Tel Aviv Tuesday (Yuletide Edition)

I sorely missed my friend Shiran and her amazing family, and I had just survived a pretty wretched midterms / finals / rewrites / thesis forming / stupid strike, so after writing the last midterm (!) paper and doing more work on my thesis (I think I may be getting somewhere. Thank goodness for my advisor!), I headed to Tel Aviv for the afternoon and evening.

I arrived at the Tel Aviv Central bus station and, to my amusement, my shock, and my delight, I found massive Christmas displays in the bus station's mall! The lights! The trees! The boxes of ornaments! I felt like I had wandered back into a South Florida mall -- just add the stench of cigarette smoke and ambiguously connected floors, nudge an inter-city bus terminal off of one corridor, and you've got Tel Aviv's Central Bus station on Christmas Day!

Coral Square Mall? No...Keep Guessing...

Aventura Mall? No...One more try...

Tel Aviv Central Bus Station?! BINGO! Yuletide glow is felt all 'round this secular city!

Na-nac-nachman meuman followed me to Tel Aviv. This graffiti is very popular and found ALL over the place in Israel.

I left the bus station and made my way down to Nachalat Benyamin, a crafty street fair that is open in Tel Aviv every Tuesday and Friday. I got a huge Diet Coke at Burger King (ordering in Hebrew) and wandered around the fair's pretty displays for a long while. I ran into a bunch of Florida kids on Birthright, and the new UF rabbi, ordained at JTS last spring. It was fun to see the FL kids, and to hear that Yoni's enjoying UF Hillel! (Also, Go GATORS! Wooo!)

A fine retail establishment, close to Shuk HaCarmel and Nachalat Benyamin. There didn't seem to be any books inside, so we can chalk this up to crazy Israeli translation skills (like when you order a "beagle with lox").

I also wandered through Shuk HaCarmel (FYI, Davidson Chevre: This is actually fun when it's not raining!), and up and down Sheinkin Street, which has funky shops. I FINALLY got new leggings (or, as they say in Hebrew, "tights"), as I discovered that Tel Aviv is the leggings capital of Israel. Jerusalem is not the capital of leggings...or Israel, for that matter, at least according to my home country. I'm just trying to raise the intellectual bar a little, seeing as how I'm just talking about shopping here. But really. Leggings are hard to find in Jerusalem. And so is the US Embassy, because it's in Tel Aviv.

Anyway, the leggings came in this fabulous bag: Sometimes, when Israelis put English on things, they just throw words together that they think look cool. I was half mortified, half elated, to be carrying such a disgusting and ridiculous bag, filled with, not sex, but two pairs of leggings and my fleece jacket.

When Shiran met me as the sun was setting on Allenby Street (Sheinkin, Nachalat Benyamin and the Shuk are all spokes off of an intersection at Allenby), we got her some backpacking pants (she's going to India!), and then I made her convince me that I needed not only a new necklace for my birthday, but a new wallet as well. Happy birthday to me!

"It's a fine neck-LACE," as they'd say on the State.

Look, I got a wallet for an adult! For the first time since high school, I will be using an adult wallet! I'm growing up, I guess:
Big Girl Wallet outside!

After all this, we amused ourselves with the finer things in life: גרבי חברות / Garbei Chaveroot / Friendship socks. See:

גרבי חברות / Friendship socks!

We also had a jeans-trying-on adventure in Castro (um, zippers at the ankles are just not OK), which is like Express in the States, and we got fruit shakes before our bus ride back to her hometown.

Dinner was great, and I feel like I can actually talk in Hebrew with Shiran and her family. I told them what it was like to prepare for a hurricane, and we conducted much of the conversation in Hebrew. It was awesome. With ulpan back and school (supposedly) operational, and my visits to my Israeli pseudo-families, I just may be able to converse with Israelis wherever we may meet!

After watching most of the Israeli Try-Out-For-Grease-Idol, I was tired and got on the bus back to Jerusalem. As the bus rolled back to Jerusalem, another successful Tel Aviv Tuesday spun to a close.

PS - I love Shiran and her family!

Mixed Bag

Today was pretty uneventful, so I have a bunch of little things to write about that didn't fit into a day trip summation...

1. SuperSol Deal: Today we went to another supermarket in Jerusalem. Our friend Adam attempted to guide us through the supermarket, wising us up to the "secret" stash of nuts by the last register, and showing us which stuff we wanted to buy. Today was my first experience EVER buying chicken from a butcher counter at a grocery store. It was pretty intense...and I felt like a real, normal citizen. Also, I noticed that there were about 5 (yes, five) aisles, featuring Elite Chocolate (you remember this if I've ever given you poprox chocolate).

Things we purchased at SuperSol Deal include a sh'moniyah (that's an 8-pack of Diet Coke. We're moving on up.), schnitzel-grade chicken (proof that there is a God, if you can't find God at the Kotel), diet yogurt (in weird flavors like passionfruit), a wide variety of pretzel/cookie/snacky things, and tomatoes. Tomato-shopping, by the way, is INTENSE here. There was like 4 times the normal supermarket display of tomatoes, and people were sifting through them to find the PERFECT complement to their cucumbers for Israeli Salad.

2. My Dramatic Flair: Allison pointed out that I interrupted her reading of Frommer's to show her (and Rafi) the sign about the Dead Sea being the lowest point on Earth. She's not nearly as stupid as I made her look. But much like the work of James Frey, let's remember that it still made for a good read. (I'm a big fan of James Frey, so if my beelog isn't as accurate as you would like, well, you're just going to have to suck it up and deal.)

3. Lifeguards: The Dead Sea has lifeguards, even though it's virtually impossible to submerge your head in that buoyant, fabulous water. As an on-again, off-again Lifeguard (recertified this past summer), I know that you can drown in only 2 inches of water. I also know that I've never seen a lifeguard smoking on the job. That's right. The ultimate Israeli experience includes a dip in the Dead Sea, and being yelled at by a lifeguard who sports sunglasses, a megaphone, and a half-smoked cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth.
4. Lines: Are you all queued up? Ready to take your place in front of the register at Aroma? Well, don't let the 80-year-old grandma with the cart of vegetables stomp on your foot to get her Ice Aroma first. Israelis are p-u-s-h-y. Allison and I enjoy our fought-for coffees. (She had to stand up for her place in line because of a pushy Israeli. Really.)

5. Nokia: Cellcom, Shalom, indeed. Israel is a world leader in technology. They INVENTED everything electronic (sorry, Al Gore). OK, not everything, but a lot of stuff. So why is it that 98% of cellphones here are the Nokias so coveted by me, pre-cellphone, in the year 2000? (Conan shout-out) I MISS MY SAMSUNG. These non-flip-phones are soooo Sophomore year.

6. My Own Illiteracy: I was talking recently about how if I were in the states, I would NEVER eat this much bread. If only I knew how to order a salad with the toppings that I want, I wouldn't have to get a sandwich. I also would be interested in buying cream cheese, or arguing with a bus driver or a talking to a person on the street, but I just don't know enough Hebrew to do that. My conversational inclination lies fallow, except for when I'm with the crowd from NY.

7. Israeli Soldiers: When I was on USY Poland/Israel Pilgrimage, in 1999, Israeli soldiers were THE hotties. Everyone wanted to hook up with a soldier, and why not, if they were maybe a year or two older than us? Now that I'm 25, I see these soldiers and think, "Oh, s/he's just a child!" These tiny little kids are defending this tiny little country. It's really quite unbelievable. This child-soldier was napping, cradling his machine gun like a baby sleeps with a teddy bear, while waiting for his bus in the Jerusalem Central Bus Station, just before we went off to the Dead Sea.


That's all for now. I'm sure I'll do something exciting soon. For now, just my little ramblings.