Touring in Israel - Day One

After a lavish and extensive buffet breakfast at Carlton on the Beach which is included, we began touring today. We met Mick, our British lives in Italy once married to an Israeli and lived here for a while, tour director last night at the welcome reception and dinner. This morning we met Ori, our Israeli guide, and Misha, our bus driver. We really are only 18 in the group and only 3 are with Tulane and all the rest with Northwestern. We were speaking with a couple who had come in one day earlier than us in the lobby before our meeting and they urged me to go complain at reception about how hot our room is. We should have done this yesterday. It is blowing cold air on me this evening as I type this and we came back to find our west-facing windows with the curtains left open all day by housekeeping!

Mick told us our itinerary had dropped the diamond museum for Neve Tzedek neighborhood walk because the diamond museum had suddenly shut down and gone out of business. I am not sure this was a good substitute. Mick told us last week they walked for over an hour there in a drenching, freezing rain. I can only imagine what they thought.

We started by getting our Vox headsets that we will use every day except when we are on the bus. We loaded the bus and drove to Jaffa. We can see this out our hotel room window in the distance down the coast. It was the original settlement here before Tel Aviv started in 1909. It was a settlement during Old Testament and the home of Jonah who was swallowed by a whale. Appropriately, we unloaded the bus and began our walking tour by a fountain sculpture of a happy whale. We wove through little alley ways and up and down stairs. We visited the St. Peter Church perched as a towering landamark at the end of the little peninsula. We walked back down hill to the clock tower and reloaded the bus. We rode a few minutes and unloaded again to see the former original train station. From there we walked to the Neve Tzedek neighborhood. We strolled and heard a lot about the history of Tel Aviv and Israel. About noon, we walked back to the bus and loaded up. It was a fairly short ride to Allenby Street and the HaCarmel Market or Souk. We had free time here until 1:45pm. We headed into the belly of the beast as instructed but, one it was far too crowded for me, too noisy, no promised street food. About 2 blocks in we cut out to a parallel street and headed back down Allenby St where Clay thought he had overheard Ori say there was a good shawarma stand. We don't know if we found the one he was talking about but we found one with a red and white awning where they were wearing t-shirts that said Doner Kebab. We again way over-ordered and had hummus, falafels and chicken shawarma wraps. Clay will never duplicate the meals he wants to recreate from Libya until he returns to Libya, if ever. We both thought it was closest to one we had in Bordeaux.  We walked back down to the noisy souk corner and found a corner market with a cooler box of Ben & Jerry's cookies & cream cones. We each got one and waited for 1:45pm. We reloaded the bus and drove for a while to stop the bus next to the spot where Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. Our guide, Ori, is a former political journalist and political media spokesman so he had some personal experiences here. Last stop of the day was the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora. We were split into 2 smaller groups and guided through on a truncated and focused visit. It was interesting. We spent time looking a small models of worldwide synagogues and associated artifacts from each. Then we went to an exhibit about Chim, a photographer.  We finished earlier than the other group and had a few minutes to slip into a special Leonard Cohen retrospective and got a sample of You Want It Darker with Mick. We got stuck in heavy traffic on the way back to the Carlton and it took over 45 minutes to get back.

We made our usual stop at the Lobby Bar to request a refill of ice cubes for my water bottle and picked up a hot focaccia topped with pesto, feta and olive and cherry tomato halves to bring to the room to share. I couldn't face another long way to the Tel Aviv Old Port and Clay couldn't face another too big meal at Fortuna del Mar right out on the beach. We enjoyed it with our room AC!

Tomorrow we have an early start as we have to pack up and check out to leave by 8:30am. Tomorrow we visit Caesarea, Akko and Tiberius before spending the next 2 nights at the Scots Hotel in Tiberius.

Photos