Israel...Part 2...Day 10

March 15, 2019

Day 10: We knew that we would be improvising today but I don't think that we were prepared to improvise quite this much...stupid marathon!

Being Friday, we knew that we had to prepare for Shabbat since the entire city shuts down as soon as the sun goes down. We headed toward the Yehuda Market for challah and other dinner and lunch necessities. Because we were early and beat the crowd, we saw itty bitty teeny tiny old Jewish ladies shopping for their Shabbat dinners.

'Around' 18 shekels   

My family lived on these slushies last time we were here. Of course, it was a million degrees then and Israel doesn't have a deep appreciation for ice or cold drinks like we do in the States

Tiny and cute pineapples! 

My mom and her nasty black licorice candies. Seriously, she won't eat the local food but she'll eat THESE??? 

Our original plan was to visit Yad Vashem (Holocaust Museum) but the buses and trains weren't running (due to the marathon) so we decided instead to walk to the Israel Museum. What should have been a 26 minute walk ended up being a 45 minute hike through checkpoints, and huge crowds with blasting music. When we finally got to the museum we were told that it was closed because of the marathon. Ooookaaaay. So we decided to wander back to the Old City to see if we could find some of the items that I still wanted to buy. We start walking around the shuk only to find that half the shops are closed. Why, you might ask? Because of the dumb marathon! The entire city shut down on the day before Shabbat because of a MARATHON! Yeah, I'm a bit annoyed in case you can't tell...

I knew those things were evil.

Stupid marathon!

Okay, maybe I don't want to know how bad a bathroom in Israel has to be before they condemn it. Because I've only seen a handful of restrooms in this country that pass the acceptable hygiene test, most are covered in fluids I won't bring up here. So for this port a john to be condemned can only mean that there's a corpse or something in there

Weird random statues in an ugly parking lot. The things people call art...

It wasn't all bad. The weather ended up being way better than predicted and I got to try something new (because they ran out of my coffee...guess why?) a hot cinnamon coconut drink called sachlav. I will definitely be getting another one of those... We also sat down in the lounge and had our own Erev Shabbat dinner which was kinda cool. Then we walked on top of the roof, just to see what was up there. Afterward, we wound down and got ready for bed, probably hours before we should have but we had already accumulated over 25,000 steps from all of our wanderings and we were kinda tired.

Saclav

At least there's no marathon tomorrow.