Filling in some blanks

I have now entered the second leg of my trip, moving from my cousin Mickey, in the South to my cousin Dan, in a more central, temperate zone.
Fittingly, the weather changed drastically; it rained hard yesterday, so our trip to the Dead Sea was off the table.
We made an effort to go there, but the rain only got harder and floods threatened, so we went to Makhtesh Ramon, the tectonic sinkhole I have written about before, the place we didn't go to last week because the air was not clear enough to give us a good view.
Though rain threatened, we got a good view of the makhtesh, as well as the museum and visitor's center accompanying it.
This was mostly a memorial to the Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon, who was killed in the space shuttle disaster in 2003, along with others.
We then drove down into the hole itself before heading into the interior of the country, to my cousin's apartment.
The landscape and milieu changed quite  a bit as we drove along, gradually growing more lush with flowering trees and underbrush.
We passed an anonymous crusader's castle, remnant of the history in every stone of this ancient land.
After a few hours interlude during which I met my cousin's son in law and his three young grandchildren , we went to eat shwarma and a bevy of wonderful salads at a restaurant near my cousin's home.
Compared with the restaurant I ate at in the south--a Japanese joint-- service was brisk and efficient and the order perfectly executed.
At the Japanese restaurant, very young and scantily clad servers had milled around, chatting with one another and avoiding eye contact with customers, it seemed.
Our server brought us the wrong things a few times and then disappeared.. When she finally collected the money for the food, she dropped my cousin's credit card, which was subsequently rescued by an older, more experienced employee.
This put me in mind of my experience on Saturday night, when we attended a performance of a wonderful symphony orchestra, conducted by the country's first German conductor. He had brought some of the musicians from his previous orchestra, in Germany, to play with the local symphony for a series of Brahms performances.
My cousin remarked that she could tell which musicians were local and which were Germans. The Israeli ones never looked once at. the conductor. while the others hung on his every movement.