Weather today, Thursday 26 January, is predicted to be very rainy, calm in the morning with increasing wind throughout the day. We awoke to thunder and rain. Well they were right about the rain, it was torrential. There was also a lot of lightning and window shaking thunder.
Our street was turned into a river. It didn’t seem to deter the bicyclists or motor scooters as you can see from the video. We had a lot of laughs and entertainment just watching the traffic below. At one point Jim ran into a man named Noah who invited him onto his wooden boat with a lot of animals on board. And did we tell you that we came here for the temperate winter climate. Little did we know that a good part of our first few weeks here would be dominated by amazing tropical storms.
The thing that the weatherperson left out was the hail.
22 minutes later the rain, lightning, thunder and hail had stopped and it looked like this.
Given the forecast we had already decided to stay in all day and do crosswords, work on our blog and read. We are both reading books about the Arab/Israeli situation, learning the history of this country and its cultures. Jim is reading My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit, an Israeli journalist who is trying to come to terms with the need for a Jewish homeland while also being fair to the Arab Palestinians who also have a right to the land and freedom from oppression. Sandy is reading The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan which chronicles a house with a lemon tree owned originally by Palestinians and then Israelis who ultimately met up and became friends.
Three hours after the hail & torrential rain, we decided to brave the elements and went out and ran 3 miles along the Yarkon river. Sandy ran well finishing a couple of minutes before Jim but he has now had two runs in a row where he is much more comfortable running and is hoping that his endurance is finally returning.
After a nice hot shower and some more reading and crosswords we walked to a local hummus place and had some good middle eastern comfort food of lentil soup, hummus with pita bread and a salad. All in all this was one great stormy down day in TLV.
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