Hopeful in Haifa

Our day began with a thunderstorm - a cloudburst, really. We set off North from Haifa to visit Acre (Acco), Rosh ha-Nikra, and a friend on the kibbutz Gesher ha-Ziv. We made only one wrong turn on the way.
I guess intelligent life without a GPS may actually be sustainable - but that is still an unproven hypothesis.
When we returned to Haifa we set off down the main drag of Carmel to find a kosher restaurant that served meat dishes. When we reached the end of apparent civilization and restaurants without finding anything other than coffee shops and fast food joints, mostly not kosher, we were, to put it mildly, surprised. We asked a doorman/guard at a hotel where we could find such a restaurant , and he directed us to an Argentinean steak house a short way off the main drag. There we had a very fine kosher steak meal, the size of which we justified by the few miles we walked to locate it and the subsequent walk home. The waitress informed us that they were the only kosher meat restaurant in Haifa. I suspect that this may have been a slight exaggeration, but close to true. Thus was shattered our illusion that eating kosher anywhere in Israel would be easy. It turns out that Haifa is just about the most secular of Israeli cities, and Carmel is the most secular area of Haifa.
Tomorrow morning we drive to Jerusalem, where there are more kosher restaurants.
This blog may pause for a while - we are going to a wedding tomorrow night, and I will need to find another wireless network access point for my phone

Digital Data Damnation

So, tonight I dumped the contents of my 2GB SD card containing two days shooting to my Epson 2000 - or at least I tried to do so. After about half the card was transferred, I got a disk full message. I checked the space available. Plenty. Pop the card back in the M8 and find that a couple of images are corrupt. Delete them. Try to copy again. Same thing - disk full. Try to copy a few at a time. Some give the same error message. Fortunately, most copy successfully. None of the lost images were very important.
Lesson learned. Use smaller cards and save to the hard drive more often. I have 2 1GB cards with me. I will stick with them for the rest of the trip.
I have used Compact Flash cards for several years with no problem - now I get a failure of an SD card within three weeks. I hope that this is not an omen.

We are in Israel

We arrived in Israel Thursday April 6 after a flight that was uneventful, except for a moment after we checked in when Delta agent demonstrated his concern for customers by jumping over the counter and beating up a passeger who groused a little too much about a late flight.
We spent a couple of days in Herzliya with my old friend Peter, and are now in Haifa with Hilda's family.
It is wonderful to be travelling without touring. We are just hanging out with friends and family - no serious sightseeing yet.
My new Leica M8 digital camera is behaving wondefully, despite my misgivings about travelling with a new camera.
I am posting this from my mobile phone - I have not remembered how to upload pictures to the blog from the phone. I forgot to research it before I left. I will try to find out.