tell aviva i'm going sightseeing

Wednesday (12/28)

limi and i had planned on getting up early so we could get out and do stuff, but we just couldn't get out of bed. i hate it how twenty minutes before the alarm goes off it suddenly becomes soooo comfortable under the covers that you can't leave. fortunately, limor's dog kessem [magic] invaded the room and started slobbering over everything, so i felt compelled to leave.

for breakfast i finished the last of their pillows. mm mmm good, breakfast of champions and all that. we packed up our backpacks, and i stuffed a number of extra items we hadn't been able to bring back the previous weekend - like a really heavy bag of potatoes, among other things.

we left the apartment and went downstairs to catch a bus to tel aviv. we got off at rothschild st., because it was a really pretty day for walking, and yesterday i had seen some cool statues i wanted to check out.

like the wolves in downtown raleigh a couple years ago, or the lions i saw while in france, tel aviv had commissioned some artists to make statues of animals. limor tells me it used to be penguins or dolphins or something, but this year it was bulls, representing a prospering stock market. so limor and i wandered up and down the street, admiring and taking pictures of each of the statues. they each had some theme or another, but i only paid enough attention to limor's translation of the informative plaques to line up my camera for a photograph. i'm sure once she reads this she'll kill me, but hey baby, you know i'm kidding, right? right???

during our promenade we came across a tour bus - not just any tour bus, but a taglit (birthright) tour bus - and not just any taglit tour bus, but a kenes tlalim (israel outdoors) taglit tour bus. i thought it was really cool and coincidental that of all the possible groups i could come across, i happen to see the same trip i went on a year and a half ago. so i start taking lots of pictures of the bus to try to get a good shot, and i think i freaked out the bus driver because he left the bus and went across the street. i felt bad, so to try to reassure him i had limor explain that i had been on that same trip before and i was excited to see it again. i asked him (through limor) who the tour guide was, in hopes that it would be the same one from my trip. sadly, it was not. i was ready to say hi to the tourists as well, but they were inside a museum at the time, so i missed my chance.

since it was pretty warm, while we were walking a couple blocks over to the artists market and shenkin st. i stopped limor so we could get some ice cream bars. i really love this one company's ice creams, especially their "magnum" bars, so we go some of those. as a side note, the company has a very distinctive spiral heart logo. whenever i saw it, i'd say "hey look there's miko!", meaning the name of the company, but limor had no idea what i meant. she said the company was called "strauss". later i went online to clear up the confusion - it is indeed "strauss" in israel, but apparently they are also very popular in europe under the name "miko".

we passed through the ever-present security check to get into the artists market. usually they are only there on certain days of the week, but they must have changed their schedule since we last went. it was cool with me, because they have some really neat crafts. i think i asked just about every artist there what was "roman glass" (which my mom still bugs me to get) but not only do i still not know what it is, but neither does anyone in israel. as for the crafts, there were a lot of pretty touristy stuff, like hand-made mosaics or mezzuzot or those good-luck hand things (the name escapes me at the moment). we also saw a very fancy palace-like building under historical renovation. well, it will be fancy when they're done with it, because at the time it was so old as to be falling apart.

my bag was getting kind heavy (those damn potatoes) so we figured we should head over to the shenkin st. on the way, we stopped at the street market. if you've ever seen an arabian market on tv, that's basically what this place looks like. it's like a very narrow (and long!) alley with shops on every side, and swarthy men shouting out stuff like "fresh meat here!" or "batteries! one sheqel!" or "get your human organs here cheap!". well, maybe not the last one, but they could be saying it for all i know.

it must have gone on for nearly a mile - a mile of closely-packed, shoving pedestrians, vegetable stalls, and random crap. it was great, if a little claustrophobic. we stopped at a couple places, like the "everything for 1 sheqel" shop, and a shoe store (where i bought slippers because israeli floors aren't carpeted).

we finally escaped the market, after moving out of the way for an idiot who thought it would be a good idea to transport his wares by driving his car to his stall (even though the street was little wider than the car). we then wandered up and down shenkin st, which is a trendy place in tel aviv that all the kids go to hang out. something like that. they have a lot of fashionable clothing shops lining the avenues. limor and i had a nice debate over "old" vs. "new" memories when i started taking pictures of the places i had been to been to on my last trip. limor thought i should take pictures of new places, so i could have new memories, whereas i thought that i would enjoy the nostalgia more. what i should have said was that it just so happened that the things i took pictures of the first time were still the most interesting things to take pictures of anyway.

while walking along the street, i noticed graffiti in several alleys. i wasn't sure if they were intentional (i.e. advertisements for shops, or trendy artwork) but the graffiti was cool nonetheless. we also saw a very intriguing poster strung up on a building facade. it was a speciment jar labelled "peace" containing a preserved dove, with the title "israel/palestine" and some hebrew. at the time we were too tired to speculate on its symbolism, and right now i'm too lazy.

also while walking, we stopped at one of the many lottery booths. at these kiosks you can purchase tickets for different games of chance. limor's favorite are the scratch-and-win variety, particularly the kind that cost 5 nis per ticket and feature different zodiac symbols. limor picked mine (scorpio), and we won 20 nis! feeling lucky, we picked another, but it didn't work. still, up 10 sheqels!

as our last sight to see in tel aviv for the day, we stopped at a small park, where i saw a very cool graffitti on the ground - it was a can with the label "enlightenment" (in hebrew). i saw it again on a wall nearby. it just struck me as clever (englightenment in a can - get it?).

on the bus ride back we sat in front of an israeli soldier whom i'm sure was deaf, because we could clearly hear his music - and he was listening to an ipod! do you know how loud those speakers are? for us to have heard it that clearly, the volume must have been all the way up, and for him to survive he must have had deviated ear canals filled with wax and sound-proofing foam. after a while we asked him through a series of hand-signals if he could turn it down, which he did to a dull roar. i read my book for the rest of the ride home.

at home in the apartment, we found the apartment to be a minor mess - food and poop everywhere. okay, the poop wasn't everywhere, but it might as well have been. since aviad had stayed at his girlfriend's to work on homework the last couple days, blame fell squarely on the other roommate. since she doesn't clean out her cat's litter box, and so smells like cat shit all the time, we didn't find the scenerio too far-fetched.

we only had time to drop off our bags and complain for a couple minutes before walking to hadas' apartment to see her new puppy. it was very cute, and limor made many exclamations over it. apparently the puppy is "shared" by the whole floor, and everybody takes turns taking care of it, presumably because it is so cute. i finished a giant pretzel i had bought in the market while i sat down to watch "xena: the warrior princess" on tv. of all the things to be on tv, that was probably the last thing i expected.

so we hopped in hadas' car and drove off to the mall to watch the fourth harry potter movie. i resisted hadas' repeated efforts to pry some plot spoilers from me, insisting i would let her form her own opinions of the film. i didn't want to ruin it for her with my negativisms. possibly in revenge, hadas parked her car right next to a pillar, so i couldn't open the door.

in the mall, we met limor's perach "kid" (she's actually 18) and her little sister, and we went in to watch the movie. like the other films, i enjoy them more the second time around, but i still think they should have followed the book more closely. the theater was more cozy than small, like the theatre i went to on the champs d'elysees than the raleigh grande. i had forgotten about the european practice of intermissions, and i'm still not sure if i like it or not (bathroom break vs. continuity break). unfortunately, we had to deal with some whispering idiots during the movie, and if hadn't been sure of the language barrier i might have told them to shut the **** up instead of just shushing them. and they were kids.

after the movie, we had a little difficulty with the exits - they opened up to some confusing corridors somewhere outside of space and time, where we wandered around for a couple minutes before finding the way out. we were walking up some stairs in what we thought was the correct direction when i noticed some people walking back to where we came from, and then we found out it was because the exits were locked. so we turned around, only to confront another group of people about to make the same mistake we did. fortunately i remembered the directions to an israeli card game, and so could say the word in hebrew for "closed" [petuach], because they ignored my hand-signals to "go the hell back".

finally back in the mall proper, we parted ways and went home.