The Seas Were Angry That Week in Tel Aviv...

Old Jaffa (above and below)

My first work trip of the year (besides the train ride to Eastbourne for our sales conference) - so my first outside of UK trip this year was back to Tel Aviv... leading up to the trip I was hoping that the weather would be just more of what I had become accustomed to there - sunny and pleasant - but instead my colleague and I got to see the one week a year when winter hits the middle east.

I tried to get the snow on the hills here - roads were closed in Jerusalem as a result of the rare snowfall and decent accumulation:

It was a good trip overall - but when packing for Israel the main items are usually sunglasses, short sleeved polo shirts, etc. - not corduroys and winter hats... and an umbrella would have been a good call as well as we saw almost a year's worth of rain in a three day period - as well as thunder and lightening at night and a hail storm while we were eating shawarma that had everyone at Shemesh (regarded as one of the, if not the best shawarma in Tel Aviv) running out to the sidewalk to feel the pea-sized ice.

Here Herzlyia is lit up by sunlight in the far distance beyond Tel Aviv:

Not too much else to report - people were a bit uneasy with the Gaza border being open to Egypt, and everyone apologised for the weather - and as you can see from the photos - the water which is typically calm and mediterranean blue was an odd brown from all of the sand that had been churned up. For a comparison click here for a photo from last August.

On our last day there the sun came out - but the sea was still pounding the shoreline:
and we went over to grab pizza on Shenkein Street (a sort of high street with trendy shopping, juice stands, etc.) and came upon a music video being filmed (no idea who they were - but they were lip synching and they had to keep shooing that little kid out of the frame - he was digging the music and dancing around...)