The week following the West Bank trip was another quiet one (the weekdays are all turning out to be rather quiet this year), although it was chock-full of birthdays: Randy's on Sunday, Lars's on Tuesday, and mine on Wednesday. First of all, to make up for previous blog posts not ending in pictures of cats, this one will begin with a ckat -- short for "backpackat" -- observed while I was writing the last blog.
Yep, that's a thing that happens here. That isn't anyone's cat, it's just a stray, and this isn't a living space, it's a public computer room.
Public service announcement: The pictures here have again been selected with the consultation of Caper Inc. Ltd.
On Sunday it was Randy's birthday, and she invited her whole class; some of the other apartmentmates went to a restaurant to celebrate. I didn't really feel like going out, so instead you get more pictures demonstrating how depressing are the hallways that adjoin all a floor's apartments:
At first one thinks one can't be int he right place. People live here? But luckily when you open the door you get a slightly less depressing sight:
Sunday's main story is that while I was doing homework with Caper, I got a call from Shani the Polyglot, whom you might remember as the operator of a store who said she would order a dish-drying rack for me. In this call, she said she was walking from her home towards the student village in order to deliver "the dish-drying rack". What can she mean, I thought? Am I not supposed to buy it at the store?
So we went out to meet her, and after a bit of fruitless searching, found her at last. She was carrying an old plastic dish-drying rack, and she gave this to me. She said it was just sitting in a room in their house, and I said it was more than serviceable for us students here for only a couple more weeks. She didn't want it returned, so I promised to donate it to the students of posterity.
Considering how nice that was of her, I'm hereby sharing the store's Facebook page out of gratitude... this dish-drying rack is infinitely better than the fail tablecloth/scrap of plastic that we had been using before.
Sadly, I have no other pictures from Sunday, so just this once I'll break my policy of only using photos of things I was personally involved in and show you this cool street portrait artist that Lars and Ivony met that day:
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| Photo credit: Lars |
So delicious. Just so delicious.
As Caper was planning to go on a tour that involved passing through religiously conservative areas, she needed to acquire a more superficially modest dress and hat. Here are some creepy hanging effigies the store had:
As we made our way through the streets to the restaurant, we talked about our lives and especially about how Luka ended up working in Jerusalem, and figure out why he thinks he may die early -- perhaps it has something to do with a faulty knee (a quality he shares with Caper, as it happens). Anyway, it was good times. Along the way, it was amazing how outside every restaurant -- this was a pedestrian mall, so the whole street was taken up by people and tables and chairs -- people would accost you and beg you to come into their restaurant and have the special and so forth. The best way to get rid of them seemed to be a forceful "Lo, toda!" ("No, thank you!")
Finally we arrived at Ben Sira, the place Luka had in mind, whose hummus was reputedly good. There are a few amusing things about their menu, including the "beef meat hummus":
It was indeed quite good. We sat outside -- a wonderful evening with friends on a Jerusalem street, very surreal when I think about it -- and discussed our goals in Israel and in life, linguistics, and regrets. Speaking of which, the restaurant featured a soap bottle whose (existential?) philosophy was equally appropriate for the atmosphere of the night:
As we went back, walking to the bus, Luka revealed that his contract actually requires him to learn Hebrew within a certain timeframe, so he more or less has to continue studying it until he fulfills the criterion. Caper asked us good questions, and I recited a poem, and then Luka went back to Givat Ram (another campus of the university) and Caper and I made our way back. It was a good night for talking.
The next day was Lars's birthday. In the morning she went on an adventure that included swimming with Ivony in a pool in the middle of a forest -- Jerusalem Peace Forest. Their attempt to cab back recalls a funny thing about Israeli taxi drivers: they all have business cards and they all give you their number, saying that if you call them to arrange a ride somewhere they will give you the best fare and whatnot. Yet none of them is really better than any other. One guy who gave us his number was in bed when we called to get an urgent ride once, and he groggily told us he could come by in half an hour. Lars and Ivony called him from the forest, and all they got was "How did you get my number? I give it to you??" Another guy whom they called replied, when they gave him their origin and destination, "No. No! No no no! No no!" and hung up, and repeated the same thing when they called him back. This despite his card claiming that he will drive anyone anywhere. The lesson here is don't bother to take a taxi driver's card.
Anyway, one way or another they made it back. Lars didn't want a special dinner for her birthday, partly because Paul wanted to save on restaurants, so to make up for it he offered to make a particularly glorious pastascramble.
When they got back, Lars, Cas, and I went to get a cake. We checked out some grocery store cakes, but since they were disconcertingly similar to the ones you can get anywhere in Canada, we opted for a small bakery nearby that seemed more authentic. (I was delighted to discover that I now knew enough Hebrew numbers to interpret the prices the baker listed.) On the way back up to the apartment, we saw Elevator Cat:
Elevator Cat is now my primary topic of conversation for avoiding the awkwardness that can arise when sharing an elevator for nine floors with a stranger. Of everyone I've talked to, only one has never seen or heard of Elevator Cat. (She was quite weirded out by the topic.) One group of friends has even christened the cat "Fluffs", which is not the most creative name, but what can you do.
So now it was evening, and people were already arriving to celebrate Larissa's birthday with her, namely Randy and Bas. I forget if I've introduced Bas before; he's a Dutch fellow who likes to run with Paul in the evenings.
We had acquired a rose and a white wine (that turned out to be abominably sweet) to celebrate.
The pastascramble Paul made was indeed magnificent. This contains more cheeses and vegetable matter than I think you should like to imagine:
Oh, and here's the Dutch Clive Cussler book I mentioned. Paul gave it to Bas since the latter can read it. Would you have been able to tell it was in Dutch if you were quickly grabbing it as you headed out the door to your tour bus? And might it not still have been worth trading a Gideon Bible for?
It was a great night. I asked Randy the secret of her legendary bottomless spring of happiness, Bas tried to guess everyone's ages (and undershot each one), and someone made an excellent salad to accompany the pastascramble. Everyone was talking and enjoying themselves, and it just made me glad to have this glimpse of young adult life, living with roommates in an apartment and inviting friends over for a humble birthday dinner.
(I pulled out Google Translate at one point to plug in the Hebrew and check whether the cake was suitable for the nut-allergic Ivony. It was. We also had a small bottle of vanilla extract, and I made the mistake of examining its ingredients as well to see whether it actually contained any real vanilla: a mistake, I say, because the result was disappointing. But we did learn that Google Translate for Hebrew is hilariously unreliable, or else Hebrew is highly volatile, since for one phrase a single letter made the difference between it yielding the translation "condensed child actually" versus "flavouring materials".)
Here we are. From left to right: Randy, Paul, Bas, Ivony, me, Cas, birthday girl. (The camera itself is taking the picture from the counter.)
While we were cleaning up afterwards, we had to empty the dish-drying rack of a bunch of fruit that Paul had acquired for pennies and had left to dry there. We had no fewer than (if I recall correctly) twelve green plums, and therefore the natural thing to do was to make up a party game best described by the name "Can you hold all the green plums?"
Randy can!
Paul can!
Or can he -- ?
Bas can!
And Paul, using the refined, efficient food-carrying skills he acquired during his employment at Food Basics, returns at last to outdo everyone by adding both a tomato and half an eggplant:
Clap, clap, clap.
The festivities went on long after the birthday girl herself actually went to bed, including a very quick card game called Egyptian something-or-other that involved slamming your hand down on a discard pile as quickly as possible (quite painful when all is going well). Oh, and Paul also turned out to be the champion of dextrous eyebrows, albeit not when required to simultaneously discuss the doctrine of predestination:
That was that night, a very happy one. And thus Lars turned twenty-three.
The next day it was my turn to turn twenty-two. I woke up to one of the exceptionally many cloudy mornings this year. Last year, I recall there only being one.
Amir (if he is reading this) might recognize this next one as a nod to the appearance of semi-rendered distant land in Morrowind...
The sun always obliterates the clouds in the end, of course.
By contrast, to bring us back to earth, here is a singularly non-awe-inspiring cutlery drawer.
Nevertheless, slightly wondrous is the fact that those knives' blades are actually blue. That's a thing here.
Nomi now teaches our Hebrew class regularly; she may not always be as easy of spirit as Ateret, but her no-nonsense approach is beginning to grow on us. That Wednesday, she took us for a walking tour of the campus, explaining some history and landmarks in Hebrew (insofar as possible, of course).
Here's an amphitheatre where they have convocations, guest speakers, concerts, and a great view towards the Dead Sea:
I also liked the unusual arrangement of carpets (seats??) on these benches...
Also, on one of these days, the classroom was short a chair, so Caper and I went questing for one. We found some on a landing outside on the way up to the roof, so we took it inside, but a custodian stopped us. "Lo babinyan!" ("Not inside the building!"), I believe she said. We tried to explain our problem in English and a little bit of Hebrew, but couldn't, and then Caper tried Arabic. The woman understood her perfectly, and escorted us via the elevator to the mysterious basement level, where she gave us an extra chair. Just goes to show the good of learning more languages!
I also talked with Barak Dan, my Biblical Hebrew professor whom I mentioned in a previous post, about some differences I had noticed between Biblical and Modern Hebrew. For the linguists reading, one interesting thing is that the participle has become a kind of present tense (Biblical Hebrew used an imperfect/perfect aspect system) and even, in some slang, almost as if the language were analytical, a false past and future if the reference time is supplied (i.e. something like "Tomorrow I'm arriving there... Yesterday I'm buying socks").
Also, an excellent example of reanalysis is that the construct state, whereby one specially marked noun is modified by the following one (e.g. bayit "house", but bet lekhem -- Bethlehem -- "house of bread"), has largely fallen out of use to be replaced by the preposition shel, like "of" or French "à", from an original relative pronoun plus preposition she le "which is [belonging] to/for". If, as Ateret did, you wanted to joke that camels are the buses of the Bedouin, in Biblical Hebrew you might say autobuseh bedouiim, but now the originally rare form autobusim she l'bedouiim has become the standard choice under the form autobusim shel bedouiim. (Of course, the clever readers will have noticed that no Biblical Hebrew speaker ever said autobus anyway.)
Since there's little else to report from that afternoon, I'll insert two small anecdotes I forgot to mention before:
One is that when the maintenance guy came to check our apartment shortly after the others moved in, he stopped by my room to fix some broken drawers in my nightstand and saw my Hebrew Old Testament. "Are you Jewish?" he asked Paul.
"No," replied Paul, "but my friend is learning Hebrew."
"Very good!" the maintenance guy commended him; "very good!"
The other is that when the Bezeq employee came to our apartment in person to set up our wireless connection for us (I was delighted, by the by, to discover that the problem really wasn't on my side trying to fix it -- they had supplied us with a faulty modem, and replaced it with yet another one, before he came), he saw the paper they gave us when I ordered the service and scratched out his name and number on it. "I don't want any more calls from anyone!" he said to Lars, or something to that effect, meaning he wished they would stop putting his number on their promotional material. Unfortunately for him, his name and number are on each of the gazillion fliers they distributed to the incoming students...
Anyway, on Wednesday night we (the five apartmentmates plus Caper) opted to go to an Israeli-Italian restaurant for my birthday dinner. This restaurant, Kedma (tagline: "the spaghettis"), is one Lyera discovered and we went to last year. Unlike most restaurants here, it's big enough that they don't choose one but have two separate sections for dairy and meat menus.
On the way I got a couple of pictures of the light rail area out of the fear that I might be finding the scene dull only because I've seen it so many times when it might in fact be interesting. You be the judge.
The restaurant's menu -- which had us debate the meaning of "scallions" for a long time, eventually settling on "little green things" -- provides a better description of shakshuka than I did in a previous post. This serves to answer my mum's question, "What is an 'eggy bruschetta' if not an omelette?"
It also featured amusing diagrams of the lost art of culinary mathematics.
In your opinion, should this equation be read left to right or right to left?
The restaurant was very nice. They had delightful pasta sauces. This is what the patio looks like, if you include a pensive Lars.
Also amusing was a family nearby that kept getting up and running to avoid a stray cat that occasionally wandered near their table.
The walk back took us back once more through the Old City and the Wadi Al-Joz. Recounting the conversations would no doubt be impossible, so the pictures can depict the path on my behalf.
On the other side of the Old City we decided to get knaffa and, if we could find it, Ramadan juice (Ramadan had now started).
The knaffa shop was closed, or not open yet, it's hard to tell, but here's some Ramadan juice. This stuff suddenly appears on stands everywhere in the Arab markets throughout Ramadan. It's so good for how cheap it is. It's a little hard to describe the flavours exactly, partly because there's no English on the bottles. Caper tried to read the black ones, but its main ingredient was likely a fruit whose name she didn't know. Anyway, the point is that it's delicious.
While we were buying it, the man at the stand suddenly cried out and pointed, and a firework went up when we looked and made a deafening blast. If I remember the explanation right, this signalled the breaking of the fast.
And then we continued our journey. In Jerusalem, you are never allowed to forget that there are Israeli soldiers everywhere.
The same Ramadan lights shown in a previous picture are on people's houses in the Arab districts:
Someone observing this particular one commented that it was like Christmas:
So my birthday fell on Christmas this year.
I crammed a lot into telling you about Wednesday, but Thursday is more subdued until the night. It began with yet another cloudy morning (being obliterated by the sun).
Here are some classic scenes around the Hebrew University (barring the rare dog).
This was Cas's last day of class, and that night, after homework with Caper and other apartmently things, Cas was going to a rooftop party he had been invited to by a classmate. They were supposed to have homemade beer there. Now, Lars and I were going for a walk that evening and decided to walk Cas to the south gate of the student village, where he was to meet his group. Paul had also joined us by some means or other. When we arrived, the pack started moving, and soon enough we were more or less invited to come along.
This was a weird experience, especially for me -- why would I spontaneously go to such a party in Jerusalem at a location I didn't know? I tried to keep track of our route, until of course we got on a bus, a kind of point of no return. Lars didn't seem to be as uneasy.
Soon we were in a residential neighbourhood I later learned was part of the German Colony. Everyone dismounted from the bus and we walked down a couple of roads until we came to a two- or three-storey apartment at the end of little sidewalk. The door led into a narrow, dark stairwell and we climbed up after the others. It opened up, past a small washroom and a little kitchen turned into a makeshift bar, onto a rooftop porch, partially covered and partially facing the roofs (rooves?) of the nearby buildings.
The place was crowded, and people were lining up for beer and bread with dip at the bar. I didn't feel much like drinking, and Lars doesn't drink, but Paul and Cas got in line. All around us, people were standing or sitting on the floor, or at one or two little tables, on makeshift benches, on random objects, and talking. Most of the speech was in Hebrew, and most of the people looked like locals, not international classmates. Many people were drinking and some were smoking, and there was also non-cigarette smoke. I was simultaneously repulsed and fascinated -- I'm not a party person by any stretch of the word, but somehow this felt like a real Jerusalem place, the kind of thing many of the residents would have gone to when they were twenty-somethings.
Suddenly, a live band appeared on one corner of the roof and shouldered their instruments. Not long after they began playing did people begin paying attention. The music was certainly not in a very Western style; Cas was told it was Balkan. It involved a lot of instrumental noodling, and the band was -- well, actually, you can just watch a video:
This was for me the coolest part of the evening. Even though I very much wanted to get back, I couldn't stop watching them. In particular, the lead singer, the guy in the middle on the accordion, reminded me strongly of a statue of a young King David (before he was king) I saw in the Tower of David museum last year, and I thought: Would this be David today? Were he born in the eighties or nineties, would he be playing not a harp in Saul's court but an accordion for a rooftop party?
I conceived the idea for, and a few days later wrote the following draft of, a poem mixing these thoughts with the hypothetical thoughts of one of David's loyal men still making some kind of yearly pilgrimage to see him, on the assumption that he is perpetually alive.
----
I saw King David twice this week
I saw King David twice this week.
Once in a museum
in a fortress made by Ottomans
on the ruins
of Herod’s,
known as the Tower of David
despite sporting a minaret.
He was in green stone.
A boy forever,
by his foot the head
of Israel’s enemy,
one hand on Saul’s sword,
one hand on the hip
bearing Saul’s armour,
a pose almost feminine,
the subtle smirk
of the hero who has already
outlived this world
alive beneath his curls.
I could almost love him there,
kneel and swear allegiance,
take the blade from him
to place in some museum.
And once on a roof in Jerusalem
in a sleeveless shirt in a Balkan band.
His loyal men played violin,
guitar, and double bass, and drums,
and David took accordion,
not harp this time,
playing in a different court
in the German Quarter
where people spoke Hebrew and queued up
for homemade beer—
this is the David his son took after
there among the smokers and the stoners,
and I was there.
I saw the grim look pass
before the wicked smile,
the curly blond hair shift
as his fingers flew through
a beautiful quick music.
He looked at me and nodded.
Yesterday, my king,
I climbed in your spring,
the spring of the young ibex,
and swam where the waterfall pools
in the heart of Judah’s desert
to the cave in the cliff face.
I’m sorry, David, last year
I couldn’t make it,
the climb was too high,
and I was no rebel,
not like you,
a man after
God’s own heart.
---
Even so, it was soon time to get out of there, Lars and I felt, and when Cas had sampled the homemade beer we sallied out. We had the minor problem of finding out where we were...
And that of facing bugs so disgustingly monstrous it was morally offensive that they should exist:
But in the end, after waiting for what seemed like forever at a bus stop and turning down an insistent cab driver, we managed to catch the bus we needed.
And so it was off to home.
Friday began with (surprise) a cloudy morning.
Today Cas and Lars and I planned to go to Tel Aviv for a day trip to swim in the Mediterranean. We didn't hang around too long in the morning, although we did see what it would look like if we sketchily exploited the fact that our window faces a building of windows into other people's kitchens:
Of course, they can look in on us, too. Nobody is safe.
Oh, by the by, Ivony made this salad for her breakfast. It astounds me. Look, it has fruit and everything! Who can make such a worthy salad at nine in the morning?!
Anyway, after we had packed up our stuff, it was time to catch a bus to the Central Bus Station and then to Tel Aviv. On the way, we saw a flying object which this zoomed-in picture confirms is a blimp. I didn't realize they still have blimps.
On the way to the CBS, there was an odd juxtaposition: a bunch of Orthodox Jews climbed onto the bus just as Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes came on. Obviously, nothing prevents Orthodox Jews from enjoying good music, but the song, which reminds me of Canada and modernity and everything, contrasted with the context.
Speaking of coming home, at the CBS, we discovered Kosher McDonald's and decided to give it a try. First thing to notice is how the colour is something like 100% wrong.
They have not the Big Mac, but the Big America:
"That's not a Big America," Larissa or Cas pointed out. "A real Big America would have to be a cheeseburger." But of course there is no such thing as a kosher cheeseburger.
It was pretty good. Disappointingly similar to the Canadian burgers, actually.
We also ran into Nomi at the CBS. Then we got on our bus, and it was a long, hot, beautiful ride to the Tel Aviv CBS, which had even more floors.
It also had a bizarre arrangement of foods spread out on a metal table. I'm sure the eggs serve some kind of purpose, but damned if they don't look weird just sitting there between the various breads.
The following Engrish is not so striking except for how unlikely it seems:
Meanwhile, this washroom sign (why are the paid washrooms always the worst quality?) is poorly worded on a more predictable level:
On one floor of the bus station we discovered what appeared to be an indoor street sale. Just in case you want to do your shopping at the bus station. It's as if Square One decided to merge the mall and the terminal.
Quite cool, though, is that this probably one of the few places in the world where signs are in Hebrew, Arabic, English, and Russian:
We discovered the Filipino section of the bus station and Cas got a terrifically mysterious drink/dessert.
One storekeeper we talked to (to ask him about an advertised food that turned out to be a fish) guessed that Lars was of Singaporean heritage. She is half so. Pretty good.
We took a last bus to get to the beach. It seems that on all of the buses here, they have these emergency glass-breaking hammers -- at least, that's what we assume they are:
On the bus ride we met a woman who was also headed to our beach, Bograshov Beach. She was from Be'er Sheva, a city in the south of Israel in the Negev Desert, and said that she absolutely had to come to the beach at least once every three weeks. We talked about her thoughts about Israel and whether it was touristy and her travels in the world, and she directed us to where we needed to go. It was a neat encounter.
[Note that after this point, some of the pictures are by Cas, since he was also borrowing the camera from time to time, but as usual, I forget which.]
The entrance to the beach looks like this:
The beach itself looks like this:
And the Mediterranean looks like this:
That picture barely conveys the incredible heat and sunlight going on at this beach. Seriously, it was unbelievable. Paul put on sunscreen when he was at this place and got burned. Because until very recently (specifically this very day) I believed I was immune to sunburn, I put on no sunscreen. The peeling is going very well, thank you.
We picked up an umbrella from a large bin of umbrellas (umbrellae?) and at once a man appeared to move lawn chairs around for us and set up our umbrella. He asked oddly detailed questions: These three chairs are very close together. Would you like me to move this one over so I can put the umbrella between these two, or to move this other one over instead ...? And of course his aid was for a fee. Finally we were established.
The Mediterranean -- perhaps everywhere, and certainly in Tel Aviv -- is wonderfully warm, but also an odd swim. For one thing, it's very salty, and you can taste it. It constantly makes me want to spit. More importantly, there's a constant barrage of very large waves that render real swimming impossible. Even standing is difficult without being thrown around. Granted, this can be a lot of fun. You try jumping as a wave taller than yourself crests, you try submerging yourself, you try swimming into it, you try swimming away from it, but in the end you must just take it. It becomes a matter of wading and getting a short bath a couple times a minute.
Here's the aftermath of one wave (on Cas or me; it's hard to see in this picture).
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| Photo credit: Lars |
The waves also bring in lots of jellyfish (Hebrew "medusa") around this time of year, as we were warned and also saw for ourselves. At one point a man near us plucked a lumpy, gelatinous office out of the water and flung it away. "Jellyfish!" he declared. The water also sometimes caused pains like small, sharp pinprickes, but none of us having ever known what a jellyfish sting feels like, we can't be sure whether that was the explanation.
We went in and out of swimming for a few hours. There's not much to tell, since aside from that it was a typical beach. Sadly, Lars wore her glasses in the water and lost them in one large crash. We spent a while looking for them, but the sheer tumult of the waves made it extremely unlikely that they would stay in one place, let alone remain intact. We thought they might eventually wash up on shore, so we notified the lifeguards and they took Lars's number, but there's been no word. Luckily, she has an extra pair here with her.
One thing about this beach is that everyone is playing a kind of ping pong; if you walk along the beach, no matter how far you go you hear the constant pock, pock, pock of a ball bouncing from paddle to paddle.
Even this guy, who scores a few badass points for dressing up to go to the beach, is playing.
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| Photo credit: Lars |
"Ani mdaber qtsat ivrit" ("I speak a little Hebrew"), I replied.
Perhaps smelling the possibility of a memorized phrase, he pointed to Lars and asked, "Hi mdaber ivrit?" ("Does she speak Hebrew?"). Now, in this phrase he set a trap for me: the verb has been conjugated improperly, so I could not reply simply yes or no.
So I confusedly replied, "Hi mdaberet -- ani mdaber" ("She speaks; I speak").
I passed the test, and "Good for you," he said. Of course, Cas and Lars were curious about what he had asked me concerning her...
When we had eventually had enough of swimming and sunbathing -- or rather, enough without pausing to eat supper -- we turned away from the water and changed into our clothes again and decided on our options.
Interesting fact: behind where they're standing in this picture is a sign with locker rules. Can you spot what's interesting about it?
We decided to walk back via the highly hotelled streets towards the arts and crafts shuk or a restaurant, whichever came first.
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| Photo credit: Lars |
The beaches of Tel Aviv are frequented by both locals and tourists. We were trying to find the shuk going largely on our memory of the bus route, but now and then we got a nice vague direction towards the shuk from someone else who had no idea.
At this bus stop we saw an amusing vandalism all too appropriate for the beach, and yet one that still makes you wonder who on earth goes to the trouble:
The streets of Tel Aviv are a very interesting place. I wrote last year that it's a big city, much more like the other big cities of the world than Jerusalem is. In the context of Israel, though, finer distinctions can be made. It's very commercial and full of international visitors, but of a somewhat different sort than in Jerusalem. Many of these tourists aren't here to see the Church of the Redeemer, but to swim and party. For an observant Jew in Tel Aviv, as my professor said, finding a kosher restaurant is difficult. It's also known as the "City that Never Sleeps", referring not only to things being open 24 hours --
-- but also to a much smaller proportion of stores that shut down on Shabbat. (In Jerusalem some of the 24-hour places have signs advertising, believe it or not, "24/6".)
The storefronts also feature some frankly frightening advertising:
But also some interesting graffiti; we actually saw this same one on several walls:
When we got to the shuk, though, it had already closed for Shabbat.
Finally we discovered a Yemeni restaurant and sat down. A very personable waitress walked us through the menu, which included (for once!) foods that were neither typical Western nor falafel, hummus, and shawarma.
It was really good food, too, one of the best places we've eaten at here. Here's a wonderful mixture of hummus and shakshuka:
The jachnun is a roll of bread soaked in some kind of sauce and prepared for twelve hours overnight:
Malawach bread is served with an egg and soupy tomatoes:
(My taking a picture of the following sign, visible from our table outside, is a testament to how bad my eyes are. Cas could read it, but he wanted to ask me about the Hebrew, and when I found I couldn't read it I had to take a picture so I could see it in the camera screen...)
Cas tried a Goldstar, Israel's national beer -- as he put it, it's the Coors of Canada: a nationally recognized brand that isn't very good -- and felt more a part of Israel for having done so, and especially for having recognized, as the average Israeli no doubt does, its inferiority to other beers. Better, though, they gave us free tea at the end of the meal.
Finally we headed back to the beach to enjoy it in the evening, to walk along the shore if not to swim.
On the way we saw this most interesting age restriction...
The place was as closed as can be, but inside it we spotted a cat who, I guess, had seen Scott.
As we approached the beach, we could hear a concert going on by the beach facilities and walked past it on our way to the water. Mediocre though it was, the chorus of one song is now forever burned into my brain...
We walked along the water for a long time as the last light from the sun disappeared.
Out at sea, we could see that the waves were still as big as ever, crashing against the rocks they set up to establish the beach. But here on the shore, they lapped more gently against our tired feet.
When we had had our fill of walking and talking, looking out towards the ocean and trying to guess in which direction home was, feeling like we were on some massive movie set, we returned to the shore.
From the shore we called the number of a taxi company (some walking to a recognizable intersection had to be done first), and when one came at last, we were on our way back to Jerusalem. A mere forty-five-minute ride. I'm pretty sure I fell asleep.
So that was our day in Tel Aviv, and a good one it was in our books -- sunburns, stings, spectacles and all.
That's all for one post. But I'll let a reprise of the rooftop band play you out.
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