First night in Bat Yam

So the night before I left for Amsterdam I had to go to the mall to get a few last minute things.....just a quick trip. The malls like a 10 minute walk through the park so it's pretty nice. It was like around 8 or 9 when I decided to go. Yael and Gaby came with me as we'll because we had to get some food for our apartment. What we thought would take about 45 minutes turned into like a 3 hour trip. It's funny because as we were walking to the mall I don't remember who but either yael or Gaby brought up about when Slava (our Russian goat herder at Yemin orde) said something like, "always remember the experience you have while getting somewhere" I don't remember the exact quote but it was something like that. Ok so anyway we finally get to the mall and we went into a few stores. Then we all walk out of the store and then Gaby walked away. Yael and I thought she went back into the store we had just walked out of for some reason. So Yael and I went to another store for like 5 minutes then we realized we had no idea where Gaby went. We looked for her everywhere but she was no where to be seen. I really don't know why we didn't just call each other but whatever. But we searched like the whole mall then we see Gaby running around and she looked so confused. She went down a level while Yael and I were on the floor above her. So we just watched her freaking out...it was so funny. Yael and I were just laughing at her. We kept screaming her name but she didn't hear us. Finally she saw us laughing at her and she started laughing too. So this was just the beginning of the night. Then, we decided to go to one of the photo booths...well we thought it was a photo booth. After we took the pictures, we realized it was a passport photo booth. haha It was really funny at the time...we felt so dumb though. After that, we went food shopping to pick up a few things. When we were done, we started walking back to our apartment. In order to get back to the apartment, we have to walk through this park again. As we were walking in the park, Gaby noticed her bag ripped. So we all stopped to think for a second and then Yael realized her bag was also ripped. For some weird reason, we all decided to sit down in the middle of the sidewalk....in the middle of the park. We just started laughing and tried to figure out what to do because we did not have any extra plastic bags. Then the most random people who came out of no where decided to sit down with us. We just died laughing because we really had no idea what to say or do. It was the funniest moment ever. They started talking to us and asked if they were invited to our "picnic"...we just started laughing again because it was so weird. Then more of their friends came over and sat with us. So by that time there were like 15 of us sitting in the middle of the sidewalk. Some of them knew english and some did not. I forgot what we all talked about, but we sat with them for a good 30 minutes. In the end, a few of the people said they would give us extra plastic bags they had. They offered to help us carry everything, but we said no thanks. It was just a really weird experience. Something like this would actually never happen in America..........only Israel.