Afternoon Adventures

After a long and productive day, we met up in the shuk for dinner. We wanted to go to a small whole-in-the-wall called Azura, but they were closing. However, we did have time for the following conversation to take place:
"Do you have kosher certification?" Jon asked.
"No, do you have kosher certification?" the owner replied.
"No, I don't, but at home I know what's going into my food."
"Here too! We're Jews, just like you. Don't trust the Rabbanut!"
We wound up at another grill-and-humus joint, where we had some fantastic soup. The meat-filled kubbeh were as large as an infant's shoe! Little baby Ezra would have looked adorable wearing them!


After dinner we did some quick shopping in the market. At a fruit stand we're pretty sure we saw Hagrid. He was without his umbrella, but was easily identifiable by his massive size - at least 100 times the size of little baby Ezra!

Later in the evening we finally made it to the Off the Wall Comedy Basement to hear David Kilimnick's "Aliyah Monologues." He was very funny and made great observations about the ridiculousness of an American's life in Israel. One of our favorite bits was the comparison between the Israeli גבר גבר and the American חמוד . Cute as David was, though, he doesn't even come close to little baby Ezra!

We closed out the evening with another free concert at the Jerusalem Theater, which is thankfully still celebrating the Israel Festival. The show tonight was a quartet - bass, drums, and two guitars - of middle aged Israeli men playing American hits from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Their accents were dead-on and their music was a lot of fun to listen to, and they had the room packed to capacity, with many people doing the hippy-hippy shakes. We were both surprised at how many Israelis knew the words to the songs, as we figured they probably had other things on their minds in those initial years of statehood.