Say It in Hebrew

“Mat-SA-ti!”
“Eureka!”

After approximately three hundred and sixty-two days, I found them. Tortillas! There they were, all this time, calmly residing on a shelf in a second-floor deli on the corner of Herzl Street and Geula Street, surrounded by taco shells, salsa, and dried chiles.

The friends we had over for dinner last weekend tipped us off on where to find items of non-kosher fantasy, such as (primarily) pork, shrimp, “hard-core Italian” ingredients (per one friend’s description), and, as I discovered, Mexican staples.

On a walk to town last night, after sunset, when the heat was minimally bearable, I followed the friends’ instructions on how to find the deli. Even though there’s a goofy cartoon-cow’s-head sign hanging off the balcony of the deli’s restaurant area, the entrance is disguised up a circular flight of stone stairs. If you look carefully, from Geula Street, you can make out the shapes of wine bottles behind the water fountain next to the stone staircase. That was all I needed. I dashed up the steps and walked toward the deli door. A gray-haired man in dusty overalls, pushing a wheelbarrow full of metal odds and ends, arrived at the door at the same time I did. I stepped cautiously toward the deli, since the door was open, but he lifted one hand from the wheelbarrow to wave me away.

“Segur, segur. No, no, closed,” he said. “We close at seven and a half.” He blinked away a moth and pointed at the sign on the door.

“I just want to look inside,” I said, edging inside. (It was 7:35.) “My friends told me what a great place this is…”

He sighed and set down the wheelbarrow.

“What time do you open tomorrow?” I asked, glancing around as I imagine a CIA agent would; or, at least, as I imagine a tortilla-possessed CIA agent would. Must memorize contents for future reference! Wine! Gnocchi! Mustards!

“We open at eight and a half,” the owner said in a tired voice. Thai chili sauce! Coconut milk! Chutneys!

I backed out of the shop, rather dazed. “Thank you! See you tomorrow!” Wasabi peas! Pickled ginger! Soba noodles! Fermented bean curd!? Gee, maybe I was out of my league.

Still, this morning, I wound up the staircase at ten, and proceeded around the store in a leisurely pace, reading the shelves. The woman behind the meat counter eyed me with curiosity, as I made my way around the perimeter of store. The owner leaned out of a back room and nodded in recognition, but did not come closer, as I was clearly crazy.

Exercising great restraint, I bought tilapia and a package of “Poco Loco” tortillas. Munching on a quesadilla at home, it occurred to me that this place is a closely guarded secret. After all, most of the people we know are from a variety of exotic locales, and, for all we know, have been cooking up a storm of bean curd, chili sauce, chutneys, and gnocchi ever since they arrived here. So, I thought, in a puny way, how come no one told us? Do people still think American food consists of burgers and fries?

This self-serving line of thinking is merely an excuse for sometimes being more hesitant than you really need to be, here. Walking off the main street won’t kill you. (Well, it certainly will if you don’t look both ways at least twice, and then run.)

We have a year left to explore Rehovot. And now for the rest of the side streets.

Calling Harry Potter…

“Ha-oo-KHAL lu-da-BEYR eem mo-KHAYR?”
“May I speak to a salesman?”

Before going to Europe for six weeks, we called to cancel the Ha’aretz subscription. In the U.S., this would take thirty seconds. Here, the rep pleaded with us to just put the subscription on hold. No, we said, call us in July.

On July 1st, a man with a pleasant South African accent rang up and invited us to subscribe again at 69 shekels per month (about 15 USD). Sounds good, we said. Sign us up.

The subscription agreement, which arrived today, reveals that the deal is Too Good to Be True. The three pages of carbon copies show what seem to be six subscription options: “4 months at NIS 69 per month, 4 months at NIS 96 per month, 4 months 30% off full price; 4 months 20% off full price; 6 months 10% off full price; full price thereafter (presently NIS 193).”

None of these was marked, so I called them.

“Hello,” a bored voice in Tel Aviv answered.

I explained what I was looking at. “The sales rep indicated that we were subscribing to the first option, but it’s not marked.”

“No,” the voice replied. “That’s just for the first four months. Then it’s 96 shekels, and so on, and so on.”

I looked down at the pink page. “You mean…this is some sort of pay schedule? It’s not a list?”

“That’s right,” the voice said in a smug tone.

“So the deal gets worse each month?” I laughed at the preposterousness of this arrangement. “This encourages people to stop subscribing after four months!”

The voice hung up.

It seems to me that you ought not to call it “customer service” when you effectively swat the customer away like a pesky insect, after four months. Regardless of whatever rationale may be behind this (perhaps they hope you are literate in Hebrew after four months, and can switch to the other version; perhaps they need to cut circulation), it seems nuts. I refuse to let the paper boy practice extortion on us.

“Me-te-o-ro-LO-gyah.”
“Meteorology.”

Everywhere else has real weather. (Lightning strikes in Europe and the Mediterranean.)

Well, at least, now we know where the weather’s hiding. (Infrared satellite imagery for the Middle East from METEOSAT-7, from Nasa’s Global Hydrology and Climate Center.)

“KAH-yeets.”
“Summer.”

Yes, by now, it’s difficult to deny it. Any clouds disappear by eight o’clock in the morning, and there’s no sleeping at night without air conditioning. The worst part, however, is not the heat, but knowing that it isn’t really that bad, right now.

The worst part is knowing that summer has another three months to go.

Ideally, we would just go camp out at the beach for the rest of the summer, slathered in sunblock. This is unthinkable, though, except between the hours of 7 p.m. and 8 a.m.

Last week, we went to Tel Aviv with the sole purpose of finally swimming in the Mediterranean. Bearing bags stuffed with towels, dry clothes, water, a cell phone, wallets, various math papers, the latest New Yorker, and a copy of that day’s cursed Sudoku puzzle, we staked a spot in the stand only to discover that we had too much stuff to both go swimming at the same time. So one of us took Stuff Guard duty while the other frolicked in the Sea.

(Incidentally…I maintain that the phrase “Mediterranean Ocean” has a great deal more lyricism and poetry than “Mediterranean Sea,” which is the unfortunate real moniker.)

The water was warm, but the surf was only about two feet tall; about three hundred meters offshore, jettys break the waves all along the coastline.

After getting out and drying off, I noticed a pile of opaque, blue-tinged shapes slumped in the sand, right at the waterline. More were rolling in with the tide. We sat on our towel and watched one man in the water poke at one of the things, which was shaped like an inflated dinner plate. In the water, it looked translucent, with strange coils on the top. The man nudged it with his finger as one floated past, toward the sand, and then leaped back. It was right around then that I realized that these were jellyfish–big ones. After a moment of goosebumpy realization that we’d been swimming with these creatures, and managed to avoid getting stung, I felt sort of sorry for them. There they were, limp and sand-coated, bunched up in a heap with each other, narrowly missing joggers’ feet and dog noses, and night was coming on quickly. That’s no day at the beach, if you ask me.