Wednesday night was not a good sleeping night. My jetlag kicked in big time. I slept great until about 6:30 when I woke up completely wired. I was really really awake until about 9:30 when I completely crashed again. I slept until almost noon when David forced me to get out of bed. That’s one of the ways I know he really loves me because he knew that if I didn’t get out of bed I would be worthless for yet another day and would never get over my jetlag. We were going to try to visit Ariel, the same friend that we had failed to see the day before. When we found out that she might not be able to meet us we were really lazy and just lounged around the house. Then her plans got cancelled so we went into town to hang out at her house. We sat with her for a couple of hours and caught up. She is one of my closest friends here and she and David are also close and we are close with her boyfriend too so it’s a really nice connection. I also crash at her house whenever I don’t have a place to sleep. Her family is amazingly hospitable and it has really rubbed off on Ariel. I am really excited to finally be able to be in a position to pay them back for all of the things they have done for me over the years.
She had dinner plans with her mom which is just as well because David’s parents called and invited us to dinner. We went to a really good meat restaurant (Joy) on Emek Refaim (the main street through my neighborhood). Dinner was nice and then I went with David’s parents to the wine store to learn a little something about wines while David davened mincha.
Noa my youngest cousin was the only one I hadn’t seen yet and she was in town that evening. After dinner we went to the center of town to meet up with her. We didn’t work out the timing very well and ended up basically walking her to her bus stop. Fortunately it was an unbelievably lovely evening and the bus stop was about 10 minutes away. We chatted with her and waited for her bus. It was nothing special but it was nice to get to see her!
David and I meandered back to the car. It was such a nice evening that we didn’t mind being out walking. One of the things I love about Jerusalem is how cool and pleasant it gets at night. It really is a pleasure to wander with a slight chill in the air and a soft breeze. We waited for Ari to come back from karate so we could drive him home. Nothing exciting there.
On the way home one of David’s closest friends from yeshiva called. He had been stationed at an outpost not too far from David’s house and said he would love to have us come visit. This friend, Eliran, happened to be one of my favorites of David’s friends so I really wanted to go see him. We dropped Ari off, got directions, and headed out. It was not the most successful endeavor. The directions weren’t great and the road was pitch black. It was an area that David had never been to and as it is considered the west bank it’s not the safest place to be alone at night and unarmed. He usually has a gun from the army but because he had just finished officer’s training and had switched bases he didn’t have a new gun yet. Once we realized that we had no cell phone service and that this place was much farther along than we’d anticipated I started getting nervous. It’s really not the safest thing and we didn’t see any other vehicle traffic, Arab or Israeli, and that made us even more nervous. We decided to turn around much to the dismay of Eliran. We couldn’t call him for directions or encouragement because our phones didn’t work so we couldn’t let him know that we were ok until he had already started to worry about us. Maybe if David had been armed we would have continued but neither of us were comfortable (mostly me) and figured it was better to turn back.
At home we did some more reading and almost finished the first chapter!!
No comments:
Post a Comment