Tel Aviv - Day Two

*yawn*

Forgot to post this last night - blame the rich food and wine (see below).

Okay, I think I've beaten jet lag so far. That said, I woke up at 5:30 AM and couldn't go back to sleep, so I caught up on the news and prepped for the day's meetings. I didn't mention the free breakfast - it's pretty spectacular, with quite a bit of fresh seafood and fresh-squeezed orange juice to die for. If I lok ever so slightly yellow-tinged when I return, it's not jaundice, I promise.

Meetings went well - these guys get lunch brought in every day, which is impressive. However, they also get to pick what they want every day from selection of local restaurants - they have a web application where they choose, and another that tells them when the food arrives. How cool is that? I had Hummus and Shourma (local spellings), and yea, it was good. Brian had the spaghetti - clearly he's not human, as that quantity of pasta would knock a normal man into a carbo coma from which nothing could return. A semolina event horizon, if you will.

After the day's meetings wrapped up, we headed out to a local restaurant on the beach with several of our new friends. Gilly's(Over_$30)/Gilly%11s_20060223310/ is a 'meat' restaurant, according to our hosts. It was pretty similar to an American nouvelle cuisine restaurant, with sa variety of meat and seafood. We had some fantastic calamari, and I had the Yehudale - a meat-in-cream-sauce dish for which the restaurant was particularly known. Some lovely Chilean wine rounded out the main course. Dessert was a flourless fudge cake with cardamom ice cream and a small creme brulée.

Dinner's conversation was wide ranging - Ilya, a russian immigrant from Kyrgystan (I won 'guess the republic' on the first try - even knew where it was in relationship to China and Tajikistan) and I had some great discussions on Cold War opinions of each other's countries, the difficulty of being a non-traditional Jew in a Jewish state, etc. etc. No one seemed to shy away from difficult topics - 'Political Correctness' gets very little mileage here. Refreshing, actually.

That's all for today - I'll update tomorrow night before the flight if I can.