Day 5. April 9, 2017.  not pesach yet.

We woke at 6 am to the beautiful sounds of Hallie’s coughing.  We went through the whole croup routine.  Coughing, mucus vomits, saline, suction, prednisone, more mucus vomits, and then finally around 730 she went back to sleep.

 We got out of bed around 9, got ready and went down to breakfast.  Another great breakfast.  We were at breakfast for a while, then we left the hotel and took a cab to the old city to pick up Hallie’s Hadaya bracelet.  It came out really nice.  My father got a begalach that we all shared – a nice bit of chametz.  Then we got pretzel samples from Mr. Pretzel.  They weren’t bad, and we were all surprised when they told us they were actually potato flour and kosher for pesach.  It wasn’t a great pretzel, but still impressive.

Before leaving the old city we made a stop at the Blue and White art gallery to see Udi.  We’ve been visting Udi’s gallery for years and my parents have a lot of art they’ve bought from him.  Tzvi and I have bought a couple of things from him too, including our Agam painting and a painting of the kotel Udi did, which was a “draft” of a painting he did that’s hanging in the president’s office (Rivlin, not Trump).  Today he had a lot of new things – he was sick for a couple of years, and since he’s recovered he’s been painting in new styles.  One of his new paintings was a beautiful large black and white painting of the kotel that was just really different.  Since we obviously couldn’t afford that, we spotted the small black and white test painting he did for that painting and right away said we’d take it. Maybe one day we’ll graduate from test paintings. Then my mother saw a beautiful round painting of the kotel that she loved, and when she said she wanted to buy that one, he said he would give us the black and white one for free!

After the old city we took a cab over to Ben Yehuda.  We walked around for a bit trying to decide what to eat and eventually settled on Café RImon, which was not kosher for Passover yet.  For a last chametz meal, I had an Asian stirfry with noodles and veggies, and Tzvi had a salad with two different cheeses and sweet potato chips.  Also, my father got pizza and we all had some of that.  From there we walked all the way to Machane Yehuda.  We first stopped at marzipan where the rugalach was still warm, totally unbaked, and dripping in chocolate.  Disgusting but delicious.  Then we walked all the way through the shuk, which is normally crazy, but was especially so with a stroller.  It’s so narrow and there are so many people.  According to Tzvi, the shuk has actually been getting a lot of attention lately in travel media; the NY Times travel section and some other travel magazines and websites have been writing about it as a serious culinary destination when visting Jerusalem.  I think because of that you could tell that a lot of the stalls have really fixed themselves up, made things nicer, and put up nice modern signs.  We bought some dried fruit that was insanely overpriced, but tasty.

After the shuk we walked all the way back down Yafo, passed Ben Yehuda, tried to get a coffee at Aroma (it took ten minutes after ordering for them to tell us the machine was broken), then walked all the way back to Mamilla where I finally got the iced coffee at Aroma.  Hallie once again enjoyed walking through Mamilla, and even found a chasid playing guitar that she enjoyed dancing to. All this to the soundtrack of some serious coughing.

We walked back to the hotel and started to pack up as we were going to be moving hotels in the morning.  While Hallie napped, we got ready to go, and then at 730 went downstairs for dinner at the King’s Garden restaurant in the lobby.  The boys had just flown in for dinner and Austin met us at the restaurant (Avery was going out with Gabriella’s parents.)  The restaurant is the hotel’s dairy place, and was certainly not the strongest part of the hotel.  While the old city views are nice, the food left something to be desired.  Tzvi really couldn’t decide what to get and ended up getting pecan and cheese blintzes.  He said they were fine, but after tasting Austin’s penne he regretted not going with a pasta dish (which is really saying something considering its kosher for Passover pasta). I ordered the nicoise salad, which basically turned out to be a large leaf of lettuce, some boiled potatoes and some weird marinated tuna that tasted like whitefish and was horrible.  Everyone agreed the tuna was weird, and when we told the waiter he offered to take it back and bring something else.  I ended up ordering an omelet, which was just eh.  For dessert we got crème brulle, which was actually very good. Visible vanilla bean.

After dinner we went back up to the room, got Hallie ready for bed, finished packing up ourselves as much as we could, and went to sleep.