Scenic Views and Other Highlights: Jerusalem Week 2

Since I spent a lot of my last post giving you a general sense of what's been going on here for me, I decided this time I would instead offer just a few of the highlights from my experience in Jerusalem so far.
- Rock climbing - under the Teddy Stadium there's a brand new rock climbing gym - who knew?! Yossi and I went last Tuesday and had a great time, and I'm hoping to convince some Yeshiva friends to go with me again.
- The Egged bus system: Israeli bus drivers are actually very friendly and willing to help confused passengers like yours truly. They'll even remind you when they reach the stop you asked about when you got on timidly and verified that you were on the right bus.
- The Tayelet is a beautiful "promenade" area overlooking the entire gorgeous city of Jerusalem from the south in Talpiyot. Apparently it's one of the most common tourists stops, but for some reason I can't ever remember having gone there. It's incredible. Yossi and I walked over to it from his cousins house on Friday morning before Shabbat , and I was blown away by the view. (I'll post pictures as soon as Yossi e-mails them to me)
- Bowling! Jerusalem has a brand new bowling alley neat the mall, and after going out to dinner with basically everyone from the Yeshiva for Simona's birthday, a bunch of us headed over there to check it out. Funniest experience - watching super-religious Jews go bowling. It's just silly.

Today was Yossi's last day in town, since he's spending tonight in Ra'anana and flying home tomorrow. We spent the whole day together, and despite my tendency to want to know everything that's going on, I let him plan exactly what we were going to do and leave all of it as a surprise for me. He took me to lunch at the most incredibly-located cafe. It's in the neighborhood called Yemin Moshe, and from our seats next to the windows, we had a spectacular view of the outer wall of the old city and all of the surrounding area. It was a clear and bright gorgeous day despite the cold, and we just soaked in the scenery over lunch. We also spent a while walking around in the Machaneh Yehudah area - it's this incredible open air market with just about anything you could possibly want to buy. I happen to really like seeing lots of bright colored things all lined up next to each other, so I just had fun looking around:


Yossi didn't want to sit on the floor with the spices, but he did long enough to me to take a picture!

I've got a bunch more fun activities on my list, and I'm sure there will be plenty of unexpected ones as well. Stay warm, wherever you are, and don't forget to write.