Day 4 - Port of Tel Aviv

So after 15 hours sleep (well 13 for me as I was up from 2:00 till 4:00 trying to figure out how to blog on an iPad - Note to my brother-in-law Adam, BlogPad Pro app not working for me so back to Blogger on Internet) we had our first breakfast in Tel Aviv. Lots of carbs on the menu with hard boiled eggs, cheese and pickled salmon the only proteins. Looks like I may become a vegetarian on this trip. On the plus side the coffee is great here and after 4 cups I'm ready to explore Tel Aviv.

We trekked off to Tel Aviv Port which is sort of like Granville Island with a Jewish flair. The hardest part of getting there was the elevator in our hotel. Today is Saturday, Shabbat - the day of rest. To explain this to my non Jewish friends, today you are not supposed to do any work, which includes pressing a button in the elevator to select a floor. As such one of the 4 elevators in our hotel is programmed to stop on every floor, so no need to press a button. I of course got onto this elevator and proceed to spend the next 5 minutes being introduced to floor 17, floor 16, floor 15 (you get the picture) and finally found freedom at lobby level. A half hour walk later and we entered the historic port of Tel Aviv.

(Directory was in Hebrew but we managed to make our way around)

Being Shabbat there wasn't a whole lot of activity in what you could tell would normally be a busy place, but we walked around and scoped out several possible restaurants for dinner that evening.

And a nice dinner we had indeed. We went to a restaurant that I thought was called "ntyoD".

I was starting to get used to the fact that, like in Canada, everything was written in two languages. However I could not pronounce the restaurants name. I asked Sheryl if she could and she said Hebrew is written right to left, which made sense as the "D" was capitalized. After rearranging the letter I still could not pronounce "Doytn". After several minutes of listening to Sheryl and Samantha laugh at me I was then informed the entire restaurant name was in Hebrew. I still can not pronounce the name but if you are planning on going to Israel and want to try this restaurant, look for this sign

The restaurant we were at is next door.

Anyway, another boring blog as we are again calling it an early night, but tomorrow we're taking a city tour which includes Old Jaffa, Sarona Gardens and (gulp) the Israeli Diamond Exchange. Someone please remind me to leave my wallet at home.