and nursing their hangovers through the day. This time, we thought we’d leave all that behind and head for the shores of the Dead Sea with a group of strangers.

“Time to escape the world!” Dani and I high-five as we jump into a Gett, the Israeli equivalent of an Uber, to get to the  meeting point.

The chaos of this past week, my friends in Boston constantly reporting the ugliness spreading after the 2016 election – after everything that has happened, a peaceful retreat is the perfect distraction.

We arrive at Metzoke Dragot, our hotel on top of a hill. The sight before us is overwhelming. We all stand, transfixed, staring at the view, incapable of looking away. The Dead Sea lies still below us and beyond are the Jordanian shores. I tell the receptionist I’m here to escape reality. “Or maybe explore a different reality,” she corrects me, smiling. She’s right; this may seem like a dream to me, but this place is her reality.

Our little group is as particular as it is perfect: a sweet young couple, an Israeli and a Dane, together for nearly ten years with a baby on the way. An Australian girl who’d fallen in love with Israel and had moved here not two years ago. A seventy year-old woman, who’d been a hippie throughout the sixties and had written a book on her work as a welder, fighting for feminism. Everyone is here for one reason or another, and in no time we begin talking about our lives outside of the retreat, becoming friends and promising to meet again in Tel Aviv.

I cannot help thinking “only in Israel,” as my roommate Gili, would put it. Something about this country makes those who visit it feel instantly intimate with those around them.

Only in Israel could eight people, completely different from one another, strangers only hours before, spend an impromptu weekend together and have time slip by without even noticing.

A couple of couches had been placed on the peak of the hill, right on the edge, facing the view. Any time we aren’t doing yoga or walking through the desert, I sit here and read with Dani for hours in comfortable silence. Sometimes I feel the need to stop reading, or chatting with my new friends, and look across the view before me, from the silent sea to the rolling hills of Jordan. I still have trouble realizing just how close the two countries are. “I could swim there” I joke with one of the group members, “and yet these countries are thousands of miles apart.” He understands me: the wars that happen and don’t happen between Israel and its surrounding countries, the bad blood that has existed in this region for over sixty years. I think to myself, “It feels so unreal that, in spite of the beauty we see around us, we are in a territory plagued by the constantly looming threat of war.”

I think back to our drive here, while crammed in a car filled with supplies for the weekend. As we made our way along the winding desert roads towards the sea, we passed a checkpoint of armed guards a few miles before our final destination. A month ago my pulse would have been racing; today, as I watched the soldiers clutching their firearms, I think of Dov, of Jonathan, and the other friends I’ve made who are serving in the military. Knowing them eases my anxiety, and I feel safer knowing they’re out there protecting us.

The peculiar bipolarity of this country is striking to all of us, and we carry on chatting about our individual relationships with the place we’ve chosen to call home, for however long.

The weekend has had its desired effect: Dani and I have gotten to experience a different part of Israel, and have finally started making sense of the country we’ve come to love.

“Back to normal,” I say to myself, once we’ve returned to Tel Aviv, staring at an entirely different sea. The wind propels the waves of the Mediterranean rapturously onto the shore, and I already miss the retreat, the friends I made, the things I saw.