It’s a lazy day today – since it’s a holiday, most of the country is closed. I slept in, since I needed to catch up on the sleep I missed out on due to waking up so early the past few days! After a very light breakfast, I caught up on emails and news, then headed over to pick up a few items for my aunt who is making her famous kugel for thursday night’s meal. A few hours late, I went over to my cousin’s place, grabbing a “sabich” for lunch on the way. It’s a sandwich that has hummus, tahina, eggplant, lettuce, tomato, onion, egg, parsley and tastes really really good. After hanging with my cousins for a bit, I headed back to my sisters, to help with the rest of the preparation for the holiday meal.
After a nap, we headed out to Ariel, where my brother-in-law’s family lives. As mentioned earlier, it’s one of the largest Jewish “settlements” in the West Bank. I use quotes around the word because, for all intents and purposes, it’s become a rather large city in it’s 30 year history. Not exactly mobile homes or anything like that. The drive there was interesting, since we took the freeway that suddenly was blocked off by an IDF checkpoint as we entered crossed the “green line” into the West Bank. They didn’t mind so much who was leaving Israel, as who was re-entering! It was nice to see more of the extended in-law family, and dinner was amazingly good. (As an aside, my cousins brought their Colt M4 Carbines with them… with ammo… “just in case”.) When we left, it was interesting to notice that the road to the right of the city was blanketed in darkness…. but to the left, bright street lights shone the way back to the green line. So that was rather interesting – definitely a sense of “don’t go THAT way!” We passed through the IDF checkpoint with no problem, and then were back on our way to Tel Aviv.