Step One: Drop your luggage and hit the shuk at 1PM on a Friday afternoon. Then ditch shopping for a nice lunch, while someone else does your shopping* for you. At the end of lunch, pick up the last few items on the list and head to the kitchen you've borrowed to cook a shabbat meal.

Step Two: Stare at all of the bags of fresh produce and cheeses. Wonder how you'll ever manage to cook lasagne, a soy stir fry, salads, dessert and the mysterious Matbuchah. 

Step Three: Wash you hands for the first of 100 times.

Step Four: Turn all of the burners on the gas stove on. All of them. No really, you don't have any pots or pans out, but turn on the burners. Take that bag of peppers that look like banana peppers but are more like jalepenos. Put them directly on the burners and char the skins. Flip them occasionally, using a fork, but do not pierce the skin. When the peppers are as charred as your hands, put the peppers into a paper bag to allow them to steam.

Step Five: Boil water and begin blanching 40 tomatoes. Drop 4-5 tomatoes in at a time for a few seconds, then take them out of the boiling water. With your freshly charred hands, take the fucking hot tomatoes and plunge them into cold water and peel the skin off. If you kept them in the boiling water long enough, this will be easy. If you didn't, then you'll spend two hours with your hands alternating between boiling and cold, trying to peel the skin off the tomatoes and eventually picking up a knife to scrap the stubborn bits off. When your hands are as wrinkled as the denuded tomatoes, you are ready. Go ahead and forget the last stubborn tomato, there isn't room for it in step six.

Step Six: Turn the fire on under an empty pot, grab the cooling tomatoes and squeeze them into the pot. Squirt the seeds onto your face, the wall, the floor and your shirt in the effort to get the guts into the pot. Eventually you'll learn to pierce the tomato with your thumb and pull the tomato apart from there. Fill the pot with the squeezed tomato guts and ripped apart flesh. Let them come to a boil.

Step Seven: Get the peppers from the paper bag, a cutting board and a sharp knife. Scrape the charred skin from the outside with the dull side of the knife, slice it open long ways and scrape the seeds out from top to bottom. Do not take your bare hands to the pepper to pull the left behind seeds and bits of charred skin. It will be tempting, but your hands will burn for the next 12 hours. Your hands will burn so much that you'll wash them 6 times, soak them in milk, rub yogurt on like lotion, cut the aloe plant, use cortisone 10, use more aloe and finally settle on doing shots of Arak. The alcohol will move the burn from your hands to your chest. Do not rub your eyes. 

Step Eight: Dice the peppers and add to the boiling tomatoes. Become so distracted by your burning hands that you miss the rest of the directions. It includes adding some olive oil for shine, salt, and a lot of paprika for color. Cook the mixture as long as you can.

Step Nine: Move from the Matbuchah, which has taken all of your afternoon, left your hands shrivled and burning and made your knees sweat, and turn your attention to the lasagne, two quiche, steamed zuchinni, salad and other odds and ends. 

Step Ten: Give up and run across Jerusalem as the shabbat sirens are blaring. Hop in the shower, being careful not to rub the soap out of your eyes (and other sensitive parts) with your burning hands. Change into shabbat clothes and run back across Jerusalem to the dinner. Find the kitchen completely clean. The Matbuchah in a bowl on the counter, the lasagne and quiche warming on the stove, and the table set.

Step Eleven: Sit on the couch for a minute while you wait for everyone else to return from shul. 

Step Twelve: Fall asleep and wake up when everyone else returns from shul. Be careful not to rub the sleep from your eyes with your burning hands. Accept the aloe from a guest.

Step Thirteen: Shabbat shalom. Curse the man that taught you how to cook Matbuchah and didn't warn you about the peppers. Bless his mother for being able to make this every week for shabbat. Raise a glass of Arak to make the first toast. Settle in for shabbat dinner and enjoy the Matbuchah, lasagne, quiche, challah, tahini and wine. Thank the fellow cooks, because nobody could prepare that dinner alone. Enjoy shabbat.

*I'm sure in real life, I'd have to do my own shopping. But in "Jerusalem vacation life," my shopping is done for me while I enjoy lunch. 

**Thanks to David Abitbol, aka CK, for the cooking lesson, I doubt I'll be repeating the recipe anytime soon. Thank you for Sarah and Talia for hosting us for such a wonderful shabbat dinner and letting us destroy the kitchen for the cooking lesson.

The morning I was leaving for Israel, I gave myself one more hour to make a decision about where to stay my first few days in Israel. Like I said in my previous post, I've finally accepted that I should stay in a hotel those first few days while I battle jet lag and adjust to Tel Aviv heat. As someone who usually stays in big-chain hotels and never looks at TripAdvisor, I got completely overwhelmed by the reviews of hotels and hostels in Tel Aviv.

I thought about staying in Hayarkon 48 again, where I stayed in 2007, but couldn't stomach the thought of paying $80/night for a hostel. While it served as a good base, there was little I enjoyed about staying there. I'm just too grumpy for a hostel anymore.

Eventually I settled on Hotel Galileo and I'm so happy that I did. Is this hotel for everyone? No. Is this hotel for me? Yes. Keep in mind that I've stayed in a $3 hotel in Paraguay where we put the third bed against the door and used a teeny, tiny shared bathroom down the hallway. I've also stayed in the Chairman's Suite of Hotel Sax. I'm flexible, but just need a clean bed, good shower and a working air conditioner.

I got that and more at Hotel Galileo. 

The Hotel Galileo is on a side street one block behind Allenby and two blocks from Carmel Market. An easy walk to the beach, easy to get cabs to and from, and walkable from almost everything I wanted to do. While there isn't wifi at the hotel, I was able to pick it up from a neighboring business or house. Wifi is plentiful in Tel Aviv. There is wifi in the hotel - but the router isn't renamed, so I thought it was from a neighbor. 

Adit was working the desk when I arrived and remembered answering my online reservation-that's already a win in my book. Feeling like someone knew I was coming and was waiting for me. My first two nights I was in a room with a jacuzi and a balcony, the second night in a standard room. My perfect room would have been with a standard shower and a balcony, but I don't think those exist.

The AC in both rooms blasts (after it gets warmed up, give it 30 minutes or so and you'll be reaching for a sweater). There is cable TV with some english channels to help you get to sleep that first night. The staff was always friendly and helpful for me - room was cleaned quickly every day. Fresh towels, freshly made bed. The bed is pretty comfortable - given my back the last couple years, nothing really feels good after I sleep for more than 4 hours, but this was fine.

While I didn't make it any of the bars on the block, I heard nothing but good things from friends about Norman and Little Prague. There you have it - stay at Hotel Galileo is you are on a budget, but can't stand the thought of staying in a hostel. My rooms were about $80 a night with breakfast at a nearby cafe included. Not a big Israeli breakfast, but a nice coffee and croissant with a friendly vibe of other Galileo guests.

Two summers ago, I got to Tel Aviv, checked into my hostel on Hayarkon, had dinner and went to bed. I spent the next day sleeping fitfully and walking around Tel Aviv. I wasn't much for company or chatting, just focused on sleeping and the heat.

Last summer, even though I was staying with people, I spent my first day in Israel sleeping and getting used to the heat. Terrible company to the people I'd just met in person, but excellent company to my pillow.

This year, I've accepted that how I deal with jet lag and Tel Aviv heat is by sleeping. Instead of accepting the hospitality of friends and then being unable to communicate, I booked a hotel with air conditioning. I got a great dinner last night with my friend and designer/programmer Idan Gazit, then got a good night's sleep with a belly full of goulash. Got up today, took a walk on the beach, found some lunch and slept for the afternoon.

I don't know if it is jet lag or heat, but it is how I roll my first 24 hours in Israel and I'm just going to accept it. Right now? I'm sitting on the balcony of my hotel room, drinking a huge bottle of water and about to head out to the Jet Lag Tweet-up just up Allenby.

Tomorrow? I'm off to Jerusalem.

I don't know how to explain it, but I think I got jet lag before I've even left for Israel. If you haven't kept up, in the last 3 weeks I've been out of state every week. A trip to Austin, a trip to Dallas, a trip to New York. I'm finishing up my last day at home before heading to Israel for three weeks. Lucky for me (and Spidey) my good friend Billy is house-sitting for me this year.

Each trip was great, but it left me exhausted. After Thursday night's launch party and showcase of Natiiv bands, I went to sleep and slept until 4PM the next day. Granted, there were some terrible storms in Chicago on Friday that kept my condo dark and the weather perfect for snoring. I got up and had dinner, came home, checked the MOBfest schedule and fell asleep on the couch. Oops. Last night was another early night, I've just not had it in me.

And I'm off to Israel tomorrow. I'm thinking of just staying in a hostel for the first couple nights. I know that I won't be good company the first day and why put that sleepy, jet lagged version of Leah on a kind host. 

If you are in Israel and want to meet up, I'll be in Tel Aviv the first couple days, then Jerusalem for Shabbat, then back to Tel Aviv for my ROI120 workshop and a few social events, then (finally) going up to Tsfat for shabbat. Then back in Tel Aviv for a week. It is a three week trip, but the time has been carved up pretty quickly.

Time for more laundry, but I hope to see everyone that I can while I'm abroad!

Run, don't walk, over to the new online home of Natiiv Arts & Media. Built by Idan Gazit of Pixane design, I'm completely in love with my site. I would marry it if I could. He built the site using Django, which will mean something to the programmers out there, and we're using markdown on the blog instead of a WYSIWYG editor.

Not only is Idan a great designer and programmer, but he is also a sound business consultant. He really helped me think through ways of how Natiiv will function as a company. He's based in Tel Aviv, but that didn't hinder our trans-atlantic partnership - we were able to work together via IM, Skype and Basecamp.

The only way I can thank him for building this beautiful site for me is to recommend he build one for you. (And send him baby gifts and money, of course.) 

I'll tell you what I told Jon Reed at True Blue Tattoo. "The Argentine, Israeli and Chicago flags are all basically the same, but the object in the middle is different. I already have the sun from Argentina's flag and want to add one of the Chicago stars and the star of David from the Israeli flag. The problem is that the Chicago and Israeli stars are flat colors and won't look good next to the sun. What can you do to pull them all together?"

I pulled my laptop out and showed Jon photos of the three flags that I'd pulled from Flickr and a few images of the stars off the flags. I explained that I didn't want a flat red star and a flat blue star. I mused over adding a blue banner to tie the three together, but Jon (and another tattoo artist) paused at the idea. He thought the three together, all done in the same gray as the Argentine sun, would be enough. Then we figured out a size and talked about shading.

I ran around the corner for dinner, while he got the stencils ready. I came back and went under the gun. An hour or so later we were done... well... Jon was done and I was done being still. I know that the Chicago star isn't as instantly recognizable since it isn't red, but I'm happy with how the three look together.

Who knows, I might still get the blue banner one of these years. For now I have the central symbols from three of the most important locations that I've lived or visited. Thanks to Jon at True Blue for whipping this together for me. 

I've become friends with a few people at the Chicago Tribune over the last year or so. Some of those people launched a network of local blogs - called Chicago Now - each serving a different niche of Chicago life. (One written by Amy Guth - who you all know is one of my very best friends).

I was brought in to be in a small focus group to get a preview of the site and provide feedback. When I dropped by a meet-up for the bloggers last week, I told people I was there as a tire-kicker. I kicked the shit out of that metaphorical tire. I sent at lease one 1,000 word email to the team and a number of follow-up thoughts and bugs that I found.

The team was incredibly responsive and I saw many of my comments turn into changes in the terms of service, community guidelines, excerpting and other areas of the blog network. I wasn't the only tire-kicker, but I only know what I said and that a lot of my suggestions turned into changes.

I have a lot of thoughts about the site, but for now I'm going to withhold them and let you check it out for yourself. I hope that people give the Tribune a chance to succeed with this project. Why? Because they are friends trying to do something cool. Bill, Daniel and Amanda (D'oh! And Tracy and Alicia) have all worked hard to become a part of the local social media scene - not bystanders, not interlopers, but members of our community. They've stuck around in way that so many companies haven't and this project, to me, is a logical progression.

Why not put the support of a large media company behind local bloggers and see what happens? 

Watch the beta as it progresses, suggest blogs for the network and send feedback to the team. I'm certain they want to hear from you.

UPDATE: Two posts with a more critical eye about how this fits into the greater world of journalism. Whet Moser from Chicago Reader (who I just met in person a couple weeks ago) and Mark Potts the Recovering Journalist.