Saturday - Tel Aviv

So on Saturday we had a "free" day in Tel Aviv with no plans and as such, most of us slept in a lot. The hostel, Dizengoff Beach Apartments, was really nice and had a separate room with a double bed and then a foldout couch in the living room. And a nice big bathroom. The only bad thing was that the wifi was slow, weak, and unreliable. Oh yeah, and our shower curtain wasn't big enough to extend all the way around the bathtub so water would either get all over the floor near the door or all over the floor near the window. And the bathroom didn't have a little drain on the floor either so the tile just had to stay wet. It did have air conditioning, so I was super thankful for that because it was really hot.

We went to this one place that my book recommended called Benedict, a 24 hour breakfast place! Breakfast is my favorite meal by far. The wait was pretty long, like 8 parties ahead of us, but it went quick. The menu also seemed kind of expensive, but it was so worth it. The eggs benedict that I had came with my choice of drink, which included a champagne cocktail as one of the possibilities! So I definitely got that.

After that we went on another adventure to find an ice cream place also recommended in my book. We went into central Tel Aviv and found the place, which was called Iceberg. The employees there were super nice an patient with us, even when one of us accidentally threw a dirty tasting spoon into the whole bowl of clean ones, the employee said no problem and just replaced the whole bowl. When one of the customers had brought a dog in from the heat, one of the other employees got a bowl of water and gave it to the dog! A++ for service; the ice cream was pretty good, too.

Then a few of us went walking along the beach, meandering our way back up to where our hostel was. We saw a nice marina and some sailboats and lots of people at the beach. We stopped at a nice little cafe and had some drinks and watched the Mediterranean Sea for a while. I had a Tuborg, which I thought was pretty good.

When we walked further up the boardwalk to the Tel Aviv port, we saw this street entertainer who was doing Chinese yo-yo! I was pretty shocked to see that and he wasn't all that great, either. Richard wondered if the crowd even knew it was a Chinese thing (he was talking in Hebrew so we couldn't tell what he was saying to the crowd.

For dinner that night we went to another late night favorite that my book suggested, a place called Moses' Burger Station. We had some great burgers, although it didn't seem like they really understood medium-rare. It was either going to be medium or it was going to be rare. I tried to tell the guy I wanted medium-rare and he seemed to understand, but it definitely came out on the rare side.

Later, after dinner, we walked down to this hummus place that was supposed to be really good and 6 of us shared a bowl of hummus while 2 others got a bowl each. The hummus was pretty darn tasty and when we ordered another pita, the owner dude walked by and non-chalantly tossed the pita from his standing hand height all the way to our wooden bowl on the table, making a loud "wham!" on the table and sending Richard into a bout of laughter at how indifferently the guy delivered the pita.

That's all the adventures for Saturday. I'll try to get Sunday and Monday up tomorrow so I can start catching up!