Lazy Days in Tel Aviv

Today we slept in -- Stacy finally slept the whole night through, as well as the whole morning through . . . And then we tried planning the rest of the trip. We are getting help from the people with whom we are staying, and they have great connections. We are trying to get a place down in Eilat, which is five hours south of here, but it's not happening yet. We'll see. It's strange because this morning we felt like we had soooooo long still, and now it's as if we are trying to pack everything in. Hopefully it works out. It's sad, too because Yael has been sick and will be going home on Thursday with the girls instead of staying the rest of the summer. She's the whole reason we are out here and now she is going to be gone. . . .
We went shopping for some new hats today -- yall should be looking forward to some pictures of these hats. We had options of buying really trendy ones that cost the equivilant of $25, but who wants to spend that much money on a hat? And we didn't want normal baseball caps, because this is Israel. The malls are really nice, with stores and clothes that you would find in Europe and US. While I was buying some hair stuff at the drugstore, Stacy came up and announced that she found some hats for $5. Booyah. We even had a fairly decent selection on non-baseball-cap-styled hats.
Then Stace and I went to the beach . . . aka Heaven with sand. It was the afternoon, there weren't too many people, the sand is like flour (is there another comparison? . . . silk. . .finely granulated clouds . . . ), and it was neither too hot nor too cool. There was a bird who liked to play daredevil with Stacy and see how close and how fast he could fly without actually touching her face. I think she felt his belly feathers with her nose. Multiple times. It was hilarious. We were dropped off at the beach and had to find our way back with the bus. Luckily the bus driver noticed that we looked lost when we got off on the wrong stop and he asked if he could help. We were way off. Then when we finally went into the correct apartment complex (we tried the wrong ones first), a woman outside was in her car and she called something out to Stacy. This lady had only claws for hands. She said something first in Hebrew, then said it in English when Stacy looked confused, and then Stacy said "I only speak English, sorry!" It was funny. It reminded me of Lisa's "It starts with an H, Brooke" moment. The lady had asked for us to get a flier off of her windshield that wouldn't come off with the wipers (she didn't have fingers to get it off. . . ). The wipers were still going at full blast, so I tried to time the grab with the wipers unsuccessfully. End of story- we both walked away laughing at how ridiculous we just looked, holding a flier in our hand, and the claw lady drove away with a clean windshield.
Plan for tomorrow: Galilee.