Chasing the Fionist Dream

Coupled folks, what do you do to celebrate your anniversary? Dinner out? Gifts? If you go out, how long is your date? And how much does the whole thing cost? Lucky for us, we discovered early on that we both suck at buying each other gifts. Spending money to buy someone something that they didn’t really want, or accepting a gift that you don’t love from someone you do is…. awkward. And a waste of money. Instead we’ve become really into experiences. We get memories and photos for a lifetime and it doesn’t take up space in our tiny apartment.

This year instead of a nice dinner out, we decided to do a joint activity. Upon brainstorming what activities we both like, we remembered that we both love travel and being tourists. While a real vacation away from the kids wasn’t in the cards at the time, we were able to each take a day off of work and do a day trip together, thereby becoming tourists for a day. One of our favorite things to do after landing in a new city is to join a “free” (quotes because you’re supposed to tip) walking tour to learn about where we are and meet people from all over the world. Every tour of this kind we’ve been on in other countries has been excellent – and they need to be, since the participants are the ones who decide how much they are worth. So we googled free walking tours in Israel and ended up registering for this tour of Jaffa. After dropping the kids off at school, we grabbed our hats, sunblock and lots of water, and hopped on a train to Tel Aviv and then bused to the Clock Tower where we met our guide and our fellow travelers.

The tour was two hours long and included stories from Greek mythology, the Torah and the New Testament, as well a very concise summary of the past 200 years of history in this region, including the changing of rule from the Ottomans to the British to the Zionist Movement and Israel today. While we were nerds and knew many of the answers to the history questions that the guide asked the group, we learned plenty. And while we had both traveled the length and breadth of Israel before, including Jaffa a few times, we had never been on a tour designed for non-Jewish foreigners before and found the experience eye-opening. At one point we overheard Hebrew and were like “Hey! There are Israelis here. Oh wait, we’re actually in Israel, lol.” and that’s when we realized we really felt like we were on vacation. 🙂

After the tour ended, we headed to this upscale shwarma place for lunch. The food was amazing and so was the vibe. From there, we headed toward the sea and walked along the boardwalk for a while, taking in the view, the salty air and assortment of people and dogs that live in Tel Aviv.

We ended our day wandering around the old, defunct Jaffa railway station that now serves as a cultural hangout spot full of restaurants, art galleries and activities for families. We were still full from lunch, so we decided to start heading toward home and get dinner in our own city. After getting off the train, we bused to one of our local-ish pizza places (that recently moved and remodeled and we love the décor) and ordered ourselves a pizza for two and a haloumi salad. We enjoyed our dinner and recapped our lovely day together before continuing home to relieve our babysitter.

And now for the juicy part. How much did this day-long date cost us?

“Free” walking tour – 100 shekels (the website said the average tip is 50 shekels/person)

Lunch – 100 shekels

Beach, boardwalk and old railway station – free

Dinner – 88 shekels

Transportation – 74 shekels (since the public transportation app we use maxed us out at 37 shekels per person per day)

In total our one day vacation including two meals out totaled 364 shekels, which is the low end of what we might have spent on an hour or two of eating dinner at a nice restaurant. (Hey, hey, we do appreciate our expensive meat platters and will do that again, but there’s a time and place for everything.)

And to be totally transparent, we also spent 100 shekels on our teenage babysitter who picked our kids up from school and spent three hours with them, though we would have also had this same expense had we gone out for dinner.

All in all, we had a great time being tourists in another city for a day and can’t wait to do it again soon. We’re bound and determined that next year though, we get to run away from our kids for at least one or two nights. Wish us luck!

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Have you ever been a tourist in a nearby city or in your own? What were your favorite parts? Would you do it again?