Our exercise ritual our first week in TelAviv was to combine walking with shopping. Each day we would walk up to 7 miles to buy something we needed. To Tel Aviv Port for a Yoga Mat and Yoga Towel, to Kikar Ha’Medina for the Nespresso Machine, L’Occitane, and Sheets. At Dizingkooff center we bought a Duvet and powdered green tea, then to Sheinkin street for a popcorn popper and hairdryer. Its funny to have this list of the things I really need to feel and function at home. I am still debating the purchase of wooden hangers. I had a Joan Crawford moment when i opened the closets to unpack. The jumble of wire and plastic hangers was disorienting. I quickly sorted the black and grey hangers off of the dowel and banished the rest into a drawer.
Tel Aviv Port • Medina Square which is actually a circle? • The fountain @ Dizenkoff • Shenkin street shopping
In a new country it takes a few days to get your head around a new currency. I find it to be a lttle like fake or Monopoly money, unfamiliar colored notes that have no known value in your mind. So our shopping spree those first few days was done in the fog that is jet lag, with a wallet filled with play money. I didnt even try to properly calculate the exchange rates until a few days later. It turns out the Nespresso machine we have at home that was $100, cost us $300 here. L’Occitane body scrub and mini sized shampoo, conditioner and shower gel? $200! And because I wanted to head off a potential cold, I spent $1000 Sheckels (the israeli currency) on Probiotics, homeopathic zinc, vitamin C and some special Sea Plasma capsules - a whopping $300US. What all of these things have in common is they are all FOREIGN brands. We learned our lesson a few days later when we bought a huge jar of Dead Sea Balts Salts for $24 Sheckels (about $8US) and have decided to shop local from now on.
But shopping foreign brands here is much easier here than shopping local. Either you know what you are getting or you can attempt to steal a few words from a french or spanish package because at least the alphabet is the same. Hebrew is another matter. There is no way to interpret a language made from letterforms you dont understand, let alone one that is written from right to left AND without vowels. To give you non-hebrew readers an English example, take this for instance - lv. Since there are no vowels, lv could mean love, live, or leave. And since they read from right to left you have to flip it around so you’d end up with something that looks like this - vl, or evol, evil, or evael. So even if you could decipher the consonents-only hebrew alphabet, you’d still have to intepret it. This makes the package design and graphics incredibly important when shoping local. And even then, the design can be misleading. While an illustration of a cow or a farm tells me i have a dairy product in my hand, it just isn’t specific enough to communicate the difference between sour cream, milk, yogurt, or cottage cheese.
Dairy Dilemma - from left to right - Cottage Cheese • Cottage Cheese • Yogurt • Milk
Today is a perfect example. I was thrilled to find Demerra sugar at the organic market the other day. Since I could see through the cellophane the fine little brown crystals, and with the help of the spoon graphic - i didn’t need to bother looking at the hebrew lettering to see what I was buying. I knew what I had. While typing this post I decided to make myself an espresso with milk and sugar. I put the sugar in the cup so that the heat of the Nespresso would melt it. Then i added warm milk and tasted it. It wasnt sweet at all. So i added a little more sugar - it still didn’t taste sweet. I thought maybe the heat from the espresso could have carmelized the sugar on the bottom of the cup so I gave it a stir and re-tasted. Nada. I lifted the spoon and dregded up about a quarter cup of bloated sugar crystals. WTF? I looked at the package again and saw the words Sugat, and thought it might be some strange israeli immitation sugar that doesn’t melt? That just passes through you like Olestra they put in potato chips so you wouldnt absorb the fat? Baffled, I turned the package over in my hands and looked again at the front of the package. Under the hebrew font, in perfect english handwriting, it said “Fine Wheat Groats.”
Once you get the currency down (I divide by 3), get all forensic deciphering the packaging at the store, then you have to consider your timing. Time as in hours, hours in a day, days in the week, and religious timing. The Israeli workweek is Sunday to Thursday. Thursday night is like our Friday night and Saturday here is like Sunday in the states. After three weeks I am only just adjusting to this. Friday is your last chance to get stocked up for the weekend because everything is closed on Saturday, I mean for the jewish establishments. Friday everything is closed in the Arab areas like Jaffa.
I went last Friday to get some food to go from Delicatessan, a miniature version of Joans on Third in LA. Its a fave of mine, and since I havent found a market where i can buy organic meat, and the fish store in Jaffa is closed on Fridays, my last shot to buy protein for my paleo man is at Delicatessan. I went to the website to double check that it was open, and the hours listed were Friday 17.00 - 7:30. Since it was 5pm, and thinking I had 2.5 hours to go until it closed, I walked over to find Delicatessan closed. Because it said Friday in English, I didnt think to transpose the numbers. Instead of reading 5pm - 7:30am I read it as 5AM to 7:30PM. The 24 hour clock should have clued me in but subliminally I needed them to be open so we could have dinner. I came home empty handed and searched the fridge for a possibility. Then i remembered our emergency fallback dinner - popcorn! It was a good thing we managed to buy the popper that first week. Dinner was served!
(Although techinically popcorn is a grain and NOT considered paleo, many paleo blogs say it isn’t the worst cheat as long as you use real butter - and we did!
Being in Tel Aviv feels a lot like Los Angeles, it actually feels like all of California in a much smaller package - the beach, the city, the desert and the mountains. It's hard to believe that while sitting on the balcony having lunch in 72º weather - there are Israelis skiing three hours north of us in the Golan Heights and sunbathing three and a half hours south on the beach in Eilat. Because it is so familiar in spirit it is absolutely jarring when you cannot do the simplest things like read, write or buy sugar and milk.
Like i said, its NGRF TY RLMF.
California and Israel have a surprisingly similar shape. The little light blue kidney bean inside of Israel is Palestine.