Best thing about living city center? Waking up at 2 am because of jet lag, futzing around the house, then going grocery shopping at 3 am with a full list. People look at you kinda funny, but they are most likely drunk after a Friday night party.
3 am on Dizengoff, even the more residential northern end of Dizengoff, on Friday night (Saturday morning?) is still peppered with people walking to and from bars, parties, and in my case, grocery shopping. Some parts of the street are less well lit, but you never feel unsafe. In fact, you are far more likely to be pulled into random, happy drunken conversation while waiting for the street light to change than you are to see any sketchy individual wandering the streets.
There is nothing like a good beer. Tonight, as I sat in a Southwest Portland bungalow turned bar in Multnomah Village drinking delicious microbrew, I found myself thinking of the many great bars in Tel Aviv. My all time favorite is easy: HaMinzar (“the monastery”). Offering Taybeh and Dancing Camel on tap, it’s a winner. And you get the sense that people go there because they appreciate the beer (the decor certainly isn’t the draw).
I want to be more clever. But at the moment I’m just… not.
I intend for this to be my new blog documenting the adventures of living in Tel Aviv. Hooray.
Originally published at Sustainable Apple Pie. Please leave any comments there.
Soon after talking to the landlord (who is coming over tomorrow) we heard the sound of torrential rainfall outside. Dor was standing by the kitchen window as I asked if it was really pouring outside. “I can’t tell…” But it is so loud, how can he not tell? He goes to the living room window and there it is pouring. What is going on? And then, we look and see someone standing outside the building next door looking up towards the sky and in the direction of our building. And he’s dry! What is going on??? We run outside to the street and look at our side of the building and there we see a waterfall the size of Multnomah Falls coming off the roof and going down to the ground four floors below – directly over our living room window!
We happen to go outside in time to listen to two building residents talking as they also watch the plummeting waterfall. Apparently the contractors who are currently building the fourth floor apartment (a brand new floor) did not open the drainpipe for the water to fall down off the roof. Consequently, we have the last weeks worth of rain built up on the top of the building and it’s been raining quite a bit this week. Today one of the contractors went up and opened the pipe… and thus the waterfall.
Despite the craziness of the situation, it’s been a good way to meet our neighbors. I met my upstairs neighbor while taking tryng to take a picture of the last trickles of the waterfall (now it’s just gone back to raining).
And no one was particularly surprised or upset. They all just shook their heads and went on with their day.
And our ceiling went on leaking.
Originally published at Sustainable Apple Pie. Please leave any comments there.
It’s raining. Hard. With lots of thunder. I just rolled out of bed now and the clock says that it is 10 am. I find that hard to believe given how dark it is outside.
I love the thunder and I love the rain. But I don’t love the water seeping into our kitchen from under our door (the roof drainage pipe is leaking just outside) and I also don’t love the crack in our kitchen ceiling that is dripping drops into our very useful red utility bucket (also helped with the clogged drain).
Update: New leak above our closet. How is this possible when we live on the ground floor?
If there were no leaks I would enjoy Shabbat by staying curled up in bed and blowing my leaky nose. Yes, I finally got a full-blown cold after it’s long period of taunting me with occasional sniffles and sneezes. But there are leaks and it is Shabbat and that means that we probably will have to endure these leaks all day and night, since it is doubtful that anyone will come do anything about it on the commanded day of rest. And by the way, these are not little baby leaks. These are big mama and papa leaks, I may have to empty the utility bucket soon as the water level is rising.
Shabbat shalom.
Originally published at Sustainable Apple Pie. Please leave any comments there.
I’ve been wanting to forever, but today I took the plunge and spent $25 on a Flickr pro account.
Now you can view all 365 photos I have uploaded. And I will be adding more this evening while we do laundry at the coffeeshop/laundromat with the free wi-fi (best business idea EVER) and hopefully tweaking the look of the blog a bit.
If you like the blog or if you like the photos (or maybe you even like both) please visit some of the “sponsored links” on the sidebars. It’s a nice way to give me a bit of support and show how much you care. I certainly don’t have them up for aesthetic reasons.
Thanks.
Originally published at Sustainable Apple Pie. Please leave any comments there.
I love grocery stores. When I lived in Portland, I would go to the big grocery store in my neighborhood late at night and wander the aisles imagining all sorts of culinary possibilities. I was an expert on prices per ounce for just about everything. Now that I’m in Israel, grocery shopping is a bit more challenging but equally exhilarating. With all my current free time, I’ve been to our neighborhood SuperSol many many times often only purchasing the basics, but stopping to read everything (great for my vocab!).
I have made a few mistakes, I bought the frozen “American” schnitzel (basically big chicken nugget patties) instead of the schnitzel amiti (more normal breaded chicken). Luckily, Dor finds them acceptable enough to put in sandwiches. I won’t touch them, just the smell makes me nauseous. It also took me a couple of tries to figure out which canned tomatoes were the right ones for making pasta sauce and I bought plastic bags for food that I thought were like sandwich bags or zip-locs but it turns out they are neither, though still quite useable.
When I wanted to buy hamburger meat for our American night and I went to the meat counter and told the butcher I wanted meat for hamburgers she asked me how much, “Um, enough for three people.” A kilo? No, let’s make it 800 grams (I love the metric system in this way). She starts to pile it up and it’s not ground or anything, just pieces of beef in a plastic bag. I have no idea how to say “ground” so I say, “Um, can you please *motion for grinding*?” She looks at me like I’m a total idiot, “Why didn’t you say so?” Well, lady, I didn’t know that when you said you wanted hamburger meat you have to ask for it to be ground. I’m from America, goddammit. I just shrug and glance lovingly at my bottle of Heinz ketchup in the grocery cart (you just can’t compromise on ketchup) when she says, “You have to know what you want!” in a not-so-nice way. I am not sure if she is punishing me by handing me the ground beef in a almost-leaky plastic bag or if that is standard procedure.
Things that I have started to adjust to and am still amazed by: Going to the shuk and buying millions of different spices in bulk for ridiculously low prices (many that I have never even heard of), all the amazing locally made cheese (goat cheese is AMAZING and so is the dill and garlic Israeli cream cheese – gvinat shamenet shoom shamir), the huge variety of olive oil, cheap and delicious produce – including crazy tropical varieties and things like the pitaya (which is grown by Kibbutz Ketura in the Arava, by the way), and the variety of foods that seem to appeal to the many different ethnic and cultural backgrounds of grocery shoppers, some of which is now completely mainstream Israeli staples. In the frozen food section alone you can buy bagels, blintzes, pizza, meat-filled Russian style pasta, bourekas (phyllo dough filled with cheese, potato, spinach etc.), jachnun (Yemenite pastry dough in a roll, aka greasy deliciousness) and malawach (greasy Yemenite pancake).
Yum.
P.S. The title of this post comes from one of my favorite poems of all time, Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California”. And yes, I know that he is not writing in favor of American consumerism.
Originally published at Sustainable Apple Pie. Please leave any comments there.
Celebrated Shabbat by going out for some drinks. Looking for something a bit more interesting than say, Mike’s Place, we ventured over to a bar just east of the entrance to Shuk HaCarmel off of Allenby. I’ve walked past this place many many times and it was always packed and playing excellent music, very good signs. We walked in to see what beers were on tap and I was delighted to see that they carried two (!) microbrews from the area.
In Israel, microbrew is practically non-existent. While you can drink many fine European beers on tap or in a bottle, your options from Israel are basically Goldstar or Maccabi. Here we were able to try both The Dancing Camel (Israeli brewed) and Taybeh (Palestinian brewed from Ramallah). I had heard of Taybeh before, but had never had the chance to try it. It was really good. The Dancing Camel was interesting, but I preferred Taybeh – which in Arabic means delicious.
Looks like I might have found my new “spot”.
Originally published at Sustainable Apple Pie. Please leave any comments there.
Alternatively titled: Hannah is getting a cold.
Overslept this morning and consequently I had to rush the kittens to the vet before closing time. Her office is on Sheinkin and I had to weave through the throngs of tourists and locals with the cat carrier. I wanted to go to Nachalat Binyamin and also to the shuk, but I couldn’t make it in time. I ran out of the house after dropping off the cats and they had already stopped letting people in to the SuperSol. Oy, Shabbat. All I really wanted to buy was some good orange juice to help me fight off what feels like is turning into a nasty head cold and maybe some half price goodies from the bakery (always reduced Friday afternoon). Now that I think about it, however, I’m pretty sure I have some Emergen-C tucked away in the cupboards. Leftovers from past care packages from the madre.
I think I’ll make a big batch of spaghetti for dinner. It’s just me tonight as Dor went down to the kibbutz for the weekend. That means I can add as much garlic to the sauce as I want. Yum.
Originally published at Sustainable Apple Pie. Please leave any comments there.
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