Sunday

Wow!! Tel Aviv is hot and humid. The guesthouse we’re staying at, Beit Emmanuel, is a Messianic Jewish Christian community and church. It has been around a fair while, and the room and accommodation is quite basic. We have a second floor private room with bathroom. And with very high ceilings, it means that the stairs are many. And our bags are heavy. And there’s no lift. You get the picture! Chris worked hard knowing that there’s no way Lynda could bring her own bag up those stairs.

At least we’ve got till Wednesday before that task has to happen again.

Once settled in we poured over the map and worked out where we might go to do some initial exploring and hopefully get a cheap light meal. We made our way to the beach about 6pm and the sun was still high in the sky. Lots of people were swimming and there were many umbrellas on the beach. We wandered north along the esplanade to try and find a little market where we might be able to just buy some food to take back to our room. Not much luck. We turned back and kept walking and eventually found a McDonald’s sign, flabbergasted that maccas could be our rescue for the night!! Well, macca’s was derelict, and had obviously been closed down for a long time! We did find a little minimart and bought some bread rolls, cold meat, yoghurt, juice and milk [and an arabic Kit Kat] and then next door to a fruit shop for bananas, peaches and tomatoes. That should do us for dinner that night and lunch for a day or two.

We had walked for an hour and a half, our clothes were drenched with sweat and were pleased to get back to our air conditioned room.

Monday

We shared in the provided breakfast in the dining room and had a ‘domestic’ morning, getting some washing and internet banking done before heading to the beach for a dip in the Mediterranean. There was quite a tow in all sorts of directions and we had to work hard even in the shallows. But still … we swum in the Mediterranean!!

It was wonderful to Skype Cam & Jen. Just to ‘see’ family is FANTASTIC! Great to catch up on some news. It was also fantastic to hear that Clare’s first day at her new job went well.

We then went walking, walking, walking. We basically traipsed Old Jaffa. Markets, markets, markets, derelict buildings, new buildings, mosques, churches, restaurants. We were grateful that even though it was hot and humid, it wasn’t as bad as yesterday. We got to the top of the hill and had a wonderful view of the beach we swam in earlier and walked along yesterday. Beautiful. We could see though, that the tow of the water had totally changed from the morning, and we both wished we were in the water then. But dinner beckoned. We were both hungry and soon found a nice little restaurant and ordered kebabs.