Finally some action after a week of doing nothing: Keren invited us to go to Haifa for the day. Although it meant getting up at a ridiculously early hour (6am; well, okay, so maybe not that early), I was looking forward to it. Ben mentioned something about our goal being to visit "some monastery," but it could have been anything -- I was just happy to get out of the house on the cheap!

After making it out of bed on time, we started the trip off right -- at a pancake shop. This was one of the places that Keren and BK always rave about; they always have the best breakfasts. It was good, but I wasn't hungry enough to really appreciate it. BK had his favorite: chocolate chip-covered pancakes and maple syrup (he's worse than a girl when it comes to chocolate! Or in any case worse than me, which is saying a lot...); I snacked off of Ben's order (pancakes with blackberries). From there it was off to Haifa.

To me, it's surreal that it only takes a little over an hour to get from Tel Aviv to Haifa. That means, driving the entire western shore of the country takes around two hours. Israel is often referred to as the State of Israel, and now I sort of see why; my American brain had inflated the size to be something much larger than it is (an entire country can't really be the smaller than Vermont!?).





"Some monastery" turned out to mean the Baha'i Gardens -- a huge ornamental garden and shrine, built in the 90s on a prominent hillside to house the remains of the founder of the Baha'i religion. It reminded me a lot of the Vatican gardens: it's sprawling, formal, obviously very expensive, and immaculately kept. One of the tenets of the Baha'i faith is that (besides paying a fee to enter the religion), one must make a pilgrimage to the gardens and work in them for a week, so they get a third of their workforce for free.

It was lovely to walk through, although it seemed a little stiff. I can imagine it would be murderous in the summer when temperatures are high. But the weather on Friday made it seem luscious -- the air was cool and sparkling, which is my absolute favorite.

Once we were done at the gardens, we visited a friend of Keren's, and then back home. Keren and BK had an appointment with a wedding planner that night (and, it turns out, all the museums in Haifa close at 1pm on Fridays, so we weren't missing much anyway).

On our way back, out of the blue, Keren asks us if we like "stinky cheese," -- clearly she doesn't know us very well; of course we do! -- so she screetches off at the nearest exit and down some strange side road to a dairy she knows.



Ohhhh mama; everything on offer was amazing. It is one of the few places that can say it's more than 100 years old, so it takes pride in having lots of memorabilia from the town's (and the dairy's) early years, which made the ambience pretty interesting. For those in Michigan: it was a bit like Dominick's; to those from Oneonta: it was like a cross between Woodbull and Fly Creek cider mill. It was mainly outdoors between a tall roadside hedge and a dairy-house, with lots of strange odds and ends dangling from bare beams and from the few courtyard trees. It was so hard to decide what to buy, so we bought as much as we could -- yogurt, hard parmesan-like goat cheese, and something like feta embedded with mustard seeds. We'll be enjoying it for weeks! All in all, a pretty awesome Friday.