The World's Greatest Hummus

Hello, viewing populace! There is much to blog about today, much indeed. Well, actually, there's only one topic, but it's an extensive one! The topic is Jerusalem, what most people would answer with if you asked them to name a city in Israel. Jerusalem is an ancient city, holy to Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. It is also home to the greatest hummus restaurant in the world. I'll have more on that later.

This morning, I was woken up at 8:00 to a breakfast of a melting chocolate croissant and lukewarm milk. It was pretty tasty. After eating it, I sat for a while. I also got dressed and brushed my teeth, but I assume you're not interested in that, so I'll skip ahead to the part where we got off the bus and entered Jerusalem.

Not having gotten much sleep the night before, I had been looking forward to sleeping on the bus, but my mission was a failure. Thus, for about the first ten minutes after getting off the bus, I felt really tired. But then we arrived at our first destination, and my mood brightened considerably. We were at one of those outdoor markets that are all the rage with the kids these days. I snapped some pics of fruit.

As we continued through the market, we got deeper and deeper into the city of Jerusalem. It was really interesting because of the combination of old and new. There were modern shopping centers and restaurants built into ancient stone buildings, and we stupid-looking American tourists were walking right next to traditionally-dresses orthodox Jews.

There were many cool things in the market. I saw a bunch of talented guitarists playing out in the open. I tried yelling "Free Bird!" at them, but they didn't listen. Something else I noticed was the huge amount of Jesus. So much Jesus.











Now about the delicious hummus, or humous, or turpentine, or however you spell it. It's at a little restaurant called AbuShukri on Jerusalem, and it's the greatest in the world. It is necessary to try it should you ever go to Jerusalem.












The apex of the day was our visit to the Western Wall, the only wall left standing of the Second Holy Temple. Funnily, my camera died right after taking this shot. Seeing the Western Wall was a mixed bag. The wall itself was an awesome sight. The partition dividing men from women was not. I couldn't believe such old, stupid ideas were still active in such an advancing, important city. I really wanted to climb up on top of the partition and yell,
"Mr. Netanyahu, tear down this wall!"



After seeing the wall, we walked back to the bus station and went back to the apartment, before having a Georgian dinner. As in, food from Georgia, a country I do not know much about, but who's food is delicious. Then we went back to the apartment, at which point I began blogging. I continued to blog, until I got to the point where I typed this sentence that you are currently reading. I then wrote this sentence, and finished blogging.

Schnitzel and History

In my last blog (also my first) yesterday morning, I said I was going to the beach. Immediately after typing that, I went to the beach. Behold the beach. 

("Behold the beach" being, as you would point out, Mrs. Dominick, an imperative sentence.) At said beach, my family sat on beach chairs and tried to get tan, my dad only joining us after playing a computer game for an hour. We all decided that he wasn't allowed to abandon family activities to play computer games anymore, but I have a feeling he won't follow that decision. I went in the water for a little, but it was boring as there were no waves.
"Lame," I said to the Mediterranean sea, "try harder."

Quite an epic picture, I know.

After the beach we went to an outdoor market and a crafts fair. There were many musical performers on the streets, some good, some terrible, and one that appeared to be a gospel group, which is rather unusual for Israel. At the market we saw lots of tasty-looking fruits and bought some grapes. We also saw the usual bootleg T-Shirts of popular characters, and some fruits that did not look tasty. Behold fruit.



At the crafts fair, there were, well, crafts. Some were pretty cool. there were some dioramas of the lives of famous people, although one was of Coca-Cola, which is a soft drink, not a person. There were also small sculptures made out of spoons and forks, and hundreds of exact replicas of the human body, apparently carbon-based.

Hours later, we went to dinner at a tapas restaurant. Their menu advertises The Best Ice Cream In Town. As far as I know, that's true. That stuff was delicious.

This morning we woke up bright and much too early. After eating a cinnamon danish, I walked to the place where we met our tour guide, Muki. Everyone else walked to meet Muki also, but they didn't eat cinnamon danishes, and so my sentence would have been either a lie or grammatically incorrect, and we wouldn't want that, now, would we, Mrs. Dominick? (That sentence had way too many commas.) Over the course of six hours, Muki walked us all through Tel Aviv, teaching us about the city's history. We learned all about Bauhaus, a style of architecture that favors function over beauty, which originated in Germany but was stopped during the rise of Nazism. Tel Aviv has the most Bauhaus buildings in the world. We also saw lots of graffiti. Pretty much everywhere you look in Tel Aviv there's graffiti. Some of it is very pretty while some is simply words written out.

We learned about Chaim Nachman Bialik, who hid Zionist messages in his nursery rhymes, and we learned about Mayor Mayor Dizengoff, who's first name was also his job. At the end of the day, we went to a cemetery in which many famous Tel Avivians are buried, and of which I'd have many pictures if my computer weren't spazzing out.

Oh, how could I forget? It's even in the title! I had schnitzel for lunch.

Beginning the Grand Quest

Well, hello down there!

Or, up there, as wherever you are, you're probably not any lower than where I now am, Israel. Israel is at the lowest elevation of any country in the world. Now, you may be reading this from the bottom of the Dead Sea, which is in Israel and is the lowest point in the Earth's crust. If this is the case, I applaud you on two counts. First, I applaud you for finding Wi-Fi down there. Second, I applaud you for not dying under the thousands of pounds of water pressure.

Stepping awkwardly away from the people at the bottom of the sea, I welcome you, Mrs. Dominick, to my blog, entitled, as you can see in that lovely blue font up there, "Trip to Israel." My first posts for this blog will be the journal about Israel you assigned me for English class. I'll get started on that.

After a chicken dinner cooked up by my mom, my family (my sisters aged 21 and 23, and my parents whose ages I won't disclose out of fear) and I boarded a cab at 8:00 P.M on Sunday night, bound for the always lovely Newark Airport. Unusually, everything went smoothly at the airport, and as we got on the plane, I watched some TV on the monitor on the seat in front of me. Then it started. That is, the baby sitting directly in front of me began screaming and crying. It was excruciatingly loud. (Ah, excruciatingly, what a beautiful word.) My sisters and I debated whether or not to yell at the parents, who were doing nothing to shut their child up, but we ended up also doing nothing, a decision I still regret.

An hour into the flight, at about midnight in New Jersey and 7:00 A.M. Israel time, the flight attendants served a mediocre chicken dinner. Aside from the question of why my Caesar Salad dressing was so gelatinous, what puzzled me about this was the timing. My guess is that by completely messing up the schedule of the day's meals, they were trying to reverse the effects of jet lag.

After eating, I went to sleep, periodically woken by the baby, and finally by an egg breakfast I deigned not to finish. At 4:30 P.M, we walked off the plane, with seven hours of our lives gone, never spent, and never to return.

We got our baggage, and went to the apartment we're renting, where I now sit writing this. The apartment is in Tel Aviv, Israel's biggest city. After sitting around and doing nothing for a bit, we went out for a walk. On the walk, I noticed that most signs in the city were written in Hebrew and English, and it reminded me that most Israelis who had helped us on the trip spoke English in order to help American tourists, a very annoying group of people I'm happy to be part of. ("Of which I'm happy to be part." Sorry, Mrs. Dominick.)

After the familiar experience of eating dinner at a Mexican restaurant, we walked back to the apartment, watched a year-old episode of Ellen, and went to sleep. As I write this blog the following morning, we're about to go to the beach, so as they say in Hebrew, "¡vamos a la plia!"

Oh. That would be Spanish.