Hail Yes! The Weekend Tel Aviv Came to Play

Thursday, aka the last day of the work week, aka the new Friday (well the old Friday, if you're still in college), a handful of kids took the bus over from Tel Aviv. The Jerusalem Marathon was on Friday - so they came to stay at our apartment. It was great to get the old gang back together. (Unlike Sarah, I hadn't made it back to Tel Aviv since we moved....last week)

We met everyone at the Central Bus Station so the runners could pick up their registration packets. Since the marathon runners were provided a pasta dinner, the 10k runners and the cheerleaders went to Ben Yehuda for some dinner.

Fast forward: 6am Friday morning. It's a brisk, foggy day. Ok, it's freezing and raining. The ::cough::half marathon runners leave pretty early for their 8:30 start time. I made a yummy omelet for Molly, Nina, and myself, and then we left around 7:30. We had a brief difficulty finding the marathon area (let alone starting line). So we missed the half-marathon start... but it probably would have been a mad-house.

After we got Molly situated by the starting line, we left her to go find the finish line. Thank goodness we hurried away, because not 3 minutes after Nina and I arrived, Uri crossed the finish line. I got a great picture of him....on Aaron's camera. Talk about perfect timing. Then we waited around for the other runners. It was really exciting to see people we know finish the race. (We were standing right on the sideline past the finish line)

Aaron, Zach, Eric, Sarah, and Uri - all proud Half-Marathon Winners!

After the Half-Marathoners finished, they went to go get their snacks and bags, and Nina and I stayed to wait for Molly to finish her 10K. (For those of you who don't know, a half-marathon is 13.1 miles, and a 10K is 6ish miles - a ridiculous amount of distance to cover on foot, in my opinion...) While we were waiting... IT STARTED TO HAIL! What the what, Jerusalem!? Nina and I tried to take pictures of us under her umbrella, but we failed and after several attempts my hands got cold, so we gave up...

I spotted her jogging in from 30 meters out! What a champ!

On Shabbat, we decided that we wanted to go to the Old City... but how would we get there? Well, we would walk, of course! (Because they didn't run through Jerusalem yesterday...?) We decided that since the Light Rail wasn't running (Shabbat and all), we would take that path to the Old City.

Just some cool kids walking on the train tracks.

We went to the Kotel, ate some hummus, tried to buy University of Miami shirts in Hebrew... all in all, this has been a wonderful Shabbat in Jerusalem.