I would have never thought....

If you would have told me that I would be here right now....I would have told you that you were crazy.

During class today we were told that we had to work the night shift to get tool time. There are 2 tools in the lab and since they are both being used for R&D...the time that we can use them is limited during the day. We were told that we had to either come in at 6pm or midnight on Wednesday and Thursday. So now we were left with a ton of time to kill before we have to go back in to training.

We made plans to meet at 8pm and go out for the night. We have a couple of co-workers that are staying at a hotel that is about a 25 minute walk from our hotel. After getting directions from their hotel, we ended up finding a string of bars/restaurants that were very classy and trendy looking. The odd thing is that these places were in the middle of these run down alley ways. For the most part you wouldn't even think that people would walk down the street, let alone live in the area. The apartments are beat down and things are falling apart.

We ended up eating at this place called "NG". They had fantastic food! This was more of an upscale restaurant that had a wine list longer than the food menu. I started off with an artichoke soup that was really good! And I followed it up with T-bone of lamb and mashed potatoes. So much for the diet! The rest of the guys had pretty much the same but had escargot instead of the soup. After seeing the escargot...I would have traded the soup for it. Phil was nice enough to offer me one. It was as good as it looked!



After we ate we walked around looking for a place to hang out. We were looking for just a bar to kill some time. The bars that were close to the restaurant were a little to upscale for what we were looking for. So we asked a few locals and they pointed us in the right direction. We found a street that pretty much had a row of bars that were ripe for the hopping.

Just like typical bars in America...They have security out side the door. Well, almost everywhere seems to have security out side the door. I don't think I have been frisked and checked with a metal detector more in my life! Anyway we started talking to the security guards to find out what is going on and what is popular. It seemed like most of the places had loud music and you could see what you were getting into...At least that's what you thought. The first place we walked into was dead quite when we opened the door. We walked in and found a dark hallway that had a few twists and turns. At first we thought it was a joke and didn't expect much. At the end of the hall we open the door and find a bar that is jammed packed with people and we could not even fit in to the room. The placed seemed really cool but we couldn't fit 5 more people in there!

We decided to weigh our options with the other places on the street. As we walked down the street we noticed that not every place was clearly marked. There were doors that were blacked out...doors on the side of the buildings. It was like a big puzzle. If you didn't know where these places were...You would pass them by and not even notice. We ended up finding a bar to hang out in for a while.

After the bar we walked around to see what else we could find exciting. After walking for a while we realized that we had no idea of where we were and that we could not see our hotel or even point in its general direction. The interesting thing is that it wasn't really frightening...It was more intriguing. We found ourselves walking at 3am, in Tel Aviv, can't read or pronounce a singe street sign, and felt more secure than if we were doing the same at home. I would have never thought that that was even possible!

This is a very interesting and ancient culture that we are getting to experience and I am very glad that I had the chance. I never would have thought that I would be able to say that....