Home Sweet Home

It's official...I now live in Tel Aviv; in the neighborhood of Kiryat Shalom to be specific.
Tuesday morning we said goodbye to Kibbutz Ketura and headed north to Tel Aviv, our home for the next ten months. We moved into our humungous apartment and spent the day getting settled and getting to know the neighborhood. We live in a low income neighborhood a little east from the beach and Jaffa. It is also a pretty conservative and religious community. We are really close to a lot of essentials, like a bank, grocery, and clinic. It is also really easy to get to public transportation to get to the rest of Tel Aviv. There are still a few quirks to work out in our new home, but I am sure it will feel like home sweet home in no time.
Yesterday was the start of Rosh Hashana. It's weird to be in a place where the whole city, the whole country even, closes down for a Jewish holiday. Stores close, public transportation stops running, it's intense. For those of us who do not have family here, we were invited to have dinner with host families in Tel Aviv. My friend Katie and I went to dinner in North Tel Aviv with a woman named Phyllis. She is very interesting, when she came to Israel in the '70s she basically introduced health food to Israel and wrote the first vegetarian cook book here. We had a great time. Her family was really really kind and fun to be with. It was nice to have a home to go to since I am so far from home.
Today was beach day. Since nothing else was open we trekked to the beach. The beach in Jaffa is about an hour walk from our apartment. I'm gonna get a great exercise walking around Tel Aviv this year. The beach was beautiful. Old Jaffa was in the background and the Mediterranean was very blue. We swam and vegged, and watched a boy dog continually get shut down by his female companion. She wanted nothing to do with him but he refused to give up. It was like watching a doggy soap opera..."These are the dogs of our lives"...we had a really good time watching this dog continue to chase his friend. Poor guy.
At the end of the day we watched the sun set over the Mediterranean....absolutely gorgeous! It was such a nice and relaxing day...perfect way to bring in the new year.