Foreign Reality

From the JP:

"Tourists react to Friday morning rocket barrage in Tel Aviv"

Daria, a young Russian tourist from Moscow, realized this week she’d picked a hell of a time to visit Israel. On Thursday morning, when a large chunk of rocket shrapnel crashed through the roof of a synagogue next door to the apartment she’s subletting, things became bizarre. "It’s all a bit strange and unrealistic. I leave Israel on Sunday morning, hopefully, but I was told that they closed the airport,” Daria said, before Labor Party MK Shelly Yechimovich rolled up on her bicycle, stopping to speak to residents next to the synagogue that was hit in greater Tel Aviv.  The shrapnel hit the synagogue Thursday morning, as Tel Aviv was targeted by long-range rockets for the fourth straight day. Other large chunks of shrapnel landed in the neighborhood in this peaceful corner of the city near the beach popular with tourists. It was the first Friday afternoon in Tel Aviv since the rocket fire began, and the city seemed to be moving a little bit slower than usual on what is typically the busiest time of the week for cafes and bars in the city. In a small house in front of the synagogue sat Ayala McKown, an Israeli married to an Irish man who has lived in India for the past 17 years and arrived in Israel for a month-long vacation this week with her two kids, aged 12 and 7. She said her kids were a bit afraid during the alarm, and that “”they aren’t Israeli kids, they aren’t used to it. But I gave them 'shoco' (chocolate milk) and they relaxed,” Ayala said, adding that they didn’t run for shelter because they had nowhere to go anyway. Parents Troy and Robert from New York were visiting with their four children and were staying at a hotel just a couple blocks from the synagogue. The kids joked with each other about how they acted when the siren went off, the mom saying that one of them soiled herself, the teenage daughter saying her older brother threw up, and the youngest, a boy who looked to be about five, jumped in and shouted “I wasn’t scared”! In the end they said they weren’t planning ending their trip ahead of time, though Troy said the situation is harder when you have kids.

"I think its time to stop it, to send in the troops and to clean up shop with all these terrorists," he added. A couple blocks away, a small crowd of customers sat at a café where earlier in the day a chunk of rocket shrapnel hit on the sidewalk out front. The manager of the café said that earlier in the day when the siren went off he and the employees stayed put and that with the patrons it was about half-half, including with the tourists. “Some of them ran next day but the rest were like us, they stayed put.”

^ Unfortunately, Israelis have become too accustomed to being bombed all the time and hearing the air-raid sirens (probably the only country in the world today that suffers with this) and so when tourists and foreigners have to deal with the bombings it is a shock (as can be expected.) It's good to see that despite the Palestinian aggression that people continue to come and go from Israel. ^

http://www.jpost.com/Operation-Protective-Edge/Tourists-react-to-Friday-morning-rocket-barrage-in-Tel-Aviv-362456