Our Last Challenging Days In ISRAEL (Tel Aviv)

I'm Oscar and I'm Dan and today we're in Israel. We're Oscar and Dan, two boys from Sweden trying to see as much of the world as possible while we're young. In this video we're showing you our days in Tel Aviv which unfortunately got off to a really rough start. And just like that it's time to leave the Dead Sea. Now we're in the car heading all the way to Tel Aviv which is our final stop in Israel. We're so excited to see a modern, vibrant, poppin' city that's gonna have amazing food, beautiful beaches. It's gonna be a lot of fun. At 4am that morning we'd hiked to the top of Masada Fortress to watch the sunrise over the Dead Sea. As the day went on, Oscar started feeling worse and worse. We feared that it was food poisoning. The cherry on the cake was that the day after we were supposed to celebrate our consecutive birthdays. It's our birthdays tomorrow and Oscar's not feeling well. Poor Oscar was feeling nauseous when we woke up from our nap after the climb this morning and since then it's just gone downhill. He was the only driver listed on the rental car so we had to drive all the way to Tel Aviv. So I feel very bad. Now he's fully food poisoned so let's hope it's all better tomorrow when our consecutive birthdays begin. I was so nauseous all night yesterday. Today I've just been in bed all day resting which has been really really terrible because it's this guy's birthday and I've been feeling so bad about not being able to do anything to make the day special for him. But ---- happens when you travel. We have some nice delivery sushi and watching The Incredibles. I don't know why we chose to watch The Incredibles. I just like wanted some cozy light-hearted movie and maybe because we're turning 25 I'm like oh we're getting so into adulthood that we need to reconnect with our childhood. Happy birthday to me and tomorrow Oscar will be well and then it's his birthday so at least we'll get to celebrate one out of two. Okay so time has come to finally go out and explore Tel Aviv. We are excited to finally leave. Oscar is almost better and it's his birthday. My turn. 25 times two. 50 years old. 50 years old halfway through life already. I definitely think this is going to be the better of the two birthdays because yesterday is a hard low to beat. Let's go out and have fun. We just left our hotel. Walked along the beach where it is insane. It's the Shabbat so everything is literally packed. The beach is packed. All the restaurants we've walked past are packed as well because there's only a few that are open on Shabbat and we are heading to the most famous vegan restaurant in Tel Aviv, probably in all of Israel, Anastasia. Does it live up to the hype? You'll find out soon. I'm still not feeling a hundred percent. I'm still a little drained but at least now I can put one foot in front of the other and actually walk and explore the city. What did we order? Two Nutella shakes, cacao butter and hazelnuts. Is it good? I've been having nothing but white bread, rice and bananas for the past few days so this is sweet relief. So the smoothie was incredible. I think it might be hard to talk but I got this leek and onion quiche and onion is my favorite ingredient in anything ever so and Oscar has a nice egg tofu sandwich so let me just take a bite to see. We're not really quiche people. You're not keen on quiche? I don't mind quiche. I actually like quiche. It's very good. Before we continue with the video, we have some exciting news. Today's video is sponsored by BetterHelp. As two big proponents of therapy and two full-time travelers no less, we are huge fans of BetterHelp. They have a network of over 20,000 therapists you can talk to within 48 hours of joining. It doesn't matter where in the world you live or whether or not you have any therapists nearby. BetterHelp isn't a crisis or self-help line. It's professional therapy done securely online so you can connect with a pro over phone, video or even live chat wherever you are. To join, you simply fill out a quick questionnaire to match you to the perfect therapist for your needs and don't worry, you can always change your therapist free of charge. Online therapy has been such a helpful tool for us during the ups and downs of the past few years and to help you enjoy the benefits too, BetterHelp is offering 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com slash oscar and dan. That's better h-e-l-p.com slash oscar and dan. Join over 2 million people on BetterHelp and take charge of your mental health today. Thanks BetterHelp and thank you guys for supporting our sponsors. Now, let's get on with the video. We just finished lunch. It was delicious, although the prices here give me a lot of anxiety. It's not a place to go if you are on any sort of budget. I mean, you can get cheap falafel in Israel, that's pretty much it. This meal was like $30 plus per person for one smoothie and a quiche, which is like okay, but it was delicious. So we want to share a few reflections so far on Tel Aviv that really set this city apart from anywhere else we've been. First of all, there's loads of free sun protection available on the beach. Every beach should have that. Actually, by the Dead Sea, we were so amazed that they had umbrellas out in the water so people can be in the water and be in the shade. Another thing is that every scuba bike here has a helmet, which we've also never seen anywhere. It's so awesome. So we just walked pretty much the whole stretch along the entire beach in Tel Aviv. It's so windy today. It's been very hard to vlog as we go, but now we are taking Lime scooters. I've never seen so many scooters in a city. Do you have the Lime app? I do. Okay, because I can't add another one. It's difficult to record on the bike, of course, because you're trying not to die, but we did it. So yesterday at sundown was the start of the Shabbat. I must say we've been so surprised how widespread Shabbat is. It impacts everyday life for everyone here and how important it is, even in a city like Tel Aviv. Here at the hotel, they have a Shabbat elevator, so you don't have to touch any buttons, I think, since you're not supposed to do labor during Shabbat. And also yesterday at breakfast, they told us that today they won't be doing any sort of heating of food, so they can't use the stove, they can't use any sort of fire, which is just very interesting to see how much it's still incorporated into everyday life here in Israel. So one of our favorite things, as always, is to go to local grocery stores to see what they have. We stumbled across this place called AMPM with like a thousand pride flags inside, so let's go see what they have. We're here just a few weeks before Tel Aviv Pride, which is like one of the biggest pride parades in the entire world. So pretty sad that we miss it, but yeah, it's hard to time it. So many vegan options. Wow, we love this. We always get this in New York. Oh my god, it's so good. It's delicious on bagels. There's so many vegan things, vegan brownies, different kinds of vegan baked goods. This is heaven. I love these kind of health stores where everything is like organic, really nice. But I know that if my mom was in here, she would flip. She would be over the moon. But Dan and I are basically two 60-year-old LA women who do Pilates and only eat organic food. Although we don't really do that, but that's like our alter ego. Yeah, that's who we would be if we wouldn't travel all the time. This neighborhood right here is like a Mediterranean Berlin to me, which is really cool actually. It has that sort of hipster-y, edgy vibe, but also the sort of laid-back Mediterranean feel as well, if that makes sense. Sorry, I feel like we've said vegan 20,000 times in this video, but we were just walking and we like literally right next to that health food store, there was this market that also says 100% vegan, so we have to go inside to check. But they have vegan croissants. This is like hard cheese, onion jam, and green apple. So we got two pain au chocolat. They were only like five dollars each. And these bagels with onion jam, vegan, I guess it's supposed to be goat's cheese, and green apple. She said it's like such a hit, it always sells out pretty early in the day. So the bagel, it's not New York, but the filling. I am personally very excited about these. All right, it's the next day and I'm feeling better and better by the day, but still like there's something still that's like bugging me. I'm like a tiny, tiny bit nauseous. But anyway, now we're heading out into the city again and we're meeting up with an old friend of mine. I used to go to school with her for 10 years. Wow, it's crazy. And now it's been so long since we last saw each other. But yeah, we went to the same primary school, same middle school. So she's of course from Sweden, but now she works here in Tel Aviv at the Swedish embassy. So we're meeting her and we're gonna go out and explore a bit of the city together and catch up. What a beautiful, heavenly day. And best of all, there's like one tenth of the number of people that there were yesterday, which makes it all the more pleasant. Together with Helga, we headed for Old Jaffa, where we wanted to check out what we'd heard was the best hummus place in town. We made it to Abu Hassan, which is the most famous hummus place in all of Tel Aviv. Helga hasn't even been here and she's worked here for five months now, so we're about to try some great hummus. Are you excited? So excited. Make pictures, yalla. Thank you, shukran. This is the masabaha, okay? Combine the full, hummus is under, yalla. This is the hummus. Okay. Perfect. Onion, like you have in your country, spicy lemon. Love it, yes. Mmm. I think this has to be one of the most beautiful city skylines in the world. With the beach like this, it's wow. And just like that, it's already our final day in Tel Aviv. I can't believe how fast the past nine days went. Of course, poor Oscar was sick for two of them. We originally wanted to go to ANU right now, which is a museum of Jewish life, but our flight is a little too early for us to make it all the way there. So we're just going to walk around in this part of town, maybe go to the shuk. Carmel market. Carmel market. And they say shuk in Hebrew, I think, instead of suk. I remember coming here with my dad when I was 12 years old. I don't know if we said that I've been to Israel before, but I came here with my dad when I was 12 years old to this specific market. And my mom had one request. She was like, please buy saffron and bring it back to Sweden. So we were like, fine. I mean, I had no idea what saffron even was at that age. My dad thinks it's an art to chop lettuce and make it. I love you dad, but my dad cannot cook. So we came home with this spice and I was supposed to actually bake something in a class in school with saffron. So I brought it to school and the teacher was like, what is this? I was like, oh, this is saffron. I brought it from home. She's like, this is paprika. So it turns out the guy knew we were both idiots. So he sold us paprika for the price of saffron. So one really dangerous thing when we're in a country like this, it has a currency that is not like super strong in comparison to our Swedish crowns. It's that when we see all these prices, we're like, oh, they are reasonable prices because we think of them as in terms of Swedish crowns. But then we realized we actually have to take them times three. Like when we're in the US, for example, and we see prices in dollars, they're so low that we know automatically to just translate it into Swedish crowns. And you know, we have to take it times nine, but here it's like, oh, these can actually be Swedish prices. And then we discover that they are in fact, three times higher. And it just hurts every time. Another really fascinating thing is that we're learning that traditional Jewish food is actually very similar to traditional Swedish food. There's lots of herring and lots of dairy. Now we're here at Habima Square, which is sort of like the cultural center, I think, of Tel Aviv because there's Habima Theater right here. There's an auditorium and a bunch of other cultural stuff. There's also this sunken garden in the middle. I guess you could say that this is Tel Aviv's Lincoln Center, pretty much. Tel Aviv is seemingly one of the most bike-friendly cities we've ever been to. I mean, not on par with Copenhagen and Amsterdam. I mean, those two places are on another level in this universe, but still there are bike paths everywhere. They're very clearly marked, but from what we've heard from our friends who live here, traffic can get really crazy. So even if there are bike paths, you still want to be careful when you're out in traffic. Today is Monday and I have not seen the Tel Aviv beach this empty the whole time we've been here. It's a lot nicer now. So I wanted to end our time here in Tel Aviv by taking a swim, but now we actually wouldn't have felt the water. And it's really cold, like really cold. So I don't know if we'll have to reconsider. Okay, look, it's all relative. Like we go swimming in the Swedish lakes in like April and May sometimes, but you know, when you go for a swim in the Mediterranean, you're looking for a certain level of comfort, right? I don't think we're getting it here quite yet in May. We should also say that the water is so clear. It's so beautiful. Yeah. Okay. I've changed my mind. I'm going in. You have to give a moment of appreciation for beaches with foot showers. And just like that, we made it to the Hungarian airport. So sad. Already. It's gone so fast. It's gone so fast. We have had brain overload of information and we've spoken to so many people. It's been very fascinating. And all we can say is we leave even more confused yet informed than we were when we came. We've had an amazing time. It's been so, so fun. We've had nine days, which was a good amount, but I wish we would've had a few more to see a bit more of the country. Well, I don't wish we would've had a few more because there would be no money left in our bank. That is very true. Now our next adventure will not be in country 88. It will be in country UK probably. But regardless, until then, see you around the world.