The Laughlins

On Monday we took a taxi to the German Colony. We went the Natural History Museum and then grabbed a coffee from Aroma. We did a bit more walking around town and then had lunch at a pizza place. The pizzas here are mostly kosher, which means that they don’t mix meat and cheese (meat and dairy), so we had cheese pizza, which was very good. We also did our first real blunder there when we tried to buy a DVD. They have large vending machines of sorts where you can buy (and rent) videos. We didn’t know about the renting part, and after we got someone to help us buy it (since it was all in Hebrew), we thought, “Hmmm…that’s pretty cheap. I wonder if it is a rental?” Luckily we got some help again and found out that it was a rental, but if you return it to the machine within ten minutes, you are not charged…so we didn’t have to pay anything, but we learned a lesson ☺ We walked from the German Colony to the Jaffa gate of the Old City. Along the way, Mark said that he thought he remembered a place they stopped at with his IBEX group four years ago. It turns out that he has an amazing memory when it comes to anything he has studied/visited in Israel, which is good, since that is what he wants to teach. We ended up walking up this street to a St. Andrews Church, peering down over their fencing, and finding some burial caves that Gaby Barkai had excavated. They were enclosed within the fence of a large cultural center building, so we walked down to the building, asked if we could go around the back, and soon found ourselves peering into old burial caves…just like Indiana Jones ☺ I was very impressed that Mark remembered and found such an obscure location. When we got to the Jaffa Gate, we did the Rampart Walk. We basically paid about 24 NIS ($5-6) altogether to walk along the top of the city wall. It goes around the entire city, but since I had not planned to walk quite that far (and my blisters popped on the wall), we only walked around about 1/3 of the wall, but that was about a mile in (to Herod’s Gate), and then a mile back to the Jaffa Gate again. We visited Shabaan again (our money changer) and then had chicken shwarma for lunch. We took a taxi home from there.