Linda Whittaker
Thursday, April 9, 2009 10:33:51 AM
To:Linda Olsvig-Whittaker linda.whittaker@npa.org.il,
Linda Olsvig-Whittaker olsvig2000@yahoo.com
Hi everyone,
This has been a wonderful week. I'm on vacation, since our office is closed all during Passover anyway (from today until next Wednesday). I just rounded it out with a few extra days at beginning and end and got two solid weeks' vacation, 17 days without having to get up at 4:30 am. Haven't ever done this before and it is great.
Sunday, I volunteered at the cat shelter and got that out of the way. Things are looking better there since they hired an extra staff member to do dirty work, but nobody knows where his salary will come from next month....well, they always did operate that way, so I won't ask questions. I just volunteer washing cat dishes....
~pixs Googled PSL
Sunday, my friend Susana Nasser and I took the train down to Tel Aviv. It was wonderful. Breakfast on Rambam Street, a pedestrian area just beside the Carmel Market, in the kind of outdoor cafe so typical of Tel Aviv, with some pretension to class. Street buskers, shoppers, and a pleasant springtime sun and clear sky. We dived into the Carmel Market, which was jammed with frantic pre-Passover shoppers buying their new dishes and tableclothes, elbowing their ways along the narrow paths between stalls. We struggled through that, emerging in the Yemenite quarter with its funny little houses (two story with one room on each floor), and sniffed the wonderful spicy smells of Yemenite cooking (part Arab, part Indian, part African) at all the little two-table cafes on nearly every lane in this odd little neighborhood. (We made a mental note to come back and investigate this better at a later date.)
Beyond the Yemenite quarter were some drab modern business buildings, the ruined Dolphinarium (a club destroyed in a terrorist attack some years ago) and then the sea. Despite the rough weather, people were surfing off the beach, in wetsuits, and further out to sea were a bunch of windsurfers, sail up, doing their own thing. We walked along the seafront promenade all the way to Jaffa, mostly having it to ourselves since Sunday is a working day in Israel.
The Tel Aviv-Jaffa promenade leads to the old harbor, which is a walled citidel dating back to the Crusaders, I would guess. Carried on by the Mameluks and the Ottomans, it is now a regular rabbit warren. One has to climb through narrow foot-passages to get from the harbor to St. Peter's Church on top, next to the traditional site for the house of Simon the Tanner (it's in the Book of Acts). Jaffa is a Catholic administrative center, an episcopilate or bishoparic or something like that, and gets a lot of Catholic pilgrims. That means good fish restaurants. We zeroed on one next to the cathedral, an Arab fish restaurant. Susana (a Slovak married into a Christian Arab family) did the talking and once they got over the surprise of this blonde, blue-eyed Arabic speaker, we got the best seat in the house, a view of the sea, and excellent service. Fresh sea bream, laffa, and Arabic salads, finished off with a finjan of coffee and some sweet baklawa. Happy tummy.
~ PSL Tel Aviv Sunset
This was indeed fun; I haven't been out and around in the Tel Aviv area for many years, not counting a few trips to Tel Aviv University. The atmosphere is very different from Jerusalem, more tolerant and multi-cultural. For Susana especially it was like a breath of fresh air. We agreed that we have to do this again, soon.
The rest of the week, I've been puttering about. Time to put away the winter clothing and get out the summer clothing, discarding what I don't want any more. Time to do household chores and repairs. I'm already losing track of the days since my life isn't driven by an hour-by-hour calendar.
We had the traditional communal Passover feast at our congregation, a seder more civilized than usual since we limited it only to those people who contributed work to the meal and didn't accept cash payments in lieu of work. (That dropped the group from 100+ down to 60 people.) Of course our oldest people got in gratis, since they are over 70 or 80, but otherwise even the kids did their share. Nice, relaxed atmosphere, one of the most enjoyable Passover celebrations I can remember.
So now I have a week more of the same. No big plans. Visit friends a bit, do a lot on the house, and mainly catch up on rest and restoration, badly needed. I'll hit the ground running again after this holiday, with a new grad student from Holland under my supervision, but for now it is beautiful spring weather, the flowers are at peak, and I'm appreciating all this.
shabbat shalom,
Linda
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http://shabbat-shalom-jerusalem.blogspot.com/
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