The Laughlins

On Saturday we walked to Aroma Café and had breakfast there. We then walked to the Jaffa Gate, where we changed money and bought a floor rug and a shofar (ram’s horn). I am not very good at it yet, and Mark says that it is the most annoying noise in the world ☺ We get fresh bags of oven-cooked (fire oven) pitas at Jaffa Gate as well (for less than $1 a bag). Mark took me up a tiny winding staircase in an old Lutheran church for an incredible view (from all sides) of the Old City). That is where all of the city pictures are taken from, including the Dome of the Rock (gold-domed building). We also went to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which is very ornate and has incredible celings. As kind of a gross side-note, there are many cats all over the place in Israel that were apparently brought in to curb a rat problem. Well, now there is a cat problem, and we watched a man throwing a gross, stiff, dead cat out in a pile of trash in an alley near the church. (I won’t include that picture for the cat-lovers and faint-hearted.) We walked home.
On Sunday we went to all of the stores (since they are all closed on Saturday – Shabbat). We spent the day fixing up our apartment, which is talked about in my next entry.