Which instant coffee is best in Israel–? (with handy Hebrew coffee vocabulary)

This being Sukkos, or as we say it in Israel, Sukkot, there’s probably one burning question on your mind: which instant coffee is best? Okay, it doesn’t actually have much to do with the holiday, except that I’m home and have a little bit of time on my hands.

The first thing you should know is that if you ask people what the best instant coffee is, people being what they are, you’re going to get a whole bunch who tell you that nothing will compare to REAL coffee. Which, depending on who you ask, is either brewed or cold-brewed or espresso’d or capsuled in a special machine or whatever.

So let’s just get that out of the way first. If you’re looking for REAL coffee, almost any coffee is probably fine as long as it’s fresh. You can go to a special roastery – everyone has one they swear by and I guess I will shout out to  Gabriel Coffee in Kiryat Motzkin for being a cute friendly shop that roasts coffee beans and grinds them nicely to whatever fineness you like (I have a French press, so coarse grind is important).

And if you’re one of those people who say, “Well, if you’re getting instant it’s going to be garbage anyway,” then I honestly wonder what you’re still doing reading this. I’ll give you a second to click away.

Okay, good. Now we’re alone.

But first, a terrible joke

Now that we’ve gotten rid of the drip-coffee and barista purists, let’s move on to a joke my ulpan teacher taught me that I still don’t understand: “When it comes to coffee… it’s either neis, or it’s botz!”

So the first part of this is neis. Which is the generic Israeli term for instant coffee, from Nescafe. Israelis love

Things that are cool in Israel #12: Boureka Laws (with boureka and freezer puff pastry dough vocab lists)

Every once in a while, just when we start feeling Israeli, something new comes along that honestly charms the pants off of me all over again. Something like… the Boureka Law.

Yup, that’s really a thing. Read on to find out.

Tummy rumbles 

For supper tonight, at NR's request, we're making homemade bourekas. We bought the pastry and now we just have to make a bunch of fillings and bake them up. In case you're wondering, there are a million kinds of freezer pastry here. Probably in North America as well, but there, most of them weren't kosher. Usually, we just

To every fruit, there is a season (with helpful seasonal Hebrew vocabulary!)

In Canada, there are seasons. Lots and lots of them. Well, four, but they’re all exciting and distinctly different. You’re probably familiar with them: winter, spring, summer, and fall.

Israel doesn’t have seasons, as such, a fact which has been driven home by this long, warm fall. And been hammered into our skulls with a recent two-week November heatwave חמסין / chamseen (hot wind from the eastern deserts) that’s left us parched and sweating, and left my plants wilting at a time of year when they’re usually starting to soak up the first downpours of the year.

(Interestingly, as this article points out, most Israelis probably call the chamseen by that name because it’s hot, which is חם / cham in Hebrew, in fact it comes from the Arabic word for fifty – meaning fifty days a year of icky sandy hot and dry conditions.)

Spring and fall are often called עונות המעבר / onot hama’avar, the transitional season. Meaning they’re neither here nor there – just seasons that get you from one place to another. (When you sit on the aisle in a movie theatre or airplane, you’re also sitting on the מעבר / ma’avar – exactly the same word.)

The term onot hama’avar usually crops up when we’re talking about health, and other problems, that come up during spring, and especially fall. Colds, allergies, migraines, skin problems – most Israelis are suffering from some combination of all these at the moment, compounded by the current hot, dry wind which has meant I can’t smile or my lips will crack.

Normally, the fall עונת המעבר / onat hama’avar (singular) is also the time to get immunized with this year’s flu vaccine, a fact driven into my head by my ulpan teacher. But this year the vaccines were late (for various international reasons and not due to a conspiracy and/or the fact we have no government!) and we haven’t gotten ours yet.

But however you feel about the weather, that’s actually NOT what a want to talk about. Because there are even more important seasons in Israel: seasons you must be aware of, seasons people argue heatedly about on Facebook, seasons you need to prepare for before you leave the house.

I’m talking about fruit seasons, of course.

I’ve already said many times that we’re huge fans of Israeli fruit. It’s cheap and more delicious than anything I ever

What should you bring on aliyah? What should you leave behind?

Should you bring Ziploc baggies?  What about furniture and appliances?  One question every single oleh is going to have to face before moving to Israel is – what should I bring with me?

So I thought I’d turn to the real experts – olim who are already here. I asked the following question on two major aliyah groups on Facebook:

What ONE item did you (or should you) have brought with you when you made aliyah? Bonus: what ONE item did you bring that turned out to be utterly useless? (ours was snowsuits!!!)

I’ve divided up the responses into categories to make it easier for you to read. But essentially, there's no one answer that works for everybody. Some people bring several lifts' worth of items, others come with just a backpack.

The advice here is also sometimes contradictory. I’ve met people who say, “Don’t bother bringing anything major, you can get everything here.” And then there are others who tell you to bring everything you possibly can. It really depends on who you are and regardless of what other people’s experiences have been, what you choose to bring is up to you.

That said, hopefully we can all learn something from what people chose to bring (or what they regret bringing...).  Spoiler alert – not one person mentioned ziploc baggies.  Or toilet paper, tuna, chocolate chips, or any one of a huge range of items that they would have been begging for 10, 20, or 30 years ago.  You can get zipper bags of various kinds (though they’re still not very good, in my opinion!), the tuna is excellent, and they even have Godiva chocolate for sale here now.

(Mmm… I saw these in a store the exact DAY my husband surprised me by showing up with one as a Rosh Hashanah present!)

Here are the major categories of people’s MUST-BRING items as well as their aliyah REGRETS.

The very biggest regret, hands-down, is a category

What’s cheaper??? Three things you’ll love paying less for in Israel

We all love to kvetch.  Or maybe I’m just speaking for myself.  I definitely love to kvetch!  But sometimes, it’s worth stepping back and looking around at how much is truly wonderful about this unbelievable place we live.

Here are three that I’m really enjoying this week:

1. Public Transportation

This is my number one.  In fact, this was what caught my eye on Facebook today.  Someone was kvetching about the high cost of buying and renting a car—and they were right.

True, cars are expensive, but public transit is almost laughably cheap.   It’s even cheaper than when we arrived in 2013.  In an era when nothing goes down in price, fares were actually LOWERED around most of the country a couple of years ago!

Here’s what I’m talking about:

I took the kiddies to Jerusalem two days ago.  The three of us went from north of Haifa to Jerusalem and back, taking local buses in both cities, inter-city buses, and trains.  The train was an hour, a one-hour bus ride, then several local trips within Jerusalem.  Then, five hours later, an inter-city bus ride back to Haifa and one local trip to get home.

Total cost?  ₪60 per person. That’s under $20 (US).

Oh, and we could have traveled for another 12+ hours on the same fare, had we been so inclined, because it’s good for 24 hours from purchase.

Where, outside of Israel, can you get around cheaper than that?

(NOTE:  This isn’t what trains look like in Israel nowadays!  This is an authentic 1970s-era train on display in the Railway Museum here in Haifa.  Photo © Deror Avi via Wikimedia)

Two years ago, we were in Ottawa and I wanted to leave my family there and get back to Toronto by bus.  It’s a five-hour train ride, so farther

Things that are cool in Israel #11: Milk Bags (& their awesomely smart holders!)

What???  Four years in Israel and only 10 things are cool?  Impossible!

(And yes, shocking but true; another aliyahversary has passed, marking another year for us living in this amazing Holy Land!)

So here we are with a long-belated #11 – something we’ve been enjoying since our first few days here: milk in bags.

Now, as Canadians, milk bags and their cute rectangular plastic holders were not new to us as they are for many olim from the U.S. and elsewhere.  Coast to coast in Canada, walk into any supermarket and you’ll see a huge display of them:

Photo © Alex Dawson via Wikimedia

So I grew up using milk bags, both loving and hating them.  They’re very handy to keep around, they don’t hog space in your fridge, you can pop them in the freezer if you bought too many.  But on the other hand… when you need to open them, you have to run around looking for a pair of scissors.

(So much so that in 1979, a Toronto inventor created the “Snippit,” a little device that hangs on the freezer and cuts milk bags open.)

(photo credit © Tangibles, the Snippit company)

But no need for a Snippit in Israel!

Here in Israel, there isn’t

Things that are weird in Israel #17: Bread, bread, everywhere.

This picture is sadly pretty typical for our neighbourhood.   There is bread on the ground, on sewer covers, almost literally everywhere.

Luckily, I knew about this before I came to Israel.  According to halacha, you’re not supposed to throw away useable bread – which is defined as anything bigger than a kezayis (olive-sized piece) worth.  (This may apply to other food as well.)

What this means, in practice, is that all over Israel, instead of throwing away bread, people leave it out (as seen here), or leave it in plastic bags, hanging from recycle bins, dumpsters, and other public spots while the contents get moldy, slimy, and disgusting.

Ostensibly, if it’s laid out like this, then people are feeding animals (presumably birds?) with it, rather than wasting it.  But the birds here are kind of picky, and judging from the mold on these rolls, not all that interested in everybody’s cast-off crusts.

I believe it’s a very good thing to think of bread as something special, as something holy, even.  We should put in time and effort to make it.  We should make it as healthy and delicious as possible, and savour it while we’re eating it.  Bread is absolutely one of the holy things.  Mahatma Gandhi said “There are people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”

But you know what’s holier than bread?  Israel.

Duh.

Things that are cool in Israel #10: Holy Sandwich Bar, Batgirl!

Since my last post about restaurants was kind of kvetchy, I figured I’d balance that with a quickie about something that was awesome the same evening we went to a place and they started giving me THE STORY (read that post and you’ll understand!)

Want to know what’s cool here???

You go to order your sandwiches, and they’re served up with a side of scripture.  That’s what.

Here you go, your typical Israeli deli takeout place, at the Kiryon, our local mall.  Notice anything?

Eating Out: How Kosher is that Restaurant?

There's a story some restaurants will tell you here if you ask if they're kosher.
It's a long, long story.  If you don't speak Hebrew, it can be daunting to understand the gist of what they're saying.
They'll take a long time telling it.
They'll pull out all kinds of documentation.
They'll explain some more.
They'll point all around the place.
They may even raise their voice, which is scary for a nice Canadian like me.

You may even buy food there, just to shut them up.  After all, they sure wave around a lot and pull out letters that look like they're from rabbis.

See, the problem is that Israelis know about kashrus.  I remember the first time I was shooed out of a non-kosher restaurant because I was obviously religious, but it has happened a few times since. 

Even coffee, which I might have no qualms about buying in a non-kosher place in Canada, whereas here, they might practically refuse to serve me, which I see as a kind of respect for my practice - even if it's different from their practice - and I like it very much, except the one time, very early on, I had to pretty much beg a server for coffee and then decided it wasn't worth it and left.

In Toronto, if I stuck my head into a typical restaurant and asked if it was kosher, they'd probably say something like...
"Ummm, I dunno..."
"We do have vegetarian items..."
"Let me check with the chef..."
"I think so..."

One of the ways that you can tell, outside of Israel, if a place is kosher is to look at the clientele.  If people with kippahs are eating there, it's a pretty good sign.  In Israel, that doesn't always fly.  A totally-kosher mehadrin place may be full of people who look completely non-religious, and there may just be a few kippahs in the crowd at that local non-kosher McDonald's branch.

The other thing about Israelis is that they know how to talk.  Think the Irish have the gift of the gab?  Well, they may, but Israelis are super-good at pretending it’s theirs.

Here, we've also learned early on that you don't ask if a place is kosher.  You ask if there's a certificate, the teudah.  The teudah means everything, almost always.

If you ask if it's kosher, they may say yes.
Ahhh.... but if you ask to see the teudah, that's when you get the long, long story…

Cooking Toronto soup–notes from a vacation in chu”l

Here in Toronto, the celery is normal.  The carrots are normal - all year round.  The onions are clean; how awesome is it to peel open an onion without the nasty surprise of mould or flaking dirt tumbling every which way?

I'm cooking in my mother's kitchen, and this isn't the first time this visit.  It's odd, because, growing up, I used her kitchen very rarely. It was HER kitchen, and trespassers - even kids - need not apply.

These days, I'm more bold, I suspect she's more tired, and there is my hungry family to feed.

And even though we've never lived in my mother’s house before this month of vacation, I feel myself slipping into old, familiar patterns. 

For one thing, we are only 2 blocks from where we used to live.  Our old house has been torn down to build a monstrosity, but the view doesn't look too different from my mother's front porch.  Neighbours walk past with their dogs, their kids on bikes.  Police swoop past on bikes or in patrol cars.  No horses sighted yet, but it feels like they could be on their way any time.

We're also back to recycling, the Toronto way.  Recycling, the Israel way, involves rounding up any bottles that don't have deposits and dumping them in the big communal recycle bin across the street. 

12 of the most surprising, tantalizing gifts from Israel–dirt cheap

Are you sick of all the standard, cliché Israel souvenirs:  olive wood plaques, “SuperJew” magnets, cheap metal kiddush cups?  Do you feel like a sucker every time you walk into a souvenir shop and pay too much money?

I know I do, and I’m not a tourist – I actually live here.  (Maybe you live here, too, and you wish there was something different you could bring back with you the next time you travel back to visit family and friends?)

I bet you wish there was something original you could bring them instead without spending a fortune.

Why not gift your friends and family where their stomachs are - with the gift of special foods from Israel? 

Here are twelve tantalizing suggestions to tickle their tummies:

1.  Bamba

These are Israel's most beloved snacks.  If you live in a major Jewish centre, then forget this one, because you can probably buy them closer to home.  If not, share the crazy novelty of Israel's beloved "peanut-flavoured cheesies," now also available with a variety of fillings.  There's also Bissli and other crunchy snack aisle faves to round out the gift basket.

2.  Olive oil

They're all local and delicious, so just pick the most beautiful or unusual bottle.  If you know someone who's in the know about olive oil, get them to introduce you to a truly special "vintage" or artisanal producer, or to an organization like Galilee Green, which is working to revitalize a regional economy.

3.  Fancy salts

Even the "plain" table salt we buy says it's from the Red Sea,

The taste of home: What foods do foodies miss in Israel?

What foods do foodies miss most when they move to Israel?

Maybe they dream about sitting down to a plate of nachos with tangy cheddar cheese… or a fruity flan with tons of fresh berries?

When I first started thinking about aliyah, in the early 1990s, reports out of Israel were dire.  There were no chocolate chips - you had to chop up chocolate bars and hope for the best.  Also, no canned tuna.  Also, though perhaps unrelated, the toilet paper was really, really bad.

Today, things are different.  Israel prides itself on being a haven for kosher foodies.  (You can even visit them at the Israeli Foodies facebook group.)

Depending on where you're from, there are still many local treats and delicacies that you'll either not be able to find, or will have to reserve as a special treat. 

Take graham cracker pie crusts, for example.  Graham crackers don't exist here, and stores don't usually sell ready-made crusts.  That doesn't mean you can't find them.  This is the year 2015, and almost everything can be had - for a price.

Aliyah: the easiest thing in the world

Let me tell you a secret about making aliyah:  Pesach.

When we decided to make aliyah, everyone said “Mazel Tov,” and then they’d start to coo.  Ooh and awe in amazement.  “Good for you,” they’d say.  “You’re so brave.  That’s so difficult.  You must be so strong.”

It was embarrassing, really.  But I believed it, too.  I believed that we were doing something incredibly difficult.  I believed that someday, by the sweat of our brow, we would earn the praise.

And then, along came our first Pesach here in Israel.  Which was easy; almost unbelievably so.

Just about any yom tov here is easier.  I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise in the world’s only Jewish country, but there it is; it was a surprise to me.

Like before our first Rosh Hashanah, when, in the post office, the teller was selling holiday greeting cards.  In the grocery store, honey was on sale (regular and silan, the delicious local date honey).  Along the shoreline, we were far from the only family tipping out our pockets come Tashlich time.

Then came Sukkos, Simchas Torah, Chanukah, Purim… they were all so much easier than the same day anywhere else in the world.

Pesach without the monster

But Pesach.  Pesach.  Sweet, sweet, Pesach in Israel…

We have been here for two Pesachs now and each one has been a delicious, delicious surprise. 

Okay, I don’t mean buying foods free from kitniyos (legume products forbidden to us minority Ashkenazim), which was actually harder this year than last, for some reason.  But just… everything about the yom tov itself.

Here in Israel, there’s no Pesach Monster.

What’s the Pesach Monster?

In Toronto, at least, people treat Pesach like it’s a monster, coming to get them. 

Haveil Havalim, the Yikes-it’s-Yitro (Yisro) Edition

Parshas Yisro (Parashat Yitro) already???  Know what that means? 

Yes, the firecrackers going off every 15 minutes in our neighbourhood tell us that even though Tu b’Shvat is just over, the Purim train is on its way… with the inevitable “caboose” that is Pesach. 

(Love the Israel quote up above?  Find it and 8 other mind-blowing quotes about Israel here.)

What is HH?

It’s a weekly roundup of what’s new and great in the Jewish / Israel blogging world.  I host once a month to give you a taste of what other great blogs are out there that you might enjoy.  Hopefully, you’ll find some new favourites.

• Last week’s was hosted by Batya at Shiloh Musings 
• Next week’s carnival host is Paula, at A Soldier’s Mother.
• For more details, a complete schedule of future issues or to host an upcoming issue, please join the HH facebook group.

Don’t forget – the point of social media is… SOCIAL (huh?  really??).  Stop by and visit some of the blogs listed here.  Leave a comment to let them know you came from HH!

This week’s roundup is kind of rabbi-heavy and a little on the eclectic side… but all Jewish.  Just the way I like it!

Jewish Food & Books

Yes, there’s a Kosher Cooking Carnival (KCC) coming up in Adar (and I’m hosting it over at my Adventures in Breadland site), but just in case you’re hankering in the meantime…

Gift ideas for friends and family in Israel? Look no further!

How dumb is this post topic?  Who writes about gift-giving in January?

Right.  Yay!  Can you see my hand up, waving proudly, from all the way over here?

If I was a better, smarter blogger, more interested in dollar signs (and shekel symbols), I would have posted this in December.  Hmm… guess not.

And I could save it for December 2015, but really…?  The way my brain works, it’ll never happen if I put it off.

Anyway, I’m reminded of gifts today because our winter-holiday-seasonal gift arrived from Akiva’s sister in Canada. 

She mailed it on November 24th, and today it is January 27, so that’s a little over 2 months.  And I’m not saying what it cost to mail.  We’ll open it when the kids are home from school, and I can’t wait to see what’s inside.

So that’s one kind of gift.  Don’t get me wrong.  One of the highlights of living here is GETTING STUFF.  I love receiving packages.  Our local post office knows us well and I’m sure they have our number on speed-dial.

But there are other ways to send something special that feel just as “gifty” without breaking the bank on postage charges.

Giving or getting gifts to and from Israel can be a huge challenge, which calls for a little creativity.

Try an “intangible” gift that won’t take up space

If you’re in Israel and want to send gifts back to North America… (if you’re sending the other way, read on anyway)

Instead of buying something bulky and overpriced in Israel and paying more than you spent on the gift to ship it to North America or Europe, think about "intangibles" you can buy and ship for nearly free.

Some good ideas:

Seasons (don’t) change: 10 ways you’ll know it’s winter here in Israel.

Israelis love to make a big deal of the seasons changing.  Heck, you can even drive up to the northern Galil and Golan to see colourful leaves on trees.

But I’m not buying it.  It’s all just an act.

As far as I’m concerned, there are exactly two seasons here:  good weather and hot weather.

We’re in good weather right now.  I feel like a human being, as opposed to a wrung-out sponja mop.

Nevertheless, Israelis insist on referring to the bit from November to February as winter.  They walk around shivering and kvetching about the cold.  This is disorienting, because if I close my eyes, it could be any season. 

I hope this Top Ten list will help you orient yourself when it comes to figuring out if it’s winter.

Top ten ways you’ll know it’s winter here in Israel:

Israel’s cheap coffee obsession: 5 shekels, fixed price!

Do you know how much 5 shekels is worth these days?

Not much.  About $1.46 Canadian; $1.29 US.

Which probably explains why this is Israel’s favourite new price tag for coffee and other edibles.

Five-shekel obsession started in the centre of the country, but it’s spreading out, propelled by chains like cofix – the original five-shekel fixed-price coffee joint.

Before cofix, Israel’s reigning coffee-bar champ was probably Aroma.  I like the idea of Aroma more than I like the place itself, and I don’t love their icekaffe, the basic coffee slushie that every coffee chain carries.

The one thing you must know about Aroma is that it’s expensive.  You’ll pay maybe 15-20nis for an icekaffe, and any of their other chilly or warm delicacies (served with their signature mini chocolate bar on the side).

Then, along came cofix.

Things that are weird in Israel #10: Celery

Does my hand look disgusted in this picture?

It should.

This is a stalk of what passes for “celery” in most parts of Israel.

The celery here came as a bit of a surprise, because of what everybody (truthfully) says about the produce here in Israel – which is almost universally fantastic.

Almost.

We have found a few exceptions. 

Early oranges, for example, are not inspiring in the least.  But they sell like crazy anyway, because people are so eager for oranges after months without them.

The cucumbers here are tasty, but they are tiny, more like little pickles than a full-blooded cucumber.  Most people don’t bother peeling them, making them a convenient snack (for most people). 

But in me, the peeling habit has become ingrained, making them a totally annoying treat.  I’ve read too much about all the pesticides and bad stuff in the peels to just munch away on them.  So I have to peel and slice four of them to have enough to serve even me and the kids.  (slicing is optional, I admit)

And as for celery…

Going south: thoughts on a bus from Eilat

    

Christians have an easy mnemonic to remember Israel’s four seas:  “the Red, the Med, the Dead and the Bread.”  To some Jews, that last one’s a little obscure… it refers to the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee), near where they believe JC performed the miracle of the Loaves and Fishes.  Thus, “the Bread.”

Three of them are easy enough to get to, but the first one, the Red, involves a trek to what seems like the ends of the earth… Eilat.

Here’s an interesting point of Jew-trivia a friend passed along a couple of months ago:  Eilat is technically not in Israel.  Though that depends how you define Israel.  If you’re talking Biblical boundaries, it’s out.  (Nonetheless, you’ll be happy to know that people who live there still keep one day of yom tov.)

Certainly, it still feels like Israel – or at least, like some weird, remote outpost of Israel.  The presence of an airport smack-dab in the middle of the city (getting in the way whenever you want to walk anywhere) is an irritating reminder that Haifa is basically just an hour away, for anyone who has the means to fly instead of taking the 6-hour bus trip.

We went by bus.  Thus, four hours of THIS out the windows:

The goal of the trip was Togetherness, with a capital-T, and spending time relaxing with the Big Boy, who is on his way to Thailand to be swallowed up by the rebellion that has apparently just erupted there and have big-boy Adventures.

As you can tell, Togetherness was achieved, in the sense that he posed for Naomi Rivka’s many pictures, like this one.

We spent just a little over 24 hours in Eilat, which isn’t really enough.  Not because it’s such a great city, but because of the tremendous effort it takes to get there if you don’t have the wherewithal (ie money) to fly down.  I’ve heard the same thing about Australia, only more so:  unless you have a month to spend there, at least, it’s just not worth the crushingly long travel time and adjustment to not just a time but a seasonal difference.

Things to do in Eilat if you have only 24 hours:

Coral reef observatory!  Way cool.  Way overpriced.  Admission is good for 3 days, which is awesome, but it’s so far out of town that you have to either pay 40nis for a cab or memorize the bus schedule (after one cab ride, we did the latter), because they only come once an hour.

Dip in the red sea!  We did!  I did!  See picture, above.  This is a huge accomplishment… my first time getting completely all-over wet in one of Israel’s seas.  Yeah, I know: we’ve lived ten minutes away from the Med… and I still haven’t gone in, after nearly 10 months.

Dry off in a lounge chair!  This being Eilat, with 40 degree temperatures and dry, dry air, this only took about 20 minutes.

Eat a nice meal!  Yum… steak house.  Not the most mindblowing steak ever, and it cost a fortune.  Not a great reason to go to Eilat; there are better kosher steakhouses all over the country.  But Naomi Rivka was very, very impressed.

     

Sleep!

Pose!

Leave!  Here’s the bus station, where everybody is hanging around doing just that – waiting to catch buses to almost impossibly far-off cities.  It’s funny to imagine how far apart these places feel, like Eilat and Tel Aviv, when a 5-hour car ride was our standard way of visiting my in-laws up until last summer.  Somehow, here, the distances feel greater.

And now, as I “type” this message on my little tablet, we’re in a bus on our way home… in the middle of nowhere.  Here’s where the tablet’s built-in GPS says we are:

At last, after nearly 10 months in Israel, the landscape feels truly foreign, in a way that northern Israel never has.  Down here, at the ends of the earth, or so it looks through the bus window, it’s desperately dry and hot hot hot.

Definitely the dry heat everybody promises won't kill you like the muggy slap of the steamy Krayot heat last summer.  Even at 40 degrees in Eilat, with a gentle breeze and a dip in the ocean, it didn't feel a bit over 30, and we were very comfortable walking uphill to the bus terminal.

Everybody compares Eilat to beach towns and resorts:  Venice, Coney Island, Miami Beach. To me, it has a real element of Niagara Falls to it. Not quite as tacky, but a few more haunted houses and 3d ride simulators will take care of that.

There’s the same strip of attractions leading away from the beach and away from the desirable hotels - many of which, like the Hilton and Herod's, are truly fabulous (or at least look that way from the outside).  Incidentally, just as in Niagara Falls, that uphill trek leads to the only kind of hotel / hostel we can afford to stay in – the weird kind. 

Don’t worry:  it was weird but GOOD, a creepy little collection of teeny-tiny cabins…

Interspersed with papier-mache figures, so every time you go outside, you feel like dozens of people are watching you.

   

There are lots of the same  vendors of cheap trinkets and fast food... a key difference being that much of the fast food is kosher (while in Niagara Falls, you're lucky if there's one fly-by-night pizza place).

Between the tackiness and the off-the-beaten-path motel, it felt very familiar indeed.

But now, as I write this, I'm somewhere in the desert, a Biblically big desert, on the way from the Red Sea to Beersheva, where Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov had their main stomping grounds. 

So strange to think that this awful, bleak desert, too, is part of my heritage.  Even safely and sure-footedly within the Biblical Land, this terrain is  unconquerably alien and unfamiliar.

And yet!  And yet!  Here in Beersheva, the “capital of the Negev,” I found this outpost of sanity in an otherwise gusty, bleak, hot, dry world:  Mr. Corn!

I was heading somewhere else for dinner, so I didn’t stop to see if it was kosher (I thought I saw a Pesach teudah – indicating that they had sold their chametz – as I walked past).  But what a wonder!  This is a concept that the world is MORE than ready for:  corn, in all its wonderful forms.  Boiled corn, popcorn, together at last!

 

Corn! 

(For anyone who isn’t part of my immediate family… corn is easily my favourite food, and quite possibly, my favourite substance in the entire universe.)

I had to actually go back – to the irritation of my kids – to get a picture of this sign, which says, “Corn or potatoes?  Now you don’t have to choose anymore.”  I think it’s saying you can get both, maybe even mushed into the soup shown in the picture.  Not exactly sure… they were both in a hurry to get going and wouldn’t let me gaze at the sign.

Here’s the mediocre Asian-inspired supper I was rushing to get during our one-hour stopover in Beersheva.

And here’s the train that took us, in comfort and style, all the way home to Kiryat Motzkin, from where we had a comfy 7-minute walk home (it’s usually 5, but we were tired and loaded down).

Forget buses… train is definitely the way to get around this country in comfort and style – not to mention the ability to stretch your legs a little and use the washroom whenever you like.

I don’t think I’ll be heading back south anytime soon.  But dreams of (Mr.) Corn are flitting through my mind, teasing, tantalizing me still, even as the twinkly lights of Haifa’s green mountain welcomed me back to an area that is feeling  more and more normal, more and more like home, with every passing month.

I may be a stranger in a strange land (a very strange land), but with wonders like Mr. Corn lurking out there, who knows what other awesome experiences there are, still waiting to be discovered in this (huge) and holy place.