Israel. Pesach 2022. Day 3. There is No Jelly in This Hotel.
Last night was okay. Madeleine woke up around 530 and started crying and wouldn’t let me go so I ended up sleeping in their room for the rest of the night. Good thing we have that second bed in there now that Robyn went home.
[Tzvi: I think I woke up around 7am feeling very lonely and wondering where everyone was. After I found Steph I tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t, so I just read for a couple of hours, which was actually kind of nice.]
Tzvi came in around 9am, then we all got dressed and went to breakfast. There’s nothing else quite like a good Israeli hotel breakfast and the Orient’s is pretty good. Because it shabbat there weren’t freshly made to order items, but I’ll describe the general breakfast. When you come in a waiter takes your order for coffee and eggs; coffee is always the weakest part of breakfast because they can’t really do decaf correctly. There’s one buffet table with lox, herring (ew), egg salad, tuna and other salads. There’s another buffet table with just cheeses, which Tzvi really enjoyed. There was another table with desserts and fruits – there was a really good fruit salad with apples. Then there were quiches, pancakes, waffles, grilled vegetables, scrambled eggs, hard boiled eggs and shakshuka. Finally, the center of the buffet was a table of just pizzas. That’s right – breakfast pizzas. Even for pesach, everything was really good. I cant wait for the last few days of the trip when pesach is over and they turn everything back to chametz.
By the time we were done with breakfast it was maybe close to 11am and we decided to take a walk so we went across the street to the Tahcana Rishona and walked through. Madeleine was enjoying walking and Hallie was enjoying being in the stroller (at this age isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?). Every time a dog would pass by Madeleine would want to pet it.
We walked for a while along the old train tracks, which have been turned into a park, kind of like the High Line in NYC. At one point we came to a book stand that was kind of like a take-a-book, leave-a-book kind of thing (like the old penny dishes in NYC delis). Basically people left books there and you could take whatever you wanted for free. There was a sign that said ‘please only leave books that are of general interest,’ except there were lots of random things like obscure textbooks and high school yearbooks from America. Hallie found a children’s book in English and took it home.
Eventually we made our way back to the hotel and made it to lunch around 1:30pm. Our friends Abby, Mordy and Ronnie Kehat joined us for lunch. We had a little snafu at lunch because the seating was all mixed up. Basically Tzvi sat down exactly where he wanted to sit (in the middle of the table – Tzvi’s a good middle), but then I (not realizing that he had been sitting where he wanted to) moved him to the end of the table where he couldn’t be part of any conversation, and so he spent the first half of the meal visibly sulking. But then my mom switched with him and he got to enjoy the rest. The food was good – another great buffet. The best thing was this amazing cold cauliflower that we ate several plates of. No idea what was on it – it kind of tasted like techina, but it couldn’t have been because the hotel is no-kitniyot.
Madeleine was going crazy and running around the whole dining room and by the end she had taken off her dress and was running around naked. So, when you see those families with naked children and think who are those idiot parents who let their kids run around like that, we are those parents. Finally I got her dress back on but then she took her shoes off, so you know, can never be fully dressed.
I think they kicked us out of lunch a little after 3pm. We went to the indoor pool. The water was kind of cold but the girls had a good time. Eventually they got out and we tried to look for some food for them to eat. We first tried the meat restaurant on the roof, but it was already closed. Next we tried the lobby bar, but the menu was just all salads and something called “salt-fish” so there was nothing for them. We asked if they could just give us matzah and jelly, but they said they didn’t have jelly. At that point we noticed that Abby was still hanging out at the front of the hotel (she had been visiting other people who were staying here). We told her what was happening and she said they must have misunderstood us because there was no way they didn’t have jelly, so she went back to the restaurant and tried again in Hebrew, but they confirmed they had no jelly at all. Next she went to the front desk and said they must have jelly because they have jelly at breakfast, and then after making a couple of phone calls the woman at the front desk confirmed that there was no jelly to be had anywhere in the hotel. Apparently the breakfast store room was locked and there was no way to get the jelly. Awesome.
At that point Abby said we should just walk back to her house to eat. Madeleine fell asleep on the walk. Abby fed the kids matzah and jelly and applesauce and corn tortillas (yes – on pesach, hooray kitniyot!). Madeleine woke up and ate as well. Then we waited for Mordy to get home to make Havdalah and then they drove us back to the hotel.
We quickly showered the kids and got them ready for bed. The plan had been to go out with my parents and Avery and Gabs and leave the kids with Robyn, but that didn’t work out, so Tzvi went with them and I stayed back.
[Tzvi: For dinner we had made a reservation at Luciana, an Italian restaurant at Mamilla mall. Originally the reservation was for six people, but when we showed up we were only five people and they were all mixed up, so they gave us a table for four and stuck a chair on the end. That’s Israel for you. The food took forever to come – like there were people who sat down, ordered, ate and left in the time it took us to get our food. Everything was actually pretty good though. I had a Caesar salad with egg and we all shared a pizza, which was actually delicious.
After dinner we walked through Mamilla a little bit. There was an American man who was trying to get people to book a tour with him the next day. He looked pretty crazy – I think he had signs attached to himself, as well as a little speaker system and was talking into a microphone. “Once in a lifetime opportunity, a tour of the conflict zone with the former mayor of Jerusalem. Once in a lifetime. Five hour tour.” We kept trying to avoid him, but at one point he started following us. Avery made the mistake of engaging with him. Avery said no thank you and that we had plans, and the guy asked what we had, so Avery was honest and told him we were going to the beach. Then he kind of freaked out and told him he was crazy if he thought going to the beach was more important than this once in a lifetime opportunity! You’re never supposed to engage with these people.]
Back at the hotel, the girls watched their tablets a little while I tried to pack up and prep for tomorrow, because we’re going to Tel Aviv tomorrow but also switching rooms. Then they went to sleep and I did a little exercise, and that was pretty much it.
