Tuesday, July 5 2011

Today: Guest Author

We started the day off with me being the slacker. I woke up late, took 30 minutes to shower, and found 2 pieces of hair in my egg salad sandwich. Enough about me, let’s move on to the family activities though I feel that I am way more interesting. Noah ditched the family and went to hang out with Alek Zimbalist. The rest of the gang went on a search through Mamilla Mall for kids Naots for Ilana. Then, we went to the time elevator. That was pretty cool. It was a 4-D movie (or as Eitan would say, “No it’s not.” And explain 4-D in some math words that most people don’t understand). The movie was basically like a roller coaster through time in Jerusalem, Naomi was pretty scared to go on it after she realized we need seat belts. Of course she ended up loving it. After, we went on a self- guided tour. My mom gave Ilana these pictures to find along the “tour”. You’re probably asking yourself, why did I use quotation marks around the word TOUR. Well, I did it because we could only find about 4 of the landmarks along the tour, so we ended up just giving up and buying ice cream. We walked up and down Jaffa and Ben-Yehuda streets on yet another search for Naots. We didn’t find any. Then the family went home to pick up Noah and head off to the Menachem Begin Heritage Center. It was all different movies about his life. It was very interesting. We ate at this restaurant called Cup a Joe. It looked very good but unfortunately we all had stomachaches, so we didn’t really get to eat the good food. We came home and now my mom is at the
Emak Refaim looking at some art and a present for Ella Perlman, she’s turning 4. So here I am now finishing up the blog.

Guess who?
(tune in next time to find out)

Sima’s addendum:
While the kids were sleeping and slacking this morning, I was doing research and making phone calls to set up our activities over the next week and a half. One of the places that I really wanted to visit is the Begin Museum, but they were not answering the phone and you must have reservations in advance. As Google maps showed the museum to be a nine minute walk, I thought I’d take a pilot trip to find the museum and make reservations. Well, Google was right that it is nine minutes away, but it was a different nine minute walk than the one shown on the map… So after 25 minutes and a ramble through the Yemin Moshe neighborhood I eventually sought directional hope, found the huge impossible to miss building, and made reservations. The rest of the day is as described above until after the Begin Museum. After enjoying the beautiful view form the patio of the museum we did a short walk around the area, stopping first at the Lions Fountain which was a gift from Germany to Israel and has several spitting lions. The girls enjoyed wetting their hair in the lion spit and frolicking in the fountain. Then we walked over to Montefiore’s Windmill, and for a family stroll around the Yemin Moshe neighborhood. This was one of the first neighborhoods built outside the Old City walls in the 1850’s. When East Jerusalem was under Jordanian control, this neighborhood was in the line of fire from snipers. Now it is beautiful, upscale neighborhood with quaint narrow little streets, gorgeous flowers blossoming throughout, and houses overlooking the Old City walls with flat screen TV’s inside (we peeked in the windows). I did later get an hour to myself to go to the grocery store and browse in a shop called Dahlia, but the best gift of all was that I came home to four quiet, happy, peaceful children!