On Sunday the day after my birthday we went to a town called Modi’im, mainly with the intention of seeing a movie and looking at the shops in the mall. Sadly this particular cinema only did two English films and neither of them seemed that good. Looked at a few shops, one of the being Tower Records, I got chatting with the guy behind the counter, as it was quiet, we would the only people in the store, and there was some nice reggae tunes playing that the man on the till had chosen to put on, after a bit of chatting he said the Skatalites were playing in Israel in a few weeks. Sounds great, but cant really afford to get a ticket for them currently.

After the mall went to visit one of my friends’ family, this South African couple who had made Aliyah to Israel not so long ago, the flat they had was lovely, very modern, but extremely spacious but best of all was getting out onto the balcony, as it was on the 18^th floor you could see for miles, everywhere from Ashkelon all the was to Petah Tikva, with the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv in the distance.

Afterwards this man called David pointed out that me and the other 3 of us were from complete seperate continents (myself from UK, one guy from the US and the two girls from South Africa and Japan.) kind of similar to what the bible says about God bringing people from the four corners of the earth. Fascinating stuff.

My Birthday went really well, I was nervous about not having the right amount of food but it all turned out perfect, had 12 of us out in the porch outside our small flat, then there was 5 of us at Jerusalem comedy club at the top of Ben Yehuda Street, this was fun, was 40 Skekels to get in (£6)  we had the barman who was also MCing the event, and inevitably, as it was by birthday, I got lifted up on a chair with some people and had some Israeli song sung by the guy with the microphone, next was the warm up guy who looked very new to stand up, he was ok, but had to keep looking at his piece of paper to remember his gags, after 20 minutes there was the main guy called Charley who was a real natural, he kept the jokes coming thick and fast and I liked the fact he used a lot of his experience of making Aliyah from the US and getting used to life here was the main bulk of his material.   Was a really great night.