Tales from the Holy Land: Day 45 - Would you like some cheese with your wine?

I began work today by grabbing TEM grids and heading to the TEM to work with Talmon. We examined samples of carbon nanotubes functionalized with COOH and NH2 groups, and while the former were very damaged, the latter yielded many great images. And so, as predicted, I now have more images to process.

Anyways, that took most of the beginning of the day. I left around 1 pm, which was too late to join everyone for lunch, so I ate some leftovers and hummus and pita back in Clore. The rest of thw workday was rather unexciting, but I left around 5:30, at which point I went directly to Hertzl Bar where Zvonimir and Dan were having an early-ish dinner. We then changed and dropped stuff off in Clore, and left for the mall to catch a bus to Jerusalem. We were running sort of late and so decided to take a cab. This was a much more pleasant (read: air-conditioned) method, but wasn't that much faster than walking, as it turned out. When we got close to the mall, we got out sort of in the middle of the traffic circle and literally ran to the mall entrance. Through the security check we began running again, weaving in and out of old ladies and strollers, groups of people chatting in the most inconvenient locations, and dashing down the stairs.

While I've found that most buses here run remarkably close to perfectly on time, this bus was of course ten minutes late. Meaning we shouldn't have even worried. But better safe than sorry, I suppose. We got on and sat together in the back row of the bus, and I called Jonathan somewhere along the way to find out exactly how to navigate to our final destination once we arrived. He told us a bus number but said they'd just taken a cab, so we did the same when we arrived, pulling up to a rather long line to enter the Israel Museum. The event: the Annual Jerusalem Wine Festival.

We paid admission, then walked to the outdoor area, each receiving a wine glass as we passed into the open plaza. There was an outer ring of stands and an inner one surrounding a large sculpture, serving all sort of different tastes of wines. A few stands had crackers, one had wine-inspired jams and jellies, and one, which I found particularly enticing, was serving cheese. We wandered, trying various things, and without seeking them ran into Jonathan, his friend Etan, Jordan, his friend Dan, and Joel. They had been there for about an hour already. We walked with them for a bit but eventually broke up into the original groups.

The wines were diverse. One stand, which was probably rather cheap wine, poured rather large tastes with the claim that the stuff was "the best of the best of the west," whatever that means. Another had red dessert wine, which I had never tasted before and probably never will again. Many of the wines were mixtures, and many of them weren't bad. And of course some stands were much more serious than others. An interesting aspect of this particular location for a wine tasting was that many of the wineries weren't kosher, so occasionally you'd see someone in a kippah approaching and have the server say loudly, before they even reached the front of the line, that they should probably try elsewhere.

After a bit I parted with Zvonimir and Dan to grab a snack of sushi, which wasn't bad, before we finished our rounds. One of the wineries near the live music (!) had its own sort of stage, and a very cute server, so after one taste I went to get some cheese while Zvonimir debated how to go about proposing to her, with advice from Dan of course. After a while it became apparent he wouldn't have the guts, so we decided to call it a night. We luckily caught a cab outside the museum (luckily because there weren't many and it was getting close to the departure time of the last bus). We made it to the bus station 15 minutes before the scheduled departure of the last bus, but it pulled up about 7 minutes before this (which is more typical, in my experience). We got on, and got off outside the main gate of Weizmann. Dan and Zvonimir gave me their glasses and headed off to continue the party at Hertzl Bar. I was exhausted, so went back to Clore. After an entertaining chat with Ari and Rachel in the lobby, I headed off to bed.

I took pictures at the wine festival!

Me with an odd sculpture just inside the Israel Museum