A New Beginning

Shalom from Tel Aviv! We have decided to start a blog, so that we could share all of our adventures with you.

Leaving the US was bittersweet for both of us. We were excited to come on this new adventure, but also very sad to be leaving our families. We arrived at the airport and were greeted by Savta, Niva, Eytan and Tamar. It was very reassuring to see friendly, familiar faces. Our apartment is at 80 Nachum Sokolov St. in northern Tel Aviv. It is within walking distance to the center of the city, Sarah's Ulpan, the beach and many shops, cafes and restaurants. We have spent the first two days of our time here exploring the city.

Our apartment is nice. Everything here is coated in a little bit of "Israeli dust". We need to invest in a squeegee, to really get everything dust free. Our living room/kitchen has a nice brown couch, coffee table, tv and a kitchen table and chairs. The kitchen has a refrigerator, toaster oven, and 2 burners. The landlord is bringing us a microwave in the next few days, but we don't quite know where we will put it as we are very short on counter space.

The bedroom has a queen size bed and a closet with shelves. Sarah has taken up the entire closet, so we had to go out and buy some shelving for Yuval.

The part of the apartment which is the most unpleasant is the bathroom. When we got here it was very dirty and the drain in the shower did not work. Therefore, we have not been able to shower since we got here! The landlord was just here, and he poured something down the drain that hopefully fixed the problem, and we will be able to take showers when we finish this post!

UPDATE: The landlord came and he thought fixed the shower, but he was wrong. We decided that even though the shower would not drain, we were too desperate to wait any longer. So, we turned on the shower and the bathtub began to fill up, and since the drain was clogged, gunk was coming out of it. It was pretty yucky. We took the fastest showers of our life, and reached for towels, but they were as small as bathmats! We ended up partly drying off with Sarah's blow dryer because it was so freezing. For Sarah, this was the worst part of our Israel experience yet. Until the shower is fixed and we can clean up the mess, we will not be photographing the bathroom...trust us, its better.

As of right now, our internet connection is too slow to post the pictures here, so I will try on facebook, if that doesn't work, then we will email them to anyone who asks!

Tomorrow we will continue exploring the city and maybe take a bus up to Tel Aviv University to check out Yuval's school. We will try and update this blog as much as possible! Email us a lot!

We love and miss you!

Sarah and Yuval