Israel Trip, north by northwest

Friday the 15th we flew to Israel, and this blog comes to you from Jerusalem. Our planning and preparations for the trip were mostly pretty last minute, or "just-in-time" as they might say in the biz world. We flew direct non-stop from Brussels to Ben Gurion on a Brussels Airline flight that was operated by El Al. Flight crew specifically sought us out for early boarding, since we were a family with small children, and it was nice to be taken care of by the smiling crew. The food was all kosher, and it was decent to boot.

After landing, we rented an Israeli phone, and then got our car rental. There's an apparently mandatory $12/day charge for third-party accident issues, and it was annoying that I hadn't been informed about it in advance (supposedly it was in the fine print on the web site), but what can you do?

We next headed directly to the home of my cousin Ofer, in Ramat Yishay about 30 minutes from Haifa. We had shabbat dinner with Ofer's family, including wife Tal, four boys, parents, and sister Tamy's family. It was kind of crazy, but not as crazy as you might expect given all the people and kids: Ofer and Tal preside over an easy-going household. It was a very nice, warm welcome.

The next day, Saturday, a more extended family came for a potluck lunch. The lunch wasn't exactly in our honor, but we were the excuse for it. Descendants of two of my mother's mother's brothers were there, including five of my mother's first cousins (plus spouses). Most but not all of these people I had met on my only previous visit to Israel, in 1997, not including the entirely new generation that didn't even exist then.

Sunday Ofer and one of his boys took us to Rosh haNikra, the northern most Israeli town on the Mediterranean. It is home to cliffs and caves ("grottoes"), and we took a cable car down to see them. Ofer's mother Edna had taken me there in 1997, but it was good to see again, and in any case Naomi and the girls hadn't seen it before. Then we lunched in Nariya, and visited cousin Gila at Kibbutz Cabri, close to the Lebanese border. In addition to visiting a playground there, Gila gave us a tour of Cabiran, a kibbutz factory for precision aluminum casting. The girls got little squares of wax as souvenirs, and we'll see if we can't turn them into candles.

Monday we spent the first half of the day in Haifa. Edna was our chauffeur, and she took us to the beautiful Bahá'í World Centre buildings and gardens, located on the side of Mt. Carmel. We then met up with Hadas and her parents for lunch at her apartment. The food was falafel, which is of course very Middle Eastern; whereas the apartment really felt like New York to me. For the second half of the day, we headed to Tel Aviv to meet our MIT friend Adee and her two sons (her husband was regrettably indisposed). It was a long day, but fun.

Yesterday we arrived in Jerusalem, but we first stopped at Tamy's at the moshav Beqoa. She and her one-month-old son took us to a nice restaurant that served delicious food made from very local ingredients. Tamy said the restaurant was famous in the area, but it was off the beaten path to say the least—you really had to know where you were going to find it, literally traveling unpaved roads through farmlands. We were hoping to do more in her neighborhood (see Mini-Israel or Stalactite Cave), but we were late for getting to Jerusalem as it was.

Our destination in Jerusalem was the German Colony, not far from the Old City. Uncle Jeff and aunt Adele are fortuitously renting a 3-bedroom apartment here for a few weeks, so for a few days we will occupy two-thirds of their place (that's not too big an imposition, is it?). Navigating to Jerusalem was trivial, but navigation within Jerusalem is another matter entirely, especially since on counsel we did not rent a GPS. There is currently construction related to a new trolley system, and that's not helping, but fundamentally the issue is this is Jerusalem, where the insane layout of the streets is presumably meant to serve as a deterrence to invasion or something like that. Last night we visited a nearby playground with the girls, today we went to the zoo (more on that later), and we'll see what other sights we taken in in the next day and a half.