הרצליה

Though much of this break has been spent purely relaxing (read: doing nothing), we have tried to stay busy for at least a few hours a day and take a couple day trips. Some of these things have included meeting our old roommates at a bar for a fun Flamenco concert, and doing laundry. Last week Amalia had a lesson in Tel Aviv so we spent part of the day there, and yesterday we wanted to find a place that we had never been to before, preferably a place that spoke little English (we have been a bit frustrated with how American Jerusalem is, but I will save that for another post). After much thought and research (including our old roommate Dotan who told us to just go to the bus station and get on the first bus we saw), we chose to check out Herzliya because it is pretty close, had a good weather forecast, and has a beach. The beginning of our day was a bit rough, as Amalia was trying to figure out some banking matters and wanted to practice, so we didn't end up leaving Jerusalem until about 2. This got us into Herzliya around 4, after a quick transfer in Tel Aviv. We did some aimless walking around in the city center before grabbing a slice of pizza and heading over to the other side of town, where there were supposed to be some really nice houses and a beach. The bus ride gave us ample views of the nice houses and dropped us off right in front of the beach. Unfortunately, the bus took longer than we had hoped and we only caught the very end of the sunset. I proceeded to take about a million pictures of Amalia, which I think was fun for both of us. Then we walked the length of the beach until the end, and got on a bus headed back towards the city center for dinner and festivities we had read were happening throughout the city during Sukkot. Peering out the window from the bus on the way back to the city center, we didn't see many restaurants, but we did see a lot of people out on the streets watching some smaller musical acts. As we walked around for about a half hour in several different directions, we saw that there were, in fact, only pizza restaurants in town, which would have been fine had we not made it our afternoon snack. We were seconds from resigning ourselves to pizza when I remembered that we had passed a burger place earlier in the day, so we booked it there and had a fine dinner of a burger and fries. After dinner we walked around a bit and saw a few musical acts, and decided it was time to head home. Of course, no one had invited us to the underground hip-hop-happenin'-DJ-break-dancing party at the bus station, and worse, no one had warned us that there would be smelly teenagers waiting for a bus to Tel Aviv as well. Needless to say, it was an interesting (and luckily short) ride back to Tel Aviv and a fairly fast, though seatless ride back to Jerusalem. Today we are taking it easy and cleaning the house/doing laundry and tomorrow we will head to Tel Aviv again to explore the arts and crafts fair and we will head on to Gan Yavneh to spend Shabbat and the end of Sukkot with some of Amalia's family.

A final note: We have been constantly reading the news lately and noticing the world around us as things have been getting quite tense around here. The police and army presence has gotten larger as the gates in and out of populated areas get smaller, and we constantly hear the circling of a helicopter overhead, presumably monitoring the Old City. Other than that, things haven't changed much. People still go about their business, and we haven't heard much talk about what is going on. Still, it is troublesome to think what could become of the situation, and I hope that things don't escalate beyond what they are now. Let's hope that talk of the "third intifada" remains talk and that the current situation is resolved quickly and peacefully.

Shabbat Shalom,
Sam