It took me a few weeks to digest our team day (and I planned the thing).  Nonetheless, I think the rest of the team will deal with it later in life through therapy…maybe it was a bit too intensive.  Although something in the flow was interesting, and such intensive things, which are out of your daily routine, get you thinking - so I thought I'd share them with you.

...in an area of constant thrill seeking, actually seeking them in real life and not only on TV or the Web, everyone has his/her limits. We can't eat the world, even if it is very tasty...

It went a little like this:

After meeting, not too early, we drove an hour up north to Zichron Ya'akov, a nice and peaceful town established before WW1 by Jewish Olim (new immigrants) from Europe.   There, we visited the N.I.L.I museum -- built in what used to be the Aharonson's, founders of Zichron Ya'akov in 1882, family home.   The house became a museum (rather than just another piece of very expensive real-estate in Zikron) because the Aharonsons started a espionage organization assisting the Brits invasion of Israel (then Palestine), which was ruled by the Turks, i.e. the Ottoman empire.

Here's the Team outside the museum, we're still all very energized and happy -- and/or one little dysfunctional family :)

As it turns out, if you didn't have the privilege of going through the Israeli school system, you probably don't know the entire story.  To make a long story short, the Aharonsons, they did great things.  One was killed when trying to ride to Cairo and others were caught and tortured.   The highlight of the museum tour is the bathroom where Sarah Aharonson shot herself so she wouldn't fall in the hands of the Turks - afraid that if that happened, she'd break during the integration.   (Naturally, this act made a hell of a impression on me as a 2nd grade pupil!) Evenso, we (young Israeli pupils) still retained a good amount of sensitivity as that room seemed to have a similar effect today on the rest of our team...

After a bit of history, we continued on with team day to something a bit lighter...a chocolate workshop!  Now if  the N.I.L.I museum was a overdose of emotions, this was serious overdose of cacao and sugar.  Basically it was a pure bowl of melted chocolate with all the mix-ins and fixings we could imagine!  The highlight was when Mrs. Chocolate Lady combined some Brandy with our melted chocolate and we drank pure goodness out of the bag -- can't really describe that feeling, but it's a bit like test driving a Ferrari within the food world.  Soooo good that it's probably illegal ;-)

Mmmmmm....Chocolate.....

Next, after we were well mixed and over our sugar high, we were on a serious down -- i.e. starving for read food.  Solution?  We got burgers on the way to our last stop…
 
Last but not least, this brings us to our final event of team day, PechaKucha Night in Tel Aviv.  PechaKucha is an interesting art show where each presenter gets to show their project in precisely 6.8 minutes. It's a very fast, visual and intense show with topics ranging in everything from political chocolate to projected masks on actors.  It is an array of new interesting ideas, all with the intention of opening new paths of thought.

In summary, our team barely made it out alive.  One member didn't make it through the whole thing (overdosed / overwhelmed / just bailed out) but the rest of us survived and were troopers to the end.  In any case, the feeling of such an intense day took us a bit of time to recover as no one was him/her self the next day. And what can we conclude from this?  Success!!

Over all, I'm not sure what we all learned from this, but even now a few weeks after, I'm still contemplating the experience.  I think we learned that we all have our limits.  That's right, in an area of constant thrill seeking, actually seeking them in real life and not only on TV or the Web, everyone has his/her limits.  We can't eat the world, even if it is very tasty.  It has so much to offer, but we can only consume a portion of it and acknowledge that fact, thus, we must decide which part we take in this crazy world, and which part we leave for others.