Somehow Ezi’s SIM card got knocked out as we were riding along the Lebanese border yesterday, so our efforts went more into getting a new card before the Shabbat and poetry got demoted on the urgency scale.  It was done, and all is now well, but my losing contact with him for a long time yesterday and the business of getting a new one took up more of my attention than I’d like to admit.  Still, we’ve been hearing a lot of lectures and some are really interesting.  The multitudes are what surprised me, and the complete lack of politics in the entire conference.  There is no place for foreign languages, no Arabic, no English – poetry is really big here and it’s all about Hebrew.  This is not what I’d experienced long ago when I first came to these festivals.  There were fewer people and a bit of multiculturalism.