Limes and Lions

The fruit available here is very seasonal.  It's probably how it should be in the US but I feel like there I can get almost any fruit I need almost anytime of the year with a few exceptions.  Here, the season of limes is really August and the early part of September.  After the early part of September, you just can't find them and you are stuck with the fake lime juice for cooking.  I'm not a big margarita drinker but I do love a good lime with my Corona and occasionally you need lime juice for cooking so I've been planning on getting limes to juice and freeze.  I've put it off until the last few weeks when I've purchased a bunch of "limes".  I put that in quotes because multiple times I've gotten home and found out that the "limes" I've purchased are orange inside.  The second time I did it, I was sure they were limes.  They were clearly different than the green oranges that they were sitting next to in the grocery store.  Of course, I'm sure that the store labeled them but since I still can't read Hebrew, I'm lost.  I bought a bunch and unfortunately they were oranges once again.  I've been looking for limes ever since and haven't been able to find them.  Finally, someone said they saw them in a market in East Jerusalem - across town in the Arab section.  I haven't driven over there and so it was a little intimidating to cross town in the car but I got directions and was successful in making my way to Wadi Joz.  I found the grocery store but NO LIMES!  The store clerk spoke great English and told me that I'm too late for limes.  How disappointing!  On my way home, I decided to drive to the Shuk.  Obviously I've been there before but I've never driven and parked there.  It's crowded but last time I walked there I had seen some parking lots so my adventurous self decided to try and park near the Shuk.  Again - successful!  I got in - and eventually out - without scraping someone's car or my own.  The most exciting part of that trip was that I found limes!  I wasn't even looking for them but I went into a vegetable stand and there were limes!  There weren't many and I held one up to the clerk - lime?  He nodded and I smelled one and it smelled like one too.  I got about 40 limes and brought them home.  I spent about 15 minutes cutting and juicing the limes.  About one ice cube of lime juice is equal to one lime.

Today is Rosh Hashanah.  Brian has a four day weekend and things are shut down in most of Jerusalem.  I haven't ventured out into East Jerusalem but I assume that things are open over there.  After a lazy morning, we all went to Safari Israel www.safari.co.il.  When you arrive, you drive into a big park with ostriches, rhinos, hippos, zebras, and tons of birds and animals I haven't seen before.  There aren't fences, etc and the animals are not too far from the road so you see them very well.  Some are walking up to the cars and it reminded me of Yellowstone with buffalo walking across the road and blocking traffic.  The same thing happened to us with an ostrich.  The park is obviously not nearly as big as Yellowstone.  It took us about a half hour to slowly drive through the park.  It made me wonder whether or not our USAA insurance would cover the car if an animal charged at us.  We would probably have bigger things to worry about if that happened.  There are signs all over in Hebrew/Arabic/English saying stay inside your vehicles, don't feed the animals, etc but we saw numerous dumb people with their windows down feeding carrots to the zebras and other animals.   There was an area as well with lions that was somewhat separated from the rest of the park and we could drive through that as well.  It was impressive.  In the middle of the park, there was an area to park and get out to walk through a typical zoo.   Our whole trip took us a little over 2 hours.  We got there at the end of the day so it was closing as we left but it was a perfect amount of time.

The kids are in bed now and I'm procrastinating on doing some obgyn questions that I have to do to maintain my certification.  They are due by tomorrow at 5pm CST.  uugh!  Ok .  It's time to get back to work.  Tomorrow Brian and I are getting a babysitter and we are going to the Israeli museum for a few hours in the morning.  I'll write more after that.  Shanah Tovah to all my Jewish friends celebrating Rosh Hashanah.