Day 10. April 14, 2017.  one day of yomtov.

We woke up around 830 and made it out for breakfast by 930.  Pretty sure Hallie had managed to get herself a new cold.  Joy.

Breakfast was mostly the same, but today we discovered whipped cream cheese, which meant I was able to have my one cheese of the year  - matzah with cream cheese and jelly and Tzvi had matzah with cream cheese and sliced cheese.  All was great, but it was no Temptee.

Around 1030 we met David Mitchell in the lobby.  David was my parents tour guide on the JNF trip they took last year.  They called him as a friend and arranged to go to the Botanical Gardens together, but Tzvi kept making jokes that they were going to have pay him as a tour guide. 

As we were leaving the hotel, we saw a woman get run over by a luggage trolley.  The woman fell to the ground and probably just scraped her leg, but she really milked it and kept laying there.  My parents went over and sort of stood there, but didn’t announce themselves as doctors.  Eventually we just left.  Me, Tzvi and my mother got in a cab, while my father and David got in David’s car, and we all drove to the Botanical Gardens in the hills by Hebrew U.  When we got there we realized that David had also brought his wife, who had short grey hair and dressed kind of homeless, barely seemed to speak English and just sort of wandered along.

The Botanical Garden is kind of like the Biblical Zoo except without the animals to keep you entertained.  We basically spent three hours going up and down hills looking at dead flowers.       David stopped to look at and explain every single flower, which was excruciating.  Along the way we met Yishai, a tour guide that we had on a trip 10 years ago, who was also friends with David. I noticed two things walking through: 1. Israelis aren’t on their phones every second and 2. Israeli women start out beautiful with long hair and guns and end up old lesbian-looking short-haired women. How?

After the gardens we decided to all go to Mamilla for lunch and called a taxi to take us.  Me and Tzvi and my father took the cab, while my mother, David and Ruti drove in David’s car.  Our cab driver was great.  He said he spends 3 months a year in Flatbush and one month in South Carolina (how do these cab drivers have so much money?) and he and my father talked about basketball and cruising.  We got stuck in terrible traffic, but I think he used a bus lane and then made an illegal left turn and got us there really quickly.

We had lunch at Roladin, which turned out to be kitniot, which wasn’t a big problem.  We ordered fantastic iced coffees, and got Hallie a kitniot pizza, which she ate about half of.  I ordered a tuna salad, and Tzvi had sweet potato ravioli with mushroom cream sauce that he said tasted like real pasta.  The meal dragged on forever and I think Tzvi even fell asleep at one point.  We (us and Avery and Gabs and Austin) decided we would go to Ben Yehuda to do some shopping, but by the time we got out of the restaurant it was after 3, and by the time we were leaving Mamilla it was basically 4, and we knew that everything at Ben Yehuda would be closed, so we just went back to the hotel.

Now we’re getting ready for Shabbos.  As my father told us multiple times, Shabbos dinner is a buffet.  The Cohens are coming for dinner, so it should be a fun night.