Grace in Jerusalem: Electric Avenue

So we're here! One unpleasant black hole of a flight in which I had to restrain myself from throttling the snooty blonde family in the row in front of us, and we've made it to Israel. As it was my first overseas flight, there are a couple things I learned.
1- for the love of god, bring some sort of pillow or neck rest
2- don't eat the food. just don't. unless it's honey nut cheerios..you can eat that.
3- sleeping on planes is highly overrated (in the sense that it's awesome and if you can do it I hate you because I can't).

but in the grand scheme none of that matters because WE MADE IT!
and it's really super freaking pretty.

see what I mean? Seriously, come on.

So Pavel's (Andie's boyfriend) parents are kind enough to host us for the first couple of days of our trip, and his step dad Johnny picked us up from the airport..which was not as stressful as I was expecting, to be quite honest. It seemed to get a little tense when we told the immigration officer we wanted stamps on a separate sheet, but she did it anyways and we moved through without a problem.

1st thing I confirmed when we got outside? Chuck all your ideas about some blistering hot country, because there is one hell of an awesome sea breeze constantly flowing around here.

2nd thing was just how close everything is to each other... I mean it really is a tiny country, and it puts all of the tension and conflict in a new light. These aren't areas 13 hours away from each other that it's easy to forget about. They're right there next to each other- in each others eyesight constantly.

Annnyways. We got back to their house in Kfar Malal, which is a small community about 20 minutes from Tel Aviv that is one of the oldest Jewish cities in Israel- in fact last night they were celebrating the 100th year anniversary and we got to go and watch performances (all in Hebrew, so it was fun to try and interpret what they were saying). It was absolutely beautiful outside.

After that we stopped by this small gallery of local artists from the community.

considering how small the community is there is a LOT of talent

Today we went into Tel Aviv and explored Old Jaffa (FREAKING SWEET), visited a souk and got some tasty falafel, checked out the after party of the massive gay pride parade and got to walk along the beach before we headed back to their house.

STREET ART! It's pretty prevalent and awesome around here so expect lots and lots of these.

The whole jet lag thing has thus far been pretty difficult- mostly because I was a dumbass and consumed WAY too much caffeine yesterday so by the time i was trying to get to sleep I was wired to hell... but the lack of sleep paid off in the form of complete exhaustion today, so hopefully I'll just pass out tonight and be done with it.

Nothing other than that to report..so I'm just going to leave off with more pictures!