About This Project
A Double Hobby Business
and a Study Strategy
I completed the Israel tour guide training course in January 2025. I took the licensing exam in July 2025 and failed — largely because I wrote the entire Part B section as if the question was asking about the Mount of Olives when it was actually asking about Mount Zion. It was a reading failure, not a knowledge failure. I knew the material. I just didn't read carefully enough.
I'm retaking the exam in July 2026. This site is part of how I'm preparing.
During the course, I started building amazingisraeltours.com — partly because the course requires weekly tour reports, and if I was going to write them anyway, I might as well make them into blog articles. I also noticed that "Israel tours" was a heavily searched term with surprisingly weak competition in the SEO landscape.
But this tour guide business is really a hobby of a hobby business. I already run Jewish Savannah as a hobby business. So this is a double hobby business. Still, it seems genuinely lucrative — I've made some nice money giving a few tours — and more importantly, I really enjoy making content about this material and learning from it.
My main Israel tour guide business identity is Safay Tours. This site — Amazing Israel Tour Guides — is something different: a resource for fellow students and guides, built in public as I study for the July 2026 exam.
"The act of creating structured, detailed profiles for each site forces me to engage with the material at a deeper level than passive reading. When you have to organize information clearly enough that someone else can learn from it, you understand it better yourself."
The NotebookLM Workflow
The infographics and slide decks on this site are generated using NotebookLM, Google's AI-powered research tool. I upload the transcripts from the tours I took during the course, and NotebookLM generates structured visual summaries — overview infographics and deep-dive slide dossiers — that organize the material in a way that makes it genuinely easier to study and remember.
The quality of what it produces has surprised me. The Tel Lachish dossier, for example, is organized as a series of thirteen "Field Reports" that take you from the topography of the site through the Assyrian siege mechanics, the Lachish Letters, and the legacy of the city. Each slide is a self-contained lesson. Studying from them trains your brain to think in the structured, narrative terms that the exam rewards.
Whenever possible, I also visit the sites and add my own video and photography. There is no substitute for standing in a place and feeling its geography.