My more personal homepage

Scuba Diving

I really like scuba diving. I am a PADI assistant instructor, and I think scuba diving is one of the best ways to relax, with a bonus of seeing some of the most amazing things there are to see in nature. You can see some of these amazing things in Garry McCarthy's Underwater Photo Gallery, and in Coral Reef Creatures (of course you can find many more with Google). A good friend of mine is an underwater photographer, and has a very nice gallery.
If you are certified divers and want to go on a scuba diving safari in the red sea then contact S-club, and tell them I sent you (that's Yishai or ישי in hebrew). You'd better let me know too, if you want me to join you as a guide.
If you're not certified then contact Siam Divers if you want to do your course in Eilat, or Jerusalem Divers if you want to do it in Jerusalem (yes, yes, I know all the jokes) and do your advanced open water (aka two star course). Again, there are many other options, of course, and you can find all the dive centers in Israel using the Yellow Pages.
In my opinion, there is really no point in doing just the Open Water course, since most of the interesting dives in the red sea and around the world are more than 20m deep, which is the limit for open water divers.

Hepatitis C

This is not a chosen subject of interest, but more a forced one. In 1992 I had some sugreory in my legs, and received a blood transfusion. It turns out that with the blood I also got a virus that causes hepatitis (that is liver inflamation). There are many kinds of hepatitis, and the one I have is named hepatitis C. It is suspected that about 5% of the world population has this desease without knowing it. More than 90% of liver transplants worldwide are a direct result of hepatitis C, and so this is one most expensive diseases to health systems worldwide. As a result, there is a huge amount of reseach on the disease, giving rise to a staggering amount of information. So much, actually, that it is very hard for an uneducated hepatitis C infected person to find the information he needs (and I consider myself uneducated, in this respect). However, the majority of information is from research organizations and pharmaceutical companies, and not from individuals who can share information. I have recently undergone medical treatment for the disease, and I am sharing my personal experience of this difficult treatment, in the hope that others might learn from it and prepare themselves for it.

Art

I have a good friend called Noa Shay, who is a very talented artist. She used to be a painter and had paintings bought by the Israeli Museum, and she is now a very interesting sculptress. You can see highlights of her work on her web page.

Travel and Pictures

br> I love traveling to beautiful and interesting places. I prefer joining this with my love of diving, and so most of my serious vacations are in tropical areas where there's good diving. I also love taking pictures, and have a nice library of pictures from around the world: