Went to the beach yesterday in Tel-Aviv. It required getting out of class a bit early, around noon. We were on the beach by 2pm, and enjoyed a nice, if not warm, day. It's still chilly, and definitely not swimming weather, but the beach is still a great place to lay around. Probably in about a month I'll be swimming. Israelis generally don't swim until May, but I am a bit of a pioneer when it comes to cold water. I even walked into the water up to my knees yesterday. How brave of me. There were a couple of kite-surfers. These are people on small surf boards who use 'kites', actually small parachutes, to catch wind. This allows them to surf at great speeds and to do all sorts of jumps and flips. Very impressive. After some shesh-besh, I forget what it's called in English but it's a great board game with dice and checkers moving around to form columns. You know what I mean. Anyways, we ate at Yotvata B'Ir. Yotvata is a kibbutz in the Arava Valley, which is in the south of Israel bordering Jordan. They make incredible milk products that are sold all over Israel. At some point very recently the kibbutzniks had a great idea that they should open, or at least franchise out, Yotvata restaurants all over Israel. The restaurants are halavi, meaning they have milk products and whatever else as long as it's not meat. The food is delicious if pricey. So far, there's one on the beach in Tel-Aviv and one in Jerusalem, and I think there's one in Rehovot.

The best way to get from Jerusalem to Tel-Aviv is to get to Kikar Zion, and catch a mekhonit sherut. From there. These are taxi-vans which fit ten passengers. They have routes, more or less, but you have to figure it out with the driver before you get on. Once the sherut is full, everyone pays 20 shekels and just over an hour later you're in Tel-Aviv. Brilliant. It brought us to the Takhana Merkazit, which is South Tel-Aviv. It's pretty sketchy, as most of South Tel-Aviv is now full of random foreign workers and all sorts of wonders of big city cosmopolitanism. As Tel-Aviv grows, the good comes with the bad. But most of the sketchiness is Philipinos and Romanians, generally I just feel bad for them. They work their asses off for low pay and have to live in sketchy areas. This is a fact in all large western cities, some people think it's colorful, I think it sucks. But the rest of Tel-Aviv is either hip, artsy or luxurious. Quite a nice place to live if you're secular or don't mind the predominance of the secular lifestyle.

A separate paragraph for the Israeli girls. You know there's a Kadosh Barukhu when you see lots of Israeli girls in one place. Easily half of them are so shockingly attractive you think you're on drugs and imagining things. The other half is still far better than anything I've see in the US. There are homely ones as well, but they are in the minority. I usually don't react to things, but my jaw literally dropped several times. This goes for all you girls out there as well. The guys are probably even more impressive than the girls. I should probably keep away from the beach if I want to keep my shomer negia streak going strong.

So around 8pm we made our way back to Jerusalem, again via sherut. Most have screens that display news, they are in Hebrew, but my language skills are getting good enough to deal with the news more or less. As you know, there have been several terrorist attacks in the past few days. There have also been published interviews with heads of terrorist groups, world net news daily mostly, wherein the terror leaders explicitly state that they are planning the 3rd intifada and that it will be in greater scope than the previous too. We recall the first intifada was in the late 80's, the second one started in October of 2000 and theoretically ended last year as a result of the building of the security barrier and IDF action. Round 3 is scheduled to begin soon, probably after Hamas solidifies its hold over all the functions of public life and all the streams of money previously controlled by the PLO. Once the new terror masters are in place, they'll have another go at us. I can only hope that the Israeli government responds in a much more brutal manner than in the past. The Arabs understand only the stick, not the carrot.