Before I begin, I should note that I will be finishing the 5-part series about our travel experience to Israel. As soon as those are ready, I will post them as well. Don't worry, I have some time!
Our first day in Israel involved landing, going through customs, getting to our apartment, climbing the three flights of stairs with all six of our bags to get to our apartment, unpacking, walking over to HUC for a short time, getting lunch, resting, before finally falling asleep at the jetlag induced hour of....7 PM. Yup. We crashed that early. I know, Sonia, as you're reading this, you're probably saying, "have I taught you kids nothing about sleep?!" Yes you have. And we didn't listen. However, we must have really needed that sleep, because when we woke up, it was 6 AM. Yup. we slept for 11 hours. And that felt great!
When we got up, we had big plans for the morning: HUC was having shacharit (morning services) and I wanted to go so I could see some friends, and we also wanted to leave our area around 11 AM to go to Machane Yehuda (the outdoor marketplace also known as "The Shuk"). Well, we were working on our computers and picking up around the house and before we knew it, it was almost 1 PM. Oh well. I imagine HUC will continue to have shacharit in the future!
We made our way to The Shuk and had an amazing experience. I'm sure Sarah's very used to this environment, and while I had only been there once with the SD/OC Birthright group last summer, I had never been there with the intention of stocking a kitchen. We smartly brought a "shuk cart" (in looking up "Shuk Cart," I found a great article about "Shuk Cart Elbow." A "shuk cart" is a rolling grocery basket) which ended up being very helpful as it is a 15 minute walk from our apartment. The Shuk was packed with people. The two busiest times to go to The Shuk are Thursdays and Fridays because this is when people buy food for Shabbat. While I tried to keep my head up and observe as much as I could, I was in charge of pushing the shuk cart this time, so I had an almost comical challenge of navigating the heavily populated pathways with an aging and worn down rolling basket.
Tip for next time: Don't bring a shuk cart on Thursday or Friday.
We got a whole host of Israeli foods and some basic kitchen staples including pita (though not hummus since we got a HUGE tub yesterday for about $3.50), red peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes (still on the vine, of course), the largest head of romaine I have ever seen (about from my wrist to my shoulder in length), mushrooms, some frozen veggie proteins (think Morning Star), Prigat juices, bananas, avocado, cauliflower, a bunch of nana (pronounced "Nah-nah" - it's an herb in the mint family - and at just over $.50 a bunch, what could be bad?!), cottage cheese, and since our apartment was missing one, a hot water kettle. All in all, a very successful trip. I have some additional thoughts about some of the foods I just mentioned and how they are different here, but I will save that for future posts.
When we returned, I continued working on editing the April 1 service (which I will also post when it's done), FaceTime chatted with my mom, Sarah rested, we had a light dinner, and stayed in for the night. The jet lag is still too intense for us to do anything substantial past the afternoon.
It was a great first full day in Jerusalem! I look forward to telling you much more about our future days (don't worry, there won't be posts every day :))
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