From Burma Road to the Tico House

Our cousin Yakov is in town, so we're under a lot of pressure to get around and do things with him, pretending that our normal life in this country is really exciting. Also, visitors are a great opportunity to actually get out of our little neighborhood and routine and get around playing tourist (skip Eitan's music class? Gymboree? Yes!).

Yesterday we were fully adventurous and spent the afternoon at the (slash looking for) Burma Road.  The wikipedia paged linked just before has all of the legit information, but in short, it's a road that was built in the war of Independence in order to get around the siege surrounding Jerusalem. Ami's wanted to go there and look around ever since we were in the cab on our way home for Pesach, and the driver pointed it out as a great nature-y place to visit not so far out from Jerusalem.

So I can see that it would have been beautiful and full of flowers a couple of months ago, now it was kind of dried out looking, but either way, it's a historical site, is in the middle of hilly mountains, and it was great to get out of the city for the afternoon.

At the entrance to the trail is the national Machal Memorial, commemorating those that have come to Israel from outside of the country to serve.

After the afternoon hike, and before traffic back into Jerusalem got standstill, we headed back into town for an early dinner at the Tico house. I hadn't been there since my year in Israel in 1999/2000, but Yakov mentioned that his parents love it there and rave about the onion soup in a bread bowl. So before he could finish saying "bread bowl", we were there. It was amazing. It might be partially because we were starving from all the hiking (and maybe forgot to eat lunch), but the soup was perfect. And it ended up being our whole dinner because we were so full after just didn't end up eating anything else the rest of the night.

Aside from the delicious soup (get it!), the setting was beautiful, a cool night in Jerusalem outside in the lovely garden with a hot bowl of soup and lots of bread and butter. Can't get much better then that. And Eitan loved the whole scene too, as you can see by that big smile when he just started with spontaneous giggles.

So in short, Burma road, go in April, and Tico house, well, go immediately!