This morning it occurred to me that the only times I’ve left the symposium grounds has been under the cover of darkness. I’ve not seen any other part of Israel under the light of day. Well, we’ll take care of that over the next week. . .

Last night I travel with Hadas over to Tel Aviv to watch Phil Eccles presentation. Phil is one of the funniest guys you could hope to meet. He’s got that whole British BBC character thing down that all of us in the states have always found so endearing. You could not be in a better moment than one spent sitting around a table listening to Phil tell a joke. It’s one of life’s little gifts. Of course karma then requires that he suffers twice the presentation projector hell of the normal presenter. Still 3 hours and 3 laptops later he was able to get on with his presentation.

Before the show started Hadas and I took a drive to seek out some food. On some random street filled with open air storefronts I saw a liquor store out of the corner of my eye. “Look!” I said, “There’s Booze!”. “We need that!”, said Hadas. Just a couple doors down I saw I falafel stand. “Look!” I said, “There’s Food!”. “We need that!” said Hadas, and we pulled in quickly to one lone empty stall. We collected a large quantity of single beer bottles from the liquor store and then went to the stand where we ordered our food.

Finally Hadas acquiesced and let me pay for something! She avoided to much embarrassment while I played tourist and got on my knees to photograph a half empty coke bottle with Hebrew writing, then we sat at a street side table to eat. Soon we were heading off down the road singing “Piano Man” along with Billy Joel on the radio. All the while I gazed out the open car window at passing palm trees and a city lit by signs of every size and color, all of course in Hebrew.

We made it back to the presentation just in time to find a crowd of techies hovering over the 3rd laptop still unable to make the presentation display correctly. Luckily the finally got it all working and Phil did a bang up job with his story.

After the presentation we went out to explore the local nightlife. We found a bar on a diminutive street lost under the cover of imposing skyscrapers. We entered through thick black curtains into a haze of cigarette smoke and the hammer base of funk. There we drank a little, talked a little, and ended up dancing all pressed together in the crowed bar to the boom, bob, boom of “Brick House”. I of course for the most part just stood back and watched which I must tell you, in Israel I’ve found, is not such a bad thing. Not a bad thing at all.