Saturday, August 22, 2015

Our First Shabbos

What a sweet first Shabbos we had ;).  Yesterday, I arranged for us to have Shabbos dinner at one of the local hotels.  It was just a few blocks away, had a lovely crowd of people there and the food was pretty good.

This morning, Bircas HaTorah set us up to have lunch with one of their Rabbis.  On the way there, ran into Tova R., a teacher at one of the schools I worked at.  So great to see her and I love there we keep bumping into these "surprise people" here.  SS has bumped into several at shul, but Tova is the first friend of mine that I ran into.

We had a really great time having lunch with the Bloom family.  Definitely worth the long walk in the hot sun (from our apt. to the Old City is about 1.5 miles.  Coming home in the mid-day sun, the walk is uphill the entire way and took us forever....).

We came home and collapsed in the blissful air conditioning for a while until....a knock on the door!  Who even knows we're here?!  Yahoo--it was Gidon and Bracha, who are our friends Matthew and Leah's brother and sister-in-law.  It was such a hoot, since our last Shabbos meal in Boston was at Matthew and Leah's house, and Ilana was a regular Shabbos afternoon houseguest over there.  I remarked that it was great to go from seeing Annabelle, Moshe, Sophia and Clara on Shabbos to seeing the first cousin of Annabelle, Moshe, Sophia and Clara :)

By the time we walked them home in the late afternoon, it had cooled down and become a lovely day.  SS went off to shul and I suggested to the kids that we go out on the little porch and read, as it was now so pleasant out.  Three of us came outside and the third one out shut the door.  Good thing that happened before the fourth person was out b/c I thought to say, "check that that door doesn't lock when it shuts.  We don't have a key out here with us".  UH OH....Locked out (as a side note, I wonder if our new place will be as crazy as this apt about door locks.  Makes me crazy that we need a key to EXIT the main door.  So unsafe in case of fire, Gd forbid, and, frankly, a total pain in the tuchus to always need to find the key to lock the door when we come in).

Anyway, the fourth person, who happened to be Ilana, was still inside.  The problem was that the door is always VERY hard to open, and, several times, I haven't been able to open it (this, in fact, was the first time any of us had stepped foot out there).  Gidon and SS had to work together earlier to get it to open.  Ilana tried valiantly to open it, but no luck.....I was expecting, after all her huffing and puffing and throwing her body into the door that there would be a cartoon-like outline of her on the door, but, nah.

Thankfully, our landlord, who lives in another part of Jerusalem, had family visiting in the second apartment they rent out downstairs from ours and we had seen him earlier in the day.  "Listen," Penina said, "I hear his voice".  "Look!!!!" Chana said--"he's down there in the street" (the street, by the way, is the small alley this rental is on.  A number of people who live on this alley have tiny apartments and very big families, and they use the pedestrian-only alley as an extension of their living room [there is a family with something like 6 kids a few houses down and I see that mom and those kids outside the entire day.  Having walked by and glanced into the apartment, I can see why....]).  Thankfully, I was able to get his attention, Ilana let him into the apartment (luckily that door opened!) and he saved us from staying out there until SS came home from shul after Shabbos ended, or someone's bladder got near to bursting and she decided to climb down the small-and-not-that-high-yet-fulll-of-garbage-and-spare-building-materials roof and go in the front door :)


2 comments:

  1. Hello from Linda Haniford. Your blog is very interesting and I am looking forward to seeing how your journey is going. To keep in touch with me via email you can send messages to leah-222 - I'm not giving the full email address because I'm thinking that everyone can see the comments that are posted.

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