Israel. Pesach 2022. Day 13. We’re Not Going Home… Not Really. Part 1.
Today was filled with ups and downs. There were certainly moments where we said ‘this is why people can’t stand this country’ and moments when we said ‘I cant believe we’re leaving this country.’
But let’s go back to the beginning and hash out every pleasant and unpleasant detail.
It all starts last night.
At around 10:15pm, I messaged my friend Einav (who you remember from day 1) to ask if she’d be working at the airport the next night. She said she’d be there, but that she had looked up our reservation and we should do our online check in immediately, because according to the reservation our seats were not together. We said that couldn’t be, because we had a booking confirmation from Joe Travel Agent saying he had paid $100 per seat to get us extra legroom seats 23 A, B, C, D and E. Nope. According to the system Hallie and Madeleine were sitting together in row 30, and the rest of us were scattered around the back of the plane in middle seats. You have to question to the capabilities of an airline that has a computer system that allows a 2 year old and a 6 year old to be seated together without any adults. It was crazy.
We tried to contact the travel agent but couldn’t get in touch. We tried to contact El Al but they were closed. Einav said she would talk to her supervisor, but there really wasn’t anything she could do at that point.
We were so stressed we just decided to eat our donut we had bought at Ne’eman at the mall and take a bath and try to get some sleep.
We woke up the next day bright and early. The woman from hatzolah came to the room to do the Covid test, except this was not a test. This was a swipe at the lower nostril. I mean, it was ridiculous. I think they Covid tested Tzvi’s mustache. Robyn looked at me and was like, ‘I don’t think she got inside my nose.’ Once she actually put the liquid into the tests she waited about 30 seconds (you’re supposed to wait 15 minutes) and then said ‘Negative!’ Not that I’m complaining – the point here is to be able to go home. I think we paid 1000 shekel for everyone, which is a lot, but I guess you get what you pay for…
Anyway, we were all thankful that we had negative tests and could fly home… in 16 hours. Once we finished the tests I tried to call El Al and spent a half hour on hold, before I finally got a live person who told me that several weeks ago they had switched the plane and they had sent an email to all of the passengers telling them that they needed to call immediately and rebook their seats. Apparently our email went to Joe Travel Agent, because when he made the reservation he put in his email address instead of ours, and he never called to rebook the seats. So even though we had paid $500 and they had kept that money, we weren’t getting seats (and yes, El Al did say that if we wanted a refund we could apply to get one). The El Al person told me that there was nothing he could do and no more seats anywhere on the plane and that we should just show up and they would work it out, because El Al has a policy of not seating children under 12 alone, but they couldn’t guarantee anything. What does that even mean.
After we received this great news we went for our last breakfast. I should say the hotel is great, and the food is great, but the food service really isn’t. A lot of them just aren’t that quick and don’t seem to know what they’re doing. Not sure if we ever wrote about this but at one point during the trip we asked one woman, in Hebrew, if we could get water, and her response was “I don’t speak English.” There was another waiter who we kept having at meals but always seemed very confused. My parents wanted to tip him so they had Tzvi give him and envelope of cash, and when he gave it to him the waiter didn’t understand. He kept asking what it was. I don’t think anyone has ever tipped him before. Anyway, this morning I ordered a chocolate milk for Hallie that just never came, and then after 20 minutes they brought me a hot chocolate, and I was just like, “No.” Whatever, we got it eventually. It was fine. We enjoyed the last breakfast.
[Tzvi: I did not enjoy the last breakfast. I was too stressed to enjoy the last breakfast, and that is something I will never ever forget. My 12th breakfast of the trip was stolen from me by El Al, and for that reason I will never fly them again. Until the next time I need to go to Israel.]
We took a cab to Machane Yehuda where we bought a bunch of dried fruit at Rosemary and a bunch of spices and onion soup mix at the spice store that Peas Love and Carrots tells you to go to. Basically you walk in and ask for onion soup mix, and she says “Peas Love and Carrots!” At both Rosemary and the spice store Tzvi had them weigh what we bought and it came out to about 10 pounds total. Not sure how that’s getting home.
Then we walked to this place near the shuk that Tzvi wanted to go for lunch. I was so nauseous from last night that I couldn’t even think of eating more meat, but Tzvi can describe his sandwich.
[Tzvi: The restaurant was called Aka and I had seen Michael Solomonov (of Philly/Zahav fame) post about it on Instagram. It was kind of a hole in the wall, and had a mural of Kim Cattrall crossing the street outside. The menu was all in Hebrew and when I asked for an English menu the kid behind the counter, who was clearly American, said they didn’t have an English menu but he’d explain it to me. I ended up ordering the goose leg sandwich. It was quite a process to watch. They put so much care into making this one sandwich. First they sliced a piece of ciabatta bread and basically fried it on the griddle in goose fat. Then they spread a garlic almond paste on one side and a salsa verde on the other. That was topped with roasted purple cabbage, radishes, pickled onions and arugula. Finally he pulled an entire goose leg and thigh out of a vat of liquid goose fat in which the goose had been confited (is that a word? It was goose confit – what’s the past tense of that?) and put that on the griddle to crisp up a little. Then he pulled all of the meat off the bones and loaded the shredded goose meat onto the sandwich. By the end of this I was salivating.]
While Tzvi waited for his sandwich we hopped on the light rail and road down to Ben Yehuda Street, where we walked to Pizza Hut and got pizza for the girls.
[Tzvi: I was surprised to find that not only had Steph and the girls not waited for me, they had actually taken a train and were now very far away. Actually, it ended up not being that far away because I walked it in less than 15 minutes. While the girls ate pizza, I ate my sandwich, and I have to say, this may have been the best sandwich I have ever had. It was so perfectly salty and crispy and just a bomb of different flavors. Well done.]
When they were done eating, Robyn got the girls little bouncy balls from a gumball machine. Madeleine kept throwing hers into the street and Tzvi kept going after it. Everyone was happy. Everything was great. And then she threw it too far and it actually went into the street and started bouncing down the street (which was a hill). Tzvi carried Madeleine and ran after it, but it just kept bouncing and by the time they made it to the bottom of the hill it was gone.
A sign of things to come?