Haifa To Tel Aviv To Haifa

It's not quite a palindrome, but who cares. Lina, Lauren and I took a 10:20 train to Tel Aviv this morning and stayed all day to romp about in the sunshine. What an absolutely perfect day. Mid 70's, sunshine, low humidity and endless visibility. A Chicagoan could get used to this! Check it out:

Bet this looks pretty nice on December 9th. Or in mid July for that matter.

The only disappointing thing about my trip is that I had hoped to meet Reut for lunch. She was in Tel Aviv for a work meeting of some sort, but the damn thing lasted until 5:30 in the evening. I guess I will have to wait until Dahlia's wedding in a few weeks to see Reut. Even so, romping through Tel Aviv on a beautiful day was more than rewarding enough. Our first stop was the Maccabi Tel Aviv ticket office, so the girls could buy tickets to an upcoming game. They have a list of their accomplishments hanging on the wall, and their dominance in Israeli basketball would humble George Steinbrenner. In my 23 years on this earth, they have failed to win the Israeli national title once.

We walked Arlozoroff street down to Dizengoff street and wandered all the way down to Kikar Dizengoff. Along the way we passed the Turkish embassy which was pretty cool to see. The girls did a fair amount of window shopping. I spent the stroll enjoying the two fundatmental aspects of Tel Aviv that I miss in Haifa: The city is essentially flat, and every other person owns a dog. I even got to play with a small puppy while we were resting on a park bunch in Kikar Ha'Medina.

The Chanukka display at Kikar Dizengoff

We stopped at a falafel joint for lunch. It was good but not great falafel. The most memorable part of lunch was that I ate a really hot pepper and ended up having the hickups for ten minutes. Makes it tough to eat a sandwhich. Our next stop was Kikar Rabin, the largest square in Tel Aviv and the site of Yitzhak Rabin's murder. We stopped at the stop where he was killed to pay our respects. The square is very large but I still can't believe that 100,000 people can be packed into it as have been for demonstrations like the pro-teachers union demonstration a few weeks back. The municipality is holding a big candle lighting party in Kikar Rabin every night of Chanukka at 6:30. I had hoped to stick around long enough to see it, but we were all exhausted and ready to head home 2 hours earlier.

Grafitti and newspaper clippings memorialize the late Prime Minister Yitzkah Rabin.

We grabbed the bus back on Dizengoff and rode back to the train station rolling down Judah Maccabee ave for part of the trip. I got a kick out of that. We got on our train and all promptly fell asleep, waking up 45 minutes later at the "Hof HaCarmel" main train station in Haifa. I plan on spending some real time in TA and hopefully checking out the famous nightlife their sometime during my trip. It was enough for one day.

I couldn't resist!

I was a little tense from the day, but Levi (one of our madrichim) had a remedy for that. He was running a "visual imagery" relaxation workshop in the moadon at 8 P.M. It was phenomenal. I felt like I was filled with warm pudding by the time we were finished, and yet I felt more energized than I had all day.