SwissWatching

Big trips always seem to cut down on our blogging as we spend the days beforehand getting ready to go and weeks after catching up. Let’s just say our trip to Israel was wonderfully full with:

• chagim (i.e. days of a holiday on which no work or travel is permitted)—lots of them, adding to the general craziness of non-holiday time and cutting down on our time to see everyone we wanted to see
• family and friends we haven’t seen in awhile (to those we missed—sorry! fly through Geneva next time you go to or from Israel and we promise not to miss you again…)


Me and my three Israeli cousins

• good restaurants, open for Passover, serving great Passover food, with and without kitniyot (more options in Jerusalem than Tel Aviv and Jaffa, but we found really good food there too)
• really nice Judaica from the Nachalat Binyamin crafts market in Tel Aviv, which we traversed multiple times with Talya B (don’t miss her pictures of the sheer mass of artistic toilet paper holders)

Talya J and Jackie eating classy pesadikt food in Tel Aviv

It was not full with:

• seders. we only went to one, probably the first time in my life. Of course, there’s a good reason—we were in Israel and double seders is a diaspora thing.
• tourism.  The only touristy thing we really did was walk along the beach and spend a morning in Jaffa.


Kramer and Jackie meet at the Jaffa flea market

• falafel. sad. (even though it’s kitniyot, which we eat, we couldn’t find it when we wanted it…in Tel Aviv!)
• work.  oops…hence the catching up.

More surprising (really!) updates and Istanbul stories to come, so stay tuned.

Seth and I are flying to Israel tonight on Turkish Airlines, arriving at the fair hour of 2am in Ben Gurion airport after a layover in Istanbul.  We will be visiting Seth’s family and many friends between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv over Pesach.  We will pretty much be doing the visit-people, non-tourist route in Israel, but we also have a bonus trip to Istanbul planned for a couple days on the way back!  I, unsurprisingly, have work to do, and I think Seth might too…nevertheless I am quite ready for a break and for travel over Pesach in a country where there will be food we can eat!!!

Our primary question: if we are doing the seder in Modi’in, which is between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, will we be saying, “Next year in Jerusalem” at the end of the seder, or are we assumed to be close enough?  Guess we’ll find out tomorrow night…

If any of you readers will be in Israel and haven’t told us, time to send us an email alert.  Or if you have been to Israel a zillion times (or Istanbul, for that matter) and want to throw out restaurant/shopping/hangout spot suggestions, we’re all ears!  Particularly in regards to Tel Aviv…and Istanbul.

Time to go finish packing and figuring out how to avoid buying an outrageously expensive dinner or bad sandwiches to take on to the flight (Switzerland and its bad, over-priced food).  And hoping the playmobil policemen sets for Seth’s cousins we are carrying on board won’t get us detained at security.  Those things include itsy-bitsy plastic guns!